دوشنبه ۰۲ مهر ۰۳ | ۱۹:۴۱ ۸ بازديد
Cook took issue with Pierce’s argument that it
was possible to return to the traditional distinction
between legitimate preemption and illegitimate pre-
ventative war given that highly dangerous nonstate
actors operate from within states. The relationship
between these nonstate actors and their host states
is highly complex—some states sponsor and support
them, some simply tolerate them, some simply can-
not do anything about the presence of violent nonstate
groups in their territory, and some are unaware of the
groups. Cook believes that there is a different legiti-
mate response for each of these relationships, thus de-
manding a legal framework more complex than the
preemption/preventative war binary. The terrorism
threat thus requires a new set of norms and custom-
ary international law which will not be as focused on
state sovereignty as previous legal frameworks. In this
new framework, discrimination and proportionality
should remain the guiding principles, but their specif-
ic meaning needs revision in a security environment
dominated by counterinsurgency and counterterror-
ism. For instance, traditional war between uniformed
militaries accepted a certain amount of collateral dam-
age based on the notion of military necessity. Coun-
terinsurgency, with its emphasis on winning public
support, requires a more restrictive notion of collat-
eral damage and a greater acceptance of military risk.
This demands a robust training regime beyond simple
rules of engagement.
Finally, Cook addressed the challenges of cross
cultural conflict when local norms are at odds with
American ones. This can, he noted, have “morally
corrosive” effects on the troops involved. While he of-
fered no definitive answer or solution, Cook suggested
that it might be time to open a wide ranging debate on
assumptions about the universality of Western values
which has driven international law for several centu-
ries. The 20th century notion—codified in the United
Nations Charter and the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights—that an ethical convergence was un-
derway which would lead to the global acceptance of
Western, liberal values, does not reflect reality. In fact,
a case can be made that the conflict between al Qaeda
and the West is resistance to this idea. Yet it continues
to undergird the legal and ethical frameworks for war.
Pregent assessed the rules that apply to U.S. mili-
tary operations. He noted that the Obama administra-
tion believes that current rules are firmly grounded
in both international and domestic law. The admin-
istration has accepted the Bush administration’s con-
tention that the United States is fighting a war of self
defense. This is very important from a legal perspec-
tive. But, Pregent noted, other states and some NGOs
believe that counterterrorism is a matter of criminal
and human rights law rather than the law of war. This
dissonance can have effects in the field when the U.S.
military is involved in coalition operations. Military
leaders must maneuver carefully through the chal-
lenges it presents.
Baker was the panel’s revolutionary, arguing for
a new framework for thinking about the rule set for
war that is agile enough to deal with the murky con-
temporary operational environment. As this takes
shape, though, its architects must consider the con-
straints that rule sets place on military effectiveness.
The tendency is to claim that strategic success requires
staying within restrictive rules of engagement and at-
tempting to win the information war by dissemina-
tion of the truth (implying that what military forces
say is an ethical issue as much as what they do). Baker
indicated that he hoped this was true but that it war-
ranted careful examination and debate—something
that has not yet happened This absence of analysis
reflects a long-standing characteristic of the American
approach to strategy which assumes, without debate,
that in a free market of ideas, the truth will eventually
win out. The American system uses the free market as
a universal paradigm for social interaction, whether in
the political realm, the economic, or the informational.
But there is no real free market of ideas in the in-
formation war. Extremists feel no compunction to
hew to the truth, instead selecting their themes and
narratives based purely on strategic and tactical effect
rather than on the basis of ethics. And in the cultures
which give rise to violent extremism, truth often has
an affinity element; rather than being judged in some
objective sense—reflecting the best available informa-
tion—truth is defined, in part, by the audience’s af-
finity with the person making a statement or telling a
story. People are more likely to believe someone with
whom they have an ethnic, sectarian, racial, or tribal
affinity than alternative explanations coming from
someone with less affinity. U.S. troops in Iraq often
encountered this—”ground” truth sometimes had less
effect than a counterfactual explanation coming from
someone with an inherent affinity with the target au-
dience.
Another consideration is that military effectiveness
has a negative element as well as a positive one. Rath-
er than shaping their behavior according to which of
the antagonists relies on the objective truth or behaves
most ethically, people often act out of fear of violence
or punishment. Strategic thinkers like Ralph Peters,
Martin van Creveld, Michael Scheuer, and Edward
Luttwak argue from this perspective.18 The American
ethos, though, is based on the notion that most people
will support the side in a conflict that behaves better.
That is the foundation of the Western notion of legiti-
macy which plays a powerful role in U.S. counterin-
surgency doctrine. Ironically, insurgents who use the
Maoist strategy make the same assumption. But many
of the enemies that the United States and its allies are
facing now, and will face in the future, function more
with a mafia mentality—that negative motivation
through fear is more powerful than positive motiva-
tion through good and ethical behavior. The question,
then, is whether this ethical asymmetry is a recipe for
defeat. Should the U.S. military rely more on fear than
on good and ethical behavior to attain the desired ef-
fects? Has the United States abandoned the mailed fist
too quickly in favor of the velvet glove? Or, to phrase
it differently, can ethics which are serious impedi-
ments to strategic success be sustained? Until now,
the tendency has simply been to deny that this tension
exists and to assert that good, ethical behavior leads
to strategic success. As Baker suggested, it is time to
re-open this discussion.
Baker also noted that as Western military forces
struggle to adapt to the new normative environment,
they often attempt relabeling to make it seem more
like the traditional war environment, using phrases
like “human terrain” and “weaponizing culture.” In
this traditional environment, norms and rules were
conceptualized as barriers which limited the behavior
of military forces. Thus planners, commanders, and
strategists had to consider not only physical terrain
and the enemy, but also legal and ethical limitations
which prohibited some actions which might otherwise
have been militarily effective. This was an attempt
to apply the logic of domestic law, which has both
negative and positive dimensions, prohibiting certain
actions by the state and enabling certain actions de-
rived from the constitutional order of the state, to the
security environment. Today’s security environment,
Baker argued, demands a “radical re-visioning” of the
normative dimension of war. Notions of barriers on
the battlefield should be replaced with a core ethic
which can form the center of strategy. Ethics, in other
words, must be a core driver of strategy—war must
be “ethic centric.” The just war tradition is inadequate
for this. The principles of discrimination and propor-
tionality, for instance, tell militaries little about what
operational goals should be and whether to focus on
killing insurgents or protecting the population. Is pop-
ulation protection, for example, a moral imperative or
simply a means to politically defined ends? By using
the domestic legal analogy, traditional thinking only
asks whether an action is justified rather than whether
it is preferred. This was appropriate for a nation state
centric system but needs reevaluation and revision in
an era of market states and powerful nonstate actors.
Why Does It Matter?
Scholarship on war and theoretical thinking are
of great value when translated into concepts applied
by strategic practitioners within the military and
throughout the government. Rather than only adding
to knowledge (a laudable accomplishment), they also
can change the world. The final panel of the conference
was designed to suggest policy, strategy, doctrine, and
force development implications of changing think-
ing about the nature of war. It included Dr. Thomas
Mahnken of the Naval War College (a former Deputy
Assistant Secretary of Defense), Professor John Troxell
of the U.S. Army War College’s Center for Strategic
Leadership, Lieutenant Colonel (Ret.) Nathan Freier
of the Center for Strategic and International Studies,
and Dr. Steven Metz of the Army War College’s Stra-
tegic Studies Institute.
Troxell noted that defining war was not simply
an academic or theoretical exercise, but was impor-
tant for developing a coherent national strategy and
for convincing the American people and their elected
representatives that national resources are being used
effectively. This is particularly true as economic prob-
lems like government deficits, mounting debt, and
growing entitlements begin to crowd out other spend-
ing, including that for defense. The result is a strategy-
resource gap that makes the need for efficiency—for
applying power resources where and how they will
have the greatest impact—even more imperative.
Phrased differently, a nation with a surplus of strategic
resources can be sloppy or inefficient in its strategy. A
nation without such a surplus—as the United States is
becoming—needs coherent strategy to maximize the
results from any expenditure of strategic resources.
Troxell also noted the importance of a convinc-
ing and clear narrative to build the consensus needed
for effective strategy. This is true of most nations but
is amplified in the United States where strategy and
national security policy are shaped more by public
opinion and the involvement of the legislature than in
any other great power today or in the past. Strategies
which the public does not understand or support, even
if they might in some sense be effective, are doomed to
failure. Finally, Troxell emphasized that understand-
ing the changing nature of war or, at least, the chang-
ing definition of war, is important for military force
development since organizations, equipment, and
doctrine created today are likely to be used for many
years in the future.
Mahnken emphasized that it was important to un-
derstand what has not changed about war as well as
what has changed or is changing. War remains an act
of violence to impose one’s will on an adversary. The
motives that lead to war, first identified by the Greek
historian Thucydides 2,500 years ago—fear, honor,
and interests—persist. And the possibility of major
war between states, while it may have diminished,
remains.
But while war’s essential nature remains constant,
Mahnken argued, its character clearly has changed.
Precision and discrimination are now expected. The
use of unmanned systems is routine. Organizations
other than states wage war. The outcomes are less pre-
dictable. War takes place in new domains like space
and cyberspace. And, from the American perspective,
potential opponents increasingly prefer types of war
other than large scale conventional combat, thus mak-
ing nuclear and irregular war more strategically sig-
nificant.
Other important characteristics also may be chang-
ing. One is the social context of war. Parts of the de-
veloped world such as Western Europe and Japan
appear to be undergoing debellicization. Publics there
increasingly oppose the use of force. Political leaders
recognize this and have shifted the emphasis of the
their militaries to peacekeeping and similar missions.
The developed world also has an increased sensitivity
to casualties (even if not an outright aversion). This
may be related to demographics. People are more ad-
verse to losing a child in war when they only have one
or two rather than many. The utility of nuclear weap-
ons may be declining in the developed world but in-
creasing elsewhere as new nuclear states emerge. The
long-standing taboo on the use of nuclear weapons,
Mahnken contended, may be eroding. Finally, the bal-
ance between state and nonstate actors in war may be
shifting toward the latter. But, Mahnken noted, this
may not continue. Nonstate organizations have been
able to function like states in large part because exist-
ing states allowed it. States could reverse this if they
elected to.
Freier examined how changes in war have been re-
flected in U.S. military strategy. The DoD’s prevailing
view of war and warfare, Freier argued, are obstacles
to real change. War, as the DoD prefers to see it, pits
one state’s military against another’s. The DoD’s view
reflects the American tradition of war as binary, or-
ganized, discrete (with an identifiable beginning and
end), and predominantly military in origin and char-
acter. But in the contemporary security environment,
that type of war is much less likely than other forms
of armed violence. Freier believes that this “legacy de-
fense status quo” is “out of synch” with today’s real-
ity. Thus the United States must decide whether the
DoD should be the successor to the War Department
and continue to focus primarily or even exclusively on
interstate war, or should be something fundamentally
different and broader.
The new defense status quo, Freier believes, in-
cludes both “threats of purpose”—deliberate hostile
actions by enemies—and “threats of context” which
are dangerous situations or structures. The distinction
between strategy, operations, and tactics still matters,
but it is different than in the past. There is both the
“strategic corporal,” whose actions at the tactical level
have direct strategic consequences, as well as the “tac-
tical general” who is able to control or, at least, attempt
to control units at the tactical level using technology.
Freier argued that the defense challenge today is
more than war. The DoD should jettison its reluctance
and accept this idea. In addition to its persisting mis-
sions—counterterrorism and homeland security—the
DoD must also prepare for two other major challeng-
es: irregular conflict and high end asymmetric war.
It must also, Freier contended, retain the capability
for large scale conventional warfighting. This threat,
though, is more manageable than ones that emerge
without attribution or overt violence, those which
come from substate and transnational networks, or
without explicit enemy design (such as ecological col-
lapse or natural disasters). In the broadest sense, the
goal is no longer to be able to undertake two nearly
simultaneous major regional wars (which was the
U.S. military’s force sizing construct from the end of
the Cold War until the 9/11 attacks), but to conduct
a wide range of dissimilar simultaneous operations.
The DoD now must be the “Department of Doing or
Defending Against Many Things” when the situation
involves violence or exceeds the capabilities of other
agencies.
Freier suggested that there are five “new immu-
table defense truths”:
1. The DoD will remain the n
dfs3434