Post-Modern Challenges for Modern Warriors
Introduction
As warfare—the practice of war—changes through the ages, so it can be expected to change the demands it places on its practitioners. Where these changes in practice are dramatic—for example, the advent of mechanized warfare—the changing demands will be easy to spot. But where the changes are more evolutionary or gradual, over a period of time, it is less easy to identify the impact on military professionals. It is also possible to be living through a period of such change without being aware of it: from one month to the next—even from one year to the next—change can take place so gradually as to be almost imperceptible.
It is certainly possible, looking back, to perceive changes in features of warfare over the almost-two decades since the end of the Cold War—for example, the increased incidence of civil wars and instability in failed or failing states, and the rise of terrorism and insurgency, national and trans-national—and to identify some of the different demands placed on our armed forces as a result; but some of the demand, particularly those that might be taking place in current operations, may be less obvious. It is timely to examine these challenges and their impact on armed forces, and to assess how well placed they are to cope with the operational challenges of the future.
This paper examines the challenges presented to modern warriors by changes in contemporary warfare, and argues that while some of these challenges have been or are being overcome, there are others, particularly those associated with military education and culture, which have yet to be fully recognized, let alone met, and which will require to be so if modern warriors are to be a match for tomorrow’s warfare.
Enduring and Changing Challenges
In terms of the challenges facing warriors—’person[s] whose occupation is warfare’1—the period of the Cold War was characterized by the quest to keep up with the modernization of the battlefield: for example, the increasing sophistication of weapon systems; the impact of information technology; the increased complexity of command and control, or staff work and tactics. One of the major challenges was that of providing warriors with sufficient training, and this despite—or, cynics might argue, as a result of—the increasing number and sophistication (not to mention cost) of training aids, simulators and operational analysis tools. New command and staff courses, for example in the United States and in several European armed forces, were created to help meet this demand, and many militaries found that training to achieve the necessary skills was a full time occupation. But as a result of responding to this challenge many became better trained and more professional—in the sense of being more focused on achieving expertise in their jobs—arguably, than ever before.
With a few exceptions, the battlefield for which they prepared (and by which they judged their professionalism) was the arena of large-scale, inter-state combat or, as some came to call it—warfighting. Indeed, for many military professionals, warfare—the practice of war, and warfighting—combat, were synonymous, thereby misleading themselves that there was no more to the practice of war than combat.2 True, some armed forces found themselves involved in other types of operations, for example post-colonial disengagement, anti-communist interventions, United Nations peacekeeping missions, or even internal security roles in their own countries. But these missions were largely considered by many military establishments to be aberrations—Operations Other
Than War, as they came to be known in British and American doctrine—distractions from the ‘real thing’: large-scale, hi-tech, inter-state conflict, which was perceived axiomatically (and not without hubris) to be ‘modern warfare’ in the sense of being a culmination in evolutionary development. The essence of this type of warfare was a contest, relatively simple in conceptual terms, between two regular armed forces, where war and peace, and victory and defeat, were clearly identifiable states, where the mission was to destroy the enemy’s forces, and the method was the application of overwhelming firepower, facilitated by physical manoeuvre.
With the exception of some nations which chose to specialize in peacekeeping and humanitarian operations, the requirement for armed forces to be prepared for ‘the real thing’ did not, of course, end with the Cold War. Encouraged by the zeitgeist of the so-called Revolution in Military Affairs, with its extravagant claims that it ‘challenges the hoary dictums about the fog and friction of war’,3 and thus the nature of war itself, and amid assertions that this view was vindicated by the one-sided nature and result of the 1991 Gulf War,4 the development of modern warfare continued, and continues, in linear fashion,5 driven largely by a technological dynamic: the quest for greater firepower, greater lethality, greater speed, better stealth, better digitization, more efficient logistics, network-centric warfare, and the ability to deliver hi-tech ‘shock and awe’. Such warfare presents mind-boggling challenges to practitioners—notably those of the coordination and synchronization of what amounts to a huge and perplexingly complex machine—albeit that their solution is, in character, Newtonian—more formulaic and mechanistic than conceptual. The overall challenge for warriors here was and is to keep pace with (and, where possible, to keep ahead of) the development of warfare.6 It remains a considerable challenge, but by no means the only one, and for some, not even the most testing.
The asymmetric challenges posed to modern armed forces, particularly those of liberal democracies, by opponents who refuse to engage them in modern, conventional warfare, but instead choose a different style of warfare, for example insurgency, are not new,7 but they are largely of a different sort: post-modern challenges—challenges that are not primarily overcome with the tools of modernity: more advanced technology, firepower, lethality, speed, stealth, digitization, logistics, network-centric warfare or hi-tech ‘shock and awe’.8 Post-modern warfare does not develop in linear fashion; and unlike modern warfare, many of the major challenges it poses are not so much technological, formulaic or mechanistic as conceptual. For example, war and peace are not easily delineated; ‘defeat’ and ‘victory’ require definition. The enemy is not obvious, nor easily identifiable, literally or figuratively, and may change on an almost-daily basis; success depends not on destruction of the enemy, but on out-manoeuvring opponents—in particular, depriving them of popular support, and winning it oneself. The contest takes place not on a field of battle, but in a complex civilian environment: ‘amongst the people’.9 Nor is it a primarily military contest; in the case of counter-revolutionary warfare, according to David Galula, ‘twenty per cent military, eighty per cent political is a formula that reflects the truth’.10 The war, is in large part, a war of ideas, the battle largely one for perception, and the key battleground is in the mind—the minds of the indigenous population, and the minds of regional and world opinion.11 Much of this ideological struggle is carried out in the virtual domain of cyberspace.12 Time is a key-sometimes the key—resource, and one which our opponents are likely to hold in far greater quantity than do we. How the war is fought becomes crucially important to the quality and sustainability of the resulting peace. Operations which could previously be clearly and conveniently labelled—for example, combat, peacekeeping, peace enforcement, counter-revolutionary warfare, humanitarian operations—can no longer be so. Now, ‘these reassuringly neat delineations sit uneasily with the reality that campaigns involving counter-insurgency are inherently messy—a kaleidoscope of different types of operation, remarkably resistant to neatness in delineation’,13 confusing doctrine-writers and warriors alike. Generalizing about these operations is not easy, not least because every one is sui generis—of its own kind; but many practitioners who have experienced them might agree that they are characterized by four things in particular: complexity, ambiguity, uncertainty and volatility, and by the fact that they all tend to be ‘wicked problems’—problems that are intractable and circular with complex inter-dependencies, and where solving one part of the problem can create further problems, or make the whole problem greater.14
The nature and characteristics of these operations point towards the roles in which military professionals may expect to find themselves, and the competencies they require. Particularly striking is the far greater diversity of roles than is demanded by combat operations alone: for example, state-building, security-sector reform, mentoring and training indigenous security forces, humanitarian assistance, civil administration, law enforcement, exercising political muscle, even social work—roles that might be expected to be the proper responsibility of other organizations, agencies or government departments. These roles point, in turn, towards the far greater breadth and variety of competencies required—for example, the ability to: apply soft power as well as hard, and choose the right one for the right circumstances; work in a partnership with multinational, multi-agency organizations, civilian as well as military, within a comprehensive approach; master information operations and engage successfully with the media; conduct persuasive dialogue with local leaders and opinion-formers; mentally outmanoeuvre a wily and ruthless enemy; and, perhaps most often overlooked, measure progress appropriately. These competencies require practitioners to have a high level of understanding across a wide range of subjects, including: the political context; the legal, moral and ethical complexities; culture and religion; how societies work; what constitutes good governance; the relationship between ones own armed forces and society; the notion of human security; the concept of legitimacy; the limitations on the utility of force; the psychology of one’s opponents and the rest of the population. Compared with large-scale, inter-state combat, therefore, the challenges facing military professionals conducting post-modern warfare such as counter-insurgency may or may not be tougher, but they certainly are very different—not least, considerably broader and more cerebral, requiring far greater contextual understanding; and successful decision-making at all levels (not just senior ones) is likely to depend less on purely military expertise than on the application of wisdom.
The Cultural Challenge
In addition to a diverse and broad range of competencies and understanding, operations such as counter-insurgency require military professionals to have a different mind-set—a different culture—from that required for modern warfare. The practitioner of modern warfare is schooled to see challenges in a certain way: the end state that matters is the military one; operational success is achieved by the application of lethal firepower which, in turn, is largely a question of targeting and physical manoeuvre; the effects to be achieved are physical ones; the means to the end are largely attritional: destroying targets until there are none left; technology will disperse or at least penetrate ‘the impenetrable fog of war’; given sufficient resources, all campaigns are winnable—and quickly; the world is divided into ‘enemy forces’ and ‘friendly forces’; and the operational picture can be seen in distinct colours: black and white.
The culture and mind-set required for practitioners of post-modern warfare such as counter-insurgency are very different, requiring recognition that: the end-state that matters most is not the military end-state, but the political one; indeed, ‘the insurgency problem is military only in a secondary sense, and political, ideological and administrative in a primary sense’;15 operational success is not achieved primarily by the application of lethal firepower and targeting; that outmanoeuvring opponents physically is less important than out-manoeuvring them mentally; that, in the words of Lawrence Freedman: ‘[I]n irregular warfare, superiority in the physical environment is of little value unless it can be translated into an advantage in the information environment’;16 that claims that technology will disperse the fog of war are to expected from technophiles with little understanding of war (and, indeed, from those paid large sums of money to make such claims); that sufficient resources do not lead inexorably to campaign success; that ‘the image of a quick and decisive victory is almost always an illusion’:17 counter-insurgency campaigns are rarely won quickly—and, indeed, some are quite simply un-winnable and should never be attempted in the first place; that the dramatis personae cannot be divided in Manichaean fashion into ‘enemy forces’ and ‘friendly forces’; and that very little of the picture is actually painted in black and white—mostly in shades of grey.18
Even the approach to problem-solving is different. In conventional warfare the doctrinal approach is essentially Cartesian or reductionist—the first step in problem-solving is to reduce the problem to its essentials and identify a workable solution as quickly as possible—a number of quasi-scientific tools—formulas, templates, ‘norms’19—have been developed to assist in the process; the preferred means to the end is the delivery of rapid and decisive effect; a well-known dictum is ‘don’t just sit there, do something!’ Counter-insurgency, by contrast, characterised by ‘wicked problems’ does not lend itself to the reductionist, PowerPoint mind: the first essential step is spending time understanding the nature of the problem and all its many facets; to try and develop formulas, templates and ‘norms’ is to misunderstand the nature of the problem; the delivery of rapid and decisive effect is but one means—in many circumstances it may be not only singularly inappropriate, but actively counter-productive; and the wiser counsel is sometimes ‘don’t do anything, just sit there!’
The degree of cultural challenge is easy to underestimate. Unless educated otherwise, those schooled in conventional warfare are liable to conduct counterinsurgency as conventional warfare. When the enlightened General Creighton Abrams assumed command in Viet Nam in 1968 he was briefed on the campaign plan:
The briefer stated that the mission was to ‘seek out and destroy the enemy’, the mission of MACV [Military Assistance Command Viet Nam] under General Westmoreland for the past four years. Abrams stopped the briefing and wrote out on an easel ‘The mission is not to seek out and destroy the enemy. The mission is to provide protection for the people of Viet Nam’.20
And Frank Kitson drew attention in 1971 to British Army commanders in counter-insurgency who ‘present the situation to subordinates in terms of conventional warfare’.21 Such commanders are, of course, transgressing, amongst other things, Clausewitz’s ‘first, the supreme, the most far-reaching act of judgement that the statesman and the commander have to make... [which is] to establish... the kind of war on which they are embarking; neither mistaking it for, nor trying to turn it into, something that is alien to its nature’.22
Since all these cultural challenges require the conventional combat warrior to jettison some old, and often deeply held, tenets, it is perhaps worth recalling Basil Liddell Hart’s view that ‘the only thing harder than getting a new idea into the military mind is to get an old one out’.23 Moreover, rather like modernists and post-modernists in Twentieth Century art, some protagonists of modern warfare have an inherent disdain for those who espouse a post-modern style, have a desire (conscious or sub-conscious) to prove that their style is superior, and therefore reluctant to change.24
An important aspect of this different mind-set or culture required by military professionals concerns their warrior ethos—a term that immediately introduces a secondary meaning of the word ‘warrior’: ‘a person,distinguished in fighting, fig [uratively] a hardy, courageous or aggressive person’, or as one contemporary historian suggests of warriors, ‘people with a penchant [‘a strong or habitual liking’25] for fighting’.26 To be effective in combat, an army needs its members to have a self-perception of warriors as fighters; and the army as a whole needs to be imbued with the characteristic spirit, or ethos, of the fighting warrior: the desire to close with the enemy and kill them. A strong warrior ethos is, thus, a precious commodity. But to be effective at counter-insurgency and stabilization operations, an army needs its members to perceive themselves as something other than, or more than, just warriors. Unless they do, they are liable to apply a warrior ethos, approach and methods, for example exercising hard power (in particular, ‘kinetic solutions’) when they should be exercising soft power—in Max Boot’s words, ‘fighting small wars with big war methods’.27 As the old saying goes, ‘if the only tool you have in your tool box is a hammer, all problems begin to resemble nails’.28 To be effective at both combat and counter-insurgency, the army needs to have sufficient warrior ethos, but not so much that it cannot adapt, otherwise warrior ethos becomes an obstacle to versatility and success. Combining these two cultures is highly problematic.
It is ... remarkably difficult for an army to be really good at both combat and counterinsurgency. Notable examples of this dichotomy are the Russian and Israeli armies, highly adept warfighting machines with a warrior ethos so strong that they have found it almost impossible to adapt to the requirements of counter-insurgency. On the other side of this coin are those armed forces which have largely foregone warfighting as their core activity, instead choosing to become specialist peacekeeping forces, and who have found it less easy than they might have wished to regain the warrior ethos needed to meet the challenges of combat operations.29
Moreover, counter-insurgency possesses features with which the pure warrior ethos is highly uneasy: complexity, ambiguity and uncertainty; the whole concept of soft power; political ‘interference’; media scrutiny; the ‘unfair’ constraints of rules of engagement which can negate the use of the trump card—firepower. And it requires these warriors to acquire some decidedly un-warrior-like attributes,30 such as emotional intelligence, empathy with one’s opponents, tolerance, patience, subtlety, sophistication, nuance and political adroitness—attributes which, to some warriors, appear to undermine the warrior ethos on which success in combat depends. Warriors can thus be highly uncomfortable with a role as counter-insurgents, and highly resistant to any change of culture. Such warriors might agree with Ralph Peters writing in the US Army journal ‘Parameters’:
‘A soldier’s job is to kill the enemy. All else, however important it may appear at the time, is secondary ... Theories don’t win wars. Well trained, well-led soldiers in well-equipped armies do. And they do so by killing effectively. There is no substitute for shedding the enemy’s blood.’31
Proponents of such an approach sometimes enlist Clausewitz in support:
‘Kind-hearted people might of course think that there was some ingenious way to disarm or defeat an enemy without too much bloodshed, and might imagine this is the true goal of the art of war. Pleasant as it sounds, it is a fallacy that must be exposed. If one side uses force without compunction, undeterred by the bloodshed it involves, while the other side refrains, the first will gain the upper hand,’32
That may have been true of warfare in Clausewitz’s day, but in counter-insurgency conducted by armed forces of liberal democracies in the Twenty First Century it is simply not true that ‘if one side uses force without compunction, undeterred by the bloodshed it involves, while the other refrains, the first will gain the upper hand’. In these circumstances, disarming or defeating an enemy without too much bloodsed is not so much kind-hearted as clever.
There is, nevertheless, a dichotomy here. In an era when armed forces can expect to be deployed on counter-insurgency and stabilization operations, there is a difficult balance to be achieved in the strength of their warrior ethos. So is a warrior just a military professional? Or is a warrior essentially a person with a strong habitual liking for fighting, an aggressive person whose job is to ‘destroy the enemy’33 ... to kill the enemy—all else... is secondary’?34 As Christopher Coker points out, killing is one of the traditional marks of the warrior, and he observes that while Achilles is the archetypal warrior in the Western tradition, today ‘for many soldiers the archetypal hero is Rambo. a one dimensional action figure engaged in a compellingly reductive vision of war as pure violence’.35 And there is a further complicating factor. Some counter-insurgency campaigns, such as those in Iraq and Afghanistan today, contain significant elements of combat, as depicted in the notion of the Three Block War (‘the entire spectrum of tactical challenges in the span of a few hours within the space of three contiguous city blocks’36). Combat and counter-insurgency are not mutually exclusive.
Training and Doctrine
A key requirement for an armed force re-orienting from one type of warfare to another is having agile and responsive training and doctrine organizations. For many militaries involved in contemporary operations it is probably true to say that training has adapted faster than doctrine. The amount of pre-deployment training in, for example, the UK and US armed forces is now significantly increased, including not only the specialist tactics and techniques required, but also special-to-country briefings, cultural awareness and language training. There is also increasing recognition that such training needs to widen still further to include, amongst other things, knowledge and understanding of the part that the military line of operation plays in a multi-disciplinary, comprehensive approach, and a more holistic approach to the study of insurgency. This has involved some redefinition of the training requirement. It was often claimed that it was relatively simple for armed forces trained in combat to adjust to what were perceived to be the lesser demands of operations other than combat, such as stability operations and counter-insurgency, but much harder, if not impossible (in a short space of time), for troops trained only for operations other than combat to become combat-capable.37 True though this is, it was interpreted by some to imply that counter-insurgency required little extra training for well trained combat troops. This was an error. Frank Kitson commented adversely on this attitude towards operations other than combat, or what he called Low Intensity Operations, in the early 1970s: ‘a considerable number of officers... still consider that it is unnecessary to make any great effort to understand what is involved in Low Intensity Operations, and the cry that a fit soldier with a rifle can do all that is required is often heard’.38 This cry is occasionally still to be heard, albeit infrequently, and rarely from anyone with any understanding of the subject.
The underlying challenge, though, is that armed forces also need to retain their capability to conduct large-scale, conventional warfare, training for which, particularly for land forces, is (as has been pointed out) a potentially full-time occupation in itself; but training time is finite and, for many armed forces, is under pressure from a high rate of operational deployments. Achieving the necessary amount of training time for both combat and for other operations, and for both war and the war, is highly problematic.
Turning to doctrine, new doctrine on both sides of the Atlantic recognizes the need for a different approach to counter-insurgency. In June 2006, the US Marine Corps produced a ‘tentative manual’, ‘Countering Irregular Threats. A Comprehensive Approach’, in which its sponsor, Lieutenant General Jim Mattis, argued that,
‘Marines will be asked to do many things other than combat operations to beat our adversaries , Marines need to learn when to fight with weapons and when to fight with information, humanitarian aid, economic advice, and a boost toward good governance for the local people,Winning and preserving the goodwill of the people is the key to victory.’39
This approach is continued in the latest US Army and Marine Corps counterinsurgency doctrine, published remarkably quickly in December 2006.40 In their introduction to the publication—significantly, jointly signed Lieutenant Generals David Petraeus, US Army, and James Amos, US Marine Corps, stress that:
This manual takes a general approach to counterinsurgency operations, It strives to provide those conducting counterinsurgency campaigns with a solid foundation for understanding and addressing specific insurgencies.
And contrary to precepts previously espoused by neo-Cons in the Department of Defense, the generals also stress that:
Soldiers and Marines are expected to be nation builders as well as warriors. They must be prepared to help reestablish institutions and local security forces and assist in rebuilding infrastructure and basic services. They must be able to facilitate establishing local governance and the rule of law.41
This is also the British Armed Forces’ approach in their emerging joint doctrine42 on what is termed ‘Countering Irregular Activity’ which, like its US counterpart, seeks to instruct military personnel about counter-insurgency as a whole and about associated threats, and emphasizes the need for military activity to be part of a comprehensive approach involving all instruments of power. Many other militaries are also updating their doctrine with a similar approach. But there are further challenges for armed forces here. The first arises from the fact that, as pointed out earlier, every insurgency is sui generis, making generalizations problematic. Doctrine that does not take this sufficiently into account can be dangerous; but equally, doctrine that is too wary of this pitfall can become so general and anodyne as to be of very limited assistance. Secondly, insurgency is becoming increasingly complex, with the advent, for example, of trans-national, and hybrid insurgencies43 for which the counter-insurgency doctrine suitable for national insurgencies may be either of limited utility or counter-productive. And thirdly, the nature of complex insurgencies is that they are amoeba-like (mutating in shape and form to take advantages of the circumstances in which they find themselves), dynamic (pro-actively changing their tactics to suit their purpose), and agile (able to make these changes quickly). And insurgents, being thinking enemies, study our doctrine44 and adjust their methods and tactics accordingly. In consequence of these factors, the likelihood is that some aspects of our doctrine are liable to be out of date almost from the day of publication. Military doctrine and training organizations need, therefore, to be flexible enough to make the necessary and appropriate changes, and agile enough to be able to do so quickly.45 And armed forces need to be learning organizations, which can learn and adapt—a key tenet of the new US doctrine—and do so even faster than their agile opponents. Particularly in counterinsurgency, it’s ‘Who Learns Wins’.
Education
Here there is a further challenge. In conventional warfare, the tools necessary for any conceptual change in a military’s approach to warfare are essentially two-fold—doctrine and training. It comes naturally, therefore, to militaries to place their faith in these tools as the means of re-orientating from one type of warfare to another. Such faith is, however, misplaced and misleading. A further essential instrument in this process is education.
It is necessary here to distinguish between training and education. Training is preparing people, individually or collectively, for given tasks in given circumstances; education is developing their mental powers and understanding. Training is thus appropriate preparation for the predictable; but for the unpredictable and for conceptual challenges, education is required. And, as noted earlier, current and likely future operations, particularly those such as counterinsurgency, are characterized by complexity, ambiguity, uncertainty and volatility—all of which add up to unpredictability—and by challenges that are not so much formulaic and mechanistic as conceptual and ‘wicked’. This calls for minds which can not only cope with, but excel in, these circumstances thus, minds that are agile, flexible, enquiring, imaginative, capable of rigorous analysis and objective critical thinking, minds that can conceptualize and innovate, minds at home with sophistication and nuance (‘interpreting shades of grey’), and minds that have developed understanding, intuition, wisdom and good judgement.46 Moreover, post-modern operations are also characterized by devolved decision-making where relatively junior commanders are making very senior decisions. The requirement for this education is not, therefore, just a requirement for senior officers.
The relationship between training and doctrine, on the one hand, and education, on the other is important. All training and doctrine needs to be founded on education. If they are not, the practitioner is liable to lack the versatility and flexibility needed to adapt them to changing circumstances or to extemporize. Indeed, doctrine alone ‘may constrain the ability to “think outside the box” [and]... limit the ability to understand novel situations’.47 This is particularly applicable in the fluid, unpredictable, ‘messy’ operations which characterize post-modern warfare. Here doctrine and training are liable to be only rough guides, requiring the practitioner to possess the ability to spot when and where they are no longer appropriate, and to adapt accordingly. Moreover, adaptability by itself is inadequate; we must also posess the understanding (resulting from education) which will enable us to anticipate change. As Giulio Douhet noted ‘[V]ictory smiles on those who anticipate changes in the character of war not those who wait to adapt themselves after they occur’.48 Furthermore, without a considerable degree of education, learning is liable to be experiential, often based on the last campaign, with a tendency to transpose inappropriate lessons from one sui generis campaign to another; and over-focus on training as opposed to education often results in too much learning time being spent on counter-insurgency—not enough on insurgency: ‘[W]hoever would understand modern counterinsurgency must first understand modern insurgency’.49 Finally, success in post-modern operations requires military leaders at all levels to possess political sophistication and nous – from the junior commander engaging with a local mayor, to more senior ones dealing with regional governors, right up to the most senior commanders interacting with and advising political leaders at national level. Education has a key role to play in developing the necessary political acumen.
It is important to recognize the purpose of this education. Its purpose is not the purist one of the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, but of developing capacity for good judgement. Such education, therefore, has a training dimension in that it is preparing practitioners to exercise good judgement in their profession, but not just in their next job or deployment, but over the duration of their career. Thus, its payback should not be judged by the improvement to an individual’s immediate performance, but by the value it adds to performance over the course of a career, and in the value added to the organization as a whole over a similar time-span. Judged in this way, professional military education is a direct and essential contributor to operational capability. The nature of future operations will almost certainly place a greater premium than in the past on this contribution, with the increased intellectual demands it is likely to place on military leaders at all levels. Whether these leaders match up to the operational challenges they will face, whether they succeed or fail, is likely to depend much more than in the past on their intellect. If so, then recruiting officers of the necessary intellect and educating them to a high standard throughout their careers will be even more important in future. To be well prepared, officers will thus need to be both well trained and well educated (that is to say, having well-developed minds and understanding of the nature of the subject). In combat operations it matters less that officers are well trained but poorly educated; it seldom determines the outcome. In operations such as counter-insurgency, it is liable to be the difference between success and failure. The educational requirement is, thus, far more about teaching officers ‘how to think’, than ‘what to think’—the antithesis of what Masland and Radway warned against, fifty years ago, as ‘the stockpile approach’ to learning: thinking in terms of ‘counting, piling and storing’.50 Developing minds is most decidedly not something that can be achieved as part of pre-deployment training.
Education is important even—perhaps, particularly—for armed forces, such as the British, who have perceived experience of counter-insurgency. The temptation for these armed forces is to believe that their experience relieves them of the requirement for education. This belief is ill-founded. For example, at the outset of the 2003 deployment to Iraq, the British army had considerable and almost universal experience of counter-insurgency, but apart from a small number of people who had briefly served in Afghanistan or Sierra Leone, and a very few individuals seconded to other armies, this experience was confined to one theatre alone, and a very sui generis one at that: Northern Ireland51 (campaigns in the Balkans were not counter-insurgency, but peacekeeping/peace enforcement). As a result, and with very limited education (as opposed to training) in counter-insurgency, there was a tendency among some to over-draw on the lessons of the Northern Ireland campaign.
Some aspects of the educational requirement for military professionals are more obvious than others, with some subjects being more obvious candidates for study, for example history. Indeed, a lack of understanding of history, and of the importance of its study, is a sure sign of a military leader destined to fail in operations such as counter-insurgency. But focus on one subject can obscure visibility of the wider educational requirement, a requirement well articulated by Samuel P Huntington, also fifty years ago.
Just as law at its borders merges into history, politics, economics, sociology and psychology, so also does the military skill. Even more, military knowledge also has frontiers on the natural sciences of chemistry, physics and biology. To understand his trade properly, the officer must have same idea of its relation to these other fields and the ways in which those other areas of knowledge may contribute to his own purposes. In addition, he cannot really develop his analytical skills, insights, imagination, and judgement if he is trained simply in vocational duties. The abilities and habits of mind which he requires within his professional field can in large part be acquired only through the broader avenues of learning outside his profession. The fact that, like the lawyer and the physician, he is continuously dealing with human beings requires him to have the deeper understanding of human attitudes, motivation and behaviour which a liberal education stimulates. Just as a general education has become the prerequisite for entry into the profession of law and medicine, it is now also almost universally required as a desirable qualification for the professional officer.52
This certainly resonates today, and the nature of current operations suggests that what may have been a desirable qualification fifty years ago is now essential. These complex operations depend for success on a multi-disciplinary, comprehensive approach, combining a number of lines of operation for example, political, diplomatic, security, economic, social—and the military professional requires an understanding across the breadth of these disciplines. There is also a corollary to this for the method and approach to the delivery of professional military education in-service. Such education and training is customarily delivered in most countries in staff colleges or war colleges—military establishments largely restricted to members of the armed services. This may meet the requirement of preparation for an operating environment which is itself restricted to the armed services, although this has not been without some disadvantages. Huntington referred to these colleges as ‘professional monasteries’.53 A purely military learning environment, whether or not a ‘professional monastery’, no longer meets the requirement. There is a strong argument for military professionals to undertake at least some of their education and training alongside representatives of those other organizations with which they will be operating in future, not least for better mutual understanding of the very different institutional cultures involved. This is already happening to some extent in colleges where outsiders are invited for short modules, but there is scope for increasing this practice still further. Indeed, some countries host multi-disciplinary establishments such as Ghana’s International Peacekeeping Training Centre, and Paddy Ashdown has proposed a similar establishment—’a school for conflict prevention, armed intervention and post-conflict resolution’54—in the United Kingdom. A further way of avoiding the effect of the ‘professional monastery’ is for some postgraduate officer education to take place away from the essentially military culture of military academies. However good these academies may be, there is likely to be an institutional culture with the attendant risk of stereotypical thinking which may inhibit thinking ‘outside the box’. An officer corps needs some of its members, indeed its brightest and best, to receive the intellectual stimulation that protracted immersion in the very different free-thinking culture that a good civilian university can provide—for example, through masters’ and doctors’ programmes—and to bring that stimulation and fresh approach back into the armed forces. Most armed forces recognize this, but there is wide divergence in the extent to which they create such opportunities and incentivize participants. The British Armed Forces are not currently in the lead in this respect.55
There is one aspect of developing minds and understanding to cope with the challenges of counter-insurgency that deserves special mention and that is the need to develop cultural understanding—a key element of the contest both in the physical domain and the ‘severely understudied’ ideological one.56 There is a tendency, particularly in busy armed forces (and not excluding those who believe that cultural undersatnding is part of their inheritance)—to short-cut the cultural understanding process by focusing on the training challenge: how to behave in dealing with those of another culture, what basic errors to avoid, a smattering of a few handy phrases. Important though this is, we delude ourselves if we believe that a behavioural check-list does any more than scratch the surface of cultural understanding. If, as has been argued, success in operations such as counter-insurgency depends on mentally out-manoeuvring opponents, there is a requirement to get inside their minds; this cannot be done without a propere understanding of their culture. And if the psychological impact of our actions is all-important, we cannot hope to succeed without understanding the psychology and culture of those whose behaviour we are trying to influence. Consistently under-estimated is the requirement for greater linguistic skills than that provided by the equivalent of a tourist phrase-book. Equally important is the requirement for cultural self-awareness: understanding our own culture, in particular our cultural inheritance—what we have inherited in the way of sub-conscious assumptions, perceptions and prejudices which may affect how we relate to people of other cultures. Moreover, Masland and Radway drew attention to the connection between cultural awareness and the development of the political sophistication required by counter-insurgents: ‘for any executive the beginning of political sophistication is the realization that there are men who may not feel as he feels, who may not dream as he dreams, or who may not pray as he prays’.57 In addition to developing minds, therefore, is the need, where necessary, to broaden them—to make them more open and sensitive to the views of others, and less certain of their own omniscience and rectitude. An important attitude is that advocated by the Scots poet, Robert Burns: ‘O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us/ To see oursels as others see us’.58 Understanding both the opponents’ culture and one’s own are essential elements of success. If we do not recognize this, we must expect to lose. In the words of Sun Tzu:
‘Thus it is said that one who knows the enemy and knows himself will not be endangered in a hundred engagements. One who does not know the enemy but knows himself will sometimes be victorious, sometimes meet with defeat. One who knows neither the enemy nor himself will invariably be defeated in every engagement.’59
Finding the necessary time for intellectual development in an officer’s career, and in the over-heated syllabi of many military colleges and schools, will be a considerable practical challenge, particularly at the same time as preparing for large-scale combat operations (which, as has been pointed out, is itself a full-time occupation), and particularly at a time when many armed forces find themselves very heavily committed to current operations. The scale of the educational requirement is easy to under-estimate. Viewed as subject areas, there may be no more than half a dozen which, to use Huntington’s phrase, ‘frontier on military knowledge’—although politics, economics, anthropology, sociology, psychology and—perhaps above all-history spring quickly to mind. But these are not subjects that lend themselves to a reductionist approach to learning, to be covered in a few periods of instruction, nor are they optional for military leaders in counter-insurgency. Taking military history as an example, it should be studied, as Michael Howard famously advised, ‘in width, in depth and in context’,60 (fast becoming the most quoted and least observed advice on the subject). Nor does the solution lie in over-programming existing courses at the expense of time for reflection, let alone the easy option of cosmetic change—a tick-in-the-box approach which allows those who wish to do so to claim that the necessary change has been made.
There is, of course, an important place in the learning process for self-education, particularly in the study of history. But the temptation for the unwise, or at least the un-forewarned, will be to postpone such self-education until it is too late. In many of today’s armed forces (including the British and the American), most senior officers, and a number of middle-ranking ones as well, are in jobs, whether operational or non-operational, which are so demanding that little time is left for any reading that is not job-related, and, indeed, very little time for creative thinking of any sort. A cautionary tale is that of General William Westmoreland who throughout his time as commander in Viet Nam had beside his bed the works of a number of authors, including Mao Zedong and the insightful Bernard Fall, which could have been key to helping him solve the problems that confronted him. But ‘I was usually too tired in late evening to give them more than occasional attention’.61
Finally, on the subject of education, is the requirement for it to be research-led. To keep at the cutting edge of the subject, particularly in competition with a learning and adaptive enemy, requires a corpus, or body, of academic research experts alongside, and able to interact with, practitioners and students. The risk here is that since research output is difficult, if not impossible, to measure, research departments become highly vulnerable to financial cuts.
Cultural Change
Appropriate doctrine, training and education are, however, only part of the solution. Even more important is acceptance of the required cultural change alluded to earlier. This will be a particular challenge for those military professionals who see themselves purely as combat soldiers. It will also be a particular challenge for those returning from operations in places such as Iraq and Afghanistan whose experience of, or acquaintance with, counter-insurgency has been largely of combat and who, as a result, may have little time for the niceties of ‘hearts and minds’ in comparison to the more obviously heroic, and more obviously rewarded, activity of combat. Those who are unable to make this cultural transition are unlikely to prove adept counter-insurgents. Selection of those capable of transitioning from modern to post-modern warfare is also problematic. In David Galula’s opinion,
There are no easy criteria enabling one to determine in advance whether a man who has not been previously involved in a counterinsurgency will be a good leader. A workable solution is to identify those who readily accept the new concept of counterinsurgency warfare and give them responsibility. Those who prove themselves in action should be pushed upward.’62
In achieving the necessary cultural change, the single most important factor will be the lead given from the top of the hierarchy. Taking, for example, the United States, the then Chief of Staff of the Army, General Peter Schoomaker, made his position, and his clarity of vision, clear in his introduction to the 2006 Counterinsurgency doctrine publication,
Western militaries too often neglect the study of insurgency. They falsely believe that armies trained to win large conventional wars are automatically prepared to win small, unconventional ones. In fact, some capabilities required for conventional success—for example, the ability to execute operational maneuver and employ massive firepower—may be of limited utility or even counter-productive in COIN operations.63
And in many other nations, military leaders have given similar support for their own armed forces’ new approaches to counter-insurgency.
Important though it is, a lead from the top, by itself, is not enough. Any changemanagement programme requires buy-in throughout the hierarchy. Addressing the subject generically, and not specifically related to the armed forces of any nation in particular, subordinate leaders are likely to fall into three main groups. At either end of the spectrum are, on the one end, those who agree wholeheartedly with the change and do all in their power to effect it; and, on the other, those who disagree with it wholeheartedly and do all they can to oppose it. The latter are unlikely to prosper if those at the top are unified in their support for the change. But among those in the middle of the spectrum—the third group—will be people who, at heart, oppose the change, but understand that overt opposition is not career-enhancing. Some of them will, therefore, keep their opposition muted, or maybe allow themselves over time to be persuaded to support the change; others, however, will treat the proposed change as yet another piece of political correctness: something that must be espoused in public, but opposed in private. This latter group is probably the greatest threat to achievement of change. It will be tempting indeed for them to wait for the reformers to move on to other jobs or leave the Service, to be replaced by those with less reformist zeal.
Achieving the right balance in the cultural orientation of an armed force is not easy, nor is it an exact science. At the heart of opposition to moderating the warrior ethos and to orientating a force more towards operations such as counter-insurgency and stability operations is the concern, often unspoken, that such operations are indeed the sideshow, that ‘the real thing’, the ultimate test, may be large-scale, interstate warfighting, possibly against a military superpower—for example, China—and that armed forces need to be fully trained and psychologically prepared for it, and not undermined by what may be a passing phase of a threat which, while serious, is not existential. Nor can this argument be dismissed out of hand, not least because, contrary to the views of those who hold that ‘[W]ar no longer exists... war as cognitively known to most non-combatants, war as a battle in a field between men and machinery, war as a massive deciding event in a dispute in international affairs: such war no longer exists’,64 such warfare is not extinct, just hibernating. Less respectable but equally passionate arguments can be expected from the military-industrial lobby for whom diversion of the focus and budget away from large-scale, modern warfare represents a most unwelcome threat which for some may, indeed, be existential.
It may be that the cultural challenge of preparing some armed forces to be both adept combat soldiers and adept counter-insurgents is simply unachievable. Where this is judged to be the case, there appear to be three options. The first is the creation of two specialist forces, with the non-combat role confined to a paramilitary force, similar to those in a number of states, such as the Italian Carabinieri which acquitted itself commendably in the NATO Sustainment Force in Bosnia, or given to a specific part of the armed forces, such as reserve forces. This, though, has major disadvantages, foremost of which is the constraint of numbers and lack of flexibility. Even without such specialization, a number of armed forces, such as the United Kingdom’s and the United States’, are highly stretched on current operations. Furthermore, as these current operations demonstrate, troops deployed on counter-insurgency or stabilization operations can quickly find themselves in combat, and vice versa. The second option for a state is role specialization for its armed forces as a whole, either as combat or non-combat forces. But, by the same token, the blurring of neat delineations in modern operations risks troops of one specialization finding themselves in situations for which they are unprepared and unsuited. The third option is to accept that the desirable level of versatility is unachievable, but pretend otherwise, accepting that troops will be less good at one role than the other (or mediocre at both), and attempt to manage the risk. This is perhaps the easiest option, but it is probably also the most dangerous, with its potential for misunderstandings with serious consequences. None of these three options, therefore, is attractive.
Conclusions
Although many of the challenges facing military professionals in post-modern warfare are similar to those facing them in modern warfare, some of them—in particular the intellectual and cultural challenges—are very different, requiring a different approach and mind-set. Armed forces, especially those whose primary focus is modern warfare, need not only to recognize this and adapt accordingly, but to institutionalize adaptability. Amongst other things, they will need to ensure a balance in their warrior ethos throughout their organization; warrior ethos needs to be sufficient for combat operations, but not so great that it inhibits effective performance in counter-insurgency. The term ‘warrior’ has a number of meanings and is potentially misleading. Controlling warrior ethos and achieving the right balance in the right circumstances is one of the most important responsibilities and duties of any military commander at any level.
Armed forces should note that it is easy to under-estimate the amount of training required in order to perform effectively in post-modern warfare, in particular counter-insurgency—even for those who are highly trained in modern warfare. Indeed, the more focused armed forces are on modern warfare, the harder the transition is likely to be. Finding the necessary training time in competition with that required to keep armed forces well prepared for modern warfare is not easy. Achieving the right balance requires fine judgement from senior military officers and Defence planners.
Many militaries need to take more active steps to ensure that their doctrine remains up-to-date with, and relevant to, an operational environment which changes faster than does that of modern warfare. But accepting that, in practice, this will not always be achievable, they also need to allow commanders in the field sufficient latitude to adjust doctrine in line with evolving circumstances. Furthermore, they need to devote considerable attention to being ‘learning organizations’, and ones that learn, adapt and anticipate faster than the opposition.
All armed forces need to recognize that reliance on training and doctrine alone as tools for achieving success in post-modern warfare is misplaced, and that an important factor in the process—more important than in modern warfare—is education. Such education needs to focus on the development of minds, and in particular the development of breadth of vision, understanding, wisdom and good judgement. Education is required not just for those new to post-modern operations, but also to ensure that those with some experience in these operations do not over-rely on their experience, for example by translating inappropriate lessons from one sui generis campaign to another. Militaries should undertake more of their education and training alongside representatives of those organizations with which they will find themselves operating in future, not least to gain an understanding of the different organizational cultures. And to avoid institutional culture and stereotypical thinking, and to inject fresh ideas into the officer corps, armed forces should ensure that they send a sufficient number of their brightest and best for postgraduate programmes in civilian universities. In general, militaries will need to find more time for professional military education.
All of this is likely to call for a change of institutional culture for some militaries, or within areas of militaries, particularly for those institutions or individuals who see themselves purely as combat warriors. The essence of the change of culture is for these combat warriors to come to judge their professionalism (in which most take such pride) by their performance not just in combat, but in all roles they are required to undertake. For some, this requires a redefinition of professionalism. Any cultural change within any military is problematic, and overcoming resistance to change may be challenging. And there is a paradox here: where change is required, senior military leaders will need to press it home if it is to sustain, but in some organizations it may be that some of the senior leaders are amongst those most resistant to change. There is also a need to ensure that those with an understanding of, and an acumen for, post-modern warfare are not side-lined within military hierarchies. There is a potential comparison here with the art world where, in some institutions, post-modernists found their way barred by an establishment dominated by modernists.
Finally, we should recognize that over-focus on a single type of warfare—large-scale, conventional warfare—inhibited understanding of other types of warfare, and of warfare as a whole. We should, therefore, beware the potential danger of over-focus on post-modern warfare having the same result.
Disclaimer
The views expressed in this paper are entirely and solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect official thinking or policy either of Her Majesty’s Government, or of the Ministry of Defence.
Endnotes
1 Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, Fifth Edition, Oxford UP, 2002. Webster’s Dictionary has a similar definition: ‘Someone engaged in or experienced in warfare’. Webster’s Online Dictionary, 2007, www.websters-online-dictionary.org.
2 See Colin S Gray, Another Bloody Century, London, Phoenix, 2006, p 37.
3 Bill Owens, Lifting the Fog of War, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins UP, 2000, p 15. As a former Vice Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Owens’ views were particularly influential in military and political circles in the US. Much of the hype surrounding the Revolution in Military Affairs is written in language that Edward Luttwak described, several decades earlier, as ‘“brochuremanship” ... where extravagant claims are camouflaged under the pseudo-technical language fashionable in military circles’. Edward Luttwak, A Dictionary of Modern War, London, Allen Lane Penguin Press, 1971, p 4. Nor were these extravagant claims confined to civilians. General Ronald Fogeleman, Chief of the US Air Force, testifying before Congress in 1997, asserted ‘[I]n the first quarter of the 21st century you will be able to find, fix or track, and target – in near real time – anything of consequence that moves upon or is located on the face of the Earth’. Michael O’Hanlon, Technological Change and The Future of Warfare, Washington DC, The Brooking Institute Press, 2000, p 13. Apart from anything else, it would have been interesting to hear General Fogelman’s definition of what constituted ‘anything of consequence’.
4 Some writers drew conclusions of even more far-reaching consequences, for example: ‘The potential ability of the United States to help consolidate a revolution in geostrategic affairs – in which most of the world’s major industrial powers are democratic, prosperous, allied with each other, lacking a major strategic foe, and gradually extending their club of membership to other countries – is even more historic, and more important, than its purported ability to again revolutionize warfare’. O’Hanlon, op cit, p 197.
5 See Rod Thornton, Asymmetric Warfare, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2007, pp 178-9.
6 This is not just a matter of keeping up with technology, but of keeping up with technics: all aspects of the relationship between equipment and its operators. ‘Weapons development is only one corner of a triangle, of which the other two are a tactical “doctrine” for using the weapon, and the training of the combatants, individually and collectively, to use it.’ Christopher Bellamy, The Evolution of Modern Warfare: Theory and Practice, London, Routledge, 1990, p 30.
7 They are, of course, as old as war itself, and with plenty of relatively recent experience on which to draw: ‘[I]f we look at the 20th Century alone we are now in Viet-Nam faced with the forty-eighth “small war”‘. Bernard Fall, ‘The Theory and Practice of Insurgency and Counter-Insurgency’, Naval War College Review, April 1965, reproduced, Winter 1998, Vol LI, No 1, p 46.
8 We should not be surprised that a particularly successful style in warfare evokes a response which rejects it in favour of a different one which exploits strengths and weaknesses exposed by changing circumstances. This process has been a constant throughout history with modern (for their time) styles of warfare constantly being challenged or usurped by post-modern styles. Nor does the use of the term ‘post-modern’ imply that those who adopt this style refrain from employing highly advanced technology – as contemporary insurgents are doing so effectively.
9 Rupert Smith, The Utility of Force. The Art of War in the Modern World, London, Penguin, 2005, p 3.
10 David Galula, Counterinsurgency: Theory and Practice, Westport, Praeger, 2006, p 63.
11 Magnus Ranstrop and Graeme P Herd, ‘Approaches to Countering Terrorism and CISI’, in Anne Aldis and Graeme P Herd, The Ideological war on Terror. Worldwide Strategies for Counter-Terrorism, London, Routledge, 2007, p 3.
12 Ibid.
13 John Kiszely, ‘Learning About Counter-insurgency’, RUSI Journal, Vol 152 No 1, December 2006, p 19.
14 Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber, ‘Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning’, in N Cross (ed), Developments in Design Methodology, Chichester, Wiley and Son, 1984, pp 135-144. The authors contrast ‘wicked’ problems with the relatively benign or ‘tame’ problems of mathematics, chess, or puzzle-solving.
15 Fall, op cit, p 47.
16 Lawrence Freedman, The Transformation of Strategic Affairs, London, IISS Adelphi Paper No. 379, 2006, p 20.
17 Anthony Cordesman, The War After the War. Strategic Lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan, Significant Issues Series, Volume 26, Number 4, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Washington, 2006, p 71.
18 See David Glantz, Soviet Military Operational Art. In Pursuit of Deep Battle, London, Frank Cass, 1991, p 44; and Bellamy, op cit, pp 173-176.
19 The Russian ‘norme’, mathematically- and scientifically- derived prescribed rates and scales. See Glantz, ibid.
20 John Nagl, Learning to Eat Soup With A Knife, Chicago UP, 2002, p 175.
21 Frank Kitson, Low Intensity Operations, London, Faber and Faber, 1971, p 200.
22 Clausewitz, op cit, p 88.
23 Basil Liddell-Hart, Thoughts on War, London, Faber & Faber, 1943, p 115.
24 There are obvious parallels with Thomas Kuhn’s paradigm theories.
25 Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, op cit.
26 Max Hastings, Warriors, London, HarperCollins, 2005, p xi.
27 Max Boot, The Savage Wars of Peace, London, Basic Books, 2002, p 285.
28 Quoted in Nagl, op cit, p 203.
29 Kiszely, op cit, p 19.
30 Or as Kitson puts it, ‘the qualities required for fighting conventional war are different from those required for dealing with subversion or insurgency’. Kitson, op cit, p 200.
31 Ralph Peters, ‘In Praise of Attrition’, Parameters, Summer 2004, pp 24-26. Also ‘[C]arrying out civil administration and police functions is simply going to degrade the American capability to do the things America has to do. We don’t need to have the 82nd Airborne escorting kids to kindergarten.’ Condoleeza Rice, New York Times, 21 October 2000.
32 Carl von Clausewitz, On War, Michael Howard and Peter Paret, trans & eds, Princeton UP, 1984, p 75.
33 This phrase is part of the US Army’s Soldier’s Creed, but excluded from the Warrior Ethos which is part of the Creed. The Warrior Ethos itself is remarkably bereft of any mention of fighting or killing: ‘I will always place the mission first. I will never accept defeat. I will never quit. I will never leave a fallen comrade’. http://www.tradoc.army.mil/plo/TNSarchives/September04/092304.htm accessed 1 Sep 2007.
34 Peters, op cit, pp 24-26.
35 Christopher Coker, The Warrior Ethos. Military Culture and the War on Terror, Abingdon, Routledge, 2007, pp 7, 41-2 & 61.
36 Charles Krulak, ‘The Strategic Corporal: Leadership in the Three Block War’, Marine Gazette, January 1999, p 3.
37 See, for example, House of Commons Select Committee on Defence, 1997-98 Eighth Report, paragraph 203, www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ cm199798/cmselect/cmdefence/138 accessed 30 September 2007.
38 Kitson, op cit, p 199.
39 Countering Irregular Threats. A Comprehensive Approach, USMC, Quantico, June 2006.
40 US Army Manual 3-24 (also US Marine Corps Warfighting Publication 3-33.6).
41 US Army Manual 3-24, pp ix-x.
42 UK MOD Joint Doctrine Note 2/07, Countering Irregular Activity Within A Comprehensive Approach, March 2007.
43 For ‘complex’ insurgencies see John Mackinlay, Defeating Complex Insurgency. Beyond Iraq and Afghanistan, RUSI Whitehall Paper No 64, 2005, pp vi-vii.
44 ‘The field manual was widely reviewed, including by several Jihadi websites; copies have been found in Taliban training camps in Pakistan. It was downloaded 1.5 million times in the first month after its posting to the Fort Leavenworth and Marine Corps website.’ Sarah Sewall, in the foreword to the Chicago University Press edition of the manual, quoted in John A Nagl, ‘An American View of Twenty First Century Counter-Insurgency’, RUSI Journal, Vol 152, No 4, August 2007, p 15.
45 This requirement goes some way beyond Michael Howard’s advice about military doctrine that ‘[W]hat does matter is to get it right when the moment arrives’. ‘Military Science in and Age of Peace’, RUSI Journal No 119, March 1974 - advice better suited to an age of peace.
46 This paragraph largely taken from Kiszely, op cit, p 24.
47 Colin McInnes, ‘The British Army’s New Way in Warfare: A Doctrinal Misstep?’, Defence and Security Analysis, 23:2, 127-141, June 2007, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14751790701424697.
48 Giulio Douhet, The Command of the Air, trans Dino Ferrari, Washington DC, Office of Air Force History, 1942, reprint 1983, p 30.
49 David Kilcullen, ‘Counterinsurgency Redux’, Survival, Winter 2006-2007, p 116.
50 John Masland and Laurence Radway, Soldiers and Scholars, Princeton Up, 1957, pp 382-5.
51 The UK referred to the Armed Forces’ activity in this campaign as ‘Military Aid to the Civil Power’.
52 Samuel P Huntington, The Soldier and the State, Cambridge, Mass, Harvard UP, 1957, p 14.
53 Huntington, op cit, p 266.
54 ‘There is... a powerful case for the establishment of a school for conflict prevention, armed intervention and post-conflict reconstruction which could act as a kind of high-level staff college to learn lessons, propose changes to government and develop and pass on expertise to senior service officers, civil servants and politicians... This teaching should have an international dimension too, given that one of the tasks is to spread best practice and raise capacity, not just in the developed world, but in other armed forces and government practitioners worldwide.’ Paddy Ashdown, Swords and Ploughshares. Bringing Peace to the Twenty First Century, London, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 2007, p 192.
55 In contrast to the United States Armed Forces; and in contrast with the British Army in, for example, the 1970s, when, amongst those officers who elected to undertake mid-career postgraduate programmes to Oxford and Cambridge, subsequently achieved four star rank, and made significant contributions to military thought, were Frank Kitson, Anthony Farrar-Hockley, and Nigel Bagnall.
56 Ranstrop and Herd, op cit, p 3.
57 Masland and Radway, op cit, p 71.
58 Robert Burns, ‘To A Louse’, The Canongate Burns: The Complete Poems and Songs of Robert Burns, Edinburgh, Canongate, 2003, p 132.
59 Sun Tzu, The Art of War, trans Ralph D Sawyers, Boulder, Colorado, 1994, p 179.
60 Michael Howard, ‘The Use and Abuse of Military History’, in Michael Howard, ed, The Causes of War and Other Essays, Cambridge, Mass, Harvard UP, 1983, pp 194-195.
61 William Westmoreland, A Soldier Reports, New York, Doubleday, 1976, p 364. See also Williamson Murray, ‘Thoughts on Military History and the Profession of Arms’, in Williamson Murray and Richard Hart Sinnreich, eds, The Past as Prologue: The Importance of History to the Military Profession, New York, Cambridge UP, 2006, p 89.
62 Galula, op cit, p 67.
63 US Army Manual 3-24. p ix.
64 Smith, op cit, p 1.
