The end of battle?

IN THE NEWS
An article in last month's Armed Forces Journal made an argument that I haven't heard for a while: the irrelevance of battle in modern strategy. While that sounds like the sort of musty subject that only military academics at the Army War College or Sandhurst might care about, it's actually a thesis that, if correct, should change everyone's expectations and measures of the utility of war.

The early forms of this thesis have been around for quite a while. Clausewitz, for example, made it clear that the standard concept of battle—two armies locked in a death struggle, waiting for the moment to deliver the decisive blow that would subdue the enemy militarily—could easily be irrelevant. Having lived through the Napoleonic Wars, he had plenty of examples where the victors of battles still lost the war. In 1812, the Grande Armée smashed the Russian Army in a series of dramatic battles (including Borodino, a major part of Tolstoy's War and Peace), occupied Moscow, and later evacuated Russia with a fraction of its original strength. In Spain, French generals came to grief chasing mobile British columns and elusive guerrillas. Napoleon, for all his self-publicity about being the master of the battlefield (a claim certainly supported by victories like Austerlitz), could not transform tactical and operational success into theater and grand strategic victories. Years later, Clausewitz would be writing On War with Napoleon clearly in mind. Battlefield victory, Clausewitz pointed out, doesn't necessarily translate into the political outcome you desire.

However, Clausewitz still believed that battles could manufacture political results, even though he was careful to warn his audience that one does not always flow from the other. John Keegan, a modern military historian and theorist, argued in The Face of Battle that battle itself might have become obsolete. After surveying famous battles like Agincourt and the Somme, Keegan concludes that various technological, strategic, and historical changes have made the notion of a decisive battle an illusion. Writing in the later years of the Cold War, Keegan pointed out that traditional "battle" depends on avoiding military scenarios that risk nuclear escalation. Assuming you overcome that hurdle, the enemy has to agree to meet you on the field of battle, an increasingly rare situation in an age when people have mastered "the war of the flea." The increased cost of war, and its disruptive effects on an increasingly interdependent international system, makes a sustained military effort that much harder.

Keegan was not arguing that war was futile. Instead, what the Armed Forces Journal article described as "the Austerlitz moment"—the dramatic battle that decides a conflict—is increasingly rare. Although Keegan didn't phrase it in quite this way, he in effect argued that the operational level of strategy, the critical middle layer between the tactical and theater levels, has fundamentally changed, changing its focus from battle to smaller, steadier clashes.

Saddam Hussein learned this lesson in the hardest possible fashion. The 1990 invasion of Kuwait was supposed to be the decisive stroke that, by putting Iraqi teeth on the Persian Gulf oil artery, elevated Iraq's position in the Middle East and the world. Instead, his invasion locked Iraqi forces into static defenses, waiting for the US-led coalition to evict him from Kuwait, cripple his army, and force Iraq into a humiliating regimen of international inspections, economic sanctions, and effective loss of control over major portions of its territory (particularly in the north).

Before you conclude that Operation DESERT STORM, a successful battle, disproves Keegan's point, think again. DESERT STORM occurred in a golden moment between the end of the Cold War and the emergence of whatever new international order there was to come. The USSR had collapsed, and its Russian core was economically and politically crippled. No nuclear-armed rival was in a position to oppose a Western military build-up in Saudi Arabia. In fact, most countries had good reason to side with the United States: by threatening the Persian Gulf oil supply, Hussein antagonized the world, not just Iraq's immediate neighbors.

Hussein learned the value of avoiding a direct confrontation. When the invasion of Kuwait inspired anger, not acquiescence, in the United States, Hussein began planning for future conflicts. The inspections, no-fly zones, sanctions, and intelligence operations against the Ba'athist regime gave Hussein a better picture of how the US government operates than he had before DESERT STORM. These experiences gave Hussein an appreciation of the value of bluff, delay, and obfuscation, the cornerstones of his new strategy. If the Americans attacked again, some Iraqi forces would put up a fight, but the rest—particularly the fedayeen units—would go into hiding. Thus was one major part of the current Iraqi insurgency born. While Hussein may be in prison, his fate is by no means decided. Who knows what might happen to him, were the new Iraqi regime to collapse?

Meanwhile, the Iranian theocracy has continued its decades-long campaign of indirect conflict with the United States. The latest crisis, in which Iran is testing its ability to play nuclear brinksmanship, is merely the latest in a series of attacks on the American political, economic, and military flanks. While the seizure of American hostages shortly after the Iranian Revolution might have been as much improvisation as deliberate strategy, other stratagems—Iranian support for the Hezbollah, the Iranian attacks on Persian Gulf shipping in the 1980s, and Iran's nuclear program—have been far more deliberate. Iran is not looking for an "Austerlitz moment," even in a confrontation over its nuclear ambitions. Instead, it continues to antagonize the United States, waiting for American leaders to make a crucial mistake, or simply give up some of its position in the Middle East out of sheer exhaustion. Nuclear weapons don't change the game Iran has been playing for nearly thirty years; they simply increase the odds of success.

For American military planners looking for an "Austerlitz moment," the People's Republic of China may be the last opponent that might reasonably grant that opportunity. However, China is just as experienced with this kind of indirect strategy, and far more skilled at it than the Iranians. Even the recent Chinese naval build-up, a development not widely reported in the Western press beyond a few military journals, is not aiming towards a decisive battle with American forces. To use classic Mahanesque naval terminology, China is more likely to seek "sea denial" than "sea control." If the United States and the PRC got into a shooting war over Taiwan or some other objective, the Chinese navy is practically doomed to lose any naval battle. The important question, however, is how many losses Chinese ships, submarines, and aircraft can inflict on the US Navy before they are defeated—particularly if Chinese forces avoid any major engagements. The Chinese naval expansion raises the possibility of unacceptable American losses in any such war: how many aircraft carriers would have to be sunk before US officials felt the political costs of rescuing Taiwan were too high? How many ships and aircraft could the United States lose in the western Pacific before it felt its overall ability to project naval and air power worldwide strained to unacceptable levels?

In short, wherever Americans look, they see a military landscape that is poor ground for future D-Days, Yorktowns, or Gettysburgs. While military power is hardly obsolete, it is now used to engineer different results than decisive battles. When intimidation fails to produce results, armed conflict is the next logical step in dealing with problems like Al Qaeda's safe haven in Afghanistan, or Iran's threat to build and use nuclear weapons. However, contemporary military action at the crucial operational level of strategy is not about the preparation, conduct, and aftermath of a decisive battle. Operational strategy is, instead, the plane of sustained, smaller-scale actions that cascade towards a political outcome.

Perhaps, then, we should do away altogether with the phrase, "the Battle of," when describing recent history. For example, there was no "Battle of Baghdad" in 2003, or "Battle of Fallujah" in 2004. Major mobilizations of US military power do not necessarily lead to decisive results. In fact, the Iraqi invasion led to the exact opposite of what the Bush Administration intended: rather than resolving the problems of the Middle East in a daring masterstroke, the modern equivalent of Napoleon's march on Austria in 1805, the invasion made the Middle East even more problematic. Worse, the United States is now more deeply entangled in the barbed wire of Middle Eastern politics than it was before. In the 1990s, the important American foreign policy question was how best to use the United States' newfound position as the world's remaining superpower. A decade later, the important question is how a local election in Najaf or Karballah might determine the future exercise of US military power. There may be no better illustration of how the traditional concept of "battle" has become a mirage, luring the likes of Saddam Hussein and George W. Bush into dangerous military expeditions.

Comments

[fra paolo]

The "End of Battle" thesis strikes me as a variant on the "End of History" thesis. History hasn't ended, in the way Francis Fukuyama believed. If anything, the collapse of the Soviet Union clarified History, which has resumed its rough march along the course plotted by Marxist navigation.

Likewise, Battle hasn't ended, but perhaps "modern" Battle has. The world is reverting to an older model, where Battle decides the fate of kings, but the main purpose of military force is the chevauchee, demonstrating that the writ of the feudal lord does not run. A Hundred Years' War anyone?

[purpleslog]

I don't think that battle is going away. It is just conflict or competition between actors is expanding and getting more complex. Battle or kinetic war is just part of conflict or competition that actors employ.