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RAND’s David Johnson Visits Modern War Institute to Discuss How to Fight Hybrid Adversaries
Dr. David Johnson, senior historian with the RAND Corporation, spoke to cadets on 7 October at a Modern War Institute event entitled “Minding the Middle: How to Fight State-Sponsored Hybrid Adversaries.” He argued that there are...
Read MoreThe Future of Warfare in Five Drawings
*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.
Read MoreWhen Warfare Rhymes
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:
Read More“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)
ISIS’s Achilles Heel
Image courtesy of the Washington Post. By Major Matt Cavanaugh ISIS is getting high marks – both for the territory that it’s seized (roughly the size of Indiana) – and for it’s use of the media. Consider...
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