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Thomas M. Duffy is a Senior Foreign Service Officer with the Department of State and a Faculty Advisor at the National War College.
War is inherently unpredictable, uncertain, and unquantifiable. The insights are timeless, and Carl von Clausewitz suffuses On War with these understandings, but we struggle to come to terms with the implications of those observations. The need to make predictions is seemingly irresistible, but approaches rooted in process or in generalizing about behavior fail in practice. Generic concepts of war facilitate discussion in the abstract but face challenges in accounting for variables such as ambiguity, leadership, personalities, politics, fear, confusion, violence, and friction. The commercial and budgetary attractions of characterizing techniques, technologies, weapons, or approaches to war as seeming to guarantee results can create powerful, if perverse, incentives that frequently lead to disappointing results. Ongoing military operations are understandably closely held or even deceptive.
There is a way to make sense of the chaos of war, but that way is descriptive rather than predictive—to explore the role of contingency in war and to better understand why people made the decisions that they did. The opposite, more predictive approach—often associated with political science or strategic forecasting—falls short when faced with the actual nature and practice of conflict. War often makes sense only in retrospect, and examining the past enables us to anticipate some of the challenges in future conflicts.1 The usefulness of the descriptive approach is why military history is essential in joint professional military education (JPME), in which we seek to inculcate strategic judgment rather than train to specific techniques.
Military historian Hew Strachan described how war can overpower policy rather than simply act as a tool of policy: “War can be elemental, rather than instrumental.”2 Strachan applied this insight to the Clausewitzian “remarkable trinity” of passion, chance, and reason: “Where policy is pitted against passion, where hostility ousts rationality, thecharacteristics of war itself can subordinate and usurp those of the trinity.”3 A careful reading of Clausewitz reveals multiple references to war’s primordial, elemental, even creational nature: “The political aim is [not] a tyrant. It must adapt itself to its chosen means, a process which can radically change it”;4 “the original political objects can greatly alter during the course of the war and may finally change entirely since they are influenced by events and their probable consequences”;5 and “every means must influence even the ultimate purpose.”6
The elemental and unpredictable nature of war is a dynamic that a casual reader of Clausewitz will miss but a study of history will reveal: that war is much more than simply “the continuation of policy by other means,” but rather a record of how governments have sought to instrumentalize war to accomplish political goals.7 The American Civil War, World War II, and the Iraq War clearly illustrate this dynamic: the Civil War did not begin with the goal of freeing the slaves; France and Great Britain went to war in 1939 ostensibly to preserve a politically independent Poland; and the war in Iraq transitioned from a hunt for weapons of mass destruction to the establishment of democracy to countering terrorism. All three are examples of how war itself can act as an independent factor that changes the aims and expectations of the participants and how the actual fighting of war can double back to affect the policies that sought to instrumentalize war in the first place. The mutation of objectives that we deride as “mission creep” is in fact inherent in any protracted conflict.
The implication of war’s elemental, unpredictable, and unquantifiable nature means that wars are mostly clearly understood— to the extent they are understood at all—in retrospect. It is entirely understandable why a seemingly scientific and linear or determinative approach would provide comfort to those who crave certainty. One sees echoes of this in STEM—science, technology, engineering, and mathematics—where physicists are known for their proclivity toward “straightening out the biologists.”8
However, as Alan Beyerchen’s study looking at the implications of nonlinear science for the liberal arts concluded, “seeking exact analytical solutions does not fit the nonlinear reality of the problems posed by war, and hence that our ability to predict the course and outcome of any given conflict is severely limited.”9
It is understandable why a more doctrinal approach would be welcome, and there may in fact be Service-specific cultures that tend toward the expectation of doctrine. Maritime historian Geoffrey Till points out, “Compared to navies, armies in action disaggregate into much smaller units. A strong sense of common purpose and prescriptive doctrine is the only thing that may bind them together in the confusion of battle.”10 Doctrine makes sense at the tactical and operational level; its potential rigidity makes it less useful and perhaps even harmful at the strategic one.
There is a meaningful difference among the tactical, operational, and strategic levels of war but a confusion of what we mean by “ends.” When Colonel Art Lykke first proposed his strategy = ends + ways + means formula, he clearly differentiated between military strategy and what he termed national (grand) strategy.11 Lykke specifically defined ends as “military objectives” in his article, which was, after all, titled “Defining Military Strategy,” which focuses on the operational level of war.12 At the national level, strategy is instead supposed to bridge the gap between policy and the use of instruments such as the military and, indeed, efforts to instrumentalize war itself in the service of foreign policy. In other words, the ends of “national (grand) strategy” are not military objectives. Strategy at the national level is much broader than Lykke’s formula: our aim is to articulate achievable political ends and, for our purposes, the role of force in achieving those ends.
How best, then, to study the institution of war in a way that will usefully broaden the judgment of future leaders thinking at the strategic level, beyond the level of battle? In the chapter titled “Theory Should Be Study, Not Doctrine,” Clausewitz discusses the interplay between military history and theory, arguing that “Theory [checked against military history] then becomes a guide to anyone who wants to learn about war from books; it will light his way, ease his progress, train his judgment, and help him to avoid pitfalls.”13 This is the chapter in which Clausewitz emphasizes the need to “educate the mind of the future commander . . . to guide him in his self-education, not to accompany him to the battlefield.”14
At the senior and strategic level, we seek professional military education, not professional military training. The uncertainty inherent in war requires leaders who can move beyond the operational excellence that one can train to and then—additionally—demonstrate the war-winning perception, comprehension, reasoning, and intuition that result from a broader education. We are not training strategists; rather, we are seeking to produce senior leaders with strategic judgment, and the two approaches and outcomes are not the same.
An appreciation for history is essential for developing this judgment. Till points out that “history, far from simply being a ‘record of exploded ideas,’ should help us avoid repeating previous errors . . . to identify the questions that ought to be asked and the issues that need to be thought about in difficult and troubled times.”15 Michael Howard reminds us that “fter all allowances have been made for historical differences, wars still resemble each other more than they resemble any other human activity.”16 The challenge then becomes how best to study this related body of unique occurrences, and here is where Professor Howard challenged us in 1961 when he wrote “The Use and Abuse of Military History”: the need to study war “in width, in depth, and in context.”17
To study war in width, we need to look at war over a long historical period, differentiating between the unchanging nature of war but the constantly changing character of war.18 In addition to appreciating war’s elemental nature, we can identify what is new and what only appears to be new. Looking at war in width includes building familiarity with standard, classical strategists including but beyond Clausewitz—those writerssuch as Niccolò Machiavelli, Alfred Thayer Mahan, Julian Corbett, and Giulio Douhet, who were able to bridge the gap between the political aims of a government and the process of translating those aims into operational designs for military forces. It is worth noting that many of the “classical strategists” wrote more history than strategy, even if they were not trained historians. The use of history to provide quality assurance for strategy goes far back, but this is also an area in which trained historians could help to ensure recognition of historical situations and to avoid the selective use of events in defense of a particular proposal.
The injunction to study in depth is classically associated with the advice to “take a single campaign and explore it thoroughly, not simply from official histories but from memoirs, letters, diaries, even imaginative literature.”19 Those of us working at Fort Lesley J. McNair, in Washington, DC, benefit from geographical proximity to battlefields from the Revolutionary and Civil wars: the Lincoln conspirators were tried and hanged on the property, the slave pens of Alexandria were a short boat ride away, and the Manassas battlefield lies 32 miles to the west, accessible via roads that in 1861 were thronged with panicked spectators “skedaddling” back to the Nation’s capital after the debacle at Bull Run. We have the capacity, as Howard phrased it, to provide “a glimpse of the confusion and horror of the real experience.”20 The means certainly exist to educate students regarding a single, early, significant campaign of a major American war, along with tangible reminders of some of that war’s causes and consequences.
Our study of war in context is to focus on the societies in which the wars occur, and this study is not just military history but rather history writ large. At the National War College, we devote an entire core course to the American domestic political context, a key component of that Clausewitzian remarkable trinity. We are likely less effective in our studies of the political, economic, and social contexts of foreign societies, although we are likely not alone in that deficiency. As Strachan tartly notes, “Historical illiteracy is a besetting sin of [W]estern governments anxious to deploy forces in regions where memories are somewhat longer.”21 Context includes examining the domestic civilmilitary relations governing the “unequal dialogue” between civilian and military leadership that results in strategy.22 There is obviously a need for social history. Above all, the study of war in context drills home the influence of politics and the ever-present factor of the contingent.
Clausewitz, serving as the director of the Prussian Kriegsakademie, famously took issue with a request by the Prussian general staff to review a war plan provided without any political context:
How then is it possible to plan a campaign, whether for one theater of war or several, without indicating the political condition of the belligerents, and the politics of their relationship to each other? Every major war plan grows out of so many individual circumstances, which determine its features, that it is impossible to devise a hypothetical case with such specificity that it could be taken as real.23
Too many planners, especially American ones, disregard the messiness of politics in search of clean and noncontroversial approaches. We have inverted that old saw about the British—that they lose every battle except the last one. We have instead constructed an approach where, excelling at the tactical and operational levels of war, we win every battle except the last one. We are winning our battles but not our wars. We face a situation of recurrent failure in translating operational victory into strategic success, and the way we think and teach about war may be contributing to that lack of strategic success. The disconnect between military performance and political results is admittedly not a new problem. Harry Summers’s critique of the American war effort in Indochina begins with a quotation from a U.S. Army colonel telling his North Vietnamese counterpart, “You know, you never defeated us on the battlefield,” only to get the response, “That may be so, but it is also irrelevant.”24 Russian Colonel General Boris Gromov, the final Soviet ground commander overseeing Russia’s withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989, stated something similar: “No Soviet garrison or major outpost was ever overrun.”25 Both utterances encapsulate the challenges that operationally successful armies face in translating battlefield victory into durable political success.
A history-led approach to JPME provides the baseline for the future conduct of war and its place in the larger national security context, a war college’s truest measurable outcome. A history-based approach will educate students that security is a relative condition, not an absolute one, and help them to understand and explain to their political leadership that battles by themselves do not win wars. Rather, these battles simply create often fleeting political opportunities for the victors.26 JFQ