by Cheryl Rofer
The Utility of Force, General Rupert Smith, Alfred A. Knopf, 2007.
Three years or so ago, I asked why we don’t admit that all the technological might of the United States can’t beat those guys emplacing IEDs and hiding in the shadows. That post has continued to get some attention.
I can’t claim to be an expert in military strategy. I know some things about some weapons and like to think that I’m generally a strategic thinker, but I’ve never spent the time to come up to speed on military strategy in particular.
Still, I’ve been fascinated for a long time by those guys unfairly hiding behind trees, often without uniforms, who defeated the British in the late eighteenth century. Even more fascinated by the fixity of attitude that would respond to flexible tactics by insisting that what the other side was doing wasn’t fair instead of looking at those tactics and responding appropriately. Fascinated enough to pick up some elementary precepts from Sun Tzu and Clausewitz.
Industrial war
So that long-ago post was naïve, but now I’m pleased to find that a military guy agrees with me. General Rupert Smith has written a book about how war has changed in the past couple of centuries. He documents the development of what he calls “industrial war,” the sort of war that mobilizes and destroys entire industrial societies, the world wars of the twentieth century, the mental model of war that we have carried into the twenty-first. Napoleon started it, and the industrial culmination, the utilization of the energy from smashed atoms, finished it.“War no longer exists,” as Smith begins his book.
He distinguishes war from confrontation and conflict. War no longer exists, but confrontation and conflict are very much with us. The Cold War was a long confrontation, and what happened in Georgia was conflict after a continuing confrontation. It’s hard to imagine how or why any country would provoke an industrial war. Even if nuclear weapons had not been invented, the two world wars would probably have convinced us that we can’t do that any more. Nuclear weapons merely provide the emphatic ending.
But we still plan for industrial war, we expect our wars to follow that pattern, and the media reports wars that way. The US military is built around industrial war, as is the military-industrial complex, which, Smith tells us, has removed the flexibility to plan for any other kind of conflict. Industrial war means big, expensive weapon systems with long lead times. Big, expensive weapon systems mean big profits and continuing employment in as many congressional districts as possible. I’ll draw on some half-remembered economics to point out that money spent on weapons doesn’t benefit the economy as much as money spent on roads, schools and other ways to improve things here at home.
Preparing for a war that isn’t likely to come by pouring money into weapon systems we’re unlikely to use
According to Smith, those weapon systems make it less likely that we will achieve our goals in any confrontations or conflicts we undertake in this new world of what he calls “war among the people.” The mindset for industrial war that the military is trained into, of course, is part of the problem as well, as is that mindset when carried by the political arm of the government, the public and the media.
That is where Smith brings in Sun Tzu and Clausewitz. War and conflict are means to political ends. If the political end is not clear, victory is not possible and conflict or confrontation continues. And I said something about that, too. (Shines nails on lapels.)
If all this is so obvious that a mere blogger can see it, why does it escape our political intelligentsia and alleged leaders?
It’s hard to give up what has given you success. We’re hypnotized by World War II, the Greatest Generation, the Victory over Fascism, all that good stuff we did when we were the good guys. But that was sixty years ago and more; I’m not sure that those of us who were toddlers at the time can claim much credit. The stories went on, of course; I recall clearly "Japs" and Americans shooting at each other from behind fallen logs in an empty lot in my neighborhood, and we watch the movies even now. The tanks rolling across the Iraqi desert were a little like that, but that part didn’t last long. And the media are stuck in the narratives of industrial war, which have good guys and bad guys, much easier to report.
But if war is indeed a means to a political end, what have been the ends of the last few conflicts? Smith describes from his experience in the Balkans how difficult it is for the commanders on the ground to figure out what to do next when they have been given no political direction beyond “stopping the fighting.”
The latest conflict
The Russians may be making some of the same mistakes in Georgia, blowing up civilian infrastructure and entrenching (WWI word!) themselves in Gori and Poti, to keep the peace, they say. Their objective, beyond whacking Mikheil Saakashvili, is not clear; perhaps Vladimir Putin is more strategic than George Bush and has a political objective that can be achieved by conflict. If he doesn’t, he may be blundering into a mess that will continue to damage Russia’s larger interests, as my colleague Pat Sharpe noted.
What is to be done, as Smith echoes Lenin in his last chapter? Simply put, we must all revise what we think war is and what it can do. War has changed, and here let me make another of my naïve blogger conclusions: humans are becoming less and less inclined toward war in all its manifestations. The reason is that we are revolted by what war does to us, the inhumanities it imposes on us.
I saw the Santa Fe Opera’s performance of Benjamin Britten’s “Billy Budd” last week, based on Herman Melville’s short story. The performance fully lived up its rave reviews.
The action takes place on the HMS Indomitable, a British warship, in the late eighteenth century. Billy is brought on board with two other men who have been seized from a merchant ship, impressed into service. This was common practice at that time; today it would be called kidnapping, probably with a touch of piracy thrown in. Impressment by the Royal Navy was perfectly legal from 1664 through 1814. It ended just as industrial war was coming in.
I won’t claim that movement away from the inhumanities of war has been in a straight line. But the Geneva Conventions and the Nuremburg war trials were steps in that direction. The avoidance of industrial war between the United States and the Soviet Union through the Cold War was a step in that direction. Smith shows that the misuses of power by the Bush administration in holding people illegally and torturing them have come about partly through reasoning associated with industrial war.
So it’s time to move on. We need to assess what the threats really are and prepare our military for them.