Hybrid, Complex, Conventional, Fourth-Generation Counterinsurgency: It’s Decision that Still Matters Most
Abstract
The complexity of modern warfare makes decision difficult to achieve. Conventional wisdom holds that, when fighting insurgents and other asymmetric actors, wars will be long and costly struggles that simply pit political wills against each other in a Clausewitzian kind of grey clash of ... moral masses’. In this article, the authors reject this fatalist view and posit that, with the right skill sets, Western commanders may possibly be able to restore their ability to achieve decision on the modern battlefield. While the authors admit their article does not pose a complete solution to this problem, they maintain that addressing this problem is critical, and offer this article as grounds for beginning such debate in the Army. To neglect the Army’s inability to achieve decision in ‘wars amongst the people’ is to consign Western military forces to the irrelevance that General Rupert Smith feared would overtake them.
Introduction
The most notable feature of contemporary war is stalemate. Despite possessing the greatest technological advantage in the history of warfare, Western armies are unable to achieve decision over warriors little changed from those Arthur Wellesley (later the Duke of Wellington) faced in the conquest of India. His victories at Srirangapatna and Assaye could not be more different from the indecision that characterises Iraq and Afghanistan. Why has Western military power now become so ineffective?
The Duke’s greatness derived from his understanding of the character of war specific to his age. The stalemates of today stem in large part from the failure of Western commanders ‘to establish ... the kind of war on which they are embarking’.1 If the West is to have the means to achieve decision in its wars again, it is essential that its commanders be able to understand the true character of each conflict correctly. This article outlines one such mechanism designed to afford commanders this understanding: the Complex Warfare Branch.
This organisation is designed to help commanders understand and influence the human and informational dimensions of the battlespace—areas neglected by Western military forces that prefer to focus on the tactical and technological dimensions of war. While the West’s technology and training provides it with the means for tactical decision, this is also largely irrelevant in the wars the West faces today. It is its enemies who have found the means for true strategic decision—a superior understanding of the nature of modern conflict. How else ‘could a mass murderer who publicly praised the terrorists of September 11 be winning the hearts and minds of anyone? How could a man in a cave out-communicate the world’s leading communications society?’2 It is because he understands the character of his war far better than the West has been able—or inclined—to.
The Primacy of Decision
The most important task facing a commander—at any rank—is the need to marshal and employ assets in a manner that makes a favourable decision possible. This is the fundamental responsibility of command, and all resources must be directed towards its attainment. To strive for less is a dereliction of duty.
Decision in the context of a military operation has a particular meaning. A government employs military force to achieve certain political objectives which, to paraphrase Carl von Clausewitz, could not be achieved by other means.3 While Clausewitz wrote in the nineteenth century, his words resonate throughout the history of the Western tradition of war. The essence of the utility of military force is its role as an instrument of national power.4
The particular nature or scope of a nation’s political objectives in deciding to employ military force is not important in the context of this article. It is merely sufficient to note that a political goal must exist; otherwise there is no legitimate rationale for a government’s resort to military force. What is essential for commanders, however, is that they align their actions in ways that either achieves a decision that obtains the government’s objectives immediately or, through a series of intermediate steps, lays the foundation for obtaining decision in the future.
It must be stressed that decision should not be confused with victory. This article deliberately uses decision to highlight the difference between defeating the enemy and achieving the political goals which initially led a government to resort to military force in the first place. In an oft repeated anecdote, Colonel Harry G Summers recounts a 1975 conversation he had with a North Vietnamese colonel. In referring to the recently lost war, Summers quipped to his victorious opposite, ‘you know you never defeated us on the battlefield’. The North Vietnamese officer rejoined, ‘that may be so ... but it is also irrelevant’.5 This exchange highlights the subtle nature of decision. Winning battles is certainly better than losing them, but it is a fallacy that victory in the field guarantees winning a war—that is to say, obtaining decision.6 If there is a lesson in Summers’ anecdote, it is that the primacy of a commander’s focus should be on the political objective, not the subservient task of winning battles.
Antulio J Echevarria II has also considered this point in the context of an American way of war. He believes that the West in general has evolved principles for ‘military victory’ rather than what he calls ‘policy success’.7 Employing the words of General Anthony Zinni, Echevarria sums this up as a preference for ‘killing and breaking’ that wins battles but not wars.8 The consequences of failing to understand the distinction between battlefield victory and political decision can be seen in the aftermath of the fall of Baghdad in 2003. The premature declaration of ‘mission accomplished’ by the US president underscored the focus of the United States on battle success rather than the achievement of policy goals, and highlighted the ease with which political and military leaders at even the highest levels confuse the two.
Perceiving Present Way
The overwhelming strength and technological edge that the US military demonstrated during the 1991 war with Iraq, the overthrowing of the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2001, and the opening phase of the invasion of Iraq in 2003 promised to usher in a new era of decision in war. Yet despite an enormous investment in transformative technologies and battle effects this has not proven to be the case. The US military has found its seemingly invincible advantages frustrated by opponents who have shifted the battlespace into arenas in which the superpower’s dominance in firepower, sensor technology and systems integration are of little benefit, if not irrelevant. As a result the United States finds itself ensnared in two counterinsurgency wars—for which its forces were unprepared—and fighting enemies who have eschewed conventional operations for other means. Now it is only an extremely foolish, or perhaps suicidal, opponent who would challenge the American military on its preferred ground.
The failure of the seeming military advantage of US might to achieve decisive and rapid success has pushed the examination of the future character of war to the forefront of Western military thinking. The claims for transformative advantage and techno-centric clarity that emerged from the post-Cold War US Department of Defense still have their adherents, but in the face of battlefield reality in places such as Kosovo, Chechnya, Iraq and Afghanistan, other voices have begun to argue that war remains in the realm of uncertainty.9 In recent years military observers, analysts and professionals have invested considerable energy in trying to identify war’s changing character and to predict its future course. The terms listed in this article’s title are by no means comprehensive; others, such as ‘three-block war’, ‘insurgency and counterinsurgency’, and ‘asymmetric warfare’ could have been offered just as easily. A countervailing school of thought has also joined the fray, arguing that the attempt to identify the nature of future war is little more than faddism or even worse a misrepresentation of history, and that war in its essential nature remains unchanged.10
While a theoretical debate on the nature of future war does have value, it is also a distraction from the reality of contemporary conflict—the difficulty Western military organisations have had in achieving decision in their recent and current operations.11 While the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan do not conjure up the stereotypical image of stalemate—the immobility and slaughter of the Western Front during the First World War—the conflicts do have something in common. The combatants of the Great War struggled to unlock the stalemate of the trenches in order to restore decision to war, an act that took three years of bloody experimentation. While casualties have never approached the levels of those of the Western Front, the members of the US-led Coalitions in Iraq and Afghanistan are also mired in a stalemate. Such a situation also applies to the ADF’s recent operations in its own region. The Australian Army has now been in Timor-Leste for a decade and the Solomon Islands for over six years, with no end in sight for either deployment.
One of the conundrums to emerge in recent operations by Western military organisations is that while their forces have the ability to project impressive power anywhere on the globe and then to manoeuvre and sustain their forces in-theatre at will, they lack the means to impose a decision that achieves their nations political goals. Instead, the Western states now appear resigned to long inconclusive interventions that gradually test the resolve of their own civilian populations. In a way similar to that of their First World War predecessors, the leaders of contemporary Western military organisations find themselves without the means to force their enemies to their will. To borrow Rupert Smiths prognosis, military forces are in danger of finding themselves without utility for their governments.12 The issue for the West in general, and Australia in particular, is that wars without decision can only result in, at best, conflict without end, and at worst, defeat.
This article addresses an aspect of the inability of overwhelming military force to secure decision in contemporary warfare. It will not advocate a new concept of war, nor will it advance a new label. Rather, it takes a pragmatic approach. In doing so it will outline a new capability for the Australian Army called the Complex Warfare Branch (CWB) that promises to provide commanders with the additional tools they need to impose a decision upon the enemy. In an era when commentators and military professionals concede the unavoidability of lengthy operations this article maintains that finding the means to shorten conflict, and in doing so restore decision, may be of more utility.13
The CWB is not a field unit, although its members will deploy. Rather it is a brain, whose mission is to lift the veil of complexity that obscures the character of contemporary conflict in order to provide commanders with the information they need to influence the battlespace in ways that will achieve the Australian Government’s objective. In brief, the organisations task is to understand a conflict’s environment. Moreover, the CWB capability has utility across the spectrum of military intervention from disaster relief to state-on-state war and is applicable to all conflicts no matter their character. It is, therefore, immune to the tendency of attempting to predict the future of war and thus avoids the grave risk of getting the future wrong.
Explaining the Human Condition
War has always been among the most complex of human endeavours. Speaking on the eve of the outbreak of the Second World War, General Sir Archibald Wavell made this case in his renowned series of lectures ‘Generals and Generalship’. Highlighting the complexity of war in his era he wrote that a commander:
to-day has now to learn to handle air forces, armoured mechanical vehicles, anti-aircraft artillery; he has to consider the use of gas and smoke, offensively and defensively; to know enough of wireless to make proper use of it for communication; to understand something of the art of camouflage, of the business of propaganda; to keep himself up to date in the developments of military engineering; all of this in addition to the more normal requirements of his trade.14
What Wavell acknowledged was that as war’s character changed, uncertainty and complexity became more apparent until a new—if temporary—understanding emerged. At a point of rapid or deep change, such as during the interwar period, the challenge to interpret the new character of war and to find the means to achieve decision would be even greater.15
Yet the assertions by contemporary commentators on the high degree of current complexity are not without merit. It is the nature of war to evolve, as combatants seek more effective methods with which to secure their goals. For much of the First World War, for example, the combatants struggled to find a solution to the great crisis of decision of their age: the need to cross a wide fire-swept zone of annihilation with sufficient surviving mass to close with and rout the enemy and thereby bring an end to an opponent’s ability to resist the imposition of their will. Military commanders and theorists recognised the problem as early as the introduction of the breach-loading rifle, but it took decades to find the means to negate the killing zone and restore decision. The solution was eventually found in the rediscovery of combined arms warfare and the integration of numerous new technologies into the art of war. The result was the restoration of mobility in 1918 and the march to victory of the British, French and US armies in the war’s final months. German interwar developments in mechanisation and armour theory built upon the lessons of 1918, resulting in the formidable campaign style that became known as the ‘blitzkrieg’.16
Today’s war practitioners face another great crisis that hinders their ability to obtain decision: the need to find and defeat or neutralise opponents who operate. beneath the detection threshold of their own forces, often in cities and amongst the local population. This is not a novel situation and there are numerous historical examples of combatants facing similar problems in the past. What makes today’s problem different, however, and which accounts for the perception of particularly opaque complexity, is the gap that presently exists between the West’s understanding of the current character of war and that of their opponents. The befuddlement of French and British forces in the face of the German mechanised onslaught during May 1940 demonstrates that the problems facing contemporary commanders are not the first time that military organisations have failed to perceive a change in the character of war in time. To the commanders of the present, what makes the task of dealing with today’s great crisis appear even more complex than the tasks confronting previous generations, is the failure of Western technology to deliver on the promise of battlespace transparency. One of the goals of the West’s investment in transformation technologies was the lifting of the fog of war. While advancements in detection have made the sea and air environments more visible, the same cannot be said of the land. The inability of sensors to identify an entire Iraqi armoured brigade in 2003 and the failure of an armada of surveillance devices to locate Taliban and al-Qaeda positions during Operation ANACONDA in Afghanistan in 2002 are but two compelling examples of the enduring nature of the fog of land warfare. This is because conflict on the land remains dominated by political, social and cultural factors and these are inextricably bound-up with geography. The result is not the expected clarity of the battlespace but what HR McMaster has termed ‘profound uncertainty’.17
The way forward in the face of this ‘complexity’ is for the Australian Army—and the West in general—to provide commanders with the tools needed to be able to secure decision again. The West must adapt to the changing character of war. In the past, the tendency in the West has been to seek advantage over an opponent through enhanced technology. The West must recognise the limitations of this response as it has in the wars of the present proven ineffective. It is a fair question to ask just how much more of a technological edge does the West require if it is to secure decision against opponents who are already manifestly its technological inferiors?
That technology has failed to provide the solution is testament to another aspect of war’s enduring nature. War is not a contest between competing technologies. Instead, it is a human activity, and technology is merely one of many different kinds of enablers, and will always remain so. The conduct of war is guided by human traits, desires, beliefs and emotions, and their interaction and competition with the values and goals held by an opponent. The nineteenth century French military theorist, Ardant du Picq, encapsulated this in his observation that ‘man is the first weapon of battle’. His recommendation was to ‘study the soldier in battle, for it is he who brings reality to it’.18 More recently, Brian Holden Reid has written, ‘warfare is essentially about human beings, men and women, and not about weapons’.19 In support of these conclusions are two retired US generals who wrote that war is and will remain a ‘contest of human wills, not machines’.20
Further underscoring the importance of the human element in war is that success in a military operation generally does not occur until an opponent is persuaded that it has lost. Most conflicts do not end with the complete annihilation of the enemy’s military forces and civilian population. It is much more common for wars to conclude when one side elects to give up, to submit.21 The Australian Army’s most recent version of its operating concept recognises this tendency. Adaptive Campaigning describes war as being fundamentally about achieving ‘influence [over] the allegiances and behaviours of individuals, groups and societies’.22Adaptive Campaigning is in alignment with Clausewitz’s thinking on the importance of influence. He wrote that ‘war is thus an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will’.23 After the passage of nearly two centuries his observation remains true wherever there is a resort to the use of military force.
Moreover, it is often the case that what a commander needs to know about an opponent is often outside the competency of technology to reach. For example, an enemy’s level of skill, motivation and morale are attributes that are not easily measured by a machine.24 They require human assessment. This is because technology cannot, to use the words of Williamson Murray and MacGregor Knox, ‘abolish war’s central essence as the realm of uncertainty and of the clash of wills’.25
Thus if war is considered to be what David J Lonsdale has termed an activity ‘best thought of in terms of human interaction’ or what Martin van Creveld has called ‘an affair of the heart’, it becomes compelling for the Australian Army to possess the capability to analyse, decipher and interpret the human condition, and in doing so recommend courses of action that will adversely affect the enemy.26 This will be precisely the function of the CWB.
The purpose of the CWB should not be confused with another iteration of information warfare. It will not seek to achieve ‘information dominance’ or some other fantasy. The battlespace is already awash with too much data. What is needed is knowledge and understanding. The background, education and training of the members of the CWB will enable them to provide their commander with sound knowledge, based on understanding and reason—an elusive and much prized commodity on the battlefields of any age. The generation of this knowledge is not the end-point of the exercise. Rather, commanders would use the knowledge provided by the CWB to assemble a ‘sequence of actions that seems likely to change the minds of a hostile population.27 In this way the CWB would contribute to the commander’s ability to maintain his/her focus on the political aim.
A secondary benefit of the CWB is that it will help save the Australian Army from a common pitfall that has trapped many military organisations across time: namely, the failure to get the future right. The past is replete with societies that have paid the price of having prepared for the wrong war. The performance of the French Army in 1940 and the US military in 2003 are just two recent examples of organisations that faced conflicts that differed so greatly from the ones they had anticipated that their defeat was the most likely outcome. Had the US Department of Defenses transformation program continued to the desired end point, the US arsenal would have been without peer. That these capabilities would have proven irrelevant to the conflicts the United States had to face would have been another matter.28
It is useful for military thinkers to ponder the future of war, as they should also study its past. What must be avoided, however, is the assumption that a military organisation can predict the future character of war with any degree of certainty. Anticipation with a flexibility of mind allows for adjustment, whereas the more precise, detailed and rigid a prediction, the higher the risk of getting it wrong.29 The ideal in planning for future war is to aspire to the condition outlined in Michael Howard’s seminal essay, ‘Military Science in an Age of Peace’. In discussing doctrine he concluded that it did not matter if a military organisation has got it wrong at the commencement of a conflict, for it is almost certain that expectations of a given war will be wrong. Instead, what is crucially important is to have the capacity to get it right quickly when the moment arrives’.30
The CWB will thus play a part in providing the Australian Army with the ability to adapt rapidly to emerging requirements. Once conflict occurs, its evolution tends to accelerate, and weapons or techniques that were once dominant quickly become obsolete. What worked for the Germans against the French in 1940 was no longer effective against the Russians a few years later. Amongst the CWB’s capabilities will be the ability to interpret the unique characteristics of each conflict in which the Army is involved. It will provide the context in which others may analyse the changing character of a conflict. To paraphrase Clausewitz again, the CWB will undertake this task through the perspective of the spirit of the age.31 In this way the CWB will contribute towards the force’s goal of creating an Adaptive Army.
The Role of the Complex Warfare Branch
The CWB’s role in an operation is to provide the land force commander with the specialist expertise necessary to navigate the complexities of contemporary operations. The recently released Adaptive Campaigning suggests that the Australian Army has recognised that the character of war has moved on from a dependence on battlefield victory. It defines the objective of the use of military force in terms of gaining influence over individuals, groups and societies in a way that can ‘shape the overall environment to facilitate peaceful discourse and stabilise the situation. This is to be achieved, Adaptive Campaigning continues, in accordance with ‘conditions conducive to Australia’s national interests’.32 This mandate holds true regardless of whatever label one chooses to place on a conflict, be that ‘conventional’, ‘asymmetric’ or ‘hybrid’. Put simply, the commander should be influencing the target individual, group or society to do what Australia wants it to do, whether this influence is obtained by helping or by killing. It is left to the words of a US ‘strategic corporal’ to summarise this argument:
every war is a war of persuasion... [but] persuasion always is culturally sensitive. You cannot persuade someone if you do not understand his language, motivations, fears, and desires.33
Understanding how best to achieve the necessary influence over individuals, groups and societies—or even which individuals or groups to influence—is a difficult task for any commander, however. Without this understanding, action may prove useless at best or counter-productive at worst. After the fall of Baghdad in 2003, for example, Coalition errors in interpreting the environment resulted in transforming an episode of lawlessness into the insurgency that continues to traumatise Iraq. Identifying who to influence, and how, is obviously one of the most important considerations for the commander. Making this identification is what the CWB will help achieve.
The CWB is best described as a pool of expertise that the commander can draw on to:
• help him/her make sense of those individuals, groups and societies (IGS) that Australia is trying to influence (hereafter referred to as ‘target IGS’);
• subsequently identify the different methods and means for manipulation that those target IGS are most susceptible to; and
• identify and acquire the expertise necessary to properly guide the actions of the forces that have been directed to achieve the commander’s plan to influence target IGS.
These are the CWB’s three primary missions, hereafter referred to respectively as ‘surveying the environment’, ‘identifying controls’ and characterising controls’. To illustrate these missions and their purpose, consider the following analogy. Imagine that a commander is a stationmaster who has been given the mission of ensuring that the trains run on time’. To do this, the stationmaster must ensure that each train is on the right track at the right time and leaves the station according to the schedule. However, in the complex contemporary operating environment, it is as if the stationmaster has been put in a switching box where there is no light, the levers are all labelled in a foreign language, and the stationmaster’s staff have no training in driving a train.
The CWB’s first mission—surveying the environment—is like giving the stationmaster a light in the switching box. The stationmaster can now see the railway plan but understands nothing of the switching levers. The CWB’s second mission—identifying controls—is akin to putting English-language labels on all of the levers. The stationmaster can now see the track plan and the levers, and understands what levers to pull to get the trains to where they are needed. However, while the commander is now fully cognitively equipped to achieve the mission, he or she is still without the people necessary to give action to the plan. Putting untrained staff in charge of driving trains now would quickly lead to disaster, even if the stationmaster knew what each of them were supposed to do. The CWB’s third and final mission—characterising controls—is somewhat like hiring a trained engineer for the stationmaster who understands how to drive a train and who can direct the stationmaster’s staff in how to do it. With this final step, the commander both understands how to achieve the mission and possesses the necessary resources to do so.
The Composition of the Complex Warfare Branch
The CWB will be composed of social scientists—sociologists, anthropologists, historians and representatives of other humanist disciplines—that will use their professional training to interpret and manipulate the human environment for the commander’s benefit. While trained as applied social scientists, these soldiers will be warriors first, no different from members of any of the other specialist trades that already exist in the Army. In fact, it is probable that the best course of action for the Army is to provide tertiary education and training to its personnel who have a social science interest rather than attempting to recruit graduate students from universities.
Moreover, the expertise of members of the CWB need not be limited to a single discipline, nor should they be seen as just ‘sociologists’, ‘anthropologists’ or ‘historians’. Rather, the most germane and practical aspects of each of these various ‘stove piped’ disciplines should be grouped together into a program of studies known collectively as ‘applied social sciences’. This will enable officers so trained to ‘pick and choose’ the most appropriate elements of these disciplines while discarding or ignoring those that are irrelevant. This will, in turn, help to ensure that the CWB’s members are always focused on acquiring only bperationalised knowledge’, or knowledge that is relevant to solving the warfighter’s problems.
The descriptions of the desired disciplines that follow are not meant to be thorough or exhaustive summaries. Rather, they are rough (and admittedly imperfect) sketches of those features of each discipline necessary to explain their utility to the CWB mission.
Sociology
Sociology is defined by the Macquarie Dictionary as ‘the science or study of the origin, development, organisation, and functioning of human society’.34 It is, loosely put, the study of human societies. Trained sociologists are critical to the ‘surveying the environment’ mission. Their work provides the commander with an analysis of the how and why of influencing the target IGS. Accordingly, sociological expertise is probably the single most important skill set for the CWB as it is the primary discipline for achieving a full characterisation of target IGS.
Sociology, however, is far from a unified field of study, with its practitioners adhering to many different—and often contradictory— methodologies and theories. In the face of this variety a fundamentally empirical approach underpins most of the discipline’s work. While a majority of sociologists would probably reject a strict, scientific definition of empiricism, they do generally accept that sociological research reveals causal relationships in societies that concordant policy can subsequently influence with reasonable predictability. This is the sense in which this article uses the term ‘empiricism’. Such empirical approaches to sociology, used in developing theoretical perspectives of a practical and applicable nature, would provide the CWB with its primary means of environmental controls characterisation.
A broadly empirical methodology is also of utility to the CWB. Empiricism is primarily concerned with isolating causal relationships in societies by manipulating an independent variable (for example, a curfew in a troubled neighbourhood) to observe the way in which a dependent variable (the attitudes of the neighbourhood residents to the group imposing that curfew) reacts. This type of research would be particularly valuable in achieving the CWB’s ‘identifying controls’ mission, as it would help the commander to determine which measures would produce what effects, prior to employing them operationally.
Anthropology
Anthropology is defined as ‘the science that deals with the origin, development (physical, intellectual, cultural, moral, etc) and varieties of humanity’.35 Anthropology is commonly divided into four subsets: biological or physical anthropology; social or cultural anthropology, archaeology and linguistic anthropology. For the purposes of the CWB, the two subsets of most utility are social or cultural anthropology and linguistic anthropology.
Social anthropology’s strength is its ability to provide the CWB commander with a comparative study of cultures. While sociology would identify the broad outline of a target group or society to illustrate how it works, anthropology would contribute to the CWB’s mission by characterising a target group or society in the context of how it differs from the Australian force’s ‘own’ societal and cultural contexts. Identifying these differences would allow other members of the CWB to isolate and counter limiting biases in their own work, helping to improve the objectivity, and hence utility, of the CWB’s advice to the commander.
That said, given the differences in perspective and methodology between anthropologists and sociologists, any examination of causal relationships in society conducted by an anthropologist would serve as a useful complement to that conducted by a sociologist.
Similarly, linguistic anthropology provides an excellent complement to any sociological ‘identifying controls’ work. It is essentially the study of how target IGS understand and express their own identities and relationships through their language, and how they use it. This provides the commander with a very powerful tool for gaining a more complete understanding of what they are being told by target IGS. There is, after all, often much more information to be gleaned from an instance of speech than simply what has been said.
Again, as with the vigorous debate within different branches of sociology, anthropologists are divided on the practical application of anthropology. Some argue that it is doomed to failure, as seen in the controversial US ‘human terrain project’.36 At the risk of oversimplifying a very complex debate, these sceptics argue that anthropologists can never escape their own cultural context sufficiently to produce reliably objective observations and conclusions about another culture. Without objective data, it follows that any conclusions drawn will be equally devoid of objectivity and therefore no conclusions with useful predictive capability can be derived.
While this is obviously of concern, one must remember that commanders must expect to operate in an environment of extreme uncertainty—they should, after all, be the masters of Clausewitz’s friction and chance. It is true that no Australian commander can be certain that the CWB’s advice is 100 per cent objective and an accurate representation of the battlespace, but the same can be said of any advice or information the commander receives from any source. This is why one of the most important responsibilities of command is to make sense of incomplete or even contradictory information.
The absence of ‘total’ information is not an excuse for inaction by commanders, because, though their information may be imperfect, it may still be better than that of the enemy. Practical experience with ‘applied anthropology’ in Iraq and Afghanistan bears out this point, showing that despite the questions surrounding the objectivity of anthropology, it still has an extremely valuable role to play. For example, one US brigade commander stated that his unit fought 60 per cent fewer actions when social scientists arrived, allowing his force to focus on delivering improvements to local services and training their Afghan counterparts—the very work his superiors believed would lead to decision.37 Such insights are not isolated to US forces, further proving the utility of the discipline in military operations.38
History
A qualified historian provides commanders with the ability to examine the past in a way that informs their actions in the present and their plans for the future. While military officers can and should read military history, only a soldier who has studied history in its breadth, depth and context will be able to serve in the CWB.39
Historians would provide the other staff of the CWB with a factual foundation— and historical context—on which to base their own work. Equally as important, historians can identify the advantages and disadvantages of various courses of action taken by those in the past who have dealt with problems similar to those facing Australian forces today.
Similarly to social and linguistic anthropologists, historians would not usually contribute directly to any of the CWB’s three missions. Instead, they would provide invaluable enabling products for sociologists who conduct the ‘surveying the environment’ and ‘identifying controls’ missions. Without the historical context and factual basis provided by the historian, the sociologist simply could not produce plausible work.
That said, the analytical skills of historians should not be dismissed lightly. Their assessment of how modern society has assumed the form and function that it has today would be of considerable utility as a complement to any work done by sociologists towards surveying the environment or identifying controls.
Just as the CWB’s sociologists and anthropologists must maintain an applied focus to their work, so too must the CWB’s historians. They must examine published works and primary sources with an eye to how their knowledge may assist a commander in influencing target IGS. While historians must be cognisant of their discipline’s limitations, and the many historiographic debates underway within it, they must not be concerned primarily with these. Instead, they must provide a timely and focused work that covers practical considerations and little else.
Strategic Communications
As Adaptive Campaigning points out, and this article argues, influencing target IGS is now the primary task of the Army and the ADF—be that influence achieved with military force or some other, ‘softer’ national instrument. While military force, the provision of aid, economic sanctions and all the other tools of influence are divergent in nature, they share one key similarity in execution—their meaning must be properly communicated to the target IGS.
Communicating with target IGS in times of war is extremely difficult. The US effort to communicate its message to the Afghan people is just one example of the challenge Western powers face in this area. While there has been some success, former Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke’s outrage at Osama bin Laden out communicating the United States illustrates the difficulties inherent to this task.40
When compared to the United States’ failure as a communicator, the odds of Australia doing better must appear slight. That need not be the case, however. Melik Kaylan argues that the United States’ lack of success stems from its early fumbling of the issue, and that it is this failure that has led to the seemingly irreparable situation of today. Kaylan believes that it is possible to influence target IGS under wartime conditions and points out that the United States has succeeded in the past. As an example he highlights the Radio Free Europe program and its effectiveness in informing the world that the United States and NATO stood for freedom and liberty while the Soviet Union stood for oppression—a message that played a not-insignificant role in the collapse of the USSR and the end of the Cold War. It is apparent then that, when directed by knowledgeable experts, success in strategic communications is possible.41 Experts in communication are therefore necessary to help communicate with target IGS so that the means of influence identified by the CWB are used in such a way that they achieve their maximum effect.
Scholars of media and communications have the skills and understanding to do just this. Media and communication as a distinct discipline covers many of the mechanisms with which to communicate effectively with target IGS: journalism in all its forms, international communications policy and public relations.42 This expertise would allow the commander to translate the advice of the CWB into tactics, techniques and procedures that his forces can use when ‘outside the wire’ to communicate influence effectively and efficiently to target IGS.
Adaptive Campaigning recognises the importance of such specialist support to land forces, stating that
All members of the Land Force ... must be ... regularly briefed on information objectives for media coverage ... so that—in thousands of daily interactions—their actions support the mission by avoiding dissonant actions and seizing fleeting chances to advance informational objectives.43
The media and communications experts within the CWB will provide the foundation of expert advice that enables this to occur.
Other Disciplines
Space limitations here prevent the inclusion of even a brief description of the other capabilities that the CWB requires. Therefore, a list will have to suffice. However, it should be noted that in all cases the holders of these skill sets must perceive themselves as warriors, and their intellectual focus must be on applied rather than theoretical outcomes. A list of other capabilities required by the CWB would include, but is not limited to, the following:
• Public policy advisers
• Economists
• Non-clinical psychologists
• Public policing specialists
• Civil engineers
• Judicial and governance advisers
• Contract and project managers
Level of War
This article considers the mission of the CWB from the perspective of the tactical and operational levels of war. Limiting itself to this viewpoint was a result of practical considerations alone—the space requirements of this forum and the constituency of its primary audience. In its first stage, the CWB would be an Army asset, possibly a part of 6 Brigade. For the long term, however, this would be insufficient because, as Justin Kelly and Mike Brennan have observed, ‘war needs to be managed as a whole’.44
The problems that the members of the CWB will help advise the commander about also exist at the strategic level of war. Arguably this would be their most important level. Recent operations, particularly those in Iraq and Afghanistan, provide compelling evidence of the effect of strategic miscues on the evolution of those conflicts. One of the best examples of this would be L Paul Bremer’s purge of Baathists from the Iraqi Government and his dissolution of the Iraqi Army. Both decisions rebounded against US strategic goals and contributed greatly to the growth of the Iraqi insurgency.
The CWB’s capabilities have a role to play at all levels of conflict, and it is at the strategic level that it may have the greatest effect. It is hoped, therefore, that the CWB concept will also be taken up at the ADF’s joint level, where its members will interpret the strategic environment for the benefit of planners, commanders and government officials.
Conclusion
As Brian Holden Reid has written, command is ‘fundamentally about choices’. It is fiendishly difficult for a commander to make the right decision at the right time. The CWB will not make that responsibility any lighter, but what it will do is provide the commander with a better understanding of the environment in which to make these decisions.45
If a military organisation cannot achieve decision then it has no utility to its government.46 The experience of recent operations suggests that the enablers the Australian Army currently possesses are inadequate for the tasks it faces. Stalemate—conflict without end—in places such as Iraq, Afghanistan and Timor-Leste are either failures or, at best, likely failures. This is not an acceptable outcome to a government’s decision to employ military force. The Army must adapt to the evolving challenges it faces, otherwise not only does the future promise defeat, it also promises irrelevance.
If Western military organisations are to have once again the means to achieve decision they must be able to impose their will on their enemies. In the First World War the solution to that period’s great crisis lay in a rediscovery of the combat multiplier effect of combined arms warfare with the introduction new weapon systems. The source of the complexity of contemporary operations lies in the enemy’s ability to hide below the detection threshold, often in urban environments and amongst the people. This is the great crisis for today’s practitioners of the art of war. Technology will no doubt play a part in its solution; it is after all one of the West’s great advantages, but such is the fundamental nature of war that technology can never be the whole solution. If war is to be waged amongst the people then Australia and the West need the means to achieve a better understanding of the people and the environment in which their opponents live. This is a humanist-centric requirement for which the CWB will be well placed to meet.
About the Authors
Dr Albert Palazzo is a Senior Research Fellow at the Australian Army’s Land Warfare Studies Centre in Canberra. His PhD is from The Ohio State University and his BA and MA are from New York University. He has written widely on warfare in the modern age and on the Australian Army in particular. His many publications include: Seeking Victory on The Western Front: The British Army & Chemical Warfare in World War I; The Australian Army: A History of its Organisation, 1901–2001; Defenders of Australia: The Third Australian Division; Battle of Crete; The Royal Australian Corps of Transport; and Australian Military Operations in Vietnam.
Antony Trentini holds Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts (Strategic Studies) degrees from the Australian National University. He works at the Land Warfare Studies Centre.
Endnotes
1 Carl von Clausewitz, On War, Michael Howard and Peter Paret (ed & trans), Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1989, p. 88.
2 Richard Holbrooke, ‘Get the Message Out’, Washington Post, 28 October 2001, B07.
3 Clausewitz, On War, p. 87.
4 Richard Dannatt, ‘A Perspective on the Nature of Future Conflict’, 15 May 2009, <http://www.chathamhouse.org.uk> accessed 30 November 2009, p. 4. See also, Rupert Smith, The Utility of Force: The Art of War in the Modern World, Alfred A Knopf, New York, 2007, pp. 20–28.
5 Harry G Summers, Jr., On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War, Presidio, Novato, 1983, p. 1.
6 Jeremy Black, ‘War and the New 21st Century Disorder’, Australian Army Journal, Vol. 3, No. 2, Winter 2006, p. 52.
7 Antulio J Echevarria II, ‘Principles of War or Principles of Battle?’ in Anthony D McIvor, Rethinking the Principles of War, Naval Institute Press, Annapolis, 2005, p. 59.
8 See also, Antulio J Echevarria II, Toward an American Way of War, Strategic Studies Institute, Carlisle, 2004, p. 10.
9 For an example of this literature see, H R McMaster, ‘Learning from Contemporary Conflicts to Prepare for Future War’, Orbis, Vol. 52, No. 4, Fall 2008, pp. 564–84. There have been theorists who have argued against the claims of certainty from the origins of the US transformative era. An early example is Barry D Watts, Clausewitzian Friction and Future War, Institute for National Strategic Studies, Washington, 1996.
10 The debate on the changing character of war is lively and growing. Some of its leaders are: Bruce Hoffman, Conflict in the 21st Century: The Rise of Hybrid Wars, Potomac Institute for Policy Studies, Arlington, 2007; Thomas X Hammes, The Sling and the Stone: On War in the 21st Century, Zenith Press, St Paul, 2006; and Smith, The Utility of Force: The Art of War in the Modern World. A particularly instructive volume is Terry Terriff, Aaron Karp and Regina Karp, Global Insurgency and the Future of Armed Conflict: Debating fourth-generation warfare, Routledge, London, 2008. For countervailing arguments, see MacKubin Thomas Owens, ‘Technology The RMA, and Future War’, Strategic Review, Vol. CCVI, No. 2, Spring 1998, pp. 63–70; Hew Strachan, ‘One War, Joint Warfare’, The RUSI Journal, Vol. 154, No. 4, pp. 20–24: and William F Owen, ‘The War of Words: Why Military History Trumps Buzzwords’, Armed Forced Journal, November 2009, <http://www.armedforcesjournal.com/2009/11/4114043> accessed 11 November 2009; and Jonathan E Gumz, ‘Reframing the Historical Problematic of Insurgency: How the Professional Military Literature Created a New History and Missed the Past’, Journal of Strategic Studies, Vol. 32, No. 4, August 2009, pp. 553–88.
11 For the pros and cons on some aspects of this debate, see Russell W Glenn, ‘Thoughts on “Hybrid” Conflict’, Small Wars Journal, 2 March 2009, <http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/journal/docs-temp/188-glenn.pdf>; and Frank G Hoffman, ‘Further Thoughts on Hybrid Threats’, Small Wars Journal, 3 March 2009, <http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/journal/docs-temp/189-hoffman.pdf>.
12 Smith, The Utility of Force, pp. 7–8.
13 The new US COIN manual uses the terms ‘protracted’ and ‘long-term’. See The U.S. Army-Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2007, pp. 43–44.
14 Archibald Wavell, Generals and Generalship, Penguin, London, 1941, pp. 27–28.
15 The best analysis of interwar military adaptation remains Williamson Murray and Allan R Millett, Miltiary Innovation in the Interwar Period, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1996.
16 The literature on this issue is large. Good introductions can be found in Antulio J Echevarria II, After Clausewitz: German Military Thinkers before the Great War, University Press of Kansas, Lawrence, 2000; and Robert M Citino, Quest for Decisive Victory: From Stalemate to Blitzkrieg in Europe 1899–1940, University Press of Kansas, Lawrence, 2002.
17 McMaster, ‘Learning from Contemporary Conflicts to Prepare for Future War’, pp. 582–83.
18 Quoted in Wavell, Generals and Generalship, p. 45.
19 Brian Holden Reid, ‘Enduring Patterns in Modern Warfare’ in Brian Bond and Mungo Melvin, The Nature of Future Conflict: Implications for Force Development, Strategic and Combat Studies Institute, Camberley, 1998, p. 16.
20 Paul van Riper and Robert H Scales, Jr., ‘Preparing for War in the 21st Century’, Parameters, Vol. 27, No. 3, Autumn 1997, p. 14.
21 Black, ‘War and the New 21st Century Disorder’, p. 52.
22 Directorate of Future Land Warfare and Strategy (DFLWS), Adaptive Campaigning: Army’s Future Land Operating Concept, Department of Defence, Canberra, 2009, p.iii.
23 Clausewitz, On War, p. 75.
24 McMaster, ‘Learning from Contemporary Conflicts to Prepare for Future War’, p. 571.
25 Williamson Murray and MacGregor Knox, ‘The Future Behind Us’ in MacGregor Knox and Williamson Murray, The Dynamics of Military Revolution: 1300–2050, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2001, p. 193.
26 David J Lonsdale, The Nature of War in the Information Age: Clausewitzian Future, Frank Cass, London, 2004, p. 43; and Martin van Creveld, Technology and War: From 2000 B.C. to the Present, The Free Press, New York, 1989, p. 314.
27 Justin Kelly and Mike Brennan, Alien: How Operational Art Devoured Strategy, Strategic Studies Institute, Carlisle, 2009, p. 5.
28 Frank G Hoffman, ‘Complex Irregular Warfare: The Next Revolution in Military Affairs’, Orbis, Vol. 50, No. 3, 2006, pp. 395–96.
29 Echevarria, ‘Principles of War or Principles of Battle?’, pp. 74–75.
30 Michael Howard, ‘Military Science in an Age of Peace’, Journal of the Royal United Service Institute for Defence Studies, Vol. 119, No. 1, 1974, p. 7.
31 Clausewitz, On War, p. 593. See also, Lonsdale, The Nature of War in the Information Age, pp. 232–33.
32 DFLWS, Adaptive Campaigning, p. iv.
33 Lorenzo Puertas, ‘Corporal Jones and the Moment of Truth’, Proceedings, Vol. 130, No. 11, November 2004, p. 44.
34 A Delbridge, et al (eds), Macquarie Dictionary, Revised Third Edition, Macquarie Library Pty Ltd, Macquarie, 2003, p. 1786.
35 Ibid., p. 76.
36 This complaint is not limited to anthropology—it is an issue confronting all social scientists. For an excellent treatment of this issue that is easily accessible to the uninitiated, see Steve Chapman, Revise A2 Sociology, Letts and Lonsdale, Holme, 2004, pp. 22–23.
37 David Rohde, ‘Army Enlists Anthropologists in War Zones’, The New York Times, 5 October 2007.
38 See Emily Spencer and Tony Balasevicius, ‘Crucible of Success: Cultural Intelligence and the Modern Battlespace’, Canadian Military Journal, Vol. 9, No. 3, 2009, pp. 40–48.
39 These are the values of the military historian espoused by Michael Howard in ‘The Use and Abuse of Military History’ in Michael Howard, The Causes of War and other Essays, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1984, pp. 195–97.
40 Richard Holbrooke, ‘Get the Message Out’, Washington Post, 28 October 2001, B07.
41 Melik Kaylan, ‘Losing the Propaganda Wars’, World Policy Journal, Vol. 23, No. 4, Winter 2006–2007, pp. 19–26.
42 University of Sydney Department of Media and Communications, ‘Department of Media and Communications’, <http://www.arts.usyd.edu.au/media_communications/> accessed 10 December 2009.
43 DFLWS, Adaptive Campaigning, pp. 51–52.
44 Kelly and Brennan, Alien: How Operational Art Devoured Strategy, p. 8.
45 Reid, ‘Enduring Patterns in Modern Warfare’, p. 27.
46 Dannatt, ‘A Perspective on the Nature of Future Conflict’, p. 4.
