Wanted: A Unified Field Theory for a Third World War

The ongoing conflict with ISIS/ISIL/the Islamic State (hereafter called Daesh) has attracted attention and interest around the world.  Pope Francis has weighed in and it is perhaps surprising that he may have come closest to identifying this conflict as the Third World War.  Henry Kissinger reportedly agrees with him.  However, there have been few signs that the US government recognizes this as a single global conflict much less any signs of a coherent coordinated strategy that addresses each local conflict and its links to every other local conflict.

This is a war that is very like wars of the past while yet being something different from what we are accustomed to.  It is the 21st Century under attack by the 15th Century.  It is a war between dogmatic conformity draped in religious trappings claiming for itself the right to impose its beliefs through deadly violence on a modern world that emphasizes diversity, technology, progress, and individual choice.  Like the Seven Years War it is taking place on a global scale in terms of reach with a relatively small and localized geographic context.  It is and will be fought by complex local alliances, marked by competing interests between politics and faith, and religious differences that result in alliance relationships or are overcome in the interests of the nation states participating – a geopolitical stew worthy of The Thirty Years War.

In Nigeria, the enemy calls itself Boko Haram.  Al Qaeda in the Maghreb is active to varying degrees in Algeria, Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, Morocco, Niger, Senegal, and Tunisia.  Al-Shabaab in Somalia was reportedly responsible for the attack on the Nairobi shopping center.  Al Qaeda in Yemen is losing fighters to Daesh as are the Taliban in Afghanistan and other groups in Pakistan.  The Abu Sayyaf group in the Philippines is now also reportedly aligning itself with Daesh.  We are confronted simultaneously with disparate enemies at locations spanning half the globe but we appear to be addressing each fight in isolation from the others.

It features full spectrum warfare with combat taking place on open ground, city streets, deep jungles, high mountains, the airspace above all of these places and between them, and in cyberspace.  Do not be fooled into thinking that Daesh’s use of our own technology against us makes them modern thinkers.  Remember, Marx and Lenin promised that they would hang the last capitalist with the rope he sold them.  They doubtless consider it fitting that they will attack us with our own technologies.  As to being professional and sophisticated fighters, if you spend enough time on a battlefield and survive, you get good at it.  This sophistication and professionalism will not necessarily carry over into other parts of their lives, especially where it might clash with their dogma.

This coalition for the 15th Century shares fighters, resources, and know-how in addition to their shared enemy.  They crave for us to identify them as our enemy because it enhances their stature and facilitates their recruiting and fundraising.  Whether of allies or enemies, neither coalition will be in unanimous agreement on many of a whole range of issues relating to why we fight, what we are fighting for, what achievements might cap our respective final victories.  They don’t need to be in agreement on anything other than who is “we” and who is “them”.   As in The Thirty Years War our enemies have in common a number of points of ideological/theological agreement and they agree that we are the enemy, an enemy that must be destroyed even though that is beyond their actual capabilities at the present time.  History shows that we ignore this determined threat at our own risk.

All of that said, we need to understand a number of key things about this Third World War.

We are fighting an idea.  We can kill its adherents but the idea will survive.

We must adapt our approach, our strategy, to each conflict/theater/locality appropriately while not undermining our efforts in other theaters.

We, not just the US but all of our partners, must recognize that it is all one war and we must cooperatively frame a common strategy accordingly.

The US does not need to put its troops, aircraft, etc. into every single one of these fights.

It does, however, need to make sure that one or more of its local allies are in each and every one of these fights with the fullest possible US support.

We also need to understand that whichever of our partners does put boots on the ground, those troops will eventually come to resent taking all of the risks of ground combat while we take none.

If the only tools in our tool box are hammers, all of our problems begin to look like nails.  We need to use resources and take actions beyond the battlefield that will help our local allies shape that battlefield into a desired state.

We need to be able to peel away their supporters by a number of means including seeing that local grievances are addressed.

We need to eliminate (realistically minimize) actions by our own or coalition forces that discourage or drive away our supporters among the populations. 
 
We need to understand and to remember that the war will not end in a way that we can control nor can we dictate the full shape of what comes afterwards.

ADDENDUM:  I wanted to add a short comment after attending two more sessions at The Brookings Institution this week that touched on this conflict.  I've said for sometime that the US is a status quo power, which in part answers the complaint that we have no national strategy, we are defending the status quo and thus reacting to threats against it.  However, while the US sees itself as defending an established international order, there are many nations who see the democratic free market capitalist USA as a revolutionary expansionist power and a threat.  And, the international order which the US is defending is not simply a matter of nation states, international organizations, and international institutions, it is a process for how all of these interact with each other.  Within this process, a referendum in Scotland - however regrettable it might be - is acceptable.  Sending uniformed armed men (and women) onto the territory of an independent sovereign nation in order to overturn the government of that nation or to steal its territory is not acceptable.

Fight the Battle, Not the Game

In his discussion of the desirable attributes for a battlefield commander, Clausewitz wrote of the importance of “coup d’oiel” – perhaps best described as the ability to quickly recognize a truth that would ordinarily be missed or perhaps only perceived after long study and reflection. Whatever his other virtues, President Obama’s approach to his decision about what to do in Afghanistan clearly demonstrates that he is not choosing to rely on any personal sense of coup d’oiel in this instance. Given that we are already in October and what Clausewitz would have called the campaigning season is nearly over in Afghanistan, this deliberative process need not be considered a fatal flaw.

This morning (October 26), the Washington Post and other news sources are reporting that Obama’s deliberative process has included at least two war games exploring different US troop commitment levels. Given that the history of war gaming as a tool of military study and analysis (as well as an entertainment) is strewn with tales of political and military decision-makers mislead by war games, one can only hope that the decision makers have actually heard the cautionary voices of any professionals associated with these games.

In the most infamous war game incident, the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) tried out its plan for the attack on the island of Midway in a war game in which the “American” side sank four JN aircraft carriers. The game directors restored the four carriers to the IJN side and the game proceeded to the anticipated Japanese victory. However, as naval historians and others will recall, at the actual Battle of Midway, the US Navy – aided by its ability to read Japanese communications – did go on to sink four IJN carriers and turn back the invasion force. (Many tellers of this story fail to point out that the game directors were not wrong in restoring the carriers because every war game has a whole list of questions to examine and in this case the game had to go on to examine them. The error would have been in the IJN failing to take note of the fact that the USN was still a potentially dangerous foe.)

However, this story also reflects a harsh reality about war games as an analytical tool – no matter how much data is piled up and analyzed for inclusion in the game, the war game is not predictive or prescriptive. A well planned and well conducted war game can clarify issues associated with a proposed course of action, but it cannot guarantee a specific real world outcome. In fact, the Prussian Kriegsspiel, a common ancestor of modern war games was no more than a tool that allowed Prussian officers to practice decision-making. It was not considered a valid or useful tool of analysis or for predicting the outcome of a military operation or campaign. (History also tells us, however, that even the Prussians would eventually attach almost mystical faith in their war gaming of various military plans and options.)

There are several reasons for limits upon what war games can tell us. One can be described in a paraphrase of the words of Chief of the General Staff Count Helmut von Moltke – “No war game scenario survives contact with the war gamer.” Or in the words of many a modern field grade American officer, “The enemy gets a vote.” No matter how well educated, informed, and talented they are, the war gamer will not exactly replicate the battlefield decisions that will be made by the real opponent. I know that many hobby and professional war gamers have designed a war game or a war game scenario only to find their expectations for that design shredded by the completely unforeseen and unexpected decisions of a war gamer seeing it for the first time.

Designers of (both hobby and professional) war games are familiar with the limits upon any attempt to model battlefield reality. Every one of them can tell of having presented the latest and most complex simulation to date, only to have someone point out how the design overlooks the extremely important factor of “X.” The reality is that there are just too many factors affecting and influencing a battle and its related decision making process to be captured in any war game.

I do wonder whether these war games factored in what is likely to be the real “schwerpunkt” or decision point of any renewed or expanded American military effort in Afghanistan: American public opinion. The Administration will have to do a very good job of selling its Afghan war strategy to the American people if it is to be given time for that strategy to bear fruit. Clearly, ongoing events in Iraq will color popular reaction to plans for Afghanistan. The US has the option to try and push the reset button in Afghanistan but they will not be able to reset public opinion on the conflict in Afghanistan without the investment of major political assets.

Note: Similar stories can be found about the use of war games during World War II by the German High Command as it pondered decisions on the Eastern Front. In a related note, it is ironic that as the Allies began the D-Day invasion of France at Normandy, many senior German commanders were out of position because of a scheduled German Army kriegsspiel on the subject of a possible Allied invasion.

A Rock and a Hard Choice

Last week the CATO Institute held its conference on the subject of Afghanistan and what the U.S. should do in the ongoing war there. The panel and conference were moderated by Christopher Preble, Director of Foreign Policy Studies at the Cato Institute. Panel members included Malou Innocent, Foreign Policy Analyst at the Cato Institute and co-author of Escaping the 'Graveyard of Empires': A Strategy to Exit Afghanistan; Celeste Ward, Senior Defense Analyst at the RAND Corp.; Patrick M. Cronin, Director of the Institute for National Strategic Studies at the National Defense University; Robert Naiman, National Coordinator, Just Foreign Policy; and Ted Galen Carpenter, Vice President for Defense and Foreign Policy Studies, Cato Institute, and co-author of Escaping the 'Graveyard of Empires'. You can see a podcast of the event at the CATO website. The two most striking points of the conference were the surprising degree of civility and the agreement that we need to do something different in Afghanistan (though without unanimity on what we should do differently) and we needed to start doing this something different soon.

My own thinking on the subject has recently been influenced by Death of a Myth by Bob Snelson on General Custer’s defeat at the Little Bighorn, published in 2005. I was struck by the author’s point that Custer’s battlefield decisions reflected how little he in fact knew or understood (beyond the tactical level) about the Native American peoples against whom he was making war. The army’s objective in this expedition was to attack the Sioux and the Cheyenne until they either moved onto the established U.S. government Indian reservations, or were annihilated. In essence, the U.S. Government had decided to use its military resources to compel these tribes to abandon their traditional way of life and its associated values and mores. Custer knew that the Indians would attempt to evade contact and combat with his force unless they perceived some advantage in fighting or a strong threat to the village and tribe that had to be countered. This understanding appears to be what led Custer to keep dividing his small command in order to cast a wide net that would force the warriors to come out fight.

The conflict between America’s Native peoples fighting to preserve their traditional way of life and an American government determined to see them acculturated or eliminated lasted for decades. It in fact resulted in the destruction of much of the traditional ways of Native Americans while many of the survivors were denied full membership in American society and ended up marginalized in their own homeland.

The United States deployed military forces to Afghanistan in pursuit of Al Qaeda and its Taliban protectors. Having brought down the Taliban regime, the efforts of the U.S. and its Allies moved away from military confrontation with and defeat of residual Taliban and Al Qaeda forces and forces were even removed from Afghanistan and sent to Iraq for the new war there. Our forces and assets remaining in Afghanistan became increasingly focused on social engineering and national building issues with the general ambition of building up a modern western-style nation state – to the detriment of Afghan elements still clinging to the more traditional system based upon clan and tribe. In the view of many Afghans, the U.S. goal is to compel them to abandon their traditions, their religion, and their entire culture.

It is increasingly clear that eight years after U.S. forces arrived in Afghanistan, the American people are unwilling to see the U.S. increase or prolong its commitment of time and resources to further push for any long term reshaping of that country. The Afghans themselves appear at least if not more reluctant to accept the sweeping changes pushed for by the U.S. and its allies, such as the elimination of poppy cultivation and full equality for women, among other things. Against the background of conflict between Al Qaeda/Taliban and the U.S. and its allies, too many Afghans are choosing the former as being less of a threat to traditional values and way of life. We need to decide that our most important objective is to deny Al Qaeda any sanctuary or presence in Afghanistan that would contribute to its terrorist plans and operations. Everything else must be considered a secondary and more long term goal. For the immediate future, the U.S. needs to decide now exactly what resources and forces it can commit and for how long – and adjust its goals accordingly.