Strategy

by Lawrence Freedman

  The counterinsurgency struggles in Iraq and Afghanistan led to an almost postmodernist embrace of pre-rational and embedded patterns of thought that allowed individuals, and broad social groups, to be caught up in a particular view of the world. Major General Robert Scales sought to explain the contrast between the failure of Islamic armies when fighting conventional battles Western style and their far greater success in unconventional war. He developed the concept of “culture-centric warfare.”43 In facing an enemy that “uses guile, subterfuge, and terror mixed with patience and a willingness to die,” he argued, too much effort had been spent attempting to gain “a few additional meters of precision, knots of speed, or bits of bandwidth” and too little to create a “parallel transformation based on cognition and cultural awareness.” Winning wars required “creating alliances, leveraging non-military advantages, reading intentions, building trust, converting opinions, and managing perceptions—all tasks that demand an exceptional ability to understand people, their culture, and their motivation.” This would be a “dispersed enemy” communicating “by word of mouth and back-alley messengers” and fighting with simple weapons that did “not require networks or sophisticated technological integration to be effective.”

  One reflection of the growing recognition of cultural factors was that the Pentagon employed an anthropologist, Montgomery McFate, to consider the interplay between military operations and Iraqi society. Among the mistakes she identified were failures to appreciate the role of tribal loyalties as the established civilian structure of power collapsed, the importance of coffee shop rumors compared with official communications, and the meaning of such small things as hand gestures.44 The growing recognition of the importance of the ability to influence another’s view of the world was evident in the frequent references to “hearts and minds” in warnings about what was lost politically by indiscriminate and harsh military operations. The phrase came to be used whenever there was a need to persuade people through good works and sensitivity that security forces were really on their side, as part of a broader strategy of cutting militants off from their potential sources of support, including recruits, intelligence, sustenance, weapons and ammunition, and sanctuaries. The counterargument went back to Machiavelli—that it was better to be respected than loved, that opponents could be intimidated and demoralized by physical strength but encouraged in their opposition by concessions.

  The problem was more an over-facile approach to the hearts-and-minds concept. In other contexts, “heart” and “mind” were pitted against each other—strong emotions versus cool calculations, appeals to values and symbols versus appeals to the intellect. This is reflected in an early use by the British General Sir Henry Clinton when facing a similar problem with the upstart Americans in 1776. The British, Clinton argued, needed to “gain the hearts and subdue the minds of America.”45 In practice, in discussions of countering both insurgency and terrorism, those opposed to brute force tended to stress gaining hearts more than subduing minds, as if provisions of goods and services could win the support of a desperate population.

  There were three difficulties. First, as noted, local political loyalties would depend on local power structures and any measures would have to be judged in terms of their effects on these structures. Second, while there were undoubted benefits to repairing roads and building schools, or securing power and sanitation, these efforts wouuld not get very far if security was so poor that foreign troops and local people were unable to interact closely and develop mutual trust. They were the sort of policies that might help prevent situations deteriorating but were less likely to help retrieve it once lost. A more minds-oriented approach might establish that trust by addressing questions about who was likely to win the continuing political and military conflict and the long-term agendas of the various parties. The insurgents could sow doubts about who among the local population could be trusted, about what was real and what was fake, about who was truly on one’s side and who was pretending. As the insurgents and counterinsurgents played mind games to gain local support, they could be as anxious to create impressions of strength as of kindness, to demonstrate a likely victory as well as to hand out largesse. In terms of the cognitive dimensions of strategy, this was as important as any feel-good effect from good works. Both would depend on the actual experiences of the local population and local leaders, and the mental constructs through which it was interpreted. The third problem was that this strategy required greater subtlety than just an awareness that different people had different cultures. It was hard to argue against an improved sensitivity about how others viewed the world and the need to avoid ethnocentrism. Culture was itself a slippery term, often being used as something that envelops individuals and shapes their actions without them being able to do much about it. The term could include almost anything that could not be explained by reference to hard-nosed matters of interest. Attempts to define another’s strategic culture often then came up with something remarkably coherent, without contradiction and almost impervious to change. At least among academics, this approach was largely giving way to a practice of referring to some received ideas that help interpret information and navigate events but which were subject to regular modification and development. We shall return to some of these ideas in the last section of this book when we develop the idea of “scripts.”46 The importance of an exaggerated view of culture was that it could lead to the assumption that alien attitudes and uncooperative behavior reflected the persistence of an ancient way of life, untouched by modern influences, asserting itself whatever the conditions.

  Against the suggestion that individuals were socialized into hard cultures sharing assumptions, norms, patterns of behavior, and forms of mutual understanding that could be implicit, unspoken, or taken for granted—that were all but impenetrable to an outsider—was the possibility that in a dynamic situation where communities were being subjected to new influences and challenges, cultures were likely to develop and adjust, and become less effective in binding people together. Thus, observed Porter, in the literature on reconstructed Islamists, warrior peoples, and insurgencies fed by cultural difference, it was as if the people encountered did “not act but are acted upon by impersonal historical forces, taking orders from the culture; or that modes of warfare are singular and fixed by ancestral habit.” People were able to learn and accommodate within their cultures new types of weapons and forms of conflict. References to the durability of hatreds and the evocation of cultural symbols could encourage stereotypes of the primordial and the exotic as harmful as those that assumed that all people were seeking to remake themselves in a Western image. Explaining problematic behavior as a consequence of people being set in their ways was not only condescending but also let off the hook those in the intervening forces, whose actions might have prompted a hostile reaction, and underestimated the extent to which opponents in a prolonged conflict would interact and pick up ideas, weapons, and tactics from each other.47 The need to have convincing stories impressed itself on officers trying to work out how they coped with a vicious enemy while trying to stay on the right side of the people they were supposed to be helping. Kilcullen observed the insurgents’ “pernicious influence” drew on a “single narrative”—simple, unified, easily expressed—that could organize experience and provide a framework for understanding events. He understood that it was best to be able to “tap into an existing narrative that excludes the insurgents,” stories that people naturally appreciate. Otherwise it was necessary to develop an alternative narrative.48 It was not so easy for a complex multinational force to forge a narrative that could satisfy a variety of audiences. A British officer saw the value of one that not only helped explain actions but also bound together “one’s team, across levels of authority and function; the diplomatic head of mission, the army company commander, the aid specialist, the politician working from a domestic capital, for instance.” He recognized that this might lead to variations in the story, but so long as there was an underlying c
onsistency this need not be a problem. But liberal democracies found it hard to generate consistent stories, or to appreciate the needs of the local front line as against those of the distant capital.49

  A generally rueful collection of essays put together by the Marine Corps suggested that the United States had proved inept at “quickly adapting the vast, dominant, commercial information infrastructure it enjoys to national security purposes.”50 It was perplexing to have been caught out so badly by al-Qaeda, who seemed to be as brazen in their message as they were outrageous in their attacks. Yet in an apparent war of narratives the United States was on the defensive, preoccupied with challenging another’s message rather than promoting their own. Attempts were made to fashion notionally attractive communications without being sure how they were being received. In addressing their new target audiences, the Western communicators had to cope with rumors and hearsay, popular distrust of any reports from official sources, a reluctance to be told by foreigners what to think, and competition with a multitude of alternative sources. People filtered out what they did not trust or what they found irrelevant, or they picked up odd fragments and variants of the core message, interpreting and synthesizing them according to their own prejudices and frameworks.

  Most seriously, there could be no total control over the impressions being created by either the actions of careless troops or the policy statements of careless politicians. There might be a group of professionals working under the label of information operations, but the audiences could take their cues from whatever caught their attention. The United States might have invented mass communications and the modern public relations industry, but these were challenges that went beyond normal marketing techniques. Those with backgrounds in political campaigning or marketing who were asked to advise on getting the message out in Iraq and Afghanistan often opted for short-lived projects that had no lasting effect. Moreover, these individuals knew that they would be judged by how their products went down with domestic audiences; thus, those were the groups to which they tended to be geared. Not only did this miss the point of the exercise but it could also blind policymakers, who often fell into the trap of believing their own propaganda. Jeff Michaels developed the idea of a “discourse trap” whereby the politically comfortable and approved language used to describe campaigns led policymakers to miss significant developments. By refusing to acknowledge that early terror attacks in Iraq could be the responsibility of anybody other than former members of the regime, for example, they missed the alienation of moderate Sunnis and the growth of Shia radicalism.51

  Attempts to persuade individuals to see the world in a different light and change their views were difficult enough and required insight into their distinctive backgrounds, characters, and concerns. It was far harder to do this for a whole category of people from an unfamiliar culture with extremely significant internal currents and differences that would be barely perceptible to outsiders. It was important when conducting military operations to understand that their effects went well beyond the kinetic to influencing the way that those caught up in conflicts understood their likely course and what was at stake. This affected the way that allegiances and sympathies might be broken and put together. Understanding this could help avoid egregious errors that might alienate important sections of the population. But because it was hard to measure and pin down effects on beliefs, it was not surprising that commanders trusted the surer results of firepower.52 If the challenge was to reshape political consciousness to produce an alignment of views with powerful foreigners, there were bound to be limits to what could be done by the military. Favorable images, let alone whole belief systems, could not be fired directly into the minds of the target audience as a form of precision weapon. If there was a consolation, the success of al-Qaeda was also exaggerated. Modern communications media undoubtedly created opportunities for the almost instantaneous transmission of dramatic and eloquent images, and to any modern-day Bakunin there were extraordinary opportunities for “propaganda of the deed.”53 The same factors, however, that worked against successful official “information operations” could also work against the militants—random violence, irrelevance to everyday concerns, and messages that grew tedious with repetition.54 As Ben Wilkinson observed in a study of radical Islamist groups, the real problem was not the lack of a simple message but the implausibility of the cause and effect relationships they had to postulate if they were to convince themselves and their supporters of eventual success. This led them astray, caught by “bad analogies, false assumptions, misinterpretations and fallacies,” overstating the role of human agency, with little room for the accidental and the unpredictable. All this made for a bad case of “narrative delusion.”55 Radical strategists might be at special risk of narrative delusion, because of the size of the gap between aspirations and means, but it is one to which all strategists are prone.

  CHAPTER 17 The Myth of the Master Strategist

  … in 1793 a force appeared that beggared all imagination. Suddenly war again became the business of the people—a people of thirty millions, all of whom considered themselves to be citizens…. The resources and efforts now available for use surpassed all conventional limits; nothing now impeded the vigor with which war could be waged.

  —Clausewitz, On War

  THE FRAMEWORK FOR thinking about war and strategy inspired by Napoleon and developed in its most suggestive form by Clausewitz was not easily displaced. So shrewd were Clausewitz’s insights and so compelling his formulations that it was hard to think of alternative ways to study war effectively. Those who drew attention to their greater knowledge about past wars and developments that he could not have imagined missed the point. The enduring power of his analytical framework lay in the dynamic interplay of politics, violence, and chance. It was because of this that writers on military strategy continued to assert their fealty to the great master. One of these, Colin Gray, wondered why modern strategic thought compared so poorly with On War. There were no war leaders comparable to Napoleon able to inspire great interpretative theory. He also pointed to a lack of military practitioners comfortable with theory or civilian theorists familiar with practice. The complexity of modern warfare challenged the lone theorist, while those concerned with national strategy had become too focused on immediate policy issues.

  Gray had an exalted view of the strategist as someone who could view the system as a whole, taking account of the multiple interdependencies and the numerous factors at play in order to identify where effort could be most profitably applied. In his Modern Strategy, he identified seventeen factors to take into account: people, society, culture, politics, ethics, economics and logistics, organization, administration, information and intelligence, strategic theory and doctrine, technology, operations, command, geography, friction/chance/uncertainty, adversary, and time. Proper strategy required that these be considered holistically—that is, both individually and in context with the others.1

  This was picked up by Harry Yarger, a teacher at the U.S. Army War College, who went even further: “Strategic thinking is about thoroughness and holistic thinking. It seeks to understand how the parts interact to form the whole by looking at parts and relationships among them—the effects they have on one another in the past, present, and anticipated future.” This holistic perspective would require “a comprehensive knowledge of what else is happening within the strategic environment and the potential first-, second-, and third-order effects of its own choices on the efforts of those above, below, and on the strategist’s own level.” Nor would it be good enough to work with snapshots and early gains: “The strategist must reject the expedient, near-term solution for the long-term benefit.” So much was expected of the true strategist: a student of the present who must be aware of the past, sensitive to the possibilities of the future, conscious of the danger of bias, alert to ambiguity, alive to chaos, ready to think through consequences of alternative courses of action, and then able to articulate all this with sufficient precision for th
ose who must execute its prescriptions.2 This was a counsel of perfection. There was only so much knowledge that an individual could accumulate, assimilate, and manipulate; only so many potential sequences of events that could be worked through in a system that was full of uncertainty, complexity, and chaos.

  Gray also concluded that this was too much, accepting that he had also been too ambitious. Yarger, he observed, “appeared to encourage, even demand, an impossibility.”3 Even making a start on these factors required a considerable technical and conceptual grasp. Nonetheless, Gray still described a strategist as someone rather special, with an “exceedingly demanding” job description, able to see the “big picture,” and familiar with all of war’s dimensions. He quoted with approval Fred Iklé’s observation that good work on national strategy required a “rotund intellect, a well-rounded personality.”4 Similarly, Yarger had described strategy as “the domain of the strong intellect, the lifelong student, the dedicated professional, and the invulnerable ego.”5