The Utility of Force in the Modern World

[Infanteer]

This gets a new thread because I think the topic should be seperate from the usual Mid-East scrum.

religion is nothing more than a means whereby a select few use the gullibility of the many to enforce their own agenda on others - which inevitably becomes "how do I get more power?" resulting in war.

Religion is nothing but a mask for politics.

Ahh...but is this necessarily true?  I used to believe the same thing, but now that thesis just doesn't make sense, especially in light of the conflicts we find ourselves in today.  Martin van Crevald believes this statement to be untrue; this passage is from one of his best works which, although 15 years old now, seems to be bang on with regards to the way conflict is unfolding. 

No doubt cynics will argue that goals such as justice and religion are mere pious smokescreens, since, once the verbiage is stripped away, always and everywhere selfish considerations pertaining to the community's interest may raise their ugly head.  This charge in is neither original nor unfounded: all too often right merely serves as a cover for might.  However, it can also be put upside down.  If modern strategic thought views rationality in terms of reducing justice and religion to the underlying interest, then the same intellectual meat-grinder is capable of reducing interest to underlying religious or legal principles.  For example, was it American economic and political interest that led to "Manifest Destiny" and the subjugation of a continent?  Or was it the quasi-religious idea of "Manifest Destiny" that translated itself into economic and political interests?  We may turn the question over and over, sprinkling it with footnotes as we go along; any answer that does not take both sides into account will do an injustice to human nature.

To conclude, the contemporary strategic premise that sees wars as making sense only when they are fought for reasons of policy or interest represents a point of view that is both Eurocentric and modern.  At best it is applicable only to the period since 1648, when war was conducted predominately by sovereign states that in turn were supposed to base their relations on power rather than on religion, or law, or - as in numerous primitive societies - kinship.  As an explanation of the more remote past, the premise is either meaningless or much too narrow.  As a guide to the future, it is almost certainly misleading.  To apply it to the wrong conflict can be positively dangerous.  As recent events have shown time and again, to believe that justice and religion are less capable of inspiring people to fight and die than is interest is not realism but stupidity.

Worse still, ordinary Clausewitzian thought is incapable of coming to grips with what in some ways is the most important form of war, namely, one whose purpose is existence.  Confronted with such a war the entire strategic structure begins to show cracks.  The very idea of policy, implying as it does calculations of the cost-benefit type, becomes inappropriate, the proof being any number of cases when modern states, from the Americans in Vietnam to the Israelies in Lebanon, lost heavily because they went to war with strategic consideration in mind.  All of which boils down to saying that policy and interest, even rationality itself, change from place to place and from time to time.  They themselves form part of the war convention: neither eternal nor to be taken for granted, and far from capable of providing self-evident clues for the conduct of war.

Martin van Crevald
The Transformation of War, pp. 155-156

Retired British General Sir Rupert Smith's new book The Utility of Force, which begins with the bold statement that "War no longer exists", is an update of sorts to van Crevald's theory.

Discuss.

Cheers,
Infanteer

 

[tomahawk6]

All these experts and their pet theories about the subject of war are more like the personal opinion of the expert. What is the politics of the expert ? Once you know that you can better assess his theory. Van Crevald is as much as a military expert as Paris Hilton. His theories hold very little water. He is a small war guy, meaning all our future wars are low intensity affairs. As a result our forces should be equiped to fight as police. If a nation were to follow his advice they would not be able to fight in places like Iraq or Afghanistan.

Sir Rupert on the other hand evidently feels that there are no more wars. Just conflicts or hostilities. What has he been smoking ? War is armed conflict to impose your will on an enemy. The purpose of war is to win. Not to break even. But to win. How do you know you win ? When the enemy no longer wants to fight you. The reasons that nations go to war have been many, but when you get past the feel good message designed to get your people motivated to risk their lives for the State, its all about imposing or resisting the will of the enemy. In the war on terror we are resisting the will of the islamic radicals. They want to see a world dominated by islam. Radical islam is the natural enemy of democracy. Its our way of life or theirs essentially.

There is an economic component to most wars and this one is no different. Much of the worlds oil comes from the Middle East. The US gets most of our oil from Canada, Mexico and Venezuela. We are not as dependent on ME oil as is China or Europe or India. If the islamists gain control of the middle east oil they can hurt much of the rest of the world economically. How does a militarily weaker opponent beat a stronger one - by finding their weakness and exposing it. At the Staff College and War College we talk about an enemy's center of gravity. You find the center of gravity, attack it and the enemy will fold. The weakness of the Europe and the world is oil. Oddly enough for a country like Iran their center of gravity is also oil. They are very vulnerable should we choose to strike. For Hizbollah or the Taliban what is their center of gravity ?
Not so easy to pin down. But one exists - namely their religion. Not easy to target. Hate is a renewable resource. But you can offer alternatives - like our PRT's. Give the people a way to improve their lot in life. Jobs. Education. A  future that can be compared to the hate offered by the other side.

Wars will always be fought. The tools we use to win the fight dont have to be only applications of force. Sort of like a carrot and stick approach. We have carrots, we want you to enjoy our carrots. But if you still want to fight then you get the stick until you decide you want carrots instead.

We fight in foreign lands so that we can enjoy our lifestyle of freedom and choice. We offer the same to any people or nation who want it. We are willing to die in that cause. In the past wars were fought for terroritorial gain, riches and power. We have no strings attached to what we offer. You dont have to change your religion. You dont even have to like us. All you need is the desire to live life the way you want to without fear. The islamists offer fear, hatred and death if you dont do what they want. Evil vs good. How can you compromise with evil without compromising your principles as a people, as a nation.

 

[Edward Campbell]

Some analysts are making a distinction between wars between nation states and conflicts which involve (a) nation state(s) on one side and movements or other non-state/sub-state actors on the other.

It might make a significant political difference – especially in the politics of the media wars for public opinion.

It reminds me, a bit, of the recent bit about “America fights wars and Britain fights battles” which is, essentially, a comment on two different national approaches to violence.  The commentator suggests that America needs the moral justification of a war in order to use deadly force/violence while the rather more sanguine Brits are ready to use violence in pursuit of mundane political goals.

As a political matter drawing some distinction between conventional wars between nation states and more routine, but still deadly conflicts makes sense: people are unwilling to vote more money for the defence establishment when there is no war on the horizon but they might be willing to see increased defence spending if the troops are, routinely, engaged in conflicts.

I’ll get to Sir Rupert’s book later this month or in October.

 

[tomahawk6]

Semantics.

 

[paracowboy]

Ahh...but is this necessarily true? 

Yes. Religion, political ideologies, racial superiority, no matter what the justification, it all boils down to Evil men using whatever tools they feel thay can to gain dominance over a group in order to further their own ends.

 

[McG]

Yes. Religion, political ideologies, racial superiority, no matter what the justification, it all boils down to Evil men using whatever tools they feel thay can to gain dominance over a group in order to further their own ends.

Are you declaring these are all tools of dominance/control, or are you arguing that "evil men" may distort these institutions & beliefs in order to wield them as tools for power?

I can use a hammer to kill someone.  Does that make hammers (in the general sense) a weapon?

 

[tomahawk6]

Hammers may be used as a weapon.

 

[McG]

Hammers may be used as a weapon.

Yes, but does that mean hammers are weapons?

 

[Kirkhill]

I think that the distinction lies in the concept of centralized authority.  Clausewitzian War, designed to influence a Nation by countering its Leaders, is only possible if Leaders and Nations exist and if the Leaders actually control, or govern, their Nation.  If the Leader controls a large Nation then not only is she/he able to mobilize that Nation against others but must also be able to prevent the Nation, its individuals, mobilizing without the Leader.

A Leader with control over a large number of people, some one that can not only reward their friends and punish their enemies but who can punish their friends and reward their enemies,  is of great utility in establishing a stable world order.  A Leader that can only reward their friends and punish their enemies is a great threat to stability.  One that only punishes their friends and rewards their enemies won’t stay in power long.

Nations come in all sizes.  As they are self-defined by blood (kinship) and belief (religion – and here I include the atheistic and agnostic religions of socialism, communism and laicete amongst others) they are constantly morphing as supporters come and go.  Thus a Nation can be little more than a large nuclear family in a valley or it can be a globe-spanning conflation of like-minded individuals.  Large Nations with single Leaders, Nations that are willing to be led, make it easy to negotiate stable conditions: hence the attractions of the Bipolar world and also of the Treaty of Westphalia.

The quid pro quo is that “you keep your lot in line and I’ll keep my lot in line and we’ll both get along just fine”.    Basically, in the past this has boiled down to “I’ll stop killing you and yours if you can stop yours from killing mine”. 

The Treaty of Westphalia grew out of not just the Thirty Years War but also out of the timeless clan feuds, mediaeval dynastic feuds and most importantly the religious wars that broke out from 1521.  Arguably the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 was only a waypoint in those wars because religion played a major part in the conflicts between Britain and France up until at least 1763 and perhaps even the Napoleonic wars.  English, Scots and Irish Catholics fought for the French while French, Dutch and Swiss Protestants fought for the British.  Likewise Catholics fought for the British and Protestants for the French: back to that self-defining aspect of the Nation.

Prior to Westphalia there was Hobbes’s brutish world of the war of all against all.  After Westphalia you have the centralizing authority of the Stewarts and the Bourbons with their Dragoons (an armed, mounted constabulary) that spent as much time slaughtering their own people as slaughtering each others. 

By the mid-nineteenth century much of Europe had been pacified so that clans and tribes were no longer disturbing the peace (Sicily, Corsica and Sardinia being some notable exceptions).  Nation-States established themselves as the dominant power regardless of how they were governed.  Violence became less and less part of the everyday life of the average citizen.  Europe prospered.

The system worked so well that the Europeans took to exporting the concept to the rest of the world so as to impose order.  Thus we have the colonial period of the world divided up by straight lines.  But there is that underlying problem of being able to punish and reward.  That only is possible if the Leader is trusted, if they are seen to be part of the Nation, however the Nation defines itself.  If the Leader is not trusted he/she will not be seen to be of the Nation and will be an ineffective Leader and of no use to the Nation or the neighbours.

The Europeans were never able to convince their imperial subjects (or at least not enough of them) that they were all of one Nation.  In part this was because their home-country friends would not allow them to reward their foreign enemies at their expense and the foreign enemies would not accept the punishments that the home-country friends accepted as the necessary norm for society.  The empires failed, probably as all empires have failed and will fail. 

But with the failure of the empires, and the last two standing empires were the US and the USSR, the last two bodies able to control events, we find ourselves heading back to the days prior to the Treaty of Westphalia where Leaders are unable to govern, control, large masses of people. 

In the tribal parts of the world this is just a reversion to the status quo ante. Or perhaps it is not a reversion but simply a continuation.  Leadership and Nation are narrowly defined as the family, the clan, the tribe.  “Me against my brother.  The two of us against our cousins.  Us against everyone.”  The Leader of the Nation, no matter how small, is trusted to punish and reward – or else they die or are otherwise pushed out.

In the democratic West the problem is different.  The West has convinced itself that punishment is no longer a part of the human condition.  That a rational person doesn’t need to be punished and that punishment is counter-productive.  Hence the silliness pertaining to our penal code and even the way we raise our children.

The birch, cane, taws and strap were all part of a child’s life up until the 1960’s.  Not to mention the cooking spoon and the flat of the hand.  Those are all seen now to be as cruel and unusual punishment.  To inflict them on children is to teach children that violence works and also to produce resentful children.  Instead we are encouraged to give them time-outs.  To sit them down and let them ponder their situation.  However, this is just another form of violence as far as the child is concerned.  They are grabbed, forcibly restrained, yelled at, plunked down in a chair and either locked into a room or forcibly returned to confinement: Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo or Millhaven.  But by eliminating violence that bruises and breaks the skin we have managed to convince ourselves that we don’t inflict violence; that we are non-violent and thus we live in a peaceful non-violent society.  By extension others can live without punishment, violence and we shouldn’t inflict violence on others.  We will not accept punishment.  We will not inflict punishment.  We will only reward ourselves and others.

This puts ourselves at a considerable disadvantage when others with a greater willingness to use violence against us do so. We’re first of all astonished that such a thing could happen. Then we are outraged against these irrational sub-humans.  Then we over-react and decide that these people must be eliminated.  (Nazis, Communists, Islamists).  Our over-reaction runs the risk of creating many innocent casualties if not new enemies.

We need to understand that just like you need an accelerator and a brake to keep a car in control people and societies need both reward and punishment, both brutality and benefit.  And we are not conditioned to brutality.

We need to accept that some judicious brutality, controlled violence, is necessary to maintain order – whether dealing with a family, a tribe or a Nation.  It should not require going to war and mobilizing the emotions of a Nation to permit that application of violence.

 

[paracowboy]

Are you declaring these are all tools of dominance/control, or are you arguing that "evil men" may distort these institutions & beliefs in order to wield them as tools for power?

option 2. Mostly. There's some of column A, and some of Column B. They are all tools of dominance, in one way or another. The difference is how that 'dominance' is employed.

 

[a_majoor]

Thucydides:

If these words are judged useful by those who want to understand clearly the events which happened in the past and which (human nature being what it is) will at some time or other and in much the same way, be repeated in the future.

I think what has happened is the scale of violence and the forms of war have changed, rather than the actual nature, uses and utilities of war.

The war between the Delian League and "Sparta and her Allies", known to us as the Peloponnesian wars, is quite understandable to the modern mind, even though the concept of a nation state did not exist, religions were pagan and social mores were radically different than those of today. Reading accounts of the Roman Legions fighting COIN ops in far flung ends of the Empire like Syria (modern Israel) and Iberia (modern day Spain) is not too much different from reading accounts by T.E Lawrence in WWI or our own Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan today, the primary difference being the Romans tended to stack the hearts and minds in bloody piles rather than try to win them over to the Res Publica Roma or Imperium.

As Paracowboy reminds us, ambitious or evil men (or people nowadays) will attempt to grasp and manipulate whatever means are available to gain and maintain power. This is not limited to perverting religions, demagogues in the assembly swayed the Athenian Assembly (Ekklesia) to commit horrendous acts during the Peloponnesian wars, the Roman civil wars that ended the Res Publica were inspired and fuelled by "class envy" and economic considerations. Phillip of Spain was at war in the Spanish Netherlands not just because of Protestant heresy, but also to maintain control of the rich wool trade in Flanders. You can probably find plenty of examples in almost every time and place in human history.

Warfare is shaking out into new and different (although not unrecognizable) forms with the introduction of new technologies and organizational techniques that change the underlying society. People are still people, however, and so the deeper motivations of fear, greed, envy and the rest of the "deadly sins" are still there. People are still people, so the desire to be part of a family, clan, and tribe are still present (look at the basic organisational subdivisions of an army or a business and you will see "family", "clan" and "tribal" groups within), if tomorrow's "tribe" is scattered throughout the world and connected by the Internet, the means to deal with the "tribe" will have to change to reflect this.

If tomorrow's world resembles that of the Middle Ages, with transnational groups and orders linking small, self contained polities, most of which are defined by their ability to field a local defensive force (i.e. an city militia) or having the economic ability to hire a professional force like the condottiere, we will need a dance card to see who is at war with whom, but there will still be wars, they will still be recognizable to today's observer and they will be fought for pretty much the same reasons we fight now, or the Mycenaean's fought in the Iliad.

 

[paracowboy]

they will be fought for pretty much the same reasons...the Mycenaean's fought in the Iliad.

for a hot chick? I'm down.

 

[tomahawk6]

Its all semantics as the word war is too negative for the pc crowd. If its a conflict or some other innocuous non-threatening term being used to describe combat operations maybe the public wont object. We do more harm than good when we describe war in terms other than what it is. Its violent, people get hurt and things get smashed up. We go to war to either defend our friends or in self defense. We fight from the moral high ground compared to our enemies who more often than not represent totalitarianism. The enemy are on a crusade to bring their way of life to us - forcibly. The imam isnt in the mall trying to convert us. Nope they sit in their mosque protected by our laws preaching hate. The enemy is fighting a war against us by any and all means. They are weak militarily but with their allies in the news media they wage a propaganda war against us with the aim to persuade us to stop fighting. They promise us more dead soldiers or more dead civilians. All we have to do to make it all stop is to pull out of the fight.

There are wars. They arent going away. The enemy is at war against our way of life. The battles are fought on our air waves, in print as well as on the battlefield and in our cities. If we dont accept the obvious then we better be prepared to lose our way of life. As long as patriots answer the call to defend their nation and her people we will stay safe. There is a patriot in every citizen, it is the task of our leaders to awaken that patriotism so that we can win the war on our way of life !