RETHINKING SECURITY

Writing blog posts and articles about the nature of strategy can sometimes seem as tedious as rappers rapping about…rapping. If it were not for the need to sometimes clarify, for those not particularly well-versed in the neo-Clausewitzian canon, the structure of strategic relationships I would probably not type “war is a duel” or “remember the policy” as often as I do now—especially since the nature of some of my newer writing projects are using some concepts not usually seen in defense analysis. But, at the end of the day, strategy and policy are important.

There has been a good deal of interesting strategy-related content lately. Mark Safranski has an blog about the rise of “tactical geopolitics“—a continuation of the opportunistic interventions of the 1990s. Jason Fritz and Gulliver of Ink Spots also have excellent pieces poking a hole in the idea of the “strategy of tactics.” Bernard Finel also has a provocative post proposing a different concept of strategy that spurred a debate on Twitter with Gulliver.

This gives an opportunity to clear up a few misconceptions about strategy that the discussion inevitably raises. I’m not going to say anything that Colin S. Gray has not said better in some way, but the misunderstandings I discuss do have deep roots in our discussions. Plus, I get to play with a few Friedman-like mixed metaphors, which is always fun.

First, strategy is very important, but not always crucial. Sometimes an opponent can simply be so weak—either strategically or materially-that you can succeed without having a strategy or theory of victory. Germany, for example, was essentially opportunist from the mid-30s to 1942. Hitler’s political tactics of salami slicing prior to the war were rooted in his own unique understanding of enemy leaders’ political and psychological vulnerabilities. He pushed a little closer each time, and received little pushback from the West as he swallowed Austria and the Czechs whole.

Note, of course, that war over Poland was not part of the plan., but his ad-hoc style of strategic leadership won him all of Europe by the end of 1941. Shimon Naveh has also argued that the Germans did not even have a coherent set of operational concepts, arguing that the “blitzkrieg” (itself a media invention, since the Germans never used that term) was really just a system of tactics that only made analytical sense in retrospect. Robert Citino has also pointed out the continuity in German warfare in his numerous books, casting doubt on the idea of “blitzkrieg” and arguing that it was simply a reformatting of traditional Prusso-German tactics and operations with planes, motor vehicles, and radios.

Of course, the Germans lost the war due to essentially strategic and policy problems: a delusional ideology and a lack of a systemic and practical way of matching resources to accomplish the goals it dictated. But there was a time when it looked to many that they were triumphant, and there seemed to be little hope of Britain to achieve unlimited aims while fighting more or less completely alone—proving, that, as Joseph Fouche observed, that sometimes magical thinking can have strategic benefits.

This is to say that strategy is not everything. Is it wise, or even necessarily moral, to risk human life in war if you don’t have a clear idea of how you’ll achieve your aims? Most definitely not. But just because drunk driving is wrong and dangerous does not necessarily mean that someone will always crash if they drink too much and turn the key.

In Libya, Bosnia, and Kosovo, the stakes for Western powers were very low. The costs, of course, for those fighting on the ground in these civil wars were very real and existential in nature. But, coldly, not having a good—or even coherent—strategy or policy is not really going to set Washington back. As Patrick Porter points out, the costs in Libya will, of course, be bourne by Libyans. Syria is a different matter—which is why there is a profound reticence to get involved. The West, Turks, and Arabs are all playing a game of geopolitical hot potato.

But even in Iraq, which had rather nontrivial human, economic, and diplomatic costs for the United States, the Iraqis were primarily the ones who fought, died, and had to live with the consequences. Eventually, as Dan Trombly often points out, the costs add up. But the reason why “tactical geopolitics” endures either in a strategy gap or with poor strategy is that it can. Perhaps that might change quickly depending on what happens in Syria and Iran in the near future, but that’s the way it is right now.

Second, while a “strategy of tactics” is an interesting notion, it must be qualified. All strategies, as Gulliver and Fritz point out, use tactics as building blocks. Gian P. Gentile’s argument, as I understood it, referred to the idea that intellectual discussions about a change in strategy in Iraq and Afghanistan were really only talking about different tactics and operations. This idea is useful as a commentary on the commentary and to some extent the strategy over the last ten years, but the concept of the strategy of tactics is itself not of great practical value—since all strategy is inevitably tactical in execution.

Another criticism, which I used to make but now does not seem particularly useful either, is the idea of saying that “__ is a tactic, but not a substitute for a strategy” or “we have no strategy.”  First, it is rather banal. Second, it obscures the fact that we may, in fact, have a strategy, but it is not a valid one. For example, in Af-Pak, it is arguable that there was a strategy and theory of victory—but it was rooted in the idea that victory would come through strengthening Hamid Karzai’s government. This idea is now substantially more controversial, but it is “strategic” since strategy is simply an instrumental device of connecting ends, ways, and means.

In Libya, there was eventually a strategy that came together—use airpower and special operations forces to help one faction of Libyans annihilate the other. It may have not been a good strategy—especially since the Europeans came close to being logistically closed out of the operation—but it was perhaps the best one available given the nature of the policy. The question we really should be asking is what the policy is, and is the strategy achieving that policy—and of course whether or not the policy itself is valid.

The problem is that this leads to uncomfortable realizations. For example, when seen through the prism of a universally agreed policy (America will not tolerate terrorism against its citizens), targeted killings—opposed by a bipartisan set of policy analysts (for different reasons, of course)—actually become, as William F. Owen has consistently argued, the only post-9/11 strategy thus far to actually use force to accomplish the policy objective. This is likely why it is now favored by a plurality of Americans who tend to disagree about nearly everything else in foreign affairs.

A strategy involving direct force against terrorism may not be the best way to accomplish the policy, but alternative paths have yet to be realistically argued in a way that does not somehow imply an indue amount of Afghanistan-like political interference in the domestic politics of Middle Eastern and Central Asian states that are peripheral to American interests in all other aspects.