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.
*This is the Blog of Tom Grant, a
Ph.D. in political science specializing in the study of violence and
politics, especially small wars, from a radical perspective. Now working
as a senior analyst in the hi-tech software industry.
