Modern Military Strategy

by Elinor C Sloan

  Strategic thinking about military innovation began even before the Cold War ended, and has continued into the 2010s. In his seminal Cold War book The Sources of Military Doctrine, Barry Posen sought to explain the rise and implementation of new military doctrines.44 Examining Britain, France and Germany in the interwar period, he determined that the institution of dramatically innovative ways of operating is largely the result of civilian intervention. Germany’s Blitzkrieg and Britain’s establishment of a fighter command and an air defence system, for example, were strongly resisted by the German Army and British Air Force respectively and would never have emerged without strong civilian pressure. Contrary to what was often believed Posen finds that civilians do affect military doctrine, and that their intervention is often responsible for the level of innovation.

  For Posen, the reason civilians undertake to make instrumental changes in the way militaries operate, and the character of their particular interventions, is best explained by the international political situation. Isolated politically, Hitler could use the offensive power of Blitzkrieg to carry out an aggressive campaign in a multipolar world, deliberately manipulating military power for coercive diplomacy. With a defensive fighter command, Britain would have the necessary military structure to back up the defensive/deterrent posture political leaders adopted in the face of German offensive power. Prior to this, British military doctrine could not support British grand strategy. Posen also finds that geography can exert a strong influence on military doctrine but that technology – often thought to be an important driver of doctrinal changes – has little influence, and to the degree that it does it is weak and filtered through statesmens’ perceptions of the international political system.

  In his book Winning the Next War, published at the end of the Cold War, Stephen Peter Rosen builds on Posen’s work. Taking to task the conclusion by Posen and others that military innovations are largely promoted by civilians, as well as the conventional wisdom that catastrophic military defeat provides a catalyst for peacetime change, Rosen argues: ‘Neither defeat nor civilian intervention adequately explain why or how military organizations innovate in peacetime’.45 The United States did not respond to ‘defeat’ in Vietnam with an effort to revamp its ability to carry out effective counterinsurgency and, earlier, the US Army failed to develop army-wide capabilities for counterinsurgency, even after being personally ordered to do so by President John F. Kennedy. In contrast to Posen, Rosen attributes the creation of Britain’s fighter command and air defence system before World War Two not to the intervention of civilians but to steady doctrinal development within the military.

  Rosen examined three historical cases of military innovation during peacetime (America’s move from battleships to carrier aviation, the US Marine Corps’ amphibious warfare and helicopter aviation in the US Army), and three during wartime (the British Army and the tank, the US Navy’s submarine force and the US Air Force’s strategic bombing force). Against the conventional wisdom that, pushed by circumstances, militaries are more likely to innovate during wartime, Rosen determined that peacetime innovations were much more successful in that they were used effectively from the start of a war, whereas wartime innovations were only partially effective. An organization has to change in order for a military innovation to be effectively put into practice; change takes time; and time is short during war.

  Like Posen, Rosen sees a key role for the international political environment in explaining military change and innovation, but in Rosen’s case it is military officers, not civilians, who express this impact. The driving force for peacetime change, he argues, is perceptions of new developments in the structure of the international security environment on the part of military planners. For example, the perceived need for a Marine Corps amphibious capability had its roots in the emergence of the United States as a global naval power in the interwar period with interests in the Pacific. A relatively low-ranking officer was the first to draw up the necessary concepts, which were then endorsed up the chain of command. For Rosen, ‘the pattern of innovation in each of these cases was remarkably similar. Officers within the military developed new ideas about the ways wars would be fought in the future and how they might be won.’46 Civilian political leaders had only a minor role in the initiation and management of military innovation. How and whether the necessary change actually came about depended on there being changes in the structure of promotions that favour the innovation, with the entire process taking the time it takes for junior officers to rise to the top (i.e. at least half a generation).

  A decade later, at a time of extensive RMA dialogue even as troops were engaged in low-level peacekeeping, Theo Farrell and Terry Terriff raised the necessity of further examining military change. ‘Western militaries are going low-tech and high-tech simultaneously: they are going low-tech in their attention to low-intensity intrastate conflict … and going high-tech … to take advantage of the worldwide revolution in information processing and communication’, they wrote in 2002. ‘There is clearly a need for both academics and policymakers, whether civilian or military, to understand military change.’47 The authors define military change more broadly than simply doctrine, stating it includes changes in the goals, actual strategies and/or structure of a military organization. They also make a distinction between ‘change’ and ‘innovation’, arguing innovation is one of three pathways through which military change comes about, the other two being adaptation and emulation.48 Seeking to answer the question ‘What causes militaries to undertake military change?’, they find a complex of sources including changing cultural norms, both political and military; new threats to national security (i.e. the international political environment, which was the source highlighted by Posen and Rosen); and, to certain degree, technology (see Box 7.3).

  Writing in 2010, Farrell and Terriff, along with Sten Rynning, examine army transformation in the United States, Britain and France in the first two decades of the post-Cold War era as, in essence, a case study of military change. These scholars find that senior army leaders, not civilians, initiated and drove the main transformation efforts, and that key aspects of transformation – digitization and networked platforms – were initiated when the services were essentially at peace. But in this particular circumstance (i.e. transformation over 20 years) the wars that were fought also provided important operational impetus for change. As examples, information technologies positively affected the US Army’s offensive operations in the 1991 Gulf War, thereby providing the operational impetus for the drive to digitization; and, the Army’s inability to deploy to Kosovo in 1999 in a timely fashion was a major impetus toward the development of smaller, more modular forces such that the US Army replaced its handful of large Cold War divisions with numerous smaller combat brigade groups in the early 2000s. In all of the British, French and US Army cases the authors find that a combination of two external factors – strategic change occasioned by the end of the Cold War, and socio-technological change accompanying the information revolution – provided the impetus for change.49

  Box 7.3 Technology and military change

  • Strategic thinking on military change and innovation includes the critical question of to what degree technology drives changes in military doctrine and strategy.

  • Examining Britain, France and Germany in the interwar period, Barry Posen finds that technology is a weak explanation for military change. Left to their own devices, militaries tended to simply add new technologies to old doctrines. Real change did not come until civilians intervened. Their incentive to intervene, in turn, was not the new technology itself but rather changes in the international security environment.

  • In their 2002 work, Theo Farrell and Terry Terriff see a complex picture regarding the role of technology in military change. Sometimes change by military organizations will follow the development of new technologies, a sort of technological determinism, but on other occasions militaries will seek out new technologies made necessary by some change in the
strategic or political environment.

  • In their 2010 work examining army transformation, however, Farrell, Terriff and Rynning find that technology was a key driver for change. Indeed, the information technology revolution is such that technology has played perhaps the greatest role in military innovation in the two decades since the end of the Cold War than it has at any other time in history. Technology and strategic change has formed the critical backdrop to a complex mixture of interests, individuals, ideas and operational experience that has brought about military innovation.

  See: Barry R. Posen, The Sources of Military Doctrine: France, Britain, and Germany Between the World Wars (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984); Theo Farrell and Terry Terriff, ‘The Sources of Military Change’, in Theo Farrell and Terry Terriff, Eds, The Sources of Military Change (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2002); Theo Farrell, Sten Rynning and Terry Terriff, Transforming Military Power since the Cold War: Britain, France, and the United States, 1991–2012 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

  Conclusion

  Strategic thought pertaining to joint theory in the early decades following the end of the Cold War was closely linked to overarching conceptions of the changing nature of warfare. Ultimately sparked or enabled by the civilian world’s information revolution, these broad conceptions progressively included the MTR, the RMA and Military Transformation. The attributes included as part of each of these phenomena varied by thinker, and there was inevitably a significant degree of overlap; in some cases only the title changed, not the content. Certain warfare characteristics pervaded and recurred in the discussions, whether the subject was the MTR, the RMA, parallel war, system of systems, NCW, Military Transformation, EBO or RDO and ‘shock and awe’ – attributes like ‘dispersed’, ‘non-linear’, ‘simultaneous’, an emphasis on speed, and the requirement for a concentration of effects, vice mass. But the most consistently stated objective was ‘jointness’ in warfare.

  The elaboration of joint theory has involved advancements and retrenchments. Early ideas on the RMA and the associated systems of systems and NCW concepts were at first embraced by many but later deemed out of touch with historical experience, only to be followed a few years later by RDO and EBO as the centrepiece of Military Transformation. Initially boosted by RMA/Transformation-validating wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, these newer concepts were in their own turn later found to be historically wanting. Yet while the utility or relevance of various conceptions of the conduct of war that emerged in the 1990s and 2000s was at times questioned, the imperative of jointness that flows through each of them was not. An aspiration to, or concrete realization of, jointness forms a critical part of the RMA and Military Transformation. The content and progression of these phenomena, in turn, can be better understood in the context of strategic thought about military change and innovation over the past several decades.

  Questions

  1 What are the US and Soviet origins of the MTR?

  2 What are the key technological, doctrinal and organizational elements of the RMA?

  3 How do we know if a military revolution has taken place?

  4 What do we mean by ‘jointness’ and how does joint theory relate to advanced military technologies and to concepts like system of systems and NCW?

  5 What is EBO and how has it been critiqued?

  6 What is meant by ‘Military Transformation’ and how does this concept relate to that of an MTR and an RMA?

  7 How does military innovation take place? What are the driving forces behind military innovation?

  Notes

  1 Williamson Murray, ‘The Evolution of Joint Warfare’, Joint Force Quarterly (Summer 2002), 35.

  2 William J. Perry, ‘Desert Storm and Deterrence’, Foreign Affairs 70:4 (Autumn 1991), 69.

  3 William J. Perry, ‘Defense in an Age of Hope’, Foreign Affairs 75:6 (November/December 1996), 77.

  4 Andrew F. Krepinevich, The Military Technical Revolution: A Preliminary Assessment (Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and Budgetary Asssessments, 2002) (originally written in 1992 for the Office of Net Assessment).

  5 Andrew F. Krepinevich, ‘Cavalry to Computer: The Pattern of Military Revolutions’, National Interest (Autumn 1994), 31.

  6 Michael J. Mazarr, The Military Technical Revolution: A Structural Framework (Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and International Studies, March 1993), 16.

  7 Richard O. Hundley, Past Revolutions, Future Transformations (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 1999), 9.

  8 Krepinevich, The Military Technical Revolution, 3.

  9 Andrew W. Marshall, ‘The 1995 RMA Essay Contest: A Postscript’, Joint Force Quarterly (Winter 1995/1996), 81.

  10 Stephen J. Blank, ‘Preparing for the Next War: Reflections on the Revolution in Military Affairs’, Strategic Review (Spring 1996), 17.

  11 Colin S. Gray, Strategy for Chaos: Revolutions in Military Affairs and the Evidence of History (London: Frank Cass, 2002), 4–5, 45.

  12 Eliot A. Cohen, ‘A Revolution in Warfare’, Foreign Affairs 75:2 (March/April 1996), 42.

  13 Alvin and Heidi Toffler, War and Anti-War (New York: Warner Books, 1993), 2.

  14 Cohen, 47.

  15 James Blaker, Understanding the Revolution in Military Affairs (Washington, DC: Progressive Policy Institute, January 1997), 5.

  16 William A. Owens, Lifting the Fog of War (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000), 99.

  17 William A. Owens, ‘The Emerging System of Systems’, Military Review (May/June 1995), 17.

  18 Owens, Lifting the Fog of War, 97.

  19 United States Joint Chiefs of Staff, ‘Joint Vision 2010: America’s Military Preparing for Tomorrow’, Joint Force Quarterly (Summer 1996), 42; United States Joint Chiefs of Staff, Joint Vision 2020 (Washington, DC: Joint Chiefs of Staff, 2000), 20.

  20 Mackubin Thomas Owens, ‘Technology, the RMA, and Future War’, Strategic Review (Spring 1998), 67.

  21 Paul Van Riper and Robert H. Scales, Jr., ‘Preparing for War in the 21st Century’, Parameters (Autumn 1997), available at http://strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pubs/parameters/Articles/97autumn/scales.htm (accessed 21 July 2016).

  22 William A. Owens, ‘The American Revolution in Military Affairs’, Joint Force Quarterly (Winter 1995/1996), 38; ‘Joint Vision 2010’, 41.

  23 Stephen Biddle, Military Power: Explaining Victory and Defeat in Modern Battle (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), ix.

  24 A.W. Marshall, ‘Some Thoughts in Military Revolutions’, Office of Net Assessment Memorandum, 27 July 1993.

  25 Gray, Strategy for Chaos, 9; William A. Owens, ‘The Once and Future Revolution in Military Affairs’, Joint Force Quarterly (Summer 2002), 55.

  26 Donald H. Rumsfeld, ‘Transforming the Military’, Foreign Affairs 81:3 (May/June 2002).

  27 Arthur K. Cebrowski and John J. Garstka, ‘Network-Centric Warfare: Its Origins and Future’, U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 124:1 (January 1998).

  28 Cohen, 45.

  29 Cebrowski and Garstka.

  30 James Blaker, ‘Arthur K. Cebrowski: A Retrospective’, Naval War College Review 59:2 (Spring 2006), 138, 140.

  31 Office of Force Transformation, Transformation Planning Guidance (Washington, DC: Office of Force Transformation, April 2003), 3

  32 Office of Force Transformation, Military Transformation: A Strategic Approach (Washington, DC: Office of Force Transformation, Autumn 2003), 13.

  33 Blaker, ‘Arthur K. Cebrowski’, 135. Cebrowski died of cancer in November 2005.

  34 David Deptula, Effects-Based Operations: Change in the Nature of Warfare (Arlington, VA: Aerospace Education Foundation, 2001), 3.

  35 Ibid., 8.

  36 David Deptula, ‘Effects-Based Operations: A U.S. Commander’s Perspective’, Journal of the Singapore Armed Forces 31:2 (2005).

  37 Harlan K. Ullman and James P. Wade, Shock and Awe: Achieving Rapid Dominance (Washington, DC: National Defense University Press, 1996), 14–15. />
  38 U.S. Joint Forces Command, A Concept for Rapid Decisive Operations (RDO Whitepaper Version 2.0), 9 August 2001.

  39 Erik J. Dahl, ‘Network Centric Warfare and the Death of Operational Art’, Defence Studies 2:1 (Spring 2002), 5, 15.

  40 Joint Warfighting Center, ‘An Effects-Based Approach: Refining How We Think About Joint Operations’, Joint Force Quarterly (Spring 2007), 3.

  41 U.S. Joint Forces Command, Joint Forces Command Glossary, as quoted in Ian Roxborough, ‘From Revolution to Transformation: The State of the Field’, Joint Force Quarterly (Autumn 2002), 72.

  42 Dahl, 15.

  43 James N. Mattis, ‘USJFCOM Commander’s Guidance for Effects-Based Operations’, Joint Force Quarterly (Winter 2008), 105.

  44 Barry R. Posen, The Sources of Military Doctrine: France, Britain, and Germany Between the World Wars (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984).

  45 Stephen Peter Rosen, Winning the Next War: Innovation and the Modern Military (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 18.

  46 Ibid., 57.

  47 Theo Farrell and Terry Terriff, ‘The Sources of Military Change’, in Theo Farrell and Terry Terriff, Eds, The Sources of Military Change (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2002), 3.

  48 Ibid., 5–6.

  49 Theo Farrell, Sten Rynning and Terry Terriff, Transforming Military Power since the Cold War: Britain, France, and the United States, 1991–2012 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 285.