Some Philosophic Remarks for the New President-Elect

Congratulations, President-elect Trump, you are now committed to filling what is arguably the toughest jobs on the planet.

As you obviously understand, the President’s most important function is to make decisions.  You will be inundated by matters to be decided by you usually accompanied by recommendations from advisors, counselors, cabinet secretaries, members of Congress, et al, but you will be the actual decision maker.  Also, as important as many of your past decisions were in business, your decisions as President may literally decide between war and peace, life and death for Americans and others.   Although the Federal Government will not function if you try to make all of the decisions yourself, it’s just too big and complex and there are too many things going on every day, you should resist as much as possible any thought of delegating the big war and peace decisions that will define your presidency. 

  

War is the organized use or threatened use of violence in conflicts between two or more states or proto-states.  Warfare is the collective human activity of conducting a war.  War is universal but warfare reflects culture, history, social organization, technology, personality, inspiration, etc. and will always be different each time a war breaks out even as parties to the conflict try to refight their last war.  Peace is generally but inaccurately considered to be the absence of war.  A lifetime studying history, war, warfare, military affairs long ago convinced me that "if you want peace, prepare for war" (from Epitoma Rei Militaris, by the Roman Publius Flavius Vegetius Renatus).  To appear unprepared to go to war even in your own defense is the surest way for a nation to invite war.

 

That said, the most important lesson I have derived from the reading of Clausewitz is that war and the use of military force to resolve a dispute or conflict is almost always the worst possible tool for solving a problem or resolving a dispute (except in cases of national survival).  Murphy’s Law applies to war because in war whatever can go wrong probably will go wrong.  The military set great store in having plans because a plan let’s everyone know what they’re deviating from.  The Law of Unintended Consequences equally dictates that for every anticipated result of a war, there will be multiple events that were not intended almost none of them good for you.  Edward Luttwak, a very smart guy even when I disagree with him, wrote a whole book on how the logic ofwar and conflict is the opposite of what applies outside of war. 

 

The first decision you have to make – because if you wait until a crisis to decide it may be too late – is whether you accept the reality that nuclear weapons are not for fighting wars but for preventing anyone else from using their nuclear weapons against the US or its friends or allies.  Deterrence is the name of the game and in order for it to work, the US invests effort and resources in to preparing to use them.  (See above re the logic of war).

Another important idea for both decision making in general and for war and warfare in particular is to understand that ‘speed is essential, haste harmful’ –Alexander Vasilyevich Suvorov.  Our own John Boyd took this idea a step further with his OODA Loop, which emphasized the cycle of Observe, Orient, Decide, Act – and doing it faster than your opponent so that he is reacting to what you do rather than initiating his own plans.  Many observers note that in today’s cyber-world, the available time to complete this cycle is under incredible pressure.

There are also some important concepts used in discussing warfare - 

Surprise – doing anything that your opponent did not expect, i.e. attacking in a place, at a time, or with a capability that wasn’t expected.  This is one of the oldest force multipliers giving the attacker the initiative.

Mass and/or Unity of Effort – making sure that enough friendly force is concentrated at the right place and time to assure victory – but not too much force – and that few if any friendly forces are needlessly left out of the fight.

Simplicity – “keep it simple, stupid”.  Combat is a multiple body problem (a phrase coined by astrophysicists to describe really hard and complicated interactions between many objects moving through space over the same time period).  The more bodies you have in motion, the harder it is to know who’s doing what much less control them as they do it.   Napoleon, Robert E Lee, Ulysses S Grant, and Dwight Eisenhower all ran into this challenge.

You never want to pit your strength directly against an opponent’s strength.  You commit your strength against weakness – never fight fair.  All properly executed warfare is Asymmetric.

You have seen along with all of us how in Iraq and in Afghanistan, the US failed in its efforts to rebuild and reshape those nations, societies, and cultures.  The US Armed Forces and the Department of State are not constituted, equipped, manned, or supported for such missions.  Ultimately, only Iraqis and Afghans can rebuild.  Our best role is to help and support them with aid and sometimes by fielding military forces to secure space in both time and geography in which our local friends and allies can do that rebuilding.   We are also not constituted politically and socially to support seemingly open ended deployments of our military forces for anything other than a major conflict.

Finally and most importantly, holding the Moral High Ground in conducting military combat operations is as critically important to long term mission success as holding the tactical high ground on the battlefield.  We have to reserve the use of lethal military force for those situations in which it is truly warranted, will be most effective, and can be used with the minimum – preferably zero – damage or casualties to civilians/non-combatants.  And we have to be seen to be acting with restraint and limited aims because as the old cliche reminds us, "with great power comes great responsibility."  As you may have observed, many Americans are not happy with the USA acting as the world's policeman, but they are even more unhappy when anyone else does it.

Which of these things is not like the other? America’s Future, The Thirty Years War, and today’s Islamic World

“History is a cruel step-mother, and when it retaliates, it stops at nothing.” Lenin

History is huge, given that by definition it encompasses the story of the human race going back to before the existence of written records.  We grapple with the challenge of history by parsing it into digestible lumps on the basis of time periods, geographic location, linguistic communities, etc.  In order to understand it as something more involved than the simple accretion of facts in sedimentary layers, we use metaphors, such as the turning of a wheel or the flowing of water in a river, my own preferred image.  The message in the metaphor is that change is the singular constant across history even as it may slow down or speed up.

“History is written for schoolmasters and armchair strategists.  Statesmen and warriors pick their war through the dark.” Lord Esher Journal, 15 March 1915

Given the time spanned by human history, it is not surprising that people have long debated, and still do, whether or not history repeats itself.  The English historian G M Trevelyan summed up the debate this way:  ‘‘History repeats itself!’ and ‘History never repeats itself’ are about equally true… We never know enough about the infinitely complex circumstances of any past event to prophesy the future by analogy.”  However, George Bernard Shaw offered an interesting observation when he pointed out that “If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience!”  For me personally, the debate is moot because whether or not history repeats itself, it is more than evident from history that people clearly do.  Nations are often seen to behave like people, which might be at least in part attributed to the reality that they are made up of people and are governed or led by people.  Thus nations, like individuals, can be perceived to be engaging in bad behavior which others then try to adjust through punishments and/or rewards.

 “What experience and history teach is this—that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.”  GWF Hegel

The violence engulfing the Islamic world over the past decade or more, with growing conflict between Shi’ites and Sunnis, long ago brought to mind the Thirty Years War (1618-1648) when the emerging  Protestants and the Roman Catholic Church confronted each other across the courts, cathedrals, and battlefields of Europe.  General Sir John Hackett, in “The Profession of Arms”, described the Thirty Years War as “A period in which fervent Christians were prepared to hang, burn, torture, shoot or poison other fervent Christians with whom they happened to disagree upon the correct approach to eternal life.”  To me the parallel of a religiously fueled, politically complex expanding conflict is self-evident.

As Sweden’s King Gustavus Adolphus observed of Europe’s version, “all the wars that are on foot in Europe have been fused together and have become a single war.”  A parallel conflict in the Islamic world today might reach from the Atlantic Coast of West Africa to the islands of Indonesia or the Philippines, and from Central Asia to the deep Indian Ocean.

Much has been made of the failure of the United States to show evidence of national strategy in recent decades, and I have been among those critics.  A speaker at the Army War College earlier this year rightly corrected us by pointing out that the US today is a status quo power – and preserving that status quo has been our strategy.  Unfortunately, such an approach places the US in the position of King Canute telling the tide to go out when it’s coming in – both are doomed to failure.

I bought a copy of Peter H. Wilson’s “The Thirty Years War: Europe’s Tragedy” to refresh my knowledge of that conflict.  Wilson offers a thorough examination of the Thirty Years War, with excellent elaboration of its background and preliminaries.  He promises to tell the whole story of the war right down to its ending (often only summarized).  With some 850 pages of text plus some 75 pages of notes, I believe he will fulfill that promise.

Whatever happens today need not be an Islamic reenactment of the Thirty Years War, but the complexities of that past conflict resonate in the one potentially confronting us.  They both reflect a complex interaction of religious and geo-political motivations for conflict.  They are contests between both state and non-state actors. Individuals from around the world choose to join the conflict in service of one side or the other, often in contradiction of their own nation’s stance on the war.  Co-religionists end up in conflict with each other for political and geo-political reasons even as they also fight others because they were not of the same faith.

The principal players in Europe’s war were Spain, Holland, France, the German principalities, the Holy Roman Empire and its Electors (both Protestants and Catholics), and Sweden – with Lutherans, Calvinists, and Catholics all pitted against each other in various and changing combinations.  Many soldiers became mercenaries and fought for pay over religion or country.   How might we look for lessons from their experience to determine which nations might possibly play which original roles?  Is the USA in the role of France or Spain?  Is Russia or China the Ottoman Empire?  There is no papal style structure in the Islamic world, but perhaps Saudi control of the holy places of Mecca and Medina brings them close to such a role.

Reading Wilson’s chapter Pax Hispanica, it quickly becomes evident that Spain was then, as the United States is today, the principal status quo power – and almost the sole superpower by wealth and military capabilities, attempting to keep things the way they are.  The challenges facing Spain then echo those facing us today.  Both countries are the economic top dogs because of global reach and, for Spain, the influx of silver from the mines in its American colonies.  But this wealth led Spain to neglect development of a balanced economy that promoted both manufacturing and agriculture, and it contributed to inflation.

The US is struggling to deal with economic challenges intertwined with philosophical battles over its social, economic, and even political future.  These ongoing contests are preventing it from effectively applying almost any remedies at the present time.  Both Spain and the US were also spending massive amounts on defense, fighting extended foreign wars, and debates over perceived threats and responses dominated each nation’s strategic thinking.  And both countries were suspected by other nations of ambitious and expansionist intentions as they sought to shape the world into the desired form.  However, the mere hypothesis that the US now is playing a role similar to Spain during the Thirty Years War must be tested against events in the real world and measured against the events of some 600 years ago played out for Spain.  Spain began its decline as it failed to maintain the world order which it had come to dominate and failed to adapt to the new emerging world order.

The hard reality is that the American people have one choice to make (among many decisions facing them):

Will the United States remain the sole superpower and by definition the world’s policeman in pursuit of this imperial role as it seeks to shape the world in its own image?

Or, will the US concede sufficient authority and capability and autonomy to a supranational body that could act around the world without the US or US forces and with the inevitable result of shaping a world to some greater or lesser degree different from what the US might prefer?

“The future is hidden even from the men who made it.”  Anatole France

You Can't Have One Without the Other

December 15’s Sunday Washington Post featured a great review by Gerard DeGroot of the new book “Strategy, A History” by Lawrence Freedman, a British strategic analyst and former foreign policy analyst to then-Prime Minister Tony Blair. What made this a great review was not just the reviewer's positive comments about the book (he convinced me that I want to read it), but I especially appreciated his comments illuminating the relationship between plans and strategy – which are far too often confounded by those discussing either or both.

At the conclusion of his review, Professor DeGroot writes, “All this strategizing is, in truth, an attempt to impose individual will upon a recalcitrant world…We convince ourselves that we are, in fact, architects of our own fate…much more palatable than having to admit that we might be mere flotsam in a turbulent sea of circumstance.” The latter reference resonates with me because it calls to mind the reality within which we work and struggle, especially at the level of national security and warfighting.

DeGroot’s statement resonated with some of the lessons I had learned from experience – enlightened at least equally by a number of tenets drawn from the pages of On War, written by the 19^th Century Prussian officer Clausewitz (and cited by DeGroot in his review)-“everything in war is simple, but the simplest thing is difficult”. Strategy is how you intend to conduct your war – plans are how you will make that strategy effective in your campaigns and battles.

During a 30 year career as an American diplomat, I found that of all the Secretaries of State under whom I served only Henry Kissinger thought and worked at the level of strategy, having a clear picture of the nation’s starting point as well as relative current situation while still keeping an eye on the intended eventual end state.  By comparison, it seemed that his immediate predecessor and his successors were for numerous reasons focused intently upon whatever event had washed up into their inbox and there immediately burst into flames.

I suspect that Kissinger, DeGroot, myself, and possibly Clausewitz, share a metaphoric vision of the world in which time moves as a river, pushing us onward as we encounter events that are swallowed up by the forward momentum, are pushed aside by subsequent events or which on occasion force that forward flow from its seemingly intended direction and bursting these banks to move in new and unanticipated directions. A commander who relies upon a precisely executed sequence of actions is doomed to fail against this tide, but one who prepares and anticipates this reality in the knowledge that his plan serves primarily as the basis for whatever adaptation or improvisation will be forced him upon by events and circumstances will have every chance at success.

I have been a player of historically based war games and conflict simulations for more than 50 years, losing and winning innumerable battles, campaigns, and wars played out on a tabletop. I learned the hard way that in games which depended often upon chance (as does war according to Clausewitz), I had to make my plans in the expectation that my plan would not go perfectly or smoothly, but would be repeatedly disrupted either by my bad luck or my opponent's good luck. I had to make plans that were ‘luck-proof’, incorporating provisions against both the anticipated and unforeseen ‘what-ifs’ that might come. Napoleon himself, though an avid planner, also recognized this when he claimed that in battle “first I engage and then I see” – knowing as he did how chance events might derail his plans and how as soldiers say today, “the enemy gets a vote” on how, when, and where a battle will be conducted.

DeGroot’s review did not specifically draw drawn upon Clausewitz’ comments upon the role of chance in warfare, but the Professor does offer his own tale of the unforeseen events that converted his plan to read Freedman’s book in four days, draft his review on the fifth, revise and polish on the sixth, and (inevitably) on the seventh take his ease – into an event-driven reality that required seven days spent on just the reading. The Prussian general von Moltke the Elder famously wrote, “No plan survives contact with the enemy.” The mythic iconic soldier, Sergeant Murphy, put it perhaps more succinctly but less elegantly when he reputedly said “shit happens.”

"Watch them words, watch them words!"

Tom Ricks, the Washington Post’s Military Correspondent, has a knack for getting my attention with the items he shares from his wide-ranging contacts with members of our armed services. The latest such tidbit was a short note on how American military personnel have picked up Inshallah as part of their everyday vocabulary. Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary (www.m-w.com/ which includes an audio guide for pronunciation) defines it to mean “God willing,” or “if Allah wills it.” What is not yet clear is the degree to which the appearance of the phrase in regular usage also reflects the adoption of some related degree of fatalistic thinking among the troops about their mission’s chances for success.

Of course, this is not the first time that American troops have taken up foreign words and phrases as a result of their exposure to foreign climes. I was very much reminded of this last Memorial Day as a friend and I drove into Washington DC to participate in the Annual Memorial Day Parade. As he described some office project to me, he made some reference to boo-coo problems – and hearing this legacy of the Vietnam War really caught me off-guard. In part because I hadn’t heard it in so long, was entirely unaware of the nature of his connection to that war, and perhaps because we were both wearing Union Army uniforms (reproductions) for the parade at that particular moment. (By the way, at least one of my sources suggests that the Yanks had previously captured the word in France during the First World War – perhaps it was sent back home during the Depression. One can only wonder at what forgotten lessons the American soldiers of the Revolutionary War learned from their French comrades-in-arms?)

Another piece of linguistic booty that I learned long before I knew its origin is boondocks to refer to remote, rural regions. This is a legacy of the Philippine Insurrection that followed our occupation of the Philippines during the Spanish-American War. Also picked up during that conflict was the word bolo, the Spanish language name for the large machete like knife used by the guerrillas. This reportedly survived in a First World War reference to the men who did not perform well on the rifle range as ‘the bolo squad’ (apparently suggesting they would be better armed with bolos than rifles) and most recently during Desert Storm in the ‘bolo badge’ nickname for a Purple Heart badge awarded for a wound that was received under particularly foolish circumstances. Interestingly, stockade is of Spanish origin but has been in English usage for so long that it appears to date from pre-American Revolutionary contacts between American or British and Spanish forces in Europe or North America.

However, in spite of all of this entertaining trivia, the reported usage of Inshallah does warrant reflection on what this conflict is doing to the military now and in for the future. For most of the 19th Century, French offered the strongest impact on the speech of American soldiers since we and everybody else took Napoleon and his Grande Armée as our model for military perfection. French was the first foreign language taught at West Point. With the rise of Prussia in Europe, after our American Civil War, German words entered the military vocabulary as our officers sought to master a more theoretical approach to war based upon the study of Clausewitz and the application of his ideas by German generals. This influence survived right up to the verge of the Cold War when Russian began to exert a greater influence. As the post-Vietnam War army refocused on a possible conflict with the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact, German re-emerged in words like schwerpunkt to mean strongpoint or center of gravity, for example, as American forces studied how to fight a war in Europe against a modern technologically advanced and larger opponent. Words do have meaning and attention to the evolution of military vocabulary offers insight into what is happening on the battlefield as well as what is happening in the higher headquarters both in the field and in Washington, DC.




“Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it, misdiagnosing it, and misapplying the wrong remedies.”
Groucho Marx