The dynamics of strategy

THEORY
Everyone has heard some tried and true principles of strategy like, “Expect the unexpected,” “Always have a plan B,” or, “Better to have more firepower than you think you need, because you might have thought wrong.” These common sense principles have their echoes in the great works of military strategy—in fact, some “great works” might seem like prescriptive lists, dressed up as profundity. What makes Clausewitz’s On War a great book, however, isn’t necessarily how original it is. Clausewitz couldn’t claim that he scooped someone else who might have written a book with the same arguments In fact, as a participant in the Napoleonic Wars, Clausewitz admitted to being a student of what Napoleon, Wellington, Blucher and others did and said.

Any characteristics from the following list might make a book great:

• Originality, including unexpected and surprising insights.


• Depth, breadth, and general comprehensiveness in covering a topic.


• The ability to move or persuade a large or critical audience.

What makes On War a great work are both its arguments and how Clausewitz makes them—a kind of general theory of action. After reading Clausewitz, you not only understand individual concepts like friction, but you also gain an almost emotional appreciation for the dynamic nature of war. If you brush aside the often stilted language of a 19th century German officer, you can see a roiling, restless world of about attack and defense, sudden brilliance and catastrophic error, measure and countermeasure.

Clausewitz didn’t necessarily tell the whole story; plenty of later writers filled in many important parts. As Luttwak points out in Strategy: The Logic of War and Peace, crafting a strategy isn’t a static affair, like assembling the plan and materials for building a treehouse for your kids. Instead, military strategy, to match reality at all, has to be based on the expected and unexpected reactions of all the participants, plus the inevitable curves that Fate will throw at you. These statements will make more sense once we look at the individual moving parts.

PRACTICE
I want to dwell on that last notion—strategy isn’t like an engineering problem—for a moment. We have a tendency to look at American wars as questions of what the United States is and isn’t doing, should and shouldn’t be doing. In other words, we often do see it as an engineering problem: apply some precisely-targeted force here, a little diplomacy there, and voila! you have victory.

We only sustain this fiction by ignoring our opponents, allies, and everyone in between. If journalism is both an insight into the news and how we as Americans color it with our own worldview, you might identify this blind spot through recent news articles. In the last week of Iraq coverage in The New York Times, here’s the focus of these articles:

New York Times Iraq coverage, 05/26/04 to 06/02/04
	Primary focus		Substantial mention
GROUP	#	%	#	%
US military in Iraq	40	38%	8	8%
US civilian authorities in Iraq	11	10%	8	8%
US military and civilian leaders in the US	22	21%	4	4%
Average US citizens	2	2%	3	3%
Coalition troops and civilian workers in Iraq	1	1%	0	0%
Coalition leaders	2	2%	1	1%
Average citizens in coalition countries	0	0%	0	0%
Other governments or NGOs	6	6%	9	8%
General Iraqi insurgents	8	8%	12	11%
Specific Iraqi insurgent groups	11	10%	3	3%
Terrorists generally	0	0%	2	2%
Specific terrorist groups	0	0%	0	0%
Specific Iraqi leaders	12	11%	10	9%
Specific Iraqi religious sects	3	3%	9	8%
Specific Iraqi clans, ethnic groups, or formal organizations	4	4%	10	9%
Average Iraqi citizens	10	9%	8	8%
TOTAL # OF STORIES	106

Just to be up front about my methodology, I left out any editorials, op-ed pieces, and the sidebar summaries of all Iraq-related news from the last few days. Some stories shared multiple main emphases (for example, the Najaf-Kufa clashes were predominantly about both the Sadrists and the US forces fighting them).

Consider, for a moment, that this week has been dominated by news that skew these numbers: UN envoy Lakhdar Brahimi’s announcement of Iraqi interim president and premier appointees; the Ahmed Chalabi espionage scandal; the continued conflict between US forces and the Sadrist Army of the Mahdi. In other words, the news was unusually skewed in the direction of particular Iraqi leaders (Iyad Alawi, Ahmed Chalabi, and Muqtada al-Sadr) and a particular insurgent group (the Sadrists). If you factored out the clash with the a-Sadr's militia, the actual number of New York Times stories that clearly identified specific insurgent groups and analyzed their organization, strategies, goals, and strength would be zero.

To make informed, intelligent choices about the war in Iraq, we can’t afford this level of ignorance. The other side has its strategies, and it’s working vigorously to undermine our own. We have allies, but they have their own interests that don’t match ours completely. And the people whose hearts and minds we’re supposed to be winning aren’t an amorphous, undifferentiated lump on which we can impress our desires.

Maybe, by the time we finish discussing of strategic dynamics, you’ll cringe the way I do whenever you hear phrases like Iraqis, the Arab street, the insurgents, terrorists--terms that effectively describe nothing at all. If you’ve read the previous paragraph carefully, you might understand why.

Postscript: You can blame journalists for being justifiably frightened of venturing into some of the more dangerous parts of Iraq in search of a story. Or maybe they’re just too lazy to leave the comforts of the hotel. However you look at it, though, I think we have a serious, national blind spot.

Comments

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