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The Future of Warfare in Five Drawings

| 05.02.15 | Commentary & Analysis

*Editor’s Note: A version of this essay will be presented as remarks to the War Council event on May 4, 2015. The panel discussion will be focused on the dominant trend that will shape warfare over the next 20 years.  

The Continuum of Conflict

Why do bad things happen to good people? 

It’s a question that we had better start thinking about. Because when enough people start thinking this thought, when a critical mass of people start thinking this thought – whether it’s due to barrel bombs or burning pilots or killing cadets – that’s when society calls for the use of force.

That’s right; in modern war, we kill cadets.  Last June the majority of the 1,700 cadets at the Iraqi air force academy were “gunned down as they marched out of the camp to take their [summer] leave.”

Even cadets are in play and a legitimate target to ISIS.  This is the world we live in.  I don’t write this to attempt to scare people into studying war.  I do so analytically. These are the facts, and they are facts we must learn from. If we think critically about our environment, we can learn from it.

One example: in November 1940, the British struck the Fascist Italian Navy at Taranto Harbor by projecting aircraft from carriers – firing aerial torpedoes in shallow water – against docked battleships.  Sound like Pearl Harbor?  It should – this attack was what gave Admiral Yamamoto the idea that an attack on Pearl was possible.

Modern war can teach us, if we only choose to pay attention. I often describe strategy as an art, like painting or musical performance.  And so it is imperative that we listen to the “music” that’s playing right now in Yemen, in Ukraine, and Syria and Iraq. 

It’s weird, but when we’re educating members of the Profession of Arms we often set our gaze too far behind us.  I don’t write this to disparage history, clearly, it’s study and use can be helpful.  Yet limited.  Historians cover war as it was at one point in the past. Beyond that, we believe that we can learn about contemporary military operations indirectly from other’s experiences.  This also is limited. Just think about how different the world is since I last fought in Iraq in 2006.  As Tom Friedman put it: 

“Facebook didn’t exist. Twitter was still a sound. The cloud was still in the sky. 4G was a parking place. Linkedin was a prison. Applications were what you sent to college. Big Data was [an obscure] rap star. And Skype was a typographical error.”

So my experiences in Iraq, and those with experience in Afghanistan, are helpful, but not sufficient.  We have to get much better at studying current and coming conflict.  We can’t just leave it all to the newspaper editors and journalists.  We will fight out there, in the yet-to-be discovered future. That’s what really matters, why we ought to think about these things now. 

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When Warfare Rhymes

When Warfare Rhymes

| 10.29.14 | Commentary & Analysis

Note: We’re revisiting some of our most popular material from the past 10 months for our newer readers; this was originally posted May 21, 2014. Enjoy!

By Major Matt Cavanaugh

The other day I had a valuable email back-and-forth with a professional acquaintance on teaching strategy.  We differed on several points, but there was quite a bit of general agreement as well.  One point where we were in violent concurrence was on the influence of strategic culture on tactics.  I feel that culture has a bit more influence on warfare than my counterpart does – but concede the broad point that different strategic cultures often gravitate toward a particular “best” tactical approach.  These similar choices can also be seen beyond culture – they can be seen across time.

The result is that, paraphrasing the comment often attributed (but never proven) to Mark Twain, “warfare does not repeat itself, but it rhymes.”  Sir Michael Howard once said much the same, “[f]or after all allowances have been made for historical differences, wars still resemble each other more than they resemble any other human activity.”  Even across time, the basics in land warfare are often the same.  Journalist Sebastian Junger, in his book War, remarks on these fundamental tactical principles – and is worth considering at length:

“In a war…soldiers gravitate toward whatever works best with the least risk. At that point combat stops being a grand chess game between generals and becomes a no-holds-barred experiment in pure killing. As a result, much of modern military tactics is geared towards maneuvering the enemy into a position where they can essentially be massacred from safety. It sounds dishonorable only if you imagine that modern war is about honor; it’s not. It’s about winning, which means killing the enemy on the most unequal terms possible. Anything less simply results in the loss of more of your own men…There are two ways to tilt the odds in an otherwise fair fight: ambush the enemy with overwhelming force or use weapons that cannot be countered.” (p. 140)

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Learning from the Summer Wars of 2014

Learning from the Summer Wars of 2014

| 08.17.14 | Commentary & Analysis

By Major Matt Cavanaugh

*Note: This essay is based on remarks to be delivered on Tuesday, 19 August 2014, at the Defense & Strategic Studies War Council event, “Summer Wars: ISIS, Ukraine, and Gaza.”

The Oxford historian Margaret McMillan recently related a story taken from the opening scenes of World War I: 

“The leading newspaper editor in Berlin took his family to Belgium on July 27, 1914. Before he went, he checked with the German Foreign Secretary.  He asked, ‘There’s a bit of a crisis developing – do you think it’s safe to take my family to Belgium?’  The German Foreign Secretary responded: ‘oh yes, don’t worry, it’ll all be over by next week.'”

Unfortunately, we can see the same complacency today. The New York Times recently described an analysis of campaign advertisements from July 2014. Of the 1,155 ads, only 49, or about 4%, were about any subject even remotely resembling foreign policy.  Despite all that is happening in Iraq and Syria, Ukraine, and in Gaza – on some broad level – what happens beyond the water’s edge is for someone else to care about. 

Thankfully, anyone reading this essay is cut from a slightly different bolt of cloth.  There’s interest in what goes on overseas, or, in seeing the world as it is.  Any reader on War Council is naturally inclined to study the use of force, particularly warm and hot battlefields.  Like storm chasers, often, the closer you get the better you’ll understand the wind patterns and trends.   However, if you can’t get to the precise center (or vortex), what follows are some things I think you might deem important to consider in your observations of Iraq (and Syria/ISIS), Ukraine, and Gaza from afar – so you can better understand the environment we live (and may fight) in.

IRAQ

With respect to Iraq, did the U.S. “win” or “lose” there?  Does that even matter?  Consider the complexity, the many sides, which I’ve referred to previously as a Rubik’s cube war.  ISIS defies definition.  I’ve heard former CIA Deputy Director Mike Morrell refer to the group as a “terrorist army,” typically a contradiction in terms.   

Some suggest that airpower is the solution to stopping ISIS.  But we should start by asking what airpower can do.  Simply put, airpower is great at engagement, but provides no sustained commitment – as Eliot Cohen of Johns Hopkins has put it, airpower is kind of a one-night stand in that respect.  Moreover, one should ask: when is airpower effective?  Since November 1911, when an Italian pilot dropped three hand grenades out of his monoplane at some Turks in Libya, there have been two general conditions for success in airpower:

            1. If the enemy moves in open terrain; no cover or concealment (i.e. desert).

            2. If the enemy has no air force or useful anti-aircraft weapons to speak of.

Reasonable military judgment would conclude from this basic analysis that we cannot compel ISIS to victory through airpower as they will (for now) be able to take shelter in cities like Mosul.  They can still find sanctuary through the cover that cities and populations provide.  However, airpower can deny them open traffickability and supply routes in between the cities they hold – and that’s very valuable. That forces adaptation in their behavior.  In car racing, there’s an old adage that “you win in the turns.”  Similarly we might be able to break something loose if ISIS handles this strategic adjustment poorly.

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Essay Campaign #6: Defining Victory in Modern War

Essay Campaign #6: Defining Victory in Modern War

| 07.24.14 | Commentary & Analysis

Summer Essay Campaign #6: “Defining Victory in Modern War”

To Answer Question #10: “What does ‘victory’ look like in modern war?”

By Christopher Davis

The recent American experience in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as on-going changes in the conduct of warfare, raises questions about how to define victory in the modern context. The fluidity between politics and conflict and between peace and war suggest difficulty in identifying a clear demarcation between victory and defeat. Nevertheless, disciplined and rigorous study of the aims of policy and the purposes of war exposes a fundamental truth: victory comes with the cessation of hostilities and the achievement of the political objects desired. In this framework, the inability of American policy-makers and military officers to define victory does not represent increasing complexity about warfare but instead exposes the lack of institutional discipline to develop and implement sound and achievable policy.

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