'People, ideas, machines' V: Colin Gray on Defence Planning

'Politics is the womb in which war develops'... Errors in politics and strategy dwarf errors in operations and tactics... Relevance for UKR... Seventeen Moments of Spring...

‘The very nature of interaction is bound to make it unpredictable.’ Clausewitz.

‘It is something of a mystery why the terms [strategy, tactics] continue to be grossly abused… It is remarkable how resistant many defence professionals are to accepting the admirably clear meaning with high utility of Clausewitz’s distinction.’ !! Colin Gray. (I’ve made this point for years about the abuse of the term ‘strategy’ in politics. It’s interesting to see a doyen of ‘defence intellectuals’ say it’s also true in military circles.)

Below are notes on Colin Gray’s Defence Planning. Gray is one of the leading academics on ‘strategy’ since World War II.

Some key points about the book.

1. The highest value learning is abstractions at the right level.

The most important advice for those in politics, strategy, defence planning and management generally is his exhortation to abstract lessons at the right level. All sorts of details are important ‘to historians’ but not to non-historians trying to learn general ‘lessons from history’. And all sorts of deep lessons recur in history if one abstracts at the right level. Historians are interested in details like ‘how Rome won the Battle of X because particular ABC’ but most of these details are only interesting to a historian interested in the particular case. But ‘how Rome innovated’, ‘how Rome organised military training’ and ‘how Roman leaders connected political ends to military operations’ are deep timeless lessons.

Stark, crucial examples of such abstractions that are constantly forgotten and have to be relearned?

Ancient lesson: war is carried on in the dark.

Ancient lesson: war is politics.

Ancient lesson: ‘fear, honour, interest’ drive politics and war.

(I tried to apply some of these lessons — what I called ‘unrecognised simplicities of high performance’ — to politics in the euro campaign, Department for Education, referendum, No10, removing Boris and wrote about it here.)

2. War is politics, politics must dominate analysis of ends, per Clausewitz...

Politics is the womb in which war develops… War is not a mere act of policy but a true political instrument, a continuation of political activity by other means. (Clausewitz)

This is obviously critical today. My criticism of some military analysis about the UKR war has been based mainly on disagreements with their political analysis and particularly their ignoring of, or confusion about, ends which must be political. (I also think many military experts have ignored the Godfather advice — never hate your enemies, it clouds your judgement — in their predictions of ‘Russian collapse’ and ‘UKR victory’.)

Our politicians have not described coherent ends for our action in UKR. ‘Putin must fail’ is not a coherent end (and there is intense disagreement about his ends). Truss’s definition of the end as ‘removing Russia from Crimea’ is a ticket to nuclear war — obviously our abysmal media and MPs being what they are, this has been ignored in the leadership farce-campaign.

We have politicians pushing escalation with the world’s biggest nuclear power over a state, Ukraine, that is of trivial inherent importance to the world and which we are not obliged to fight for by any alliance. A ‘humanitarian’ logic makes no sense given we routinely ignore such humanitarian logic applied to millions of blacks getting slaughtered in Africa for decade after decade. And our debate ignores the crucial political fact that in the east the war resembles a civil war, with both sides speaking Russian, layered on top of the history of some of the most appalling battlegrounds and massacres of the Eastern Front in World War II hence, partly, the depth of hate and the atrocities. Unlike the student politics of statues and cries of ‘Nazi’ in Oxford or Harvard, the fights over statues and ‘Nazi’ in Ukraine evoke the emotional depths of the Eastern Front that are still living memories. (As I wrote in my Reading List, one of the greatest films ever made is Come and See (Иди и смотри) about the Eastern Front. I highly recommend it in general but also as relevant to the war now.** below)

Without clarity over ends, military action risks not just failure but disaster. These risks are even greater given the neocons and their media sympathisers, who made such terrible errors in Iraq and Afghanistan and who promote conflict with China over Taiwan too, incite media hysteria over atrocities and chant nonsensical slogans exhorting us to ignore the most important aspect of Russia, its nuclear arsenal.

Pointing out the obvious fact that Boris Johnson cannot explain coherent ends, which are essential for military success, gets you attacked by senior academics as a ‘Putin stooge’ (even though in every other context the exact same academics mock him as a clown). I’ve talked to serving officers involved in UK operations in UKR. Without exception when I ask ‘what do you think the government’s ends are, is the MoD improving under the pressure of the war?’, they reply ‘nobody knows, no almost everything is stupider than ever’.

I won’t rehash everything I’ve written on UKR. My point here is: Gray’s lessons on the inherently political nature of defining ends, and how this dominates purely military calculations, applies to UKR now, as does his warning that this lesson is often ignored and causes disasters.

3. My main disagreement with the book… He’s right to warn that a) quantitative methods cannot eliminate uncertainty and b) hubris concerning them can be disastrous, but he pushes the lesson too far. Such methods can usefully constrain uncertainty about politics, which he treats as a domain almost entirely outside quantitative analysis.

Gray wrote before the Tetlock experiments and his worldview was shaped before the advances of modern data science and its tools. He is rightly sceptical of futurology and predictions. He rightly warns that hubris with quantitative methods has often been dangerous and/or disastrous, from RAND to McNamara’s Whizz Kids.

But there is scope to integrate the ancient wisdom of Thucydides and Sun Tzu with modern methods provided it’s done with humility. He warns that we can’t reliably predict crucial political ‘tipping points’ but he’s wrong. For example, Bayesian techniques applied to polling/models can and do predict critical tipping points in elections, which are inherently political and therefore the root of strategy in Gray’s own formulation. There are many similar examples though obviously this entire field is massively under-rated in politics/government because they’re so hard and so dysfunctional.

This obviously does not negate the profound wisdom of classics. It does not mean we should ignore ancient warnings to be humble in the face of inherent uncertainty, nonlinearity and chance. But we can cautiously improve methods and know more of the future, at least in the relatively short-term (months not decades), than a reasonable historian or scholar of strategy may think. We must always keep in mind the fragility of such predictions, the dangers of depending on them, and the need to seek strategies that are robust in many different plausible branching futures.

Quantitative methods and tools can be applied to fields that have previously ignored them and produce great value. They can also be disastrously mis-applied.

A classic example…

In the 1940s-60s, the Manhattan Project, the ICBM project and Apollo developed new methods for managing highly complex projects (‘systems management’ and ‘systems engineering’). In the 1960s, McNamara, a famously successful businessman, ran the Pentagon. His Whizz Kids went to work on Vietnam, defence planning and procurement. Not only did they horribly botch Vietnam, but in the name of ‘efficiency’ and ‘accountability’ and ‘transparency’ they also changed the way the Pentagon did procurement, including ditching the phenomenally successful methods of Manhattan/ICBMs/Apollo. No more highly fast, effective and efficient deals done with a handshake and trust. Ever since, the Pentagon has got worse and worse and has resisted all attempts at systemic reform. (Cf. Packard’s attempts in the 1980s, Schriever’s letter etc.)

Today, Britain and America run highly complex projects much worse than we did 50-70 years ago, despite having the internet and many other technologies! Procurement and infrastructure building is a disaster. Across the west we’ve seen highly complex projects simultaneously take longer and longer, cost more and more, and fail more and more disastrously. In the UK, many tens of billions are destined to be wasted for 30 years in the appalling HS2 project (which I tried and failed to stop in Q1 2020) — already a case study in government incompetence and certain to become more famous as the idiocy becomes more public and the bills grow and grow. It is no coincidence that Westminster has both made building such things disastrously slow and expensive and, when challenged, produces rushed comedy graphs justifying the project with forecasts showing literally the entire UK population either traveling on high speed rail or building more of it. The same systems have produced our energy policy and infrastructure…

4. It’s normal for states to fail to integrate politics, strategy and defence planning and we never really learn from failure.

States are constantly and inevitably surprised by political developments. These surprises are often terrible for their military (e.g UK 1940), sometimes catastrophic leading to the state being conquered (e.g France 1940). When disaster hits, it seems obvious that it would have been wiser to prepare forces to cope with a wider distribution of possible futures.

Yet this lesson is never really learned. The surprises and disasters recur reliably. This seems to fit with my point about extremely high performance teams: almost nobody learns, entropy and the ‘silent artillery of time’ always do their work.

Given nuclear weapons, biological weapons, and the accelerating AI/drone swarms arms race, it’s hard to be optimistic.

5. Main criticism (apart from being a bit repetitive). He should have done some case studies of the absolute best and most disastrous examples of defence planning, with reading lists, explaining the reasons. If anybody knows of a book/paper giving such case studies please link below. I don’t mean histories of campaigns, I mean analysis of the bureaucratic processes and personalities explaining what worked very well or badly, i.e something similar to what The Dream Machine did for ARPA/PARC or Now It Can Be Told for Manhattan. Person X set up process Y with the following key people and they did XXX, AAA worked, BBB didn’t etc.

E.g Prussia’s success in 1866 and 1870, which led to states copying the General Staff model, which then failed in 1914. I want to dig into the arguments re myths/reality viz the planning process for Blitzkrieg, Guderian, von Manstein etc.

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** Come and See

It’s an accurate portrayal of atrocities on the Eastern Front therefore truly horrific. The director was evacuated from the horror of Stalingrad as a child:

The city was ablaze up to the top of the sky. The river was also burning. It was night, bombs were exploding, and mothers were covering their children with whatever bedding they had, and then they would lie on top of them. Had I included everything I knew and shown the whole truth, even I could not have watched it.

If there’s one film to show Nietzsche brought back from the dead, maybe this is it. The Nazis did indeed think they were creating a new world ‘beyond good and evil’, so did Stalin. The title comes from Revelations 6 (7-8):

And when he had opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth beast say, Come and see.

And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth.

I’d also highly recommend another piece of Russian art from the 1970s, Seventeen Moments of Spring, the most watched TV show in Russian history, the story of a brilliant Russian double-agent outwitting the Nazis. The streets emptied when it was first shown.

It’s fascinating artistically. E.g Surely nobody today would dare open a TV show with minutes of a man just looking at the sky and trees. It’s possible for things seen as ‘elite’ to be hits if they’re done well enough.

It’s fascinating for what it says about Russia. Like reading Dostoyevsky and watching Come and See, you realise just how other Russia is, such as the combinations of sentimentality and brutality that seem odd to western sensibilities.

It’s also interesting as it seems its influence has affected how Putin tries to present himself. Shtierlitz, unknown in the west, tops polls of who Russians would like to lead them, a little like James Bond topping polls in Britain. Its production was carefully orchestrated by the KGB yet one of its effects seems to have been an odd unintentional elevation of Nazi aesthetics. Every Live Player in politics is also a Sorcerer’s Apprentice…

Opening scene…

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Previous in this series:

• (I) Rosen’s book on: what causes military innovation, how does it really work?

• Previous on nuclear, (II) here and (III) here (incomplete, will finish in August).

• (IV) Notes on The Kill Chain, read by me and others involved in the Integrated Review in 2020.

Two charts illustrate very deep long-term problems in military organisations, thinking and procurement — and an inability of the political parties nominally in charge of these bureaucracies to change direction — in America, UK and the EU.

Building has got incredibly slow

Building has got incredibly expensive

Obviously we cannot stay on these exponential curves.

But HOW will these curves change? Will we keep our rotten institutions and we just see the curves flattening? Will fear force change? So far despite much greater fears over Russia and China there is little sign of institutional change.

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Intro

How can we plan defence and militaries for a future that is bound to surprise us, perhaps fatally, given no idea or process can eliminate complexity and nonlinearity?

The logical and practical core must be politics.

In the main, strategy and defence planning (DP) are the same subject.

All activity categorised as DP must be included in performance of the strategy function for a security community, but all that is strategic is not defence planning.

CG dismisses some other terms: strategic planning, military planning, war planning.

DP focuses on military without excluding non-military.

DP means:

Preparations for the defence of a polity in the future.

It includes:

• Preparing military advice relevant to political choices.

• Design of grand and military strategies.

• Design, making and administration of military programs.

• Military plans.

• Coordination with economic, social, political, diplomatic action.

• Intelligence.

• Cooperation with allies.

Three questions:

1. What you can do (capabilities)?

2. What you say (declarations)?

3. What you do (actions)?

Four categories:

1. Ends.

2. Ways.

3. Means.

4. Assumptions.

Three other categories:

1. Policy and politics — always about relative power.

2. Strategy — all polities seek security, matching political ends with good enough means employed in tolerably effective ways.

3. DP — an eternal ubiquitous activity.

Three other categories:

1. ‘Strategy in its general theory identifies inclusively the pieces and workings that comprise the logical architecture for defence planning.’

2. History.

3. Politics.

Clausewitz: the higher the rank, the more the problems multiply until you get to the supreme commander — ‘at this level, almost all solutions must be left to imaginative intellect’.

George Marshall told Princeton, 1947 that anybody thinking about international issues must study Thucydides. Churchill wrote a million words on the Duke of Marlborough, one of England’s greatest generals.

CH1 Defining the Challenge: Preparation, not (only) plans

DP should be treated as an art, not a science or social science. ‘Political science’ must be treated very cautiously. Quantitative methods are necessary and inevitable but also must be treated cautiously. Problems come when DP is approached as if it were a set of scientific challenges that can be solved with a methodology yielding objectively correct answers.

DP operates in a context where political and strategic questions such as ‘are we planning to fight mainly by the navy with the army supporting?’ dominate.

Dowding and Keith Park were competent but success also rested on DP in the 1930s that chose, manufactured, trained the system.

DP must consider how the system works internally and how it serves in combat.

Usually democracies need to have ‘serious menace demonstrated’ before they believe in it. ‘Teleological, Whiggish assumptions about an allegedly inexorable improvement in human political behaviour are quite widespread among decent liberal-minded people, including scholars who should know better.’ This makes DP harder!

Usually interpretation of recent experience is given too much weight.

DP employs, and in a fundamental sense is, strategy in order to do politics… Politics and strategy are … integral and vital components of that process… DP should be regarded as a function that in affect achieves a fusion of strategy and planning… Strategies are theories, which is to say they are purported explanations of how desired effects can be achieved by selected causes of threat and action applied in a particular sequence… The components of strategy itself — ends, ways, and means — are so interdependent in practice that an insistence upon conceptual clarity threatens misunderstanding of its true unity…

The concept of the defence planning function was not invented in 19th Century Prussia even though military planning changed radically then… Belatedly the United States, and even more belatedly Britain, bowed somewhat reluctantly to the need for professional planning revealed in the British case by the evidence of experience in the Boer War.

1. How far into the future need concern us seriously today?

2. Who or what in the future might make us feel insecure?

3. How much security do we need, can we afford, and might we advance through defence planning?

4. What will be the character of our future security environment?

5. What will conflict be like in the future?

6. How proficient will our national military forces be, quantitatively and qualitatively?

7. Given every conflict is unique in its character, though not in its nature, how confident can we be that our forces will be tactically, strategically, and ultimately politically effective?

There is no single future out there, instead there are ‘an unknowable number of possible futures’ and the one that occurs is partly the product of our choices today and tomorrow.

Grand strategy is the direction and use of any or all of the assets of a security community, including its military instrument, for the purposes of policy as decided by politics…

DP is the practice of military strategy in grand strategy, and is conducted in a thoroughly political process…

CH2 A Strategic Approach

All that can be done is education in strategy plus experience then hope to have selection processes that find the best people with both.

The historical record does suggest that even strategic competence can be hard to find.

What is ‘rational’ in the context of DP?

The reductively simple structure of the strategic function comprises only three foundational and interdependent elements: ends, ways, and means… It is sensible to define rational behaviour as that which seeks purposefully to match ends, ways, and means.

History is full of ‘abysmal policy failure despite tolerable rationality on defence planning.’

The problem is that it is all too possible simultaneously to be both rational yet unreasonable. [Cf. my blogs on Payne.] Bluntly stated, national security is and has to be hostage to the wisdom in policy choice that derives from a political process. And the policy that is chosen by political process is wholly at risk to the peril that attends false assumptions… Whether or not a rational process also is reasonable, and as a consequence likely to succeed, is a vital matter dependent upon the quality of individual politicians as policymakers and the political and strategic advice that they receive and choose to influence the quality of their choices.

The Third Reich in 1940s and USA in 2000s pursued rational paths that led to failure ‘because their strategy bridges were constructed on the basis of fatally flawed assumptions’. Hitler could have succeeded in Russia but for his disastrous beliefs about the enemy. America similarly made terrible errors re local firends and enemies. Britain failed in the 1930s viz Hitler because of false assumptions about him.

Policy and strategy errors have bigger effects than operational and tactical. E.g Hitler saying ‘invade Russia’ based on terrible assumptions re Soviet capabilities was an error so vast that no amount of operational/tactical success could retrieve it.

While it is vital to make sound decisions about how to fight, it is of much greater moment to decide whether or not to fight, and with whom.

Good performance is rare and success is not a reliable signal of it.

[H]igh competence by planners has been the exception rather than the rule… If defence planning as an expression of strategy was easy to do well, strategic history would not be littered so generously with examples of strategic failure.

Political ends are often decided without enough focus on ways and means.

Strategic ways are often decided that are not right for the ends.

Military means can dominate when politics should dominate.

He advises focus on two classics:

Defence planning for national security should draw heavily upon Thucydides … and Clausewitz... The two authors are potently complementary. Thucydides explains inclusively the connections between war and the politics of statecraft with particular reference to what today is termed grand strategy. Clausewitz analyses forensically the nature of war, its functioning as an instrument of policy directed by strategy and waged in combat with tactics. Few subjects are blessed with bequests from the past as worthy of intellectual dominance as is Strategic Studies in its debts to these classic Athenian and Prussian authors.

He summarises much of his thinking in a table which I reproduce:

Strategic ways chosen to employ tactical means for policy ends selected by a permanently political process is the all but pulsating dynamic reality of the subject.

CH3 Historical Context: The Great Stream of Time

We must be careful about analogies and it’s obviously always going to be subject to argument to say ‘learn X from history’. Details matter, it’s hard to know what’s relevant.

But history rhymes and we still learn from Thucydides, from fundamentals like ‘fear, interest, glory’.

Strategic history to date has showed major continuities across time, place, and culture. It is only sensible to anticipate that future strategic history will resemble its past… Biology and sociology compel the politics of anxiety about, and struggle for, security.

Generally historians and social scientists look at each other with ‘disdain’. The SS dismiss narrative detail and the lack of theory. Historians dismiss ignorant SS theorising.

There are some things we can learn from, e.g the repeated patterns of failure in counterinsurgency and arms control.

Sometimes there are ‘shocks’. The archetypal shock was the sudden use of two nuclear weapons, the ‘most obviously strategically shocking event of the twentieth-century’.

CG believes:

The “game” of competitive national and international security has not changed fundamentally, notwithstanding the changes, even revolutionary ones, discernible in its altered character over the centuries.

Sun Tzu, Thucydides and Clausewitz continue as the lodestars of strategic education.

The nuclear revolution has changed the character of some aspects of warfare but not its most elemental nature.

But the possibility, even probability, that nuclear war would be a game ending, not nearly changing, event has not incontestably transformed the game of nations to date. Unarguably, one hopes, the now permanent nuclear context should mean that great war between the greater states ought not to be a live policy option any more. However deterrence can never be thoroughly reliable, and its achievement is believed widely, if not quite authoritatively, to require a capacity to wage some nuclear warfare if necessity so demands. Defence planners cannot and do not dare assume that the absence of nuclear use in anger for nearly 70 years is proof that nuclear deterrence is an eternal and ubiquitously reliable condition in the future game of nations…

The provision of armed forces of different kinds for the future is more of a contingency fund against a range of possible dangers and opportunities than it can be preparation to meet identifiable future needs. As a general rule such needs will not be locatable with high assurance far in advance of their appearance…

As a general rule it is entirely safe to assume that futurology is both thoroughly unreliable and will remain so.

Cf.

• Michael Howard, The Lessons of History.

• Neustadt & May, Thinking in Time.

• He says John France’s Perilous Glory is a great book but not written to influence the defence planner.

CH4 Historical Context: Patterns for Anticipation

Politics and strategy are arts not sciences and are ‘not subject areas fit for scientific examination’.

There is no kind of analytical technique, no form of organisation that can achieve reliable predictive quality understanding of the strategic future…

He gives an example (re the nuclear crisis of 1983) of a historian arguing that we could find methods and organisation to pinpoint a ‘tipping point’ in deterrence:

What would be new would be the ability to ‘pinpoint this tipping point’ with reliable prediction quality knowledge for understanding. Of course the idea is dangerous nonsense… It is dangerous because the pretensions of social science in this case are apt to appeal strongly to officials and a public who want to believe that their future is knowable, and therefore possibly reliably controllable in some of its less agreeable possible features.

Education in strategic history cannot enable impossible futurology, but it would equip defence planners to cope with the kinds or categories of contextual challenges that across millennia certainly have existed before, albeit not always dressed in a toga or fighting with a gladius.

Politics and strategy are more arts than science. But there are also ways of thinking, tools, models that are ‘scientific’ in the proper sense of the term and very useful in reducing uncertainty.

For example, in 2016 we found ideas from applied mathematician Andrew Gelman and applied them to election modeling, then again in 2019. In 2020 data scientists helped enourmously in providing data and predictions of crucial NHS dynamics (e.g demand for oxygen, emergency beds) that greatly improved policy, strategy and operations.

Such ideas/tools are not perfect. Everything outside maths is approximate. They can reduce uncertainty, help you see things that will be ‘shocks’ to others.

In the field of strategy and defence planning, it’s clear that Tetlock methods could have very valuable application. We know they can outperform intelligence agencies on important geopolitical questions. The successful demonstrations could be extended, as I wrote in 2019, to ‘clusters’ of well-formed questions to surround ‘mysteries’.

E.g ‘Will Brexit be a success?’ is the classic sort of question the media asks and pundits burble over because the terms are unclear.

But you could easily develop many well-formed questions, like ‘Will growth be higher or lower in UK/Eurozone over the next 20 years?’, ‘Will one or more Eurozone countries leave the euro and suffer XXX serious problems by 2040?’ etc. You can surround the central mystery with questions that can be answered objectively and thereby gain insight, though never certainty.

The same thing could be done on Ukraine. I’ve seen no such efforts in public because the media and politicians don’t care about getting these things right.

It’s clear that proper integration of science and modern tools with ancient insights can improve performance of politics, strategy and DP.

CG argues the use of history for DP depends on these propositions:

• Human nature is constant, local context is crucial.

• Human behaviour is unavoidably political.

• All politcs is about power.

• Need for security has shaped social life and political process.

• Historians are rightly careful about context and detail, DP must look for eternal ideas about thought and behaviour.

For DP, ‘getting it right’ is NOT the task. We can only make judgements in retrospect and even then only provisionally.

CG makes the distinction between rationality and reasonableness we see in Payne. Thinking the enemy is ‘irrational’ is a constant source of error.

Too often warfare is seen as a technical phenomenon independent of ‘politics’. NO. Political will, not the art of warfare, determines the quantity of future war and its character. The great wars were rendered great by politics, not military ways and means.

History helps push people to face the extraordinary, which peacetime organisations often struggle to face.

History’s lessons repeat categorically, not in details.

The details of how Rome did many things aren’t relevant to us, but how they handled insurgenices is relevant and so is their overall approach to ends, ways, means. Similarly the Duke of Marlborough is a ‘gold mine’ for DP.

The details of Afghanistan won’t be relevant to us (unless someone goes back!) but more abstract lessons can be learned:

What we can learn from Afghanistan in the 2000s is that foreign intervention on behalf of unpopular politicians whose regime is systematically corrupt will be resented and eventually opposed. [Interventions] were always so likely to fail to achieve positive results at all commensurate with their costs that they ought to have been rejected as policy. The US and Allied (re)learning of enduring truths about the tactical countering of insurgency was futile, because success with COIN requires a permissive political context in order to empower sensible strategy enabled by high tactical expertise and competence. Defence planners will not be better educated for their duty by means of mastery of the techniques of COIN in Helmand Province in the late 2000s, but they should be able to learn from the evidence of that experience why, and therefore when, COIN would be likely to work well enough in the future.

Similarly CG believes we can learn from arms control. He says he foolishly believed it and its details were important earlier in his career.

Happily or otherwise, belatedly I came to understand that the entire edifice of arms control — official bureaucracies, negotiating processes, diplomatic activity, and even creative intellectual effort — was at worst a charade, or at best relatively unimportant political theatre.

CG says that Churchill was right to say ‘when you have peace you will have disarmament’. Not all arms control is pointless but it’s ‘a largely decorative appendix to the serious business of statecraft and strategy’.

Weapons neither make war nor keep the peace, rather it is human beings with their politics that do both, inter alia with their military instruments.

Five domains:

• Land

• Sea

• Air

• Electro-magnetic

• Space

Before 1900, just the first 2.

From strategic history we ought to be able to learn why some armies fight harder than do others, why military training tends to be rewarded by advantage in combat, why some armies are able to adjust their culture in order to adapt to novel challenges, and why others cannot.

CH5 Political process and defence planning

There are four types of player:

1. Politicians

2. Soldiers

3. Historians

4. Defence analysts

CG places the strategist outside these categories.

The four are job descriptions, strategist is a ‘functional label’.

Strategy is so inclusive a concept that strategist is endangered as a distinctive species. If we all attempt to think and behave strategically, which is at least a partial truth, the consequence is that strategy fails to be recognised as necessary thought and behaviour. Since the ubiquity of functionally strategic behaviour is matched fully by its difficulty of competent achievement, it is not very surprising that the honour roll of great strategist is so sparsely peopled…

There is an essential unity to the subject of defence planning that is not well reflected in the thoughts and behaviour of those who undertake its study and advise about it…

A fundamental problem, possibly even the fundamental problem, is that although the concept and real-world function of strategy is a logical unity in its trinitarian neatness, in practice it need not be so.

Even if you have great government competence, you still have enemy action, chance, and friction to contend with.

In 1907-14 and 1939, the British decision to send a force to Europe ‘betrayed a noteworthy disconnect between British statecraft and British military planning’ and in neither case did the political decision rest upon careful strategic or military planning. In both the army was ‘not remotely ready’ for what in was asked to do. But none of the participants in either war prepared adequately.

Failure on strategy is normal.

1. You never know if your DP is right.

2. Political players are always contending for power.

3. DP is inherently political, the political gains/losses will usually be more important than the DP issues, and politics may well be dominated by people ‘less than deeply concerned’ about DP.

4. There’s inherent uncertainty about how much defence to buy.

Often states settle on metrics that are not the product of careful thought.

Thucydides ‘fear, honour, interest’ tells us ‘all we need to know’ about the motives that fuel political processes behind DP. E.g Schelling and Kahn discuss nuclear strategy but their theories about commitment and reputation are ‘honour’.

It seems inherently hard to bring together political thinking about ends with military thinking on strategy and DP. Fusing political and military power has sometimes worked but also often been disastrous.

Because war is a political act, civilian authority should always be superior to military experience… Defence planning … has to engage with the whole field encompassed by the perilously inclusive concept of grand strategy.

The military must be subordinate and responsible to civilian authority. The military will often rightly complain that the politicians don’t understand military advice, but similarly the military will often not grasp the political context.

The threat or action of military force is not predictable in its political sonsequences, the ‘currency conversion’ is nonlinear.

Prudence is the most appropriate quality needed in statecraft and its DP.

The lingua franca of defence planning has to be money, not strategy.

It’s much easier to discuss money than strategy with all its unknowns!

Grand strategy is the master concept.

Put ENDS WAYS MEANS on the wall of planners.

Security is a meaningless idea without value for defence planning for two fundamental reasons: it is inherently subjective and is without boundaries… It is normative, discretionary, can be highly emotional and it consumes its own contexts… [T]he width and depth of its popularity provides more than a hint concerning its impracticability.

Clausewitz defined tactics and strategy:

Tactics teaches the use of armed forces in the engagement; strategy, the use of engagements for the object of the war.

People don’t stick to these definitions and get confused.

It is something of a mystery why the terms [strategy, tactics] continue to be grossly abused… It is remarkable how resistant many defence profressionals are to accepting the admirably clear meaning with high utility, of Clausewitz’s distinction. [!!]

Cf. 7 Deadly Scenarios, Krepinevich. Soldiers of Reason, Arbella. The evolution of operational art, van Creveld. Manstein, Melvin (von Manstein is often described as the greatest (German) general of WW2).

CH6 Guidance for DP

The choice of policy and strategy is usually much more important than choice of operations and tactics.

CG stresses again — we can’t know the unknowable, and this puts severe limits on how science and maths can help us.

Political responsibility cannot be delegated to technically proficient cognoscenti… [T] the issues of strategy most significant for future national security are decided by the political will, even the mood, of the domestic stakeholders. There is large scope for quantitative analysis of defence issues, but that analysis can only be relevant once politics and its policy and strategy have decided on the course of the community’s effort…

There is simply too much that will prove consequentially unpredictable that is important in the competitive dynamics of warfare for a decision to fight to be other than a roll of the dice.

Combat models can be useful but human will and accidents can render them of little value.

DP is largely dominated by problems involving anticipation of political behaviour by people who may not be open to rational or responsible strategic argument.

Even if some near miracle of forecasting science, social science, and art could reveal basic facts about future strategic history, the nature of war and the character of its warfare must frustrate a search for understanding with reliably predictive quality.

Again: largely true, but…

1. What’s ‘unknowable’ is also unknowable and changes over time!

2. Things are not just ‘knowable or unknowable’. We can have different degrees of confidence. What’s ‘reliably predictive quality’ depends on details. E.g Is ‘will the Tories win a majority in 2019?’ knowable or unknowable? It obviously isn’t knowable in the sense of ‘certain’ but there are reliable methods that constrain the uncertainty of such questions. What is ‘reliable’ depends on details. You can certainly determine all sorts of critical political questions with ‘enough’ reliability for practical questions, such as ‘which are the marginal seats/states [UK/USA] we should focus resources on’. But what’s ‘reliable’ when it comes to all-out nuclear war is different.

3. Over time science and maths change our view of what is knowable/unknowable and our confidence in the frontier between the two. E.g we have tools, unknown 10,000 or 50 years ago, and which will improve, to measure ephemeral qualities like ‘will to fight’.

4. ‘Technically proficient cognoscenti’ cannot be given crucial political responsibility but a) they can help far more than they now do and b) I think it will be easier to train a subset of ‘technically proficient cognoscenti’ to understand politics than to find the few people great at politics and train them to be ‘technically proficient’. What’s really needed is an ‘Odyssean’ integration of skills, someone who has read Thucydides and can understand quant models.

5. The fact that war is ‘a roll of the dice’ means that we must push the frontiers of how new tools can limit uncertainty, not just say in despair ‘war is carried on in the dark’ (Thucydides). It is and always will be but it can be partly illuminated.

Defence analysts are not competent professionally to choose the political purposes that should be translatable into the goals of strategy that may enable them… War is not about what can be done, no matter how competently, but rather about the consequences of violent action.

The public owns the forces, their deeds, and the consequences.

There is no sound basis for doubting the prudence in the assumption that nuclear forces, able to survive surprise attack and intended to deter, have critically unique political and strategic advantage.

Example of a crown jewel of defence planning: British homeland air defence pre-1940. Fighter Command was smaller than desirable and acquired the Spitfire and radar later than it might but it proved ‘good enough when the test came’.

CG is rightly critical of the way some in the defence community elevated economic analysis and methods, including game theory, to a dominant position. E.g Charles Hitch and some around RAND. The McNamara Whizz Kids, which I’ve described before, mis-applied business methods to Vietnam and DP, and actually set back procurement practice in the name of ‘efficiency’.

Public discussion of defence involves money and is ‘apt to be exceptionally misleading’.

Re calculating nuclear deterrence:

The advocates of large scale nuclear reduction have no plausible idea just how little might prove sufficient to provide the strategic effect required for deterrence in the future. If risk management is a high priority desideratum for defence planning, unverifiable claims for the strategic benefit of a substantial scale of nuclear disarmament merit sceptical examination.

Cf. Lessons from RAND’s work on planning under uncertainty for national security, 2012.

CH7 Between Prudence and Paranoia

Four crucial concepts:

1. Risk

2. Threat, e.g Chinese navy viz Taiwan operations

3. Danger

4. Shock, e.g Sputnik, nukes in Cuba, 9/11

Re shock:

The beginning of prudence … needs to be acceptance as a reliable assumption that the events will be entirely unexpected by socially and politically accepted expert assessment.

DP must define enemies, even though we know guesses may prove false.

We will rightly always look for trends and rightly infer that much about tomorrow will stay the same and constantly be suprised by nonlinearities when it isn’t.

P202ff has a summary of the lessons from the book, I won’t reproduce it as these notes are a summary too.

Re the 2010 UK Government ‘National Security Strategy’, he writes that ‘the “Strategy” in the document’s title [is] more aspirational than methodologically rigorous and robust.

Cf. Calculating Credibility, Press.

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