Reconsidering the Relationship Between War and Strategy

Abstract

AbstractThe doctrinal definitions of strategy regarding ‘ends, ways, and means’ imply an unrealistic linear process, which lulls military officers into unrealistic expectations before conflict and subverts their strategic roles once fighting begins. When it comes to actions taken during a conflict, there should be no separation between political, economic or military strategies, as death and destruction drive reciprocity between war and strategy. Shane Praiswater argues that despite the best efforts of pre-war military strategists, there is an unrecognised danger in attempting strategy before a conflict. Therefore, while generals briefing a literal war plan and objectives amid an emerging crisis will ask important questions regarding national interests, feasibility, risks and so on, they should not use the term strategy. Military leaders present plans, tactics and objectives derived from political guidance, but true strategy can only begin once the war starts. This essay is written from a US perspective but is applicable to any democratic system with a civilian-dominated chain of command. ◼ The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the United States Air Force or Department of Defense.Notes1 Peter Feaver, ‘The Civil-Military Problematique: Huntington, Janowitz, and the Question of Civilian Control’, Armed Forces and Society (Vol. 23, No. 2, 1996), pp. 149–78; Eliot A Cohen, Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen, and Leadership in Wartime (New York, NY: Free Press, 2002); Risa Brooks, ‘Paradoxes of Professionalism: Rethinking Civil-Military Relations in the United States’, International Security (Vol. 44, No. 4, 1 April 2020), pp. 7–44.2 Richard K Betts, ‘Is Strategy an Illusion?’, International Security (Vol. 25, No. 2, 2000), pp. 5–50.3 Eliot A Cohen, Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen, and Leadership in Wartime (New York, NY: Free Press, 2002).4 While the point of this essay is not to create a new and perfect definition of strategy, it does argue that a significant level of violence is necessary to consider the processes involved. As Libiseller and Milevski discuss when considering hybrid or grey-zone conflicts, ambiguous concepts often create more ambiguity than the phenomena they attempt to describe. Libiseller and Milevski astutely observe that by focusing ‘exclusively on violence, Western thinking on war misses the nuance of Clausewitz’s definition’. It might be feasible that violence is not a necessary condition for a fashionably labelled grey-zone operation to be war. However, for the purposes of strategy, this essay argues that violence is a prerequisite for the processes that should drive leaders, regardless of whether a war is actually declared. A non-violent war, however that might look, will simply not drive the same emotions and decisions a violent conflict does. Chiara Libiseller and Lukas Milevski, ‘War and Peace: Reaffirming the Distinction’, Survival (Vol. 63, No. 1, February 2021), pp. 101–12.5 This essay does not concern itself with William Owen’s argument that the operational level of war does not exist, but it wholly agrees with his assertion that the obsession of modern militaries with the operational level builds a barrier, rather than a conduit, from strategy to tactics. William F Owen, ‘The Operational Level of War Does Not Exist’, Journal of Military Operations (Vol. 1, No. 1, 2012), pp. 17–20.6 Hew Strachan, The Direction of War: Contemporary Strategy in Historical Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 118.7 Risa Brooks, ‘Paradoxes of Professionalism: Rethinking Civil-Military Relations in the United States’, International Security (Vol. 44, No. 4, 1 April 2020), pp. 7–44.8 Milevski suggests that effects, assumptions, conditions, rationales, agents, allies and enemies are at least as integral to strategy as ends, ways and means. Lukas Milevski, ‘Enunciating Strategy: How to Talk about Strategy Effectively’, Military Strategy Magazine (Vol. 7, No. 1, 2020), pp. 18, 25.9 Libiseller’s arguments mirror those of Dan Marston and other historians bemoaning concepts such as counterinsurgency as somehow separate from the basic definitions of war. Libiseller, ‘“Hybrid Warfare” as an Academic Fashion’.10 Stoker, much like Strachan and Lawrence Freedman, repeatedly emphasises in several works that Clausewitz struggled with the definition of strategy, and in many cases was describing what modern theorists consider the operational level of war. He also argues, somewhat provocatively, that misidentifying limited wars leads to avoiding actual victory. Donald Stoker, ‘Everything You Think You Know About Limited War is Wrong’, War on the Rocks, 22 December 2016.11 Ibid.12 Margaret MacMillan, War: How Conflict Shaped Us (New York, NY: Random House, 2020).13 Lawrence Freedman, Strategy: A History (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2013).14 Michael Howard, ‘The Forgotten Dimensions of Strategy’, Foreign Affairs (Vol. 57, No. 5, 1979), pp. 975–86.15 Freedman, Strategy: A History.16 Strachan, The Direction of War.17 John Kiszely, ‘The Political-Military Dynamic in the Conduct of Strategy’, Journal of Strategic Studies (Vol. 42, No. 2, February 2019), pp. 235–58.18 This essay respectfully departs from Gray’s influential efforts, not to repudiate it by any means, but to suggest that history proves there are significant changes affecting leaders once a conflict erupts. Colin S Gray, The Strategy Bridge: Theory for Practice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).19 Gray defines strategy as ‘the theory and practice of the use, and threat of use, of organized force for political purposes’. Colin S Gray, Modern Strategy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).20 Gray, The Theory of Strategy, p. 181.21 Shawn Brimley and Loren Schulman, ‘Au Revoir QDR’, War on the Rocks, 15 June 2016.22 Whether or not Huntington was responsible for these problems (his defenders would insist Huntington was focused on peacetime operations), he is still widely cited for all contexts. Risa Brooks, ‘Beyond Huntington: US Military Professionalism Today’, US Army War College Quarterly: Parameters (Vol. 51, No. 1, March 2021), pp. 65–77.23 Gregory Daddis, Westmoreland’s War: Reassessing American Strategy in Vietnam (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).24 Cohen, Supreme Command.25 Hew Strachan, ‘Clausewitz and the First World War’, Journal of Military History (Vol. 75, No. 2, April 2011), pp. 367–92.26 Feaver, ‘The Civil-Military Problematique’.27 Strachan, The Direction of War.28 Strachan, ‘Clausewitz and the First World War’.29 Daniel Marston, ‘Limited War in the Nuclear Age: American Strategy in Korea’, in Hal Brands (ed.), The New Makers of Modern Strategy: From the Ancient World to the Digital Age (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2023), pp. 717–40.30 Brooks, ‘Paradoxes of Professionalism’.31 Hew Strachan, ‘Strategy in Theory; Strategy in Practice’, Journal of Strategic Studies (Vol. 42, No. 2, February 2019), pp. 171–90.32 Kiszely, ‘The Political-Military Dynamic in the Conduct of Strategy’.33 Strachan, ‘Strategy in Theory; Strategy in Practice’.34 Brooks, ‘Paradoxes of Professionalism’.35 Roger Chickering, ‘World War I and the Theory of Total War: Reflections on the British and German Cases, 1914-1915’, in Roger Chickering and Stig Förster (eds), Great War, Total War: Combat and Mobilization on the Western Front, 1914–1918, Publications of the German Historical Institute (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 35–54.36 Mary Louise Kelly, Erika Ryan and Patrick Jarenwattananon, ‘The US Lost Track of Why it Was in Afghanistan, Former Commander Says’, NPR, 10 August 2022, , accessed 29 July 2023.37 George Bush and Brent Scowcroft, A World Transformed (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1999).38 David Halberstam, Best and Brightest (New York, NY: Ballantine Books, 1972).39 Cohen, Supreme Command.40 The same would prove true for Westmoreland’s successor, Creighton Abrams, and his relationship with Nixon and Kissinger. Daddis and others document the extent to which strategic agendas differed, but the war drove generals and civilian leaders to agree on controversial decisions like actions in Laos and Cambodia. Daddis, Westmoreland’s War.41 John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).42 Cohen, Supreme Command.43 Marston, ‘Limited War in the Nuclear Age: American Strategy in Korea’.44 This attitude reflects Libiseller and Milevski’s thesis that non-traditional wars are still wars and should respect Clausewitz’s maxims. Chiara Libiseller and Lukas Milevski, ‘War and Peace: Reaffirming the Distinction’, Survival (Vol. 63, No. 1, February 2021), pp. 101–12.45 The author uses counterfactual in the quantitative sense, not as an alternative history. For example, when considering how Hitler meddled with the Nazi advance into France and potentially aided the Allies by making Dunkirk possible, a counterfactual exercise gives credence to the statement: if Hitler had not slowed down his allegedly ‘mission command-enabled generals’, the British might not have been able to evacuate. A statement along the lines of ‘had the US had a less aggressive nuclear strategy, the USSR would have overrun Europe or launched a nuclear attack’ does not hold up to the same general scrutiny. Gaddis, Strategies of Containment.46 Vladislav M Zubok and Hope M Harrison, ‘The Nuclear Education of Nikita Khrushchev’, in John Gaddis et al. (eds), Cold War Statesmen Confront the Bomb: Nuclear Diplomacy Since 1945 (Oxford University Press, 1999).47 Nichols states that: ‘We all know the Cuban missile crisis because it’s just part of our common knowledge about the world, even for people that didn’t live through it. I think we don’t realize how dangerous other times were. I always think of 1983 as the year we almost didn’t make it’. Kevin Townsend and Tom Nichols, ‘Radio Atlantic: This Is Not Your Parents’ Cold War’, The Atlantic, 17 February 2023, , accessed 12 September 2023.48 ‘By the 1980s, the Soviet model had exhausted its innovative potential and had lost its international credibility (except in parts of the Third World). Above all, the model began to lose its appeal within Soviet society, even among the bureaucrats, educated elites, and skilled professionals, who since the 1950s had formed the growing Soviet middle class’. Vladislav Zubok, ‘Soviet Foreign Policy from Détente to Gorbachev, 1975–1985’, in Melvyn P Leffler and Odd Arne Westad (eds), The Cambridge History of the Cold War: Volume 3: Endings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 93.49 ‘The policy which seeks to protect all we have has been called the policy or strategy of containment. The conception of containment has been abused by those who would presumably do more rather than less, but the policy of doing more seems quite unable to generate any real dynamism behind it’. Bernard Brodie, Strategy in the Missile Age (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1959), p. 269.50 Describing how the Truman administration tried to doctrinise containment, Gaddis explains the rifts between Kennan’s nuanced formulations and attempts at strategy, which did not anticipate US participation in Korea: ‘NSC-68 was not intended as a repudiation of Kennan. He was consulted at several stages in the drafting process and the final document of some sixty-six single-spaced typed pages reflected his views at several points. The objective rather was to systematize containment, and to find the means to make it work. But the very act of reducing the strategy to writing exposed the differences that had begun to develop between Kennan and the administration’. Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, p. 88.51 Kennedy, tellingly, acknowledged that excessive nuclear arsenals could not ‘be rationally defended’, but he understood that despite his personal commitment to flexibility, MAD was easier to sell to Allies. Not only was the Cold War hardly a ‘war’ in the traditional sense, even if one argues that the unique nature of nuclear weapons requires a wartime strategy, there was no process obvious in MAD’s creation other than a justification to tame some nuclear acquisitions and mollify Allies. Lawrence Freedman, Kennedy’s Wars: Berlin, Cuba, Laos, and Vietnam (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).52 Strategy, as Schelling put it, requires that the best course of action relies in part on the opponent’s actions. Thomas C Schelling, Strategy of Conflict (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960). Using the word ‘strategy’ to describe MAD belies a misunderstanding of its true purpose: when ‘flexible response’ failed to mollify the Soviets or reduce the arms race, McNamara needed a new political tactic. McNamara suddenly embraced targeting cities in no small part to prevent ‘delusions’ that winning a total nuclear conflict was possible, and to fend off accusations of weakness from hawks upset about stemming missile production and various nuclear programmes. Lawrence Freedman and Jeffrey Michaels, Evolution of Nuclear Strategy (London: Palgrave, 2019).53 The Soviet Union certainly never bought into MAD. It does not appear the Soviets ever changed anything based on US decisions, really. Freedman and Michael, Evolution of Nuclear Strategy.54 MAD could hardly have been a strategy if it did not pre-empt other nuclear fighting concepts. The most generous interpretation is that MAD was one piece of a larger strategy, but more realistically, given the growing nuclear capabilities of multiple nations, MAD was an acknowledgement of a reality that lent some quantitative credibility to arsenal sizes. Alain C Enthoven and K Wayne Smith, How Much Is Enough? Shaping the Defense Program, 1961-1969, 1st ed. (New York, NY: Harper & Row, 1971).55 Further evidence that MAD was not a strategy was the military’s unwillingness to acknowledge it as a strategy (nor did anyone force it to), and it never ceased planning on somehow winning a nuclear conflict. ‘[The military was] distressed that few new weapons systems were being authorized and that McNamara was unwilling to pursue the arms race with any energy’. See Freedman and Michaels, Evolution of Nuclear Strategy, p. 328.56 The Kennedy administration alone took various approaches during a bevy of potential crises, which it could do in no small part due to the sudden realisation that the worst fears of Soviet capabilities taken for granted in 1959 were proven wrong. A re-reading of Wohlstetter makes one question not only MAD, but all popular Cold War assumptions. Was Wohlstetter wrong about how difficult deterrence would be, or were the much-publicised ideological differences between the US and USSR insufficient to drive a real crisis? Or perhaps the US managed its deterrence challenges somehow, despite the lack of a consistent approach? Albert Wohlstetter, ‘The Delicate Balance of Terror’, Foreign Affairs (Vol. 37, No. 2, 1959), pp. 211–34.57 Policymakers on both sides of the conflict understood that using a nuclear weapon would provoke a response, and MAD’s slight rephrasing of massive retaliation did not lend the former any updated cachet. Thomas C Schelling, ‘Meteors, Mischief, and War’, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (Vol. 16, No. 7, September 1960), pp. 292–300. Even in 1955, well before the USSR’s ICBM’s became a realistic threat, Brodie wrote that ‘even if you shoot first, you will probably die too!’ Bernard Brodie, ‘Strategy Hits a Dead End’, Harper’s Magazine, October 1955, , accessed 14 April 2023.58 Influential wargames with representative personnel proved that even crossing the nuclear threshold was difficult, and as Kahn and Schelling predicted, albeit in different ways, escalation would require conscious decisions by actors still reticent to sacrifice their national polity. See Freedman, Kennedy’s Wars.59 Some braver leadership might have taken a different route, and there were options readily available. McNaughton, for example, was running with Schelling and non-zero-sum games, while McNamara was doing a former Secretary of State John Foster Dulles (known for his escalatory rhetoric) impersonation much to the chagrin (or sometimes relief) of NATO allies. Even creative non-escalatory nuclear strategies, however, might be dangerous given the absence of a known wartime situation, and in any case would be politically risky. Simply put, MAD was very easy for voters to understand and was probably the most comforting ‘tough’ option for the average American. See Freedman and Michaels, Evolution of Nuclear Strategy.60 Kahn’s ladder is routinely misunderstood as a one-way mechanism, but more importantly, Kahn clearly separated pre-war actions from nuclear wars. Deterrence as a strategy rarely considers what Kahn most famously advocated, that nuclear wars need not be automatically existential: ‘Kahn was particularly concerned to debunk the notion that the parallel nuclear capabilities made war inconceivable. He reminded his readers, as had Brodie, that the obligations of the United States to NATO required the ability to strike against the Soviet Union even if it had not been attacked itself. “The agonizing decision to start an all-out thermonuclear war would be ours”. He refused to accept that the threat of mutual suicide would guarantee deterrence’. See Freedman and Michaels, Evolution of Nuclear Strategy, p. 168.61 Schelling went so far as to state that ‘[m]ilitary strategy, whether we like it or not, has become the diplomacy of violence’. The acknowledgement that deterrence morphs strategy into something very alien echoed his earlier 1960 statements that deterrence was a ‘problem’, not necessarily a strategy. Thomas C Schelling, Arms and Influence (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1966), p. 33.62 Robert Powell, ‘Nuclear Deterrence and the Strategy of Limited Retaliation’, American Political Science Review (Vol. 83, No. 2, 1989), pp. 503–19.63 Libiseller is blunt when discussing deterrence, stating that it is not war, ‘because the intention to use force is conditional for the former and not the latter’. Libiseller, ‘“Hybrid Warfare” as an Academic Fashion’.64 Stoker, ‘Everything You Think You Know About Limited War Is Wrong’.65 Freedman and Michaels, Evolution of Nuclear Strategy.66 Hew Strachan, ‘The Lost Meaning of Strategy’, Survival (Vol. 47, No. 3, October 2005), pp. 33–54.67 CSIS, for example, asked ‘where is the strategy?’ when analysing President Trump’s 2017 NSS, but what seems most remarkable when reading Cordesman’s critique is how genuinely CSIS argued in good faith with a strategy the administration largely ignored despite its lack of specifics. However, the same could be said for any administration and the NSS or similar documents. This essay previously mentioned Truman’s decision to intervene in Korea despite explicit statements to the contrary and containment’s denial of Korea as applicable, but in any given conflict, it is difficult to imagine a pre-war strategy being as impactful as domestic politics and other evolving situations. Events and circumstances, not explicit strategies, drive war entry decisions. So why should pre-war efforts not be explicitly delineated as separate from wartime strategic processes? Anthony H Cordesman, ‘Giving the New National Security Strategy the Attention It Deserves’, Center for Strategic & International Studies, 21 December 2017, , accessed 18 August 2023.68 Jonathan B A Bailey, ‘Military History and the Pathology of Lessons Learned: The Russo-Japanese War, a Case Study’, in Williamson Murray and Richard Hart Sinnreich (eds), The Past as Prologue, 1st ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 170–94.69 Strachan, The Direction of War.70 This essay’s message to the military is simple: do not pretend you can ignore politics any more than you can ignore the weather. Do not accept disconnects between supposed strategic goals and realties on the ground, and do not treat politicians as annoyances or overlords built to provide little more than permissions for violence. Do not treat deployments as temporary duties in service of a medal: if there is a fix for denying the disconnects that plagued Vietnam and Afghanistan, it must involve the military. Do not accept oversimplistic lessons from history, and realise that for many of the campaigns we celebrate today, strategy was bitterly contested between and within Allies, civilian and military alike. Michael Howard, The Mediterranean Strategy in the Second World War (New York, NY: Praeger, 1968).71 Eisenhower was an incredibly gifted political figure; given the permeation of Huntington’s model, modern officers might be shocked to learn the responsibilities Eisenhower had for negotiating directly with Stalin and with his own allies. He was far more than an operational-level commander. Joseph Patrick Hobbs, Eisenhower’s Wartime Letters to Marshall (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University, 1971).72 Ridgway is a fascinating example of how strategy works in practice because even though historians justifiably lauded Ridgway as a master strategist, his ends or aims were nebulous at best. Ridgway was still conducting significant offensives, but he innately understood that he was fighting as hard as possible while also keeping the conflict from escalating into nuclear war. That meant a considerable number of seemingly important questions would remain unanswered, but this level of nuance did not hamper Ridgway. Matthew Ridgway, The Korean War (New York, NY: Doubleday & Company, 1967).73 Thus the famous ‘war is too important to be left to the generals’ quote. See Cohen, Supreme Command.Additional informationNotes on contributorsShane PraiswaterLt Col Shane ‘Axl’ Praiswater PhD is a recent graduate of the SECDEF Strategic Thinkers Program at Johns Hopkins’ School of Advanced International Studies. He is an Air Force bomber pilot and Weapons School graduate. Lieutenant Colonel Praiswater would like to especially thank Professors Dan Marston and Paula Thornhill for their guidance in writing this piece.