Principles of strategy

THEORY
I've taken a short rest from the "official" posts on the blog, the long-running discussion of time-hallowed principles of strategy and what they tell us about current events. That was the first phase in the extended discussion I had planned for this blog; the next stage is to get into the specifics of terrorism, guerrilla warfare, and revolutionary political violence of all sorts.

It's time to make the move to this next phase. It'd be appropriate to provide some kind of summary before leaving the principles of strategy. Happily, you can summarize these principles in a pithy fashion, much like you can squeeze the core formulae you need for a physics or chemistry test onto a 3" by 5" card. That signifies the maturity of a discipline, when you can make simple, declarative, useful statements, easy to summarize, while longer discussion might be appropriate to fully digest them.

So here's the list:

I. War and politics

1. War is, properly, the use of violence to achieve a political situation that didn't exist before the war.


2. War aims are often fuzzy, making it that much harder to achieve victory.


3. For this reason, and others, wars are often harder to end than they are to start.


4. War aims can shift during the war itself.


5. Declarations of war force a more precise definition of war aims.


6. Since war is a political instrument, it can and should operate within existing political institutions.


7. The US Constitution is better designed to handle the exigencies of war, including "little wars" or largely clandestine struggles, than most people give it credit.

II. War, power, and leverage

1. War is an instrument of both power and leverage, two competing interpretations of how nations (and other actors) get want they want in international affairs.


2. Since a country's ability to get what it wants depends on the context, leverage is a better guide to understanding international affairs than brute indicators of national power.


3. Power also does not explain baffling situations where nations with less power often have far greater influence than nations with greater power.


4. Doing something for its own sake--in other words, exercising national power because you think it's universally useful--isn't necessarily the right course of action.


5. Since power is a finite quantity, you should avoid exercising it too often, thereby advertising the limits of your power.


6. Alliances don't necessarily constrain power. In fact, like many contractual relationships in other spheres of human activity, they usually enable you to do more than you could have on your own.

III. Strategic levels and dynamics

1. Strategy actually has many levels: grand strategic, theater, operational, tactical, and technical.


2. Victory depends not only on succeeding at each level, but ensuring that each level contributes to the ones above and below it in the strategic strata.


3. A good strategy has to account for some degree of the unexpected.


4. Equally important is the existence of a thinking, reacting enemy. War is not an engineering problem, the exercise of resources against an inert target; it's a struggle between two adversaries trying to outwit and outfight each other.


5. You therefore need to think "a few moves ahead," by making an informed guess at how the dynamic of measure and counter-measure is likely to play out.


6. Maintaining the initiative--when, where, and in what form clashes occur--is critical to success.


7. Doing the unexpected--what is sometimes called "the indirect approach" is a technique for both maintaining the initiative and winning the measure/counter-measure battle of wits.


8. Strategies should be as simple as possible, and should include some redundancy (i.e., more resources than the minimum required, and more contingencies than just one).


9. The center of gravity defines the core features of a conflict--and, therefore, what it will take to win it.

PRACTICE
Principles of war aren't like the formulas you memorize in physics class, however. Like chess, the rules are simple, but it may take a lifetime to master the game.

That's why it's critical to keep the military from being "politicized," a neutral word for, "Telling politicians what they want to hear." The art of war requires a great deal of time and effort to master. That makes the answers to particular military puzzles not always obvious--or else, any armchair general would see them--and often, even inobvious to the vast majority of military professionals themselves. Revolutions in military strategy or organization wouldn't happen if you didn't have the occasional flashes of genius that people like Marius, Napoleon, Frederick the Great, or others could provide. Of course, that means the answers you get as a political leader from your generals and admirals may not make sense at first glance, and they may make you exceedingly uncomfortable.

That's the real reason why the Bush Administration's treatment of General Shinseki was abhorrent. Shinseki was doing his duty by giving his professional judgement about the number of troops needed to occupy Iraq. If Bush's supporters want to cry foul about Lyndon Johnson's micromanagement of the Vietnam War, they need to be equally outraged at the treatment of Shinseki--if not moreso, since unlike Vietnam, there was a fairly clear measure of success in Iraq. Public order collapsed after the 2003 invasion, and it hasn't recovered.

A note of apology to Shinseki is in order--not just to ask for his forgiveness, but to signal to the rest of the people in uniform that their professional judgement is valued and heeded, not simply overruled because the man in the Oval Office wants to hear a different answer.

Comments

[ali]

Shinseki did his duty and voiced knowledgeable dissent; he was pilloried for it by ignorant Suits. Tony Zinni, eloquently but a little belatedly, has done the same. It’s a tribute to the institutions of the US military that such men exist.