Our binary understanding of 'war' and 'peace' is not fit for the 21st Century
General Mark Carleton Smith, the professional head of the British army, recently offered the view that ‘peace’ and ‘war’ are “ artificial and binary characterisations of a strategic contest that no longer exists today, but which still drives much of our policy ”. And we should listen to what he says, not simply because of the prominence of his current job, but because he is a leader of that generation of soldiers whose careers have been spent at the sharp end of their profession, from The Balkans, through the First Gulf War and on to the Wars of 9/11. He has also spent much of that time in the arcane world of Special Forces, and so is not burdened by the conventional assumptions of his more traditionally minded contemporaries.
Neither is he alone. General Rupert Smith, the leading soldier intellectual of an earlier generation, offered much the same view in his seminal book The Utility of Force. While at the other end of the scale of military celebrity, junior officers like Emile Simpson and Patrick Hennessey have written accounts of the sense of dissonance they felt when the conventional wisdom of their formal training at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, met the battlefield reality of Southern Afghanistan. An American view has recently been added by Sean McFate and his book Goliath has the subtitle “ Why the West doesn’t win wars. And what we need to do about it”, just in case we had missed the point.
The key issue that joins all these observers of the conflicts we fight now is that the idea of clearly defined conditions called ‘war’ and ‘peace’ is not fit for 21 st century purpose. In particular, war as a condition between clearly defined state entities, initiated by a formal declaration, concluded by the occupation of the enemy’s capital and codified by instruments of surrender is not an adequate description of Iranian proxy forces sustaining Bashar al Assad in a conflict with his own people. Neither does it cover the activities of Russian cyber warriors trying to manipulate elections in Europe or America, nor the violence between Mexican drug cartels that claimed more lives in the first half of 2017 than America lost in Iraq and Afghanistan combined.
And it all used to be so simple. The Peace of Westphalia that brought an end to the Thirty Years War in 1648 laid down rules that lasted into this century, where wars were fought between states and alliances of states according to recognised conventions and with definitive outcomes. Not that those outcomes were always good; any international system that has the world wars of the 20 th century to its name has a case to answer, but a lack of clarity is not part of it.
So, what has led to the end of the Westphalian system? There is no single, definitive answer, but Western hubris, globalisation, the emergence of non-traditional forms of warfare, a loss of tolerance in religion and politics, organised crime, the return of Russian belligerence and the rise of China have all played a role. The effect has been to move away from conflict defined in black and white terms and towards infinite shades of grey, where insidious, episodic, ambivalent and, above all, persistent forms of violence between factions, religions, ethnic groups and criminal enterprises are replacing wars between states. The process has created its own vocabulary: The Gray Zone is favoured in Washington, New Generation Warfare works for the Russians, the Israelis capture it in Campaigns Between the Wars, the Chinese settle for a Three Warfares strategy, and informed commentary speaks of forever wars and durable disorder. Durable disorder might in future see mercenaries return to the battlefield, large corporations or even the super-rich raising their own armies and governments acting as spectators to conflicts fought out within their borders, as Mexico, Somalia, Iraq and the Democratic Republic of the Congo illustrate. Plausible deniability will be more potent than firepower and technology will not save us. However it plays out, one thing is clear: The West is trapped in its traditional assumptions about the nature of war and is way off the pace in finding an appropriate response.
In the early years of this century, a revanchist Russia and a rising China separately drew the same conclusion: that to take on the USA in anything resembling conventional war was a mug’s game and alternatives had to be found. For the Russians, this was no more than realism. However much they burned with resentment at their reduced strategic condition, they recognised that they would not be a peer military competitor to America in the foreseeable future. For the Chinese, it was strategic expediency. They did – and still do – have ambitions to achieve military parity with America in the western Pacific but had no intention of compromising that prematurely by inviting conflict on anything other than their own terms and in their own time.
Most closely associated with General Valery Gerasimov, Russian military doctrine has moved decisively away from its traditional reliance on overwhelming force and towards the subtle and insidious application of all instruments of national power to test the boundaries of conflict, but never cross them. In this way, the occupation of the Crimean Peninsular by unattributable “little green men”, followed by a rigged referendum and supported by a deluge of publicity, disinformation and online cheer-leading restored territory to Russian control without ever giving the West sufficient pretext to intervene. Ukraine is currently receiving the same treatment, and, if you want to unravel the institutions of Western Europe, don’t confront NATO or alienate the EU, just bomb Syria and start a massive migration of refugees; that’ll do the job in half the time. In America, the fact that the Mueller Report was ever commissioned is a perfect illustration of how effective Russian techniques have been.
For the Chinese, this is easy. Strategic disguise can trace its provenance back to Sun Tzu’s writings in the 6 th century BC and it was brought up to date in a book titled Unrestricted Warfare, written by two Chinese colonels in 1999. Its central theme was not to attack strength but exploit weakness: avoid conventional conflict and use psychological warfare, restrictive trade practices, economic entryism, terrorism, cyberwar, “lawfare” (bending or rewriting the rules of international order in China’s favour), disinformation masquerading as education, media and the Chinese diaspora to achieve national aims in a way that never offers a single provocation sufficient to justify the threat of conventional war. They have also mastered escalation/de-escalation in a way that constantly threatens, but avoids engaging, Western ships and aircraft testing China’s territorial claims and poses the implicit question to any sitting US President of whether he or she is willing to risk nuclear war over a bunch of rocks in the South China Sea.
And it’s not only the big players that have adapted to a new reality. While the West ponders its strategies for Iraq and Syria, Iran recognises that national borders are artificial devices and orchestrates the 140 million Shia Muslims living between Lebanon and Afghanistan by subsidy, militia forces, on line propaganda and pleas to religious solidarity. Opposing them, ISIS has given a masterclass in digital communication, and, while the caliphate has been destroyed as a physical entity, its doctrines flourish in a virtual dimension. As the Russians and Chinese weave their sinuous strategic webs, terrorists, separatists, populists and organised criminals profit from the confusion that results and compound the tendency to inchoate violence that is replacing our traditional concept of war.
All of this puts the West on the horns of an exquisite dilemma: does it double down on maintaining the technological military advantage that won the Cold War or does it try to meet new threats on their own terms? The US Ford and UK Queen Elizabeth classes of aircraft carrier are both fabulously capable and fabulously expensive but what use are they in neutralising a cyber troll operating out of the Internet Research Agency in St Petersburg? This question not only implies strategic choice, it also challenges strategic interest. The index of institutional success of armies, navies and air forces tends to be the numbers of tanks, ships and aircraft they have manged to procure. A process encouraged by pork barrel politics and the disproportionate power of defence manufacturers and the swarm of lobbyists, consultants and fixers that support them, particularly in Washington. A successful historic record, the power of political and commercial advocacy and intellectual indolence have combined to trap the West in a strategic rear view mirror – what’s worked in the past will work in the future. Others, guided by failure, ambition or opportunity, have drawn different conclusions and are prospering in a changed world.
Whatever the mix of traditional and novel capabilities that represents an appropriate Western response, a number of things are patently clear now and should act as a handrail into the future. First, though bombs and bullets may be the final guarantee of national security they are the last resort against the most pressing threats we face today. Second, the military’s traditional dominance of strategic debate is anachronistic, only by mobilising every dimension of national power can today’s challenges be met. Third, every dimension of national power can only be engaged if we step outside established institutional assumptions; many of the capabilities we need don’t exist in government departments but in civil society. If you want to win an information war why wouldn’t your first stop be Hollywood or Madison Avenue? And fourth, we need to train strategic leaders as intellectual generalists and not technological specialists. To disappear down a cyber rabbit hole is as egregious a mistake as relying on aircraft carriers to do everything; we need to create strategic imaginations as wide as the threats they have to counter.
War is unchanging, operates to enduring rhythms and is most easily understood as armed politics. Warfare is infinitely variable and will take on different forms as weapons, tactics and doctrines change. The West grasps the first but has lost is way on the second and no longer understands the relationship between the two.
