Counterfactual History: Soviet Aggrandizement in the 1980s

It’s difficult for Americans to appreciate the fact that the 1980s were probably the most dangerous years in the history of human civilization. There was no shortage of commentators exclaiming the miraculously “peaceful” dissolution of the USSR, but few dwelt on the fact that matters could have easily gone the other way had the Soviet Union  followed the historic pattern of empire and attempted to reverse decline through expansion. In his 1983 book The Grand Strategy of the Soviet Union Edward Luttwak correctly diagnosed the terminal illnesses plaguing the communist superpower, and argued that it was highly likely that the Soviet Union would attempt to consolidate its position by invading the remote western provinces of China and setting up client governments in the newly conquered territories. Here’s how he made his case (to ease the writing of this post, I sometimes drift back and forth between the past and present tenses):

 

Prophecy Fulfilled

In 2001, Red Storm Entertainment released Ghost Recon, a squad-level combat simulator that has since become a major franchise. The premise of the original game was that in 2008, a revisionist Moscow regime would incite separatist violence in South Ossetia and use it as a pretext to invade Georgia.

SSG. Michel de Nostredame

 

Rory Sterwart on Afghanistan

A few weeks back I re-read Rory Stewart’s The Placed in Between, an account of his walk across central Afghanistan in early 2002. He makes some pointed comments about Afghan development efforts that remain relevant today:

Most of the policymakers knew next to nothing about the villages where 90 percent of the Afghan population lived. They came from postmodern, secular, globalized states with liberal traditions in law and government. It was natural for them to initiate projects on urban design, women’s rights, and fiber-optic cable networks; to talk about transparent, clean, and accountable processes, tolerance, and civil society; and to speak of a people ‘who desire peace at any cost and understand the need for a centralized multi-ethnic government.’

But what did they understand of the thought processes of Seyyed Kerbalahi’s wife, who had not moved five kilometers from her home in forty years? Or Dr. Habibullah, the vet, who carried an automatic weapon in the way they carried briefcases? The villagers I had met were mostly illiterate, lived far from electricity or television, and knew very little about the outside world. Versions of Islam; views of ethnicity, government, politics, and the proper methods of dispute resolution (including armed conflict); and the experience of twenty-five years of war differed from region to region … These differences between groups were deep, elusive, and difficult to overcome. Village democracy, gender issues, and centralization would be hard-to-sell concepts in some areas. (p.246)

He also has some harsh things to say about international officials who are so quick to condemn the colonial officials from empires past:

Postconflict experts have got the prestige without the effort or stigma of imperialism. Their implicit denial of the differences between cultures is the new mass brand of international intervention. Their policy fails but no one notices. There are no credible monitoring bodies and there is no one to take formal responsibility. Individual officers are never in any one place and rarely in any one place and rarely in any one organization long enough to be adequately assessed. The colonial enterprise could be judged by the security or revenue it delivered, but neocolonialists have no such performance criteria. In fact their very uselessness benefits them. By avoiding any serious action or judgment they, unlike their colonial predecessors, are able to escape accusations of racism, exploitation, and oppression. (p. 248)

 

Machiavelli on Gun Control

From the David Wootton translation:

No new ruler, let me point out, has ever disarmed his subjects; on the contrary, when he has found them disarmed, he has always armed them. For, when you arm them, their arms become yours, those who have been hostile to you become loyal, while those who have been loyal remain so, and progress from being your obedient subjects to being your active supporters … But if you take their arms away from those who have been armed, you begin to alienate them. You make it clear you do not trust them, either because you think they are poor soldiers or disloyal. Whichever view they attribute to you, they will begin to hate you.

The Prince, Chapter 20.

 

Strategy Applied: Gen. Albert Wedemeyer and the Victory Plan of 1941

I am sometimes distraught by how long it’s taking me to write my MS thesis. Considering that Albert Wedemeyer devised the U.S. Army’s World War II grand strategy, unit structure, equipment requirements, and general concept of operations, all in a period of about three months, that sentiment is probably justified. A monograph by Charles Kirkpatrick recounts how Wedemeyer accomplished this, providing a nice case study on how strategy is formulated in the real world.

In 1941, the War Plans Division was tasked with calculating the nation’s total manufacturing requirements for the coming war. The assignment was given to then-Major (later General) Albert Wedemeyer, who had an office, a small staff, and about ninety days to complete the job. After pondering the question for a time, Wedemeyer realized that his mission was much more complicated than first thought:

In order to deduce the nation’s ultimate production requirements, Wedemeyer concluded that the essential first task was to compute the size of the Army and Air Corps that the War Department would have to arm and equip. Size and composition of forces were functions of mission, however, and no one could estimate the size of military forces required without knowing the missions they would be ordered to execute. Missions depended upon military strategy, and in order to know the military strategy, Wedemeyer had first to know the national objective in the event of war … Wedemeyer therefore established for himself a series of questions to answer in order to accomplish his task:

1. What is the national objective of the United States?

2. What military strategy will be devised to accomplish the national objective?

3. What military forces must be raised in order to execute that military strategy?

4. How will those military forces be constituted, equipped, and trained?

America being America, the first question was the most difficult to answer. Even in 1941, the U.S. had no idea what its national objective was:

To his surprise, Wedemeyer ascertained that the government seemed to have no mechanism whatever for considering such paramount national policy problems or for answering them systemically. To Wedemeyer, it appeared that few men in Washington were even conscious of the fact that “supreme issues of war and peace required thorough analysis in the top echelons of the national government.” Government planning was short-term planning, aimed at accomplishing immediate goals, of which the ad hoc executive decision on the destroyers-for-bases deal was typical. Long-range planning to determine war goals for a peace favorable to the national interests of the United States seemed to be no one’s task. In 1941, few American leaders looked beyond the problem of militarily defeating future enemies [for better or worse, not much has changed since then]. (p. 61-62)

After some inconclusive interviews with U.S. foreign policy officials, including Henry Stimson, Wedemeyer came up with this mission statement: “to eliminate totalitarianism from Europe and, in the process, to be an ally of Great Britain; further, to deny the Japanese undisputed control of the western Pacific.” (p. 63)

The following question of military strategy identified Germany as the enemy to defeat first, but U.S. options were constrained by the issue of timing. In 1941, U.S. war planners were deathly afraid that Russian resistance would soon collapse, leaving Germany in control of Mackinder’s Eurasian “heartland.” If that happened, Germany would require about two years to stabilize and exploit its conquests and reconstitute its military capabilities for an invasion of the British Isles. Because the U.S. would require almost as much time to fully mobilize, Wedemeyer had to assume the worst case scenario of America continuing the war against Germany alone.

The first priority was to gain control of the oceans, the only way that U.S. power could be projected outside the hemisphere: “Without the ability to transport military formations in security and to maintain the lines of supply needed to keep them in action, all other propositions became meaningless.” (p. 74) A powerful navy and a substantial merchant fleet were prerequisites.

Next was air superiority, which would be a critical force multiplier against the superb German military, and would allow strategic bombardment to reduce the enemy’s industrial capacity and undermine the fabric of his society. Conscious of air power’s limitations, Wedemeyer understood it as necessary but not sufficient condition for victory; though unable to win the war by itself, air superiority would degrade the German army’s ability to maneuver on the European battlefield.

Finally, the U.S. required a network of encircling forward bases close to the European theater from which to launch operations against Germany. The specific details of these operations was outside the mandate of Wedemeyer’s study, but he had no illusions concerning what would deliver final victory, writing that “we must prepare to fight Germany by actually coming to grips with and defeating her ground forces and definitely breaking her will to combat.” (p.64)

…Wedemeyer saw that the United States and the Allies had to weaken the enemy by overextending and dispersing his armies. Concentration of forces brought victory. If the Allies could so threaten the Axis that it had to send reinforcements in many directions, then the eventual decisive attack would inevitably succeed, because the enemy could meet it with only a portion of his total strength. Attacks on enemy supplies of fuel and matériel and, most particularly, his transportation net, contributed to this end. Deterioration of the enemy’s national will on the home front might result from propaganda, subversion, deprivation of a reasonable standard of living, destruction of the fabric of the enemy’s society, and the chaos and public disorder that accompany such domestic conditions. Strategic bombing, planners expected, would attack the German national will just as it attacked the German industry and economy. Civilian and economic chaos would, in turn, diminish the effectiveness of the German military forces.

In sum, the United States had to adopt a military strategy that placed the bulk of American combat forces in contact with the enemy in the European theater. In order to accomplish this, the United States had to build and maintain armed forces capable of controlling the sea lanes of communications in two oceans; to fight a major land, sea, and air war in one theater; and to be sufficiently strong to deter war in the other. (p. 76-77)

Having defined the U.S. national objective, and the  general strategy to serve that objective, Wedemeyer moved on to the question of the ground forces that would be required. Critical to this was the number of men that the nation could mobilize without weakening its industrial capacity or undermining the cohesion of society itself:

Wedemeyer turned to historical examples of mobilization for precedents and closeted himself in the Library of Congress, where he studied all of the major wars since the time of Gustavus Adolphus. In the course of his survey, he discovered that roughly 10 percent of the total population of any nation could be taken into the armed forces without doing serious harm to the economy and social life of the nation.        (p. 78)

Thus, Wedemeyer calculated that the U.S. could put 12-14 million men under arms. From there, he moved on to detailed planning concerning the structure of the army. Even with tens of millions of men under arms, the US and Great Britain could not achieve the 2-1 numerical superiority that was traditionally considered a requirement for successful offensive operations. But by then the Army had long understood that mass alone does not deliver victory, but rather, mass at the critical place and time. A numerically inferior force could achieve this through maneuver and firepower, armor in particular being the instrumental platform. Analysis of German blitzkriegs in Poland, France, and Russia left Wedemeyer with no doubt as to the nature of the coming war. Thus, he designed an army that was heavily mechanized and composed of small, compact divisions that were in turn built from standardized regiments that could be easily shifted from one division to another without snarling command arrangements or logistics:

Ultimately, American divisions would fight in the high intensity European theater, where only armored and mechanized units had real offensive utility. Fewer of those units would suffice, if their value, in turn, were multiplied by powerful tactical air forces. Organizational economy could be gained by building divisions of different types and capabilities out of standard tactical units. To meet the threat of strong enemy armored forces and air forces, which WPD planners expected to be even more powerful by 1943, divisions required massive antitank, antiaircraft artillery, and field artillery reserves for support. Highly mobile logistical and service units sustained the divisions in battle. Finally, a smaller division, vastly greater in firepower than the old square division, was the more efficient tactical tool on a modern, fast-paced battlefield. (p. 90-91)

Wedemeyer believed “that the enemy can be defeated without creating the numerical superiority” traditionally required for success in battle. They key to victory lay in building efficient forces and using them effectively to achieve local force superiority. His basic plan involved creating powerful armored and mechanized task forces that could exploit this local superiority to strike violently and swiftly from well-prepared European bases to defeat the Germans in detail. Firepower, mobility, and air power would make up for manpower shortages. (p. 92)

The number of divisions that the Wedemeyer had to work with was estimated based on the manpower that would be available to ground forces after the Navy, Army Air Corps, and support units were properly manned. The remainder from a total manpower pool of 12 million allowed for 215 divisions, which Wedemeyer allocated into five different field armies, three tasked with offensive operations, and two functioning as the nation’s strategic reserve. More specific deployments were determined according to the larger war plan, with critical territories in the western hemisphere and both oceans receiving permanent garrisons.

Wedemeyer’s report was incorporated into a larger document that became known as the Victory Program. Of course, not all of its precepts were implemented by the United States; as the old cliché goes, no plan survives first contact with the enemy (or with U.S. politicians). But it was an important point of departure for U.S. planning in the early years of the war, and it filled a strategy vacuum that had existed in a nation that retained strong isolationist sentiments.

What I find most interesting is the systematic – almost mechanical – process that he used to write the plan. Some subjective decisions were involved, but for the most part, Wedemeyer’s strategizing  required very little art; he could almost be likened to a computer searching for a solution to a mathematical equation, though with human controls that ensured a product of vastly higher quality than the “systems analysis” of the 1960s. Thus, Wedemeyer could be regarded as an archetype American strategist; a master of the physical variables of war, who applied men and metal to problems that had a more intangible origin, but achieved victory all the same [at least in this case].

 

Lessons from Byzantium: Survival Amid Weakness and Eternal War

The word ‘Byzantine’ has come to denote political intrigue of treacherous complexity. Thus, it might be thought that a Byzantine grand strategy would be something to avoid like the plague; a nightmarish tangle of ill-conceived and contradictory policies that is guaranteed to produce catastrophe [sound familiar?]. In fact, the empire from which the term derives was one of the longest surviving empires in history. Surely they must have done something right.

Indeed, as Edward Luttwak argues in his new book, The Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire, Byzantine history provides an excellent example of a grand strategy that utilized all instruments of state power to maximum effect.

Strategy is an imperative for the poor and the weak. Compared to the united Roman Empire of centuries past, Byzantium was both. When it decided to wage war, the ancient Roman Empire was able to combine well-trained military forces raised from its huge manpower reserves with sheer warlike determination to literally grind its enemies into dust, often abandoning strategic and tactical subtlety to gain victory through simple attrition; a high-cost but low-risk strategy guaranteed to produce success for anyone able to foot the bill. Not so the Byzantine Empire, which suffered from a chronic shortage of combat-ready troops and a disadvantaged geography that left it surrounded by enemies, with no easily defensible frontiers or a secure “homeland” territory. And yet, the Byzantine Empire survived nearly a millennium longer than its Western ancestor. How? With a grand strategy attuned to its situation.

Byzantium’s situation was one of endless war, if not with a particular enemy then with others that would follow it. On its European frontier, the Empire faced the recurring onslaughts of migrating steppe peoples, beginning with the Huns. No sooner would one be defeated then another would appear behind it as the migratory pressures of central Asia pushed nomadic populations westward out of the steppe like clockwork. On the eastern frontier was a perpetual border conflict with Sassanid Persia that would occasionally escalate into full-scale war. The Sassanid threat would be replaced by Islam with its constant ghazi raiding and annual jihadi invasions, first by the Arabs and then by the converted Turkic peoples. And then there were the peripheral threats to the West as the rest of Christendom picked off remaining Byzantine enclaves on the opposite shore of the Adriatic and beyond. Thus, for the Byzantine Empire, decisive victory of any sort was impossible. Had it waged all-out wars of annihilation like its Roman predecessor it would have rapidly exhausted itself into oblivion. Instead,

They [the Byzantines]…learned to view their enemies of the moment with a distinct element of ambivalence, evaluating them not only as immediate threats that had to be countered and possibly fought very hard, but also as possible future allies. That made attrition tactics inappropriate at the strategic level, as well as costly. (p. 284)

Since it was impossible for the Empire to defeat every one of its enemies militarily, diplomacy became the primary instrument of strategy:

The Byzantines continuously relied on deterrence – any power confronting other powers must do so continuously, if only tacitly – and they routinely paid off their enemies. But they did much more than that, using all possible tools of persuasion to recruit allies, fragment hostile alliances, subvert unfriendly rulers, and in the case of the Magyars, even divert entire migrating nations from their path. For the Romans of the Republic and the undivided empire, as for most great powers until modern days, military force was the primary tool of statecraft, with persuasion a secondary complement. For the Byzantine Empire it was mostly the other way around. Indeed, that shift of emphasis from force to diplomacy is one way of differentiating Rome from Byzantium, between the end of Late Roman history in the east, and the beginning of Byzantine history. (p. 112)

Those few instances when the Empire did attempt to completely vanquish an enemy usually serve to illustrate the ruinous consequences of such endeavors. During Justinian’s campaign to reconquer the former Roman territories in the west, Vandal power in Africa and Gothic power in Italy was destroyed rather than co-opted, saddling the Empire with the enormous expense of maintaining the newly conquered provinces. Much wiser to pursue limited objectives that leave the enemy of today strong enough to be meaningful allies against the enemies of tomorrow.

On the military level, the Byzantines developed a way of warfare that conformed to the larger strategy. Just as decisive victory at the strategic level was impossible, so it was on the battlefield. Instead of equipping itself for battles of annihilation with armies based around heavy infantry, the Byzantines embraced a doctrine of “relational maneuver” which emphasized cavalry to supply the necessary mobility:

For the Romans, who believed in destroying enemies not wise enough to recognize the advantages of submission, the cutting and thrusting and besieging heavy infantry was the most important arm, because it could best achieve decisive results. By contrast … the Byzantines believed in containing but not destroying their enemies – potentially tomorrow’s allies. Therefore for them the cavalry was the most important arm because its engagements did not have to be decisive, but could instead end with a quick withdrawal, or a cautious pursuit that would leave both sides not too badly damaged. (p. 272-3)

In both offensive and defensive operations, Byzantine commanders were expected to avoid open battle with the enemy’s main body unless they had an overwhelming advantage; otherwise they could not afford the inevitably high casualties. Relational maneuver required information in order to identify enemy strengths to avoid and weaknesses to exploit. The Byzantine art of war could not exist without intelligence; spies to learn the enemy’s strategic intent, reconnaissance and patrols to locate forces once they were deployed in the field, and probing attacks to identify weaknesses in their battlefield disposition. Only when the Byzantine commander had sufficient information to make a decision could he risk his own forces. For a strong army, a meeting engagement is a welcome opportunity to destroy the enemy, but for the Byzantines it was a catastrophic failure.

Avoiding battle could not produce results quickly. Instead of disarming the enemy directly, the Byzantines had to gradually undercut the sources of their strength. This took time. When Basil II set out to destroy the Bulghars (another rare example of an absolutist objective, but a rational one: the Bulghars controlled the Danube which was the only defensible terrain the European frontier), he did not seek victory in a single campaign of decisive battle. He slowly chipped away at their power by retaking the fertile lands along the Danube river valley. The campaign took decades, but it succeeded.

Even when the empire was threatened with destruction the Byzantines did not conform to the pattern of war imposed on them by the enemy, instead using maneuver to rapidly shift the center of gravity back in their favor (a good illustration of RADM J.C. Wylie’s “power control” in action). In the early 7th century, the Sassanid emperor Khusrau II abandoned Persia’s traditionally limited border objectives and launched a campaign to conquer the entire Byzantine Empire. Over the next two decades, Byzantium suffered defeat after defeat, losing all of the Levant and most of Anatolia to the Persians and most of Europe to the Avars. By 624, the emperor Herakleios was left with Constantinople itself and a few scattered pieces of territory along the Aegean. With the Avars and Persian converging on Constantinople, Herakleios made a final, desperate gamble. He gathered the remnants of the Byzantine army together, left Constantinople to fend for itself, and drove rapidly across Anatolia, into the Caucuses, and down into Mesopotamia, into the very center of Sassanid power. Persia’s armies were scattered across the recent conquests, unable to defend the capital Ctesiphon. Seeing the Byzantines at their doorstep, Khusrau’s court rivals murdered him and made peace with Herakleios. When the Empire was on the verge of destruction, Herakleios took the only option he had left – deep, rapid maneuver – and the Empire survived another 800 years.

Byzantine grand strategy can be summarized as follows: pragmatic diplomacy to neutralize enemies and gain allies; subversion and bribery where possible to secure victory inexpensively; relational maneuver and asymmetrical warfare on the battlefield; all guided by the assumption of war without end “because as soon as one enemy is no more, another will surely take his place for all is constantly changing as rulers and nations rise and fall. Only the empire is eternal. (p. 417)” In Luttwak’s own words:

The genius of Byzantine grand strategy was to turn the very multiplicity of enemies to advantage, by employing diplomacy, deception, payoffs, and religious conversion to induce them to fight one another instead of fighting the empire. Only their firm self-image as the only defenders of the only true faith preserved their moral equilibrium. In the Byzantine scheme of things, military strength was subordinated to diplomacy instead of the other way around, and used mostly to contain, punish, or intimidate rather than to attack or defend in full force. (p. 415)

What can America learn from Byzantium? America is neither Rome nor Byzantium; it has the military strength to annihilate its enemies utterly, but it is unable to exercise that power because of its own legalistic moralism, its fear of contravening international norms of state behavior, the opposition of other major powers in the system, and the irregular nature of most of its enemies. Yet it continues to proclaim maximalist objectives (e.g. the eradication of terrorism) while abiding by the constraints that prevent it from reaching those objectives, gradually exhausting itself in a vain pursuit of final victory and the End of History. If America should learn one thing from Byzantium, it is that war is eternal; to exert strenuously against a particular enemy is only to hasten decline, for a new enemy is always on the horizon.

 

Poll: most ominous-sounding barbarian tribe

 

Mining in America

These pictures were taken at an abandoned iron mine, one of several such sites in a region that supplies over 70% of America’s iron ore. This particular pit produced some of the highest-grade magnetite ore in the world before it was shuttered in 1990, an early victim of LTV Steel’s (the original owner of the pit) eventual bankruptcy, along with an even larger mine a few miles from this one. Nearly two and a half miles long, it is now a lake (and a fun spot for snowmobiling in the winter); a grim reminder of America’s ongoing deindustrialization. Six other iron mines continue to operate in the region, but the U.S. steel industry has been in a malaise for a very long time, with no sign of a reprieve.

It’s not all bad, however. Within a few miles of this pit is one of the largest deposits of non-ferrous metals in the world, including copper, nickel, cobalt, platinum, palladium, gold, and silver. Half a dozen exploratory mining companies are operating in the area, and one is on the verge of breaking ground for a new mine. Should the ever-present environmental hurdles be cleared, this region will become a mining district of unsurpassed value and productivity. This pit might even be reopened, both for its iron and the more valuable metals that lie beneath it.

Satellite view of the site:

West edge of the pit, looking south:

West edge, looking northeast:

A moose, getting a drink along the eastern shore:

 

Repost: China and “Unrestricted Warfare”

As China’s power increases and the attention of the world’s strategic analysts shifts to Asia, it has become fashionable to attribute to the Chinese a level of conceptual power that they do not actually have. This often manifests itself as rhetoric proclaiming the Chinese to be infinitely superior and subtle strategists that put their clumsy and naive Western counterparts to shame. For example, and with only mild exaggeration: “China is planning global hegemony: they will soon invade Taiwan and proclaim the restored Middle Kingdom. And we Americans are too stupid to realize that this is happening under our noses. Unless we take action now, we are doomed!”

Fear of Chinese power is nothing new, and in centuries past it was referred to as the “yellow peril.” But whereas in the past alarmists used to demean the Chinese as racially inferior and degenerate barbarians who threatened to overrun the world, today they are regarded as intelligent, insidious, and utterly ruthless in their quest to achieve global supremacy. I like to call this phenomenon “reverse ethnocentrism”; regarding a foreign people as superior to ones’ own, at least in the realm of strategy.

So when in the late 1990s two PLA colonels – Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui – authored a treatise on their theory of “unrestricted warfare,” their work was immediately seized upon as proof of the inferiority of Western strategy next to its sublime Eastern rival. However, an actual reading of the document reveals military thinking that is mediocre at best.

A popular English translation showcases perfectly the phenomenon I’m talking about. The book is subtitled as “China’s Master Plan to Destroy America,” and the cover image depicts the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center, insinuating that the Chinese were somehow responsible. Ali Santoli’s introduction also suggests this. In addition to being inflammatory, this is misleading. The US figures prominently as the main adversary, but the document is a piece of military theory, not a “master plan” by any stretch of the imagination. Terrorism is mentioned as a form of “unrestricted warfare,” but the authors are warning of its threat rather than advocating its use.

The central argument of the book is that rapid technological advance and economic globalization is opening up new spheres of warfare aside from the traditional battlefield, and that these new spheres could be the decisive “theater” in future war. The authors give a long list of what they consider to be new forms of warfare, such as financial warfare, network warfare, environmental warfare, technological warfare, etcetera:

All of the prevailing concepts about the breadth , depth, and height of the operational space already appear to be old-fashioned and obsolete. In the wake of the expansion of mankind’s imaginative powers and his ability to master technology, the battlespace is being stretched to its limits.

The position of military and political weakness has stimulated very creative military and strategic thinking throughout history, including Unrestricted Warfare. As the authors state in their introductory chapter, they conceived their theory as a means to escape the endless cycle of competition in weapons technology, which is dominated by the United States:

To ensure that the weapons are in the lead, one must continue to up the ante in development costs; the result of this continued raising of the stakes is that no one has enough money to maintain the lead. It’s ultimate result is that the weapons to defend the country actually become a cause of national bankruptcy … Obviously, it will be difficult for anyone to keep going. Naturally, the way to extricate oneself from this predicament is to develop a different approach.

Thus, in an attempt to overcome U.S. superiority in the conventional military sphere, the authors hope to exploit new spheres that have been made available by technology and globalization. But for this strategy to work, these new battlespaces must be able to deliver victory. The authors argue that they can.

Methods that are not characterized by the use of the force of arms, nor by the use of military power, nor even by the presence of casualties and bloodshed, are just as likely to facilitate the successful realization of the war’s goals, if not more so … Any war that breaks out tomorrow or further down the road will be characterized by warfare in the broad sense – a cocktail mixture of warfare prosecuted through the force of arms and warfare that is prosecuted by means other than the force of arms. The goal of this kind of warfare will encompass more than merely ‘using means that involve the force of arms to force the enemy to accept one’s own will.’ Rather, the goal should be ‘to use all means whatsoever – means that involve the force of arms, means that involve military power and means that do not involve military power, means that entail casualties and means that do not entail casualties – to force the enemy to serve one’s own interests.’

The preceding passage demonstrates the weakness behind their theory of unrestricted warfare, because to make it work, the authors had to redefine the object of war. Rather than use force to impose one’s will on the enemy, the object is “to force the enemy to serve one’s own interests.” The West has similar concepts, but we understand them within the terms of international politics. In other words, what the West calls politics, the Chinese call war. With this understanding, “unrestricted warfare” loses much of its novelty. Indeed, the authors write with the enthusiasm of someone who has rediscovered the wheel and is attempting to sell it under a new name.

Revealing a very naive ethnocentrism of their own, the authors state that this manner of thinking “is not a strong point of the Americans, who are slaves to technology in their thinking. The Americans invariably halt their thinking at the boundary where technology has not yet reached.” Nonsense. The Americans understand the concepts of “unrestricted warfare” just as the Chinese, but they consider them as tools of international politics in an anarchic world-system. “War” is reserved for organized violence to serve political ends. The absence of war does not mean the absence of conflict; the struggle for power and security is endless, and occurs outside the context of open warfare. But ultimately, violence is the final arbiter of conflict; only by violence is it possible to impose your will on the enemy. The authors acknowledge that conventional military operations may occur simultaneously with operations in the new battlespaces, but the battlefield has lost its role as the final court of war. But this raises a question: if the traditional battlefield no longer offers the possibility of decision, why do the authors argue that it will still coexist with the new battlespaces? How is it not still the decisive sphere?

Despite all the attention that this book received in the United States, it is a useful example of the weaknesses of Eastern strategic thought, entering into the surreal at times. At one point, the authors suggest using holographic technology to frighten religiously devout soldiers. They also propose that the golden ratio of mathematics and geometry (1.618…) is the key to all victory in war. They admit that they have no idea how this can be practically applied, but insist it should be done anyway. Alas, semi-fantastical notions of bloodless victory through clever stratagems are inherent to the Chinese concept of war.

War has always involved marshalling resources that are not military in nature and committing them to the effort to defeat the enemy. The hype over Unrestricted Warfare is similar to that which surrounds its American equivalent, “Fourth generation warfare.” Ultimately, they are both concepts that repackage and restate the eternal truths of war. Unrestricted Warfare is a commendable piece of military theory, but the Chinese will need more than this to displace the U.S. as the world’s preeminent superpower.

 

MercMart: The Future of PMCs

Continuing the theme of my last post, I thought I might offer my own ideas on the future of the private military industry. Private military corporations (PMCs) in all their various guises have become a critical component of U.S. military operations and power projection. There may never again be a situation where private security contractors are employed to the extent that they were in Iraq, but it has become impossible for the U.S. government to embark on foreign contingencies without extensive support from the private sector. Thus far, however, PMCs have functioned in a supporting role; an ancillary element to an official mission.  There are some scenarios where they might be able to function as an independent, decisive instrument. Let’s examine a few of them:

1. In the employ of the United Nations. The dismal record of UN peacekeeping operations has done serious damage to the organization’s credibility. It is true that “peacekeeping” was never meant to function without the consent of all the belligerent parties, but the failure of UN forces to protect civilian populations in such places as Rwanda, the Congo, and Sierra Leone has destroyed much faith the world body, no matter what the academic definition of “peacekeeping” is; war ravaged peoples tend not to be interested in semantics. One of the problems is that these missions rely on military contributions from member states. These troops are often of poor quality, and the governments contributing them usually place restrictions on the types of operations they can engage in, severely limiting their effectiveness. This problem could be alleviated were the UN to have its own military legitimacy, and private military corporations are immediate solution.

In the years following the Rwandan genocide, it was revealed that UN officials debated hiring mercenaries to enter the country and put a stop to the genocide. In 1998, Kofi Annan explained why the decided against this, stating that “the world may not be ready to privatize peace”. Perhaps the world wasn’t ready, but one million Rwandans certainly were…

That said, the idea of the UN buying its own military forces and kicking in the doors in a forcible intervention should be cause for concern; I doubt any government on the planet is comfortable with the notion. Even if the mission was a legitimate enterprise to stop another genocide, the UN bureaucracy is so corrupt and incompetent that not even a crack army of mercenaries could save the day.

2. Employment by weak states. The use of mercenaries by governments is often condemned as somehow undermining accepted norms of state behavior. The implication of this argument is that weak governments in war-torn countries are morally obligated to either (a) surrender to the insurgent forces that seek to unseat them, or (b) throw themselves at the mercy of the “international community” in the hope that a foreign intervention will come save them. Given the importance attributed to the principle of state sovereignty by that same “international community”, this norm makes no sense whatsoever. Decolonization created a number of states that exist in name only, and the only way that they can protect their territory is with hired help. How can state sovereignty be respected if a different norm forbids governments from taking the measures necessary to exercise that sovereignty?

3. Employment as an independent instrument of U.S. foreign policy. It is possible to imagine scenarios where critical U.S. interests are not at stake, but U.S. intervention is otherwise desirable. In these circumstances, the absence of political will prohibits the employment of U.S. forces, but PMCs offer an alternative.

Let us imagine a fictional scenario to illustrate what I mean. In future decades, the distribution of world power will once again trend toward bipolarity as China continues to rise and the American “unipolar moment” comes to an end. Inevitably, a mutual suspicion will set in between these two superpowers. Let us then imagine that ethnic violence on a genocidal level breaks out in the tiny African nation of Equatorial Guinea (not a completely unrealistic prospect…it has happened before). As usual, the UN would be paralyzed, and European states would have neither the will nor capability to intervene. After the long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. is not eager for any foreign adventures, least of all one that does not involve vital U.S. interests. But there would be one reason to intervene: to get there before the Chinese do. Were the Chinese to intervene under the pretext of a peace enforcement mission, they would secure another source of oil and gain a base on the Atlantic Ocean. This would not be unprecedented for China; in the past, Beijing has committed troops to UN missions as part of strategy to isolate Taipei. A few years ago they joined the UN mission in Haiti, which was one of a handful of states in the Western Hemisphere the extended diplomatic recognition to Taiwan.  Committing U.S. forces might not be possible, but why not a PMC?

Of course, there are many reasons why not. Outsourcing foreign policy like this could set a very dangerous precedent. Intervening in any region where vital interests are not at stake is a questionable endeavor, no matter what forces are committed. In any case, the U.S. has managed to topple unfavorable governments when secondary or tertiary interests are involved (Liberia, Haiti, etc.) with little enough controversy.

Ironically, the best arguments for employing mercenaries tend to be the humanitarian ones. A crisis like the Rwandan genocide is one where armed intervention is most necessary but least attractive. This is where the employment of PMCs would have the most value, and it’s the niche that the private military industry is trying to exploit.