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On 22 January 2003 the US secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, angered by France and Germany’s reluctance to embrace the war on Iraq, characterised them as the states of ‘old Europe’. Those more familiar with history were quick to point out that a refusal to go to war was in truth a reflection of ‘new Europe’. In the first half of the twentieth century ‘old Europe’ had been far too quick to fight, with dire consequences in 1914–18 and 1939–45; it created institutions in the second half of the century, most obviously the European Union, designed precisely to prevent any recurrence. Rumsfeld’s utterances have become the stuff of satire, but in this case we need to dig a bit deeper. However deficient his tact, however flawed his diplomacy, and however inadequate his grasp of history, Rumsfeld hit an exposed nerve.
For Europeans who grew up not only with the legacy of the two world wars but also in the shadow of the Cold War, the norm that war can be an instrument of policy, however compelling its logic, is counter-intuitive.
Because there was no war in Europe, Europeans became used to the idea that war itself had no utility. As J.C. Wylie sagely pointed out in 1967, ‘War for a nonaggressive nation is actually a nearly complete collapse of policy’, as it immediately invalidates the policies in place before the war. The only qualification involves wars fought for national survival.1 Even those Europeans who, thinking historically, accepted that war against Adolf Hitler was justified, pulled back from embracing war against Leopoldo Galtieri or Slobodan Milosevic. The incredulity which greeted the outbreak of war in 1982, when Britain fought to regain the Falkland Islands from Argentina, or in 1999, when NATO used air power to coerce Serbia over Kosovo, was not necessarily inspired by pacifism. Pacifists, however strident and impassioned their tone, use powerfully articulated arguments. The overwhelming response was more emotional: it was one of surprise, even of shock. The dominant instrument of Cold War strategic thought, deterrence, had created the assumption that real wars were things of the past, not of policy.
The years since the end of the Cold War, and particularly since the attacks of 11 September 2001, have therefore been years of re-education for Europeans. Armed conflict has become much more frequent. The phrase ‘new wars’ (whether they are really new or not) and the doctrine of humanitarian intervention are both ways of making the frequency of war comprehensible, even logical, for liberal middle classes accustomed to the norms of peace.
But this has not removed the sense of fear. Trepidation about war is not just a matter of casualties, destructiveness and loss of life. It is an anxiety over political consequences. The Great Powers of the nineteenth century, for all that they may not be the great powers of the twenty-first, have not lost the habits of mind which gave them that status in the first place. The Duke of Wellington told the military secretary, Lord Fitzroy Somerset (who as Lord Raglan would command the British expeditionary force in the Crimean War in 1854), on the occasion of the 1838 rebellion in Canada: ‘There is no such thing as a little war for a great Nation’.2 He recognised the opportunity for exploitation given to lesser powers by the embroilment of a great power in armed conflict, and he also – and in consequence – appreciated the possibility of a small war escalating into a big one. Having been born in the eighteenth century, Wellington was only too well aware of how for Britain two wars in North America, the Seven Years War (1756–63) and the War of American Independence (1776–83), had both acquired European dimensions.
Moreover, having won both his reputation and his title in the Napoleonic Wars, he also knew how a series of independent and self-contained conflicts, with different participants and with potentially independent conclusions, could merge into one larger and seemingly united struggle.
Big wars for small Wellington’s admonition appeared particularly relevant in summer 2006. As Israel sought to escalate its confrontation with the Palestinians in Gaza to the south, it also resolved to tackle Hizbullah by invading Lebanon to the north. The reaction of two ‘great powers’, the United States and the United Kingdom, was not to restrain Israel but to let its armed forces have their head. Two separable conflicts, waged at opposite ends of the Israeli state, were conflated into one existential crisis. For Israel, unlike Europe, war had not lost its utility: its survival as an independent state had depended on its readiness to fight. But by 2006, what had been a genuine reason for war between 1948 and 1967 had in the eyes of some commentators become a cover for colonialism. Israel reacted disproportionately because in their eyes it was seeking to expand its territory to its ‘natural frontiers’. The rhetoric emanating from Tel Aviv in 2006 was of escalation, not limitation.
Small-scale but persistent terrorist attacks were answered with the full conventional capabilities of the Israeli Defense Force, and Israel’s posture was linked to global threats, not just regional ones. On one hand this was a war ‘to restore deterrence’: the strategic theory of the Cold War was being used to justify war, not, as in the Cold War itself, to prevent it. On the other hand it was part of the US-led ‘global war on terror’. Conspiracy theorists, already sure that US foreign policy was too much in thrall to Israel, detected an effort by American neo-conservatives to re-launch their programme to reconfigure the Middle East. Finding their plan to establish Iraq as a democratic state checked, at least for the time being, they had now hatched a fresh plot. The way out of the Iraq imbroglio was not for US forces to withdraw from the region but to redirect and refurbish US policy by fashioning Israeli victories over its neighbours. Conflating, not containing, the conflicts of the Middle East would enable the George W. Bush administration to maximise American power and so conjure success where regional defeat had seemed inevitable. Both the rhetoric and the substance of the administration’s policy gave sufficient support to such theories to make them hard to dismiss out of hand.
Once the fear that one small crisis could link with another took root, the scale of the possible conflagration grew. Those who in the Cold War would 34 | Hew Strachan have expected containment now anticipated escalation. Europeans worked to defuse the tensions in the United States’ relationship with Iran. America’s readiness to use war as an instrument of policy did not seem to have been curtailed by the apparent failure of that policy in Iraq. Washington’s apparent desire to confront Tehran, and Iran’s refusal to be coerced, meant that the arc of conflict threatened to spread from the Middle East to Central Asia, from the shores of the Mediterranean to the borders of Afghanistan. This geopolitical game (if that is not too trivial a word) having been put in motion, it was hard to see where the dominos would stop. From Afghanistan to Pakistan, from Pakistan to India, regionally contained animosities and tensions could be stoked when set against the broader backgrounds of superpower interests, ‘clashes of civilisation’ and religious fundamentalism.
The Middle East continues to be a potential flashpoint for the aggregation of different conflicts, for the convergence of potentially separable struggles.
For some time commentators have been saying that, if there is to be a Third World War, this is where it will break out. The world wars of the twentieth century did not necessarily begin as world wars: in July 1914 the Balkans played the role the Middle East seemed poised for in 2006. Like Israel, Austria-Hungary believed that terrorism confronted it with a wider existential threat. As a multi-national empire, it was a potential victim of irredentist nationalism, and took the opportunity of the murder of the heir apparent by Bosnian nationalists to launch what it hoped would be a limited war against their sponsor, Serbia. It enjoyed the backing of a great power, Germany, but it did not give sufficiently serious thought to the possible expansion of the war on which it proposed to embark. It certainly did not imagine that Japan would take the opportunity to seize Tsingtao, the German colony on the Shantung peninsula, and would use its victory there as the basis for imperialism both on the Chinese mainland and in the Pacific. Japan was not the only power to join what we now call the First World War for regional objectives. In Constantinople the Young Turks saw it as an opportunity for the Ottoman empire to throw off its subordination to the Great Powers. In entering an alliance with Germany and Austria-Hungary, they hoped not to remake the map of Europe but to create a regional security structure for the Balkans through an alliance with Romania and Bulgaria to isolate Greece. In due course all three Balkan states entered the war, but to advance their local ambitions, not promote the broader claims of the Great Powers, the values of German Kultur, the rule of law or the rights of small nations. Interpreted through the eyes of these lesser powers, the First World War not only began as a Balkan war, the third since 1912, it continued as one, even beyond 1918.
Seen as a war of Turkish independence, it ran on until 1922. To understand the First World War as a global war, we have first to disaggregate it into a series of regional conflicts.
Similarly, a succession of distinguished historians, including A.J.P. Taylor, John Lukacs and, most recently, Ian Kershaw, have argued that the Second World War did not begin until 1941. What took place between 1939 and 1941 was a series of bilateral campaigns waged by Germany to overrun Poland, Norway, Denmark, Holland, Belgium and France, before it turned on Romania, Yugoslavia, Greece and Russia. Moreover, the decisions taken in 1941 by Germany, the Soviet Union, the United States and Japan, while being informed by the wider strategic context and seeking to exploit it, were taken in isolation from the decisions taken by others. Ian Kershaw has described Mussolini’s resolve to enter the war as a ‘parallel war’ or ‘a war within a war’, designed not to further the policies of the German–Italian ‘pact of steel’ but to take the opportunity to achieve Italy’s foreign policy goals in the Mediterranean.3 The war between Japan and China began not in 1939, but in 1937. The Japanese army hoped to pursue its imperialist objectives on the mainland of Asia without the intervention of other powers. By the time Japan’s navy struck Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, its army had already been engaged in a prolonged and costly war for approaching four and a half years.
Insight and hindsight
What Philip Bobbitt has called ‘epochal wars’, including not only the two world wars but the Peloponnesian War, the Punic Wars and the Thirty Years War, only became major wars in hindsight. In the midst of these 36 | Hew Strachan aggregations of wars there were long periods of peace. Prussia did not fight France between 1795 and 1806 or between 1807 and 1813, despite the fact that France was almost constantly at war with other states in both periods. Similarly, France was not formally at war with Germany between 1940 and 1944. Armistices, initially welcomed as the precursors to a more lasting peace when they were signed, were dropped from the dominant historical narrative when they failed to deliver. But this process was neither immediate nor inevitable: not every armistice led to a failure at the peace table and a renewal of hostilities. That too only became evident over time. Not until the nineteenth century were the wars between England and France, which ran from 1337 to 1453, given the collective title of the Hundred Years War.4 Historians have a lot to answer for. The desire of some to create a metanarrative lumps rather than splits, aggregates rather than disaggregates. Two recent books on war as a historical phenomenon, both read widely beyond the historical profession, and indeed designed to be, are cases in point.
Philip Bobbitt’s The Shield of Achilles (2002) and Niall Ferguson’s The War of the World (2006), however different in methodology, style and purpose, are united by a desire to provide general causal explanations for patterns within war and international relations.5 However uncongenial their authors may find the precepts of Marxism, they are its intellectual heirs in one respect at least: the use of interpretative tools to put a retrospective shape on events not only so generalisations are possible but so political prescription can follow.
In pursuing generalisation they exclude the exceptional or inconvenient.
Most decisions relating to war are not in fact taken in the light of the broad categories such works seek to describe. Reading them may encourage us to think we gain in our understanding of the past, as in fact we do, but that comprehension is based on a limited and selective set of insights. Above all, it eliminates the roles of personality and accident. As history is turned into political science, it makes a casualty of contingency.
This matters to the political scientist as well as to the historian. It matters above all in relation to war. In war the clash of two opposing wills in a resistant environment gives particular play to personality and accident. The job of strategy in war is to work with contingency. Of course strategy aspires Strategy and the Limitation of War | 37 to create a theory of war. It uses theoretical insights to question real events in a bid to shape them according to the needs of policy. But as soon as it allows the expectations of theory to obscure its vision of what is really happening, strategy is not only no longer helpful, it is positively pernicious.
In Vietnam and in Iraq sophisticated military thought created constructs which shaped the interpretation of what was happening on the ground. But its insights, however intelligent (and indeed their very intelligence exacerbated the problem as it made them even more seductive and persuasive), created a gulf between policy and practice. They ensured that the US military’s understanding of the war lagged behind reality. The most important single task for strategy is to understand the nature of the war it is addressing.
Its next task may be to manage and direct that war, but it cannot do that if it starts from a false premise.
Strategy in practice is therefore pragmatic. For this very reason, most strategic theory – at least before the dropping of the atomic bombs in 1945 – was knowingly retrospective. It was grounded in military history. By putting shape to events that had seemed inchoate at the time, it provided interpretative and didactic tools for the future. Jomini and Clausewitz wrote after the Napoleonic Wars, in the light of their own experiences, and so provided the critical apparatus by which we can understand those wars and their influence on war’s subsequent conduct.6 The same could be said of J.F.C. Fuller, Basil Liddell Hart or A.A. Svechin in relation to the First World War.7 The theory of strategy therefore grew in step with the growth of war in the first half of the twentieth century.
Confronted with a war which by 1917–18 had become the prototype of ‘total war’, strategic theory responded with concepts that embraced not only the activities of armed forces but also the mobilisation of economies and the influence of propaganda. New phrases, such as ‘total war’ and then ‘grand strategy’ and ‘national strategy’ were coined to deal with what had happened.
They served not only as explanatory tools in the 1920s and 1930s but also as prescriptions for the Second World War. They proved entirely appropriate to the task in hand.
From that fit between theory and reality was born a new orthodoxy.
After 1945 the image of modern war was that of ‘total war’. Strategic theory worked with this assumption and the invention of nuclear weapons seemed to confirm its relevance. As with the causes of the two world wars, the origins of the Cold War can be seen in regional terms: this ‘war’ too could have been split rather than lumped. The Soviet Union’s push into eastern Europe and the United States’ anti-Communist response, specifically the Truman doctrine of 1947, embraced a number of conflicts that also had more local drivers, notably the Greek Civil War of 1946–49. Outside Europe, the challenge to the Western powers in Asia came primarily from China, not from Russia, and indeed by the early 1960s the differences between the two Communist states provided one abatement to the Cold War’s challenges.
Lumping threats in the 1950s and 1960s exacerbated problems that became more manageable when they were split. But by the same token, since 1990 European joy at the end of the Cold War has served to obscure how much of the Cold War’s architecture remains in place in Asia, not least in the Korean peninsula.
Cold War legacies
During the Cold War two factors in particular maximised the problems strategy was designed to address, encouraged the aggregation of issues and militarised international relations. One was political, the other technological.
The ideological stand-off between the United States and the Soviet Union was presented in absolute terms, suggesting that democracy and communism were mutually exclusive, and that one could only prevail at the expense of the other. Moreover, the conflict was seen as geographically unlimited: this was a global competition. Technologically, the advent of nuclear weapons meant each side had the potential to destroy much of the civilised world. The primary task of strategic theory was to work with a vision of war so cataclysmic that war would be deterred.
Strategic theory usurped strategy; policy replaced practice. Since the Cold War stayed cold, at least in that there was no third world war, strategic theory no longer developed pragmatically. In the two world wars the dialogue between practice and theory was constant, and expanding notions Strategy and the Limitation of War | 39 of strategy owed at least as much to statesmen and national leaders as to pundits, to what was done as much as to what was written, and to the conduct of war rather than its avoidance. In the absence of major conflict during the Cold War that relationship became less intimate. The declining influence of history in the formation of strategic theory, and the increasing dominance of game theory and technological determinism, were part of the reason. Moreover, although nuclear deterrence theory was frequently lampooned for its increasingly abstract qualities, it became an academic gravy train, able to attract funds to sustain research departments and ensure professorial tenure. By 1990 most strategic theory bore little relationship to what armed forces were designed to do or how they thought; indeed, by the 1980s most uniformed practitioners were doing their own thing, forsaking strategy and focusing on what they called ‘operational’ thought.
The end of the Cold War confronted strategic theory with an existential crisis. Predicated on the possibility of a major war, it found itself in a world from which that threat seemed to have been lifted. The writings of John Mueller, Michael Mandelbaum and others on the demise of ‘major war’ (the new term of choice, not ‘total war’) were themselves revealing.8 Mueller described a process he reckoned had begun after the First World War. When he published Retreat from Doomsday in 1989 there had been no major war for 44 years. Strategic thought did not confront a totally new situation in 1989; there had been real wars aplenty throughout the Cold War, but theory had not confronted them as fully as it should have done, preferring to see conflicts short of major war as exceptions to the rule. It tended to ignore wars which had been fought in favour of those which might occur, and it continued to do so after 1989. The initial response to the end of the Cold War was to warn of the dangers of Russian resurgence or even the expansionist designs of a reunited and revivified Germany, and so deny that the threat of major war had been lifted and retain it as the ‘gold standard’ for armed forces.
The stock of strategic ideas developed against the background of the Cold War thus continues to have greater purchase than perhaps we recognise.
Pre-emption became a principle of strategy within the context of nuclear deterrence. Although aggressive in its effects, its employment was 40 | Hew Strachan predicated on the evidence of an immediate and probable attack, which was never forthcoming. Set within the framework of dissuasion, pre-emption was never used in practice. After the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks, the term was given a different conceptual context as a free-standing element in the defence postures of the United States and the United Kingdom. It implied an early attack against threats that were latent, before they became imminent. A concept developed within one security structure was shoehorned into another in order to give it a legitimating pedigree. Moreover, whereas in its earlier incarnation it was designed to prevent war, in its new format it was intended to provoke it.
The mutation of pre-emption was replicated for deterrence as a whole.
Deterrence relies on the credibility of the threat it invokes. That requirement produced endless contortions in the Cold War, but they remained confined to rhetoric on both sides. When Britain’s NATO partners declared that Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s readiness to fight Argentina over the Falklands in 1982 enhanced the alliance’s deterrent posture, they were passing a retrospective judgement, not proposing a reason for war in the first place. That changed with the loss of bipolar balance: freed from the threat of mutually assured destruction, powers felt able to use war to bolster deterrence. In 2006 Israel declared it was going to war precisely to enhance the credibility of its deterrent. Such statements are no longer unusual: the conceptual vocabulary of the Cold War is now being pressed into service to legitimate war, not prevent it.
One of the more misleading concepts in current strategy to emerge from Cold War thinking is that of the so-called ‘Long War’. When the Cold War ended, historians were attracted by the notion of what Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm called the ‘short twentieth century’, bounded by the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 and the demise of the Soviet Union (itself a product of the First World War) in 1989–90. Bobbitt put this idea into a more specifically strategic context in The Shield of Achilles when he lumped both world wars and the Cold War into one ‘long war’. This was a development of a more familiar notion that the two world wars were one, united by the ambitions of Germany, and driven by the simplistic belief that the second was the product of the failure of the 1919 Versailles settlement to resolve the Strategy and the Limitation of War | 41 issues of the first. It was, however, an altogether more ambitious idea – that the ‘long war’ was fought to determine what kind of state would follow the ‘imperial states’ of Europe after the nineteenth century. For Bobbitt, the issues were constitutional – a struggle among fascism, communism and what he called parliamentarianism.9 Both the historian and the strategist should take exception to Bobbitt’s proposition. For the historian it does violence to the sequence of events: both fascism and communism were minority issues in 1914, and neither seemed to be at stake to the statesmen responsible for the outbreak of the war. Bobbitt’s interpretation of the war’s origins relies on an assessment of Germany’s role which has now lost ground among specialists in the period. It also rules out the role of contingency, both then and more generally. For the strategist the implications are far more serious, even dangerous. The ‘long war’ of 1914–1990 was not in fact a war at all. For all but ten of those years (1914–18 and 1939–45) the principal powers of Europe regarded themselves as at peace.
For the United States the period of active fighting in the two world wars was even shorter. To be sure, most American citizens would add the Korean and Vietnam Wars to the list of active hostilities in the course of the twentieth century, but at the same time these were wars that most European states would exclude from their national experiences of war over the same period.
Bobbitt’s interpretation of the twentieth century contributes both to the militarisation of international relations, since it interprets the absence of war not as real peace but as a temporary armistice, and to the aggregation of smaller wars into bigger ones. It serves the notion that major war is the dominant pattern to which strategic theory must pay attention.
Just as for Wellington’s Britain there could be no small war for a great nation, so for the United States, because it is a global power with a sense of its democratising mission, there can be no wars that do not have universal implications. As Christopher Layne and Benjamin Schwartz have written (and Bobbitt quotes them): ‘The continuity in U.S. strategy was – and is – explained by the belief that preponderance prevents spiralling regional tensions by obviating the need for other powers to provide their own security.’ 10 The effect is that regional clashes become issues of global hegemony, and wars themselves become more intractable and the search for a strategy to manage them more problematic.
Rhetoric and response
This is the impasse which confronts strategy in the United States and – by extension – the United Kingdom (as the latter has reached a point where it seems incapable of thinking about strategy for itself). Bush responded to the 11 September attacks by declaring a ‘global war on terror’. The vocabulary of major war kicked in almost immediately, and it has never gone away. Both Bush and UK Prime Minister Tony Blair portrayed the struggle in which they were engaged as the defining conflict of the twenty-first century, a war for the values of civilisation and democracy. These were the rallying cries of the leaders of the Second World War: Bush’s Wilsonian phrases harked back to Roosevelt, and Blair’s to Churchill. Indeed they were not slow to liken Saddam Hussein to Adolf Hitler and Islamic fundamentalism to fascism.
The difference is that their publics did not believe them. The rhetoric of total war in 1941–42 was designed not just (or in some cases not at all) as a prescription for strategy but rather as a means of mobilising the nation and summoning it to make greater sacrifices. The words of each belligerent state’s political leaders matched its people’s perceptions of the situation – as true of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia as it was of Great Britain and America.
In 2003 the peoples of the United States and of the United Kingdom were not ready to make greater sacrifices, and in fact they did not have to make many. The simultaneous waging of two overseas wars was achieved with no perceptible impact on levels of domestic consumption or taxation. At home heightened security at airports was seen as an inconvenience, feeding accusations of bureaucratic incompetence rather than fear of home-grown terrorism. However severe the casualties suffered by the armed forces of the two countries, they were statistically insignificant in population terms and they would have been entirely acceptable to nations convinced that their ways of life and the values that sustained them were at risk. They were not convinced.
The speeches of Bush and Blair may have failed to rally their nations, but they have become the basis for strategy. The rhetoric of the ‘war on terror’ stepped in to the black hole created by the bankruptcy of strategic thought at the end of the Cold War. It provided the means to unite war and policy, and major war at that. Those who had made careers through nuclear deterrence in the Cold War could shift to terrorist studies; the latter, from having been a fringe interest, moved to centre stage, confident that it would be central to the understanding of future war because the president and prime minister had said so. But there were significant differences. The Cold War, with its bipolar structure, created a security architecture of genuinely global significance. Moreover, nuclear weapons, for all that different nations developed their thinking about them in different ways, created some fundamental convergences in strategic thought. At bottom the threat of mutually assured destruction and the desirability of avoiding it concentrated minds wonderfully well. Terrorism, even when it uses suicide bombers or hijacked aircraft, does not generate such convergences. Today there are no assumptions within strategic thought common to both sides, for all the talk about globalisation and networked communications. The latter is used by both sides, and can affect operational decisions, especially by those belligerents who use terrorism, whose oxygen is publicity. But strategy is influenced by, rather than grounded in, such capabilities. The West’s own preoccupation with real-time, worldwide communications has created a convergence with the universalism of American foreign policy but not the nature of the wars that policy is asking America and its allies to undertake.
The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are first and foremost regional conflicts.
By aggregating them within a wider conflict we make them bigger than they are, even less amenable to strategy in its pragmatic sense, and incomprehensible to the electorates of the democratic states waging them.
In 2003 Iraq was divided by tribe and faith, and its problems have roots that antedate the US-led invasion and have nothing to do with the so-called ‘war on terror’. Afghanistan was also a tribal society, driven by an Islamic fundamentalism in a way that Iraq was not, and fraught with violence and poppy cultivation for decades. The West’s fixation with major war has given these countries’ specific problems global resonances. Because it has used 44 | Hew Strachan war to tackle these issues, the coalition has changed their complexion; it has created a reactive relationship between regionalism and globalism, and so enabled local wars to grow into bigger conflicts. But until the United States in Iraq and NATO in Afghanistan abandon the vocabulary of universalism for that of particularism, they will not begin to understand the nature of the wars in which they are engaged, and until they do so they will be unable to develop an appropriate strategy.
Just as NATO’s institutions were shaped and developed by its role in the Cold War, they will be shaped and developed by the war in Afghanistan, which in 2006 was presented as the supreme test for its future relevance as a military alliance. It is no coincidence that NATO still has no strategy for Afghanistan. Although one legacy of the Cold War is that NATO’s armed forces have a common set of operating assumptions, another is that, without the Cold War, there is no strategy to marry those military capabilities to policy. Even if NATO meets this challenge, it will continue to need great flexibility. By adapting itself to the specific demands of Afghanistan, NATO will by definition have unfitted itself for operations elsewhere. One strategy will not fit all, particularly when key instruments – counter-insurgency, counter-terrorism, political stabilisation and economic reconstruction – must be regionally determined.
This is not solely a NATO problem. Aware that ‘the global war on terror’ was not a helpful foundation for the development of strategy, the Pentagon’s February 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review latched on to a new label, or rather an old label in a new guise: ‘the long war’. Bobbitt’s term, having been applied to the short twentieth century, was now applied to the twentyfirst.
Bobbitt himself colluded in this process, specifically denying that ‘the global threat is being exaggerated and conflated for political and geostrategic ends’, and arguing in autumn 2007 that ‘three, overlapping truly global wars on terror were being waged’.11 Applying the long-war terminology to the future was a palpable absurdity, since the definition of a long war is inherently subjective and only clear in hindsight. When Rumsfeld, interviewed about the new phrase, was asked whether he thought the war on Iraq was going to be a long war, he replied, ‘No. I don’t believe it is.’12 The war on Iraq has now gone on longer than the First World War, a war which Strategy and the Limitation of War | 45 we are told was begun in August 1914 in the anticipation that it would be over within months and which we tend to see as long because it went on until November 1918, although it was shorter than many ‘epochal’ wars.
The notion of a long war is a way of avoiding more specific and considered definitions in order to make simple points; it is not a serious analytical tool.
As Ryan Henry, principal deputy under-secretary of defense for policy at the Pentagon, put it, when asked to define the idea of ‘the long war’, ‘things get very fuzzy past the 5-year point’.13 His argument in favour of the phrase was: ‘We in the defence department feel fairly confident that our forces will be called on to be engaged somewhere in the world in the next decade where they’re currently not engaged but we have no idea whatsoever where that might be, when that might be or in what circumstances that they might be engaged’.14 As an expression of policy for the Pentagon or a statement of the dilemmas of NATO defence ministries since the end of the Cold War that is unexceptionable; as a statement of strategy it is unacceptable. Strategy must first address the nature of the war in which it is engaged; neither Ryan Henry nor the 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review do so. Secondly, it must provide a means of controlling that war: the successful strategist, J.C. Wylie wrote, ‘is the one who controls the nature of and the placement and the timing and the weight of the centers of gravity of war, and who exploits the resulting control of the pattern of war toward his own ends’.15 For historians of the British army, Henry’s words are eerily reminiscent of those of Colonel G.F.R. Henderson, the Staff College’s guru, in 1900.
He claimed that, given Britain’s colonial responsibilities and their defence needs, ‘it is useless to anticipate in what quarters of the globe our troops may be next employed as to guess at the tactics, the armament and even the colour of our next enemy’. Henderson’s reaction to Henry’s dilemma was to dismiss the notion that global responsibilities could be shaped into strategy through the integration of historical experience and doctrine: ‘except for the defence of the United Kingdom and of India, much remains to be provided when the Cabinet declares that war is imminent’.16 Henry, quite rightly, was refusing to be so defeatist, but his response still does more to side-step the strategic problems of great-power status than resolve them.
46 | Hew Strachan Two points derived from Clausewitz are relevant here. First, time in war tends to work to the advantage of the defender. In operational terms, the United States and its allies, especially if they are waging expeditionary wars, are the attackers. As the war lengthens, protracted conflict saps the forces of both sides. The armies of the United States and Britain are close to being broken by Iraq, regardless of the outcome.
Clausewitz would argue that they have long since passed ‘the culminating point of victory’ (it probably came when President Bush declared ‘mission accomplished’ in May 2003). Secondly, in long wars, the Clausewitzian norm that war is an instrument of policy is turned on its head. Short sharp wars, like the German wars of unification in 1864, 1866 and 1870, have the best chances of delivering the political objectives of those who initiate them.
In long wars, war shapes and moulds policy. In the United Kingdom, the debate on the powers to be conferred on the government to deal with terrorism, the division of the Home Office into two and the repercussions of the Iraq War in the Scottish elections in May 2007 are all cases in point. And that is without factoring in the most obvious way in which war could shape policy: the possibility of coalition defeats in Iraq or Afghanistan. At the very least it is reasonable to say that at the moment the United States is not fulfilling the political objectives set by the long war.
That is why governments do not deliberately embark on long wars. The United States did not do so in 2002–03. However, its adoption of ‘long war’ is not just a way to rationalise failure, it is also a way to come to terms with its lack of a body of strategic thought to deal with regional wars. Conditioned by its own political inheritance, the American ‘mission’, and the legacy of the Cold War, its tendency to aggregate works against strategy’s demand (in this case) that it splits. In 2004, before the Pentagon embraced ‘the long war’, US Central Command promulgated the idea, so shifting the focus from the war in hand in Iraq to a potential spectrum of conflict that swept across North Africa and into central Asia. It minimised the wars in which it was currently engaged by maximising the impact of other regional conflicts, with local dynamics, and projecting them onto a wider canvas. The instabilities in the Horn of Africa, at whose hands the United States had suffered in Mogadishu in 1993, were revisited in December 2006 in the name of the ‘war on terror’: a stable but Islamic government in Somalia was toppled by Ethiopian troops acting with US support. Military action was being driven less by realism than by theory. Significantly, in April 2007, Admiral William Fallon, having succeeded General John Abizaid at Central Command, decided to abandon the phrase ‘the long war’ and told his command to focus on the real war, in Iraq.17 He escaped the straitjacket of strategic theory for the pragmatism of strategy in practice.
Limiting and delimiting wars
Admiral Fallon did not thereby resolve the challenge confronted by strategic thought, at least as developed and moulded in the American tradition (which is most strategic thought in the Western world today, and certainly within NATO). We do not have a coherent way of thinking about regional wars, and because of this lack we have no way of interrogating what we are doing and validating it.
All wars since 1945 (and there have been a great many) have fallen short of ‘total war’ or ‘major war’. The ‘general war’ or ‘central war’ planned for during the Cold War never happened within Europe. Outside Europe, states, notably Israel in its first 20 years, did fight existential conflicts, but these fell short of the extremes set by the two world wars in weaponry, duration, geographical extent or the involvement of other powers. Within NATO a great many labels were coined to describe wars short of major war (some, like low-intensity conflict, out of fashion, and others, like counterinsurgency warfare, back in). But we are unsure about what separates such conflicts from others with different labels; we are not sure when peacekeeping becomes peace support, or how both, at the stage when they move into peace enforcement, then become counter-insurgency. Troops currently deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan are doing all these things: sometimes the operations on which they are engaged could be described as low intensity and sometimes they most definitely could not.
At one level such typological ambiguity is a sensible reflection of the fact that strategy is a pragmatic business which must be responsive to the situ 48 | Hew Strachan ation on the ground. But strategy is not simply reactive: its role is to direct the war, and to do so it needs to interact not only with policy but also with strategic theory. The dialectic tests out its conclusions, and that means that regional wars need a more sophisticated theoretical framework than provided by the experience or expectation of major war.
The response of the Cold Warriors to this challenge was not as unsophisticated as their apparent intellectual legacy suggests. Confronted with the fear of major war and the threat of an all-out nuclear exchange, but recognising that the challenge which communism posed the democratic states of the West would be played out through proxy wars, they developed ideas about limited war. Many of the great names of strategic thought in the 1950s contributed to this enterprise, including William Kaufmann, Bernard Brodie, Basil Liddell Hart, Morton Halperin, Maxwell D. Taylor and Thomas Schelling, but the text which best embodied and did most to advance these ideas was Robert E. Osgood’s 1957 Limited War: the Challenge to American Strategy. The wellspring of limited-war strategy, like the best of pre-1945 strategic thought, was not technological but historical. The Korean War demonstrated to a generation which had fought in the Second World War that a conflict which involved the United States, the Soviet Union and China did not have to be a ‘general war’. Theory was a retrospective rationalisation of reality, and it argued that war could be limited geographically, militarily and politically. Critics of limited-war theory would argue that the Korean War ended with a compromise settlement which rested on a partial victory and satisfied neither side. More importantly, however, it fulfilled the policy objective of the day, containment, and obviated the real fear of a nuclear exchange. The outcome was an object lesson that security is relative, not absolute.
By 1962 limited-war strategy had moved beyond academic discourse into the realm of policy. President John F. Kennedy was persuaded that it presented an alternative to a third world war, provided a riposte to the use of proxy wars and nationalist insurgencies by communists, and would bolster the credibility of deterrence by linking conventional capabilities to nuclear in a ladder of escalation. Two National Security Action Memoranda of August 1962 recommended that the United States (in Osgood’s words) Strategy and the Limitation of War | 49 ‘adopt a strategy of integrating economic and political development along democratic lines with counterinsurgency effects in order to enable threatened governments to eliminate the roots of popular discontent and suppress guerrilla attacks upon their freedom’. If there is a currency to these words, the relevance is reinforced by Osgood’s further observation that this strategy might require the United States to strengthen ‘beleaguered governments – even to reform them’.18 Vietnam was the testing ground of limited-war strategy, and the experiment ended in failure. Limited-war theory has struggled to regain purchase ever since. But, Osgood argued, there were two ways to view the defeat.
One was that the policy was wrong, the other that the armed forces of the United States were ill-adapted to the demands of limited war. In part that was Osgood’s own fault: his theory of limited war was developed as a political tool adapted to the context of diplomacy and ignored the ‘grammar’ of limited war. Its origins in the nuclear era and its place in relation to deterrence and escalation were too evident. Limited war became a device for managing the generals, not for the making of strategy.19 Those who fought in Vietnam knew that real war could not be waged without risk, violence and loss of life, and the production of a strategy for limited war – or for any war – could not be purely a top-down, policy-driven process. This is Clausewitz’s point in Book VIII of On War: war is a thing unto itself, with its own dynamic, and when policy works against its grain, strategy (which has to be based on the nature of war) finds itself at odds with policy.20 By focusing on the failures of policy, the United States army avoided confronting the conduct of limited war and reverted to the model of major war, a reaction justified by the Cold War. The attractions of major war for strategic thought are self-evident: in a war which a nation deems vital for national survival the ends of policy and strategy converge, and the effects of the former do not so obviously intrude into the formation of the latter.
The army opted not to explore why its counter-insurgency practices had not worked or why it had been unable to implement a limited-war strategy; in other words, it did not develop strategic theory out of practice, using history by learning lessons with a view to future application. It deliberately reconfigured itself physically as well as intellectually only to fight major war. It adopted the Total Force policy, which meant that it could not fight a war without mobilising its reserve, a concept that made sense for a conventional war on the scale of the Second World War, but put strains on a volunteer force committed to a war of lesser intensity with limited popular endorsement. In parallel, the Weinberger doctrine of 1984 and the Powell doctrine of 1992 both stressed that the United States should commit its forces only when national interests were at stake, that it should do so with all the resources available to it, with the support both of the American people and of Congress, and that it should have clear political and military objectives.
Thus we confront the paradox of war today. Compared with our predecessors 50 years ago (and it is half a century since the publication of Osgood’s Limited War), the armed forces have the ability to use their firepower with discrimination and precision. Often they do, but more often they use it in massive quantities, weakening the very virtue they are trying to exploit, and they do so because the context in which they wage war, and the purposes for which they wage it, lack clarity.
* * * Strategy, as opposed to strategic theory, has two principal tasks. The first is to identify the nature of the war at hand. A misidentification is pregnant with consequences: it would be just as mistaken to fight a major war on the assumption that it is a smaller, more limited war, as the other way round.
Moreover, what begins as one sort of war can turn into another. Recognising and understanding the nature of a war is a constant interrogative process, and one where strategic theory comes into play, not just something to be undertaken at the outset. The second task, once the nature of a war has been plumbed, is to manage the war and direct it. It is perfectly possible for the policymakers of one belligerent to decide to escalate a war, to make a local conflict into a global one. But neither common sense nor common humanity suggests that that is very sensible.
Strategic theory has failed to provide the tools with which to examine the conflicts now being waged. Osgood observed that the lessons of Vietnam were ‘highly contingent, since so many of the military and political features of another local war are likely to be different or occur in different combinations’.21 Major war is the preferred vehicle for the development of strategy, as the issues are absolute, the role of contingency diminished and the play of policy is less overt. But a phenomenon increasingly remote from the actual experience of war does not provide a sufficient template for the current debate on strategy. The result is a discussion in flux, without unifying themes or coherence. Strategy uses theoretical insights to question real events in a bid to shape them according to the needs of policy, but as soon as strategy allows the expectations of theory to lessen its grasp of what is really happening it has allowed theory to be its master rather than its tool.
The concept of limited war may be too tarred by the brush of failure in Vietnam to be the appropriate label, particularly in the United States; for some too it is linked to the ideas of Herman Kahn and Henry Kissinger about limited nuclear war. However, the wars currently being waged in Iraq and Afghanistan, while unlimited for those countries themselves, are undeniably limited for the states of the American-led coalition and for NATO.
Clausewitz characterised war as a mystifying trinity made up of passion, probability and reason, and he associated each of these qualities with the three components not of war but of the warring state – the people, the army and the government.22 The peoples of the Western allies do not regard themselves as under direct attack, despite the terrorist atrocities perpetrated in New York, Washington, London and Madrid, and they have not mobilised for war, either psychologically or actually. Their armed forces characterise what they are doing with phrases which try to encapsulate the nature of the fighting short of major war, despite the fact that for some of them the combat in which they are engaged is of great intensity, while for others their tasks centre not on fighting at all but on stabilisation and reconstruction. Moreover, the labels which we currently attach to lesser wars, such as low-intensity operations, irregular war or counter-insurgency warfare, define themselves by their means (and in this respect are like terrorism itself), not their ends.23 Thirdly, governments talk about major war but provide the means only for 52 | Hew Strachan small war. Having set out with political goals that were unrealisable, they have not adjusted those goals but focused on military solutions (such as the ‘surge’ in Iraq) which lack a political end. So by default the application of military capabilities becomes an end in itself.
By failing to fulfil its function of imposing rationality on war, government is not only behaving illogically, it is also ensuring that the three components of Clausewitz’s secondary trinity are diverging, not converging. When Colin Powell, returning from the Vietnam War, read and was impressed by Clausewitz, he likened the secondary trinity to a three-legged stool.24 At the moment the stool is wobbly: each of the three legs is becoming detached, and as a result strategy, the seat itself, lacks bottom.
Acknowledgements
This paper was first presented at the 5th IISS Global Strategic Review, 7–9 September 2007, and also formed the basis of the Annual History Lecture, University of Hull, 11 October 2007; I am grateful to the organisers and auditors on both occasions.
Notes
1 J.C. Wylie, Military Strategy: A General Theory of Power Control (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1967), pp. 80–81.
2 Wellington to Somerset, 5 January 1838, Wellington papers, Southampton University Library; he made a similar observation to the House of Lords on 16 January 1838: ’A great country cannot wage a little war’.
3 Ian Kershaw, Fateful Choices: Ten Decisions that Changed the World 1940– 1941 (London: Allen Lane, 2007), p. 147.
4 Philip Bobbitt, The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace and the Course of History (London: Penguin, 2002), p. 21.
5 Ibid., Niall Ferguson, The War of the World: History’s Age of Hatred (London: Allen Lane, 2006).
6 Jean-Jacques Langendorf, Faire la Guerre: Antoine-Henri Jomini, 2 vols (Geneva: Georg, 2001–04); Peter Paret, Clausewitz and the State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976); Andreas Herberg-Rothe, Clausewitz’s Puzzle: the Political Theory of War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Hew Strachan, Carl von Clausewitz’s On War: a Biography (London: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2007).
7 Brian Holden Reid, J.F.C. Fuller: Military Thinker (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1987); Brian Bond, Liddell Hart: a Study of his Military Thought (London: Cassell, 1977); Aleksandr A. Svechin, Strategy, ed. Kent D. Lee (Minneapolis, MN: East View Strategy and the Limitation of War | 53 Publishers, 1992; first published 1927).
8 John Mueller, Retreat from Doomsday: The Obsolescence of Major War (New York: Basic Books, 1989); Michael Mandelbaum, ‘Is Major War Obsolete?’, Survival, vol. 40, no. 4, Winter 1998–99, pp. 20–38; Donald Kagan, Eliot A. Cohen, Charles F. Doran and Michael Mandelbaum, ‘Is Major War Obsolete?: An Exchange’, Survival, vol. 41, no. 2, Summer 1999, pp. 139–52.
9 Bobbitt, Shield of Achilles, pp. 24, 38–9.
10 Christopher Layne and Benjamin Schwartz, ‘No New World Order: America after the Cold War’, Current, December 1993, quoted in Bobbitt, Shield of Achilles, p. 251.
11 Simon Tisdall, ‘Bush’s Plan to Spend Away the Terror’, Guardian, 24 October 2007.
12 DoD News Briefing with Secretary Rumsfeld and Adm. Giambastiani, 1 February 2006, http://www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/transcript.aspx?transcriptid=905.
13 Ann Scott Tyson, ‘Ability to Wage “Long War” is Key to Pentagon Plan’, Washington Post, 4 February 2006, p. A01, http://www.washingtonpost.com/ wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/03/ AR2006020301853.html.
14 Simon Tisdall and Ewe MacAskill, ‘America’s Long War’, Guardian, 15 February 2006, http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,1710062,00.html.
15 Wylie, Military Strategy, p. 91.
16 Quoted by Jay Luvaas, The Education of an Army: British Military Thought 1815– 1940 (London: Cassell, 1965), p. 244; see also G.F.R. Henderson, The Science of War, ed. Neill Malcolm (London: Longmans Green, 1919), p. 343.
17 Michael R. Gordon, ‘U.S. Command Shortens Life of “Long War” as a Reference’, New York Times, 24 April 2007, http://www.nytimes.
com/2007/04/24/washington/24policy.
html; Richard Lardner, ‘Messageminded Admiral ditches “Long War”’, The Tampa Tribune, 19 April 2007.
18 Robert E. Osgood, Limited War Revisited (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1979), p. 27.
19 Stephen Peter Rosen, ‘Vietnam and the American Theory of Limited War’, International Security, vol. 7, no. 2, Fall 1982, pp. 83–113.
20 Hew Strachan, Clausewitz’s On War: A Biography (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2007), pp. 168–9; Jan Willem Honig, ‘Clausewitz’s On War: Problems of Text and Translation’, in Hew Strachan and Andreas Herberg Rothe, Clausewitz in the Twenty-First Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 61–9.
21 Osgood, Limited War Revisited, pp. 48–9.
22 Carl von Clausewitz, On War, trans. and ed. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976), book I, chapter 1, p. 89.
23 On the definitional difficulties, see Robert Mandel, The Meaning of Military Victory (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2006), pp. 139–42.
24 Colin Powell, with Joseph Persico, My American Journey (New York: Random House, 1995), pp. 207–8.
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Hew Strachan is Chichele Professor of the History of War and Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, where he also directs the Leverhulme Programme on the Changing Character of War. Between 1992 and 2001, he was Professor of Modern History at the University of Glasgow and established its Scottish Centre for War Studies in 1996. He is a Life Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.
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