Asymmetrical Warfare: Today’s Challenge to U.S. Military Power
Written by: Roger W. Barnett,
Brassey’s, Washington D.C., 2003,
ISBN: , 182 pp.
Reviewed by: Alan Ryan, Senior Research Fellow, Land Warfare Studies Centre
The concept of ‘asymmetry’ in conflict is one of the most abused buzzwords in the contemporary lexicon of warfare. It is most generally used to describe a situation where an adversary uses methods that avoid an opponent’s strengths while targeting their weaknesses. This definition is not very helpful because adopting the indirect approach is the very nature of strategy. At its most simplistic, it is often understood to mean the use of terrorism. Yet terrorism is a method, not a strategy. In this very valuable book, Roger Barnett, a professor emeritus at the US Naval War College and former Navy captain, argues that asymmetries are ‘those actions that an adversary can exercise that you either cannot or will not’. He contends that the Western world is particularly threatened by asymmetric conflict because we have been ‘de-conditioned’ from the expectation that state-sourced violence is an acceptable tool of statecraft. Most of the citizens in Western societies inhabit, in their own minds at least, a post-military civilisation.
Barnett argues that the fact that the international community is most reluctant to use force—combined with the proliferation of legal, political and moral restraints on the use of violence—makes pluralist and democratic societies vulnerable to attacks from opponents that recognise no such constraints. He lists a range of operational strategies—apart from terrorism—that those states that recognise international legal norms cannot counter. These methods include hostage taking, the use of weapons of mass destruction, environmental vandalism and illegitimate operational techniques. Such techniques include indiscriminate targeting, suicide attacks, using human shields, and illegal attacks on national infrastructure or computer networks. He cites the influential book Unrestricted Warfare, written by Senior Colonels Qiao and Wang of the People’s Liberation Army, to demonstrate that, given the unchallenged military advantage enjoyed by the United States, serious adversaries will inevitably be forced to embrace asymmetrical—and illegitimate—forms of warfare. They will do this in order to take advantage of the normative constraints on the use of force by the United States and its allies.
The publication of this book is particularly timely given that the Western world has just undergone a debate about the legitimacy of military action against Iraq. here was never any doubt that Saddam Hussein’s regime had defied the international community by acting asymmetrically. He had murdered his own population using gas—an illegal weapon. He had used his own troops (and children at that) to blow themselves up breaching Iranian minefields. In the First Gulf War he torched the Kuwaiti oilfields in a savage act of environmental vandalism. He also took civilian hostages during the same conflict. He funded and provided refuge to terrorist organisations such as Al Fatah and Hizbollah. During the recent war, Ba’ath extremists destroyed Iraq’s cultural heritage in an attempt to shape world opinion, and missiles were used that possessed no precision capabilities—simply to spread fear. Still, many countries argued in the United Nations, and many demonstrators voted with their feet on the streets, that no cause for war existed. As Barnett points out in this book, to consistently tolerate illegitimate asymmetrical attacks on the values espoused by the international system is to invite attack. Peaceable, satisfied states can no longer deter those states and non-state actors that do not accept or recognise the formers’ pacifist values.
Western military forces need to come to terms with the constraints that have been placed on them in waging war. Barnett argues that if recognising a constraint (such as rules of engagement that rule out certain categories of targets) is unnecessary, or gets in the way of achieving operational objectives, then it should be rolled back. Fighting in too mannered or conventional a way exposes our forces to asymmetric attack. The author does not argue that the use of military force should not be controlled, but is critical of those constraints that are not based on sound strategic or operational imperatives.
War is an obscenity, but as Barnett points out, we cannot avoid the fact that state-sourced violence is the ultimate sanction against, and deterrent to, international anarchy. After 11 September, apocalyptic terrorism has been unleashed on the world. We are unlikely to defeat that type of hydra by applying modes of violence suitable to wars between states that expect to continue to exist, no matter what the outcome of the war may be. Given an enemy that will kill us simply for who we are, we must be prepared to wage war in kind.
Collections of previously published essays can be unimpressive since they often lack a coherent theme. Not too many anthologies withstand the test of time and most end up as permanent exhibits on the remainder stands of highstreet bookstores. That is unlikely to be the fate of this particular collection, which is, in a word, riveting. A retired US Army lieutenant colonel, Ralph Peters, is America’s premier strategic iconoclast. A highly successful novelist, he helped pioneer the genre of ‘real-time, alternative history’ combat accounts. His 1989 work Red Army saw him lauded as the ‘thinking man’s Tom Clancy’. Writing novels may help dispose of the mortgage, but Peters’s forte lies in tearing down the sacred cows of institutional strategic wisdom and examining the world as it really is. The eighteen chapters that make up this book have previously appeared in a number of forums. Many of them were published in Parameters, the quarterly journal of the US Army War College. Others are ‘think pieces’ written to tease out a particular theme or elucidate an issue.
For years before 11 September, the author was warning that the greatest threat to human security was not so much conventional interstate war but the re-emergence of ‘warriors’—erratic primitives of shifting allegiances, habituated to violence, with no stake in civil order’. We recognise them in the militia armies of the former Yugoslavia, in Chechnya, East Timor and Sierra Leone. We see them in the narcomarxist groups that infest south and central America. They exist in the armies of the warlords of Afghanistan, Somalia and the Sudan. While in the past we could depend on these groups being quarantined in the Third World, they are beginning to adapt themselves to the era of globalisation and are becoming transnational in nature. As the events of 11 September, and most recently in Bali, demonstrated, globalisation has given them the opportunity to travel, to construct alliances between disaffected groups and to find new sources of funding. They have found their ultimate expression in the apocalyptic terrorists of al-Qa’ida and Jemaah Islamiah. Peters’s core argument is that we inhabit a deeply and bitterly divided world. In this environment, conflict is inevitable. Our only hope of prevailing is to understand the root causes of violence and respond accordingly. So far as apocalyptic warriors are concerned, Peters argues that we cannot accommodate our world view with their eschatological philosophy. We must fight them, and we must destroy them.
Peters covers a lot of ground in this book, from observations on the role of intelligence in the national security establishment through to a bitter denunciation of the inadequacies of those ideologically straitjacketed academics whose postmodern dogmas cripple our ability to formulate sensible strategic policy. His opening sentence of that chapter reads: ‘A room filled with university professors makes me nostalgic for the Khmer Rouge’. It is a challenging statement, but one that is justified by his analysis of the sort of cultural relativism indulged in by those ivory-tower scholars that accord the same legitimacy to the Saddam Husseins and Robert Mugabes of this world as they do to their own liberal-democratic governments. Consideration of the Khmer Rouge is particularly apt, for at the same time that they were wiping out their own intelligentsia, many Western intellectuals were applauding their efforts. This shameful episode is thoroughly documented in Sophal Ear’s brilliant honours thesis ‘he Khmer Rouge Canon’, which is available on the Internet. A number of prominent Australian scholars are to be found in the ranks of the public intellectuals that continued to support the Khmer Rouge long after the scale of its crimes was made obvious.
Other chapters of this book that are of particular interest to military professionals include ‘he Human Terrain of Urban Operations’ and ‘Heavy Peace’. In the former, extremely prescient piece, he points out that the key variable in urban operations is not the built environment, but the attitude of the population. A hostile population may result in a Stalingrad or a Grozny, but without that level of opposition, you are likely to see a rapid collapse as in Baghdad. In ‘Heavy Peace’, Peters points out that the challenge of conducting peace operations in an era of complex insecurity requires the United States and its allies to invest in its soldiers:
While proponents of air-power claim it can accomplish every military mission by itself, infantrymen keep the muddy watch in the Balkans. Technology is seductive, but frequently irrelevant in the clinch. The age of heavy peace is the age of the skilled, disciplined soldier ...
Presented in his usual confrontational and trenchant style, Peters’s book demonstrates that the author clearly enjoys writing and communicates that enthusiasm to his reader. His world is an uncomfortable one, and sometimes appears too uncompromising in its certainties. Nonetheless, this book should be prescribed reading for any military professional that seeks to understand the contemporary nature of human conflict.
