sorcerer
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The Road to "Unrestricted Warfare"
In the linear conception of history - which remains the dominant conception in the discipline of military history - the idea of "major wars" is usually associated with one particular period: the Clausewitzian era, i.e. the period from the levee en masse of Valmy (1792) to the dropping of the absolute weapon at Hiroshima (1945).
For this period, the master narrative of Western military historians is that of a gradual process of escalation, in which societal mobilization (from the French revolution on), coupled with industrial mobilization (from the U.S. Civil War on), eventually combine to produce the Total Wars of the twentieth-century in which the military and civilian spheres become blurred. In Hegelian parlance, the underlying philosophy of history of the Valmy-to-Hiroshima narrative is that of a gradual historical realization, in the form of Total War, of the concept of Absolute War elaborated by Clausewitz (1780-1831).
In the field of military history, this "Road to Total War" from Napoleon to Hitler is fairly straightforward, and has been well-traveled by scholars, particularly in the past two decades. The post-Hiroshima era, by contrast, does not easily fit in a single master narrative. To the extent that one major theme has dominated the 1945-1989 period, it is that of the waning of Major Wars and the proliferation of Small Wars. And in truth, in the second half of the twentieth-century, major inter-state wars have become the exception (even among non-nuclear powers) while intra- state wars have become the norm - whether in the form of revolutionary, ethnic, religious, or criminal/resource wars. But this Major Wars/Small Wars narrative is in fact only half of the storyat best.
There is another possible narrative, one that diplomatic history has failed to fully articulate to date: the mutation of kinetic Total War into non-kinetic Total Strategy in the second half of the 20th century. The first part of this narrative - from the birth of the National Security State of the Truman era to the Total Cold War of the Eisenhower era – is by now reasonably well- known. By contrast, the second part - the so-called "Second Cold War" of the Reagan era –remains accessible only in a fragmentary manner, mostly though the accounts of insiders. Yet, as formalized in NSDD-75, Reagan's grand strategy was in fact the prefiguation of Unrestricted Warfare - with American Characteristics. To make a long story short:
In the aftermath of the Great War, as Western strategists began to analyze in earnest the different aspects of the total war they had just experienced, the concepts of "economic
warfare," "psychological warfare," and "political warfare" began to enter the lexicon of strategy. In revisionist powers like Germany, the shared goal was to find a more effective way to win a repeat of the Great War. Hence the theory of an offensive Total War developed by General Ludendorff, in which policy ends up being subordinated to strategy, and War itself is seen as "the highest expression of the racial will to life."
In status quo powers like Britain, by contrast, the goal was to win a "better peace" while avoiding a repeat of the destructiveness associated by many with the Clausewitzian ideology in vogue during the Great War. Hence Liddell Hart's systematic re-evaluation, at every level (tactical, operational, strategic), of an "Indirect Approach" which eventually led him to formulate his concept of Grand Strategy. Like Ludendorff's Total War, Liddell Hart's Grand Strategy leads to a blurring of the distinction between wartime and peacetime; but the two conceptions radically differ in that, in Grand Strategy, the military dimension proper only plays a supporting role in what will later become known as the DIME spectrum (diplomacy, military, information , economy).
Overrated during the interwar era, Liddell Hart's reputation suffered an eclipse after WWII for reasons having to do with both theory, history and policy. Theory: unlike Clausewitz, Liddell Hart never offered a systematic treatise on Grand Strategy. His theory remained sketchy, and scattered in a series of books published mostly between 1929 and 1954. History: his theses on the "indirect approach" rests too much on dubious historical claims regarding an alleged "British way in war" – which historians have only been too happy to demolish. Policy: to this day,Liddell Hart is best remembered for his advocacy of "appeasement" in the late 1930s - even though, upon closer scrutiny, his theoretical work itself can be said to anticipate Georges Kennan's "containment."
After WWII, Western officials will stay away altogether from the concept of "grand strategy" and adopt instead the more nebulous concept of "national security strategy." With the advent of the first hydrogen bomb (1952) and for the next decade, the official strategic debate in the West will focus quasi-exclusively on nuclear strategy and will quickly become an exercise in strategic theology.
Meanwhile, Liddell Hart will go on to arguing that an "indirect" grand strategy is now more than ever a matter of necessity: "The H-bomb, even in its trial explosions, has done more than anything else to make it plain that "total war" as a method and "victory" as a war aim are out of date concepts (p.xviii). The common assumption that atomic power has cancelled out strategy [other than in the form of deterrence] is ill-founded and misleading. By carrying destructiveness to a "suicidal" extreme, atomic power is stimulating and accelerating a reversion to the indirect methods that are the essence of strategy."
But his book on Strategy (1954) will only devote a few pages to the subject of Grand Strategy, on the ground that "to deal adequately with this wider subject would require not only a much larger volume, but a separate volume – for while grand strategy should control strategy, its principles often run counter to those which prevail in the field of strategy." (p.353). By the time of the revised edition (1967), his interest in the Indirect Approach has shifted from the national- strategic level (grand strategy) to the theater-strategic level (guerrilla warfare).
In 1963, French General Andre Beaufre, the main disciple of Liddell Hart on the Continent, will try to bring greater theoretical rigor by re-framing Grand Strategy in terms of Total Strategy (in an explicit opposition to Ludendorff's Total War). While Beaufre's book is too dense to be done full justice here, two things are worth noting here:
First, his distinction between "interior maneuver" (the Area of Operations proper) and "exterior maneuver" (mostly, strategic communication on the world stage) anticipates today's distinction between "battlefield" and "battlesphere."
Second, long before Stefan Possony published the blueprint for technological warfare that will constitute the core of the Reagan strategy in the Second Cold War, Beaufre presciently remarked: "a new form of strategy is developing in peacetime; a strategy of which the phrase 'arms race' used prior to the old great conflicts is hardly more than a faint reflection. There are no battles in this strategy; each side is merely trying to outdo in performance the equipment of the other. It has been termed 'logistic strategy'. Its tactics are industrial, technical, and financial. It is a form of indirect attrition; instead of destroying enemy resources, its object is to make them obsolete, thereby forcing on him an enormous expenditure...A silent and apparently peaceful war is therefore in progress, but it could well be a war which of itself could be decisive."
Though not without merits, Beaufre's work was definitely "too French" for American audiences. The closest thing to an American version of Total Strategy is to be found in The New Frontiersof War: Political Warfare, Present and Future, a book published in 1962 and co-authored by the most improbable odd couple: Colonel William Kintner, a West Point graduate and Omaha Beach veteran, and Joseph Z. Kornfeder, a founding member of the Communist Party of America and aformer representative of the Comintern. In retrospect, the book both captures well the spirit of the Total Cold War of the Einsehower era and, at the same time, anticipates Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui's Unrestricted Warfare by a generation:
"'The new frontiers of war' defines political warfare as a form of conflict between states in which a protagonist nation seeks to impose its will upon its opponents without the direct use of armed force...Political warfare has been defined as consisting of diplomacy, international commerce, information, and other civilian activities, governmental as well as non-governmental, as well as military action....The higher frequency and intensity of present-day actions call for new descriptive labels. Let us therefore substitute new terms: for diplomacy, political action; for commerce, economic warfare; for information, psychological warfare. And let us extend the term "military action" beyond its traditional scope to include intervention to aid foreign governments and populations, and guerrilla and partisan warfare."
Kintner's book never got the attention it deserves, for two reasons. On the one hand, in the aftermath of the Cuban missile crisis, American strategists became less interested in grand strategy than in its opposite: crisis management. (McNamara: "Today, there is no longer any such thing as strategy; there is only crisis management"). On the other hand, with the ongoing escalation in Vietnam, grand strategy took a back-seat to something more urgent: counterinsurgency.
In IR theory, meanwhile, due to the victory of the "numerates" (social scientists) over the "literates" (historians) in the 1970s, classical realism - and its attention to statecraft - gave way to a mechanistic structural realism in which, by definition, there was no room for a concept like "grand strategy." Despite the meritorious efforts of British historian Paul Kennedy (Liddell Hart's former assistant), the study of grand strategy will be relegated to the margins of both international relations theory and diplomatic history.
Then came the "Second Cold War" of the Reagan era, and with it, a grand strategic shift from Containment to Rollback
By 1979, the conventional wisdom in the West was that the Soviet Union was on the offensive, and America in terminal decline; by 1989, it was the Soviet Union's turn to be in terminal decline, and the U.S. to be in the position of "lone remaining superpower." Even more than the Eisenhower era, the Reagan era's Second Cold War deserved to be called a Total Cold War. Surprisingly enough, though, there is still not a single book-length, strategic study of this grand strategic "surge" formalized by NSDD-75.
In part, this absence is due to the fact that the Second Cold War was waged essentially covertly, and that some elements remain classified to this day. For the most part, though, it is due to the academic world's tendency to give excessive credit to Gorbachev, and to see in Reagan nothing more than a Hollywood actor "sleepwalking through history." Thus, in their account of the end of the Cold War, most historians have focused on the role of Gorbachev (i.e. from 1985 on), and neglected Reagan's role during his first term (1981-1985). To put it differently: by defining the Second Cold War as the period between 1979 and 1985, academics have managed to give the impression there was no causal relation between the Rollback strategy of Reagan and the end of the Cold War itself.
The truth is that, even as Reagan warmed up to Gorbachev, the grand strategy devised during the early 1980s by Bill Clark (NSC), Bill Casey (CIA), and Cap Weinberger (DOD) continued to produce effects at the working level long after the departure from the scene of these policy principals. The debate over the Second Cold War Even is further muddied by an endless debate opposing those, on the Right, who argue that the hard power surge (SDI in particular) were the decisive factors, and those, on the Left, who credit the soft power surge made possible by the "third basket" of the Helsinki Accords. In truth, while both the military build-up and democracy promotion constituted important pillars, the core of the Reagan strategy was an elaborate economic warfare a outrance ranging from restricting technology transfers to Russia, to enlisting third parties to keep oil prices artificially low so as to deprive Moscow of hard currency earnings.
From a functional standpoint, Reagan's grand strategy ranged from patent warfare to petro- warfare, and from low-intensity warfare to "theological warfare" (through the weaponization of religion in both Poland and Afghanistan). From a geopolitical standpoint, Reagan's strategy went beyond rolling back Soviet gains in Central America, undermining Soviet control of Eastern Europe, and forcing Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan: with the help of China, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, Reagan's strategy included a campaign of subversion within the Muslim republics of the USSR, which hastened the demise of the Soviet empire. Last but not least, Reagan's combination of ways and means not only ran along the whole DIME spectrum (diplomacy, information, military, economy) at the horizontal level, but also from IGOs (NATO, COCOM, IEA) to NGOs (NED, AFL-CIO, Solidarnosc) at the vertical level. In short, the Reagan Rollback offensive was a prefiguration of Unrestricted Warfare. But there was a flaw.
Though from a formal standpoint, Reagan's total strategy was extremely sophisticated, wide- ranging, and terribly effective, the downside of this "unrestricted war" was the absence of any cost-benefit analysis, leading to what can only be described, in retrospect, as a Pyrrhic victory. Domestically, America, once the world's main creditor nation, had become by 1986 the main debtor nation. Internationally, America's empowerment of China and of the Muslim world (particularly Pakistan and Saudi Arabia) against Soviet Russia created unexpected consequences that we are still living with thirty years later.
As military strategist John Arquilla recently pointed out, since Pakistan "served as a haven for the rebels resisting Russian occupation of Afghanistan, Reagan was unwilling to pressure the ruling Pakistani military dictator to forgo his efforts to develop such deadly [nuclear] weapons. The consequences of this error have resonated in ever more troubling ways, as an illicit proliferation network originating in Pakistan has played a powerful role in the secret struggles of North Korea, Iran, and even the al Qaeda terror organization to acquire weapons of mass destruction of their own."
In addition to this blind spot concerning WMD proliferation, the Reagan administration gave a blank check to U.S. armed forces for a post-Vietnam conventional rebuilding and, Arquilla argues, neglected the then-emerging problem of counterterrorism: "For the most part, these funds were spent preparing for a cataclysmic conventional war in the heart of Europe that was never more than a remote possibility, while at the same time terror was emerging as a form of warfare in its own right. And when some members of Reagan's team urged a retooling of the military to launch a commando-style preventive war on terrorism – more than twenty years ago – they were loudly shouted down by traditionalists." In short, the Reagan administration was instrumental in creating the Sino-Islamic nexus identified by Samuel Huntington a decade later (more on that later).
For two reasons, Reagan's grand strategy (engineered mostly by the intelligence community) failed to register with either the academic or military community. From 1979 on, the interest of IR academics massively shifted from policy-making to theory-building, and structural realism ("the science of Realpolitik without politics") became hegemonic in the field until the end of the Cold War. Around 1979 as well, a freshly-defeated, but newly-professionalized, U.S. military decided that the job of the professional soldier was to focus exclusively on conventional tactical and operational matters and, drawing the wrong lessons from Vietnam, took refuge in Clausewitzology - the science of War without strategy.
With the end of the Cold War, the concept of strategy and, a fortiori, that of "grand strategy," became even more neglected in both academic and military circles.
On the military side, as Carl Builder remarked in the mid-nineties: "With the end of the Cold War and the political constraints imposed by the risks of nuclear confrontation, one might have expected a renaissance in strategic thinking in the American military. It hasn't happened. Both the Persian Gulf War and Bosnian conflict have been approached mostly in operational and tactical terms....Strategic thinking by the American military appears to have gone into hiding... Three decades ago, strategic thought burnt bright in the sanctuary of the national security temple. And for three decades prior to that—back to the 1930s—strategic theorizing dominated military debates in this country....If the operational thinking of our military is secure and without peer, and if tactical thinking has come to the fore, strategic thought has been all but abandoned. The difficulty lies in seeing the strategic side of national security increasingly as the province of politicians and diplomats while the operational and tactical sides belong to the military, free from civilian meddling...."
On the academic side, meanwhile, noted scholars like Richard Betts began to wonder out loud whether – given the declining strategic literacy of Western elites, the diminishing fungibility of military force, and the increasing nonlinearity of war itself - strategy as such had become an "illusion."debates in this country....If the operational thinking of our military is secure and without peer, and if tactical thinking has come to the fore, strategic thought has been all but abandoned. The difficulty lies in seeing the strategic side of national security increasingly as the province of politicians and diplomats while the operational and tactical sides belong to the military, free from civilian meddling...."
On the academic side, meanwhile, noted scholars like Richard Betts began to wonder out loud whether – given the declining strategic literacy of Western elites, the diminishing fungibility of military force, and the increasing nonlinearity of war itself - strategy as such had become an "illusion.") As a result, the academic subfield of "strategic studies" dissolved into an amorphous "security studies" and, in the process, not only did the concept of "grand strategy" altogether disappear, but the concept of "national security" itself dissolved into the nebulous (UN- and EU-sponsored) concept of "human security." As for War itself, it was increasinglytreated, in civilian circles, as a subset of "risk management."
In the post-cold War era, in fairness, neither the academic nor the military world had any (monetary) incentive to invest intellectual efforts in grand strategy. For academics, research
money from the major foundations was available only to those willing to wax lyrical about "global governance" and/or "human security" – the very negation of grand strategy. Within the military, against the backdrop of drastic budget cuts, the official strategic debate was quickly reduced to a "Clausewitz vs. Computers" faux debat pitting the manpower-intensive Army and Marine Corps against the platform-centric Navy and Air Force. Except for a few fundamentalists convinced of the "inerrancy" of Vom Kriege, most U.S.
military intellectuals were by then aware of the increasing inadequacy of the Clausewitzian straight-jacket but, given the rhetorical self-intoxication of the supporters of a Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA), the old Prussian looked like a lesser evil. At the Naval War College, influential professor Michael Handel, in a well-meaning attempt to reconcile Clausewitz and Sun-Tzu, the Western and Eastern tradition, did not hesitate to push the interpretative envelope and to highlight the "complementarity" between the two authors: Sun-Tzu approached war from the standpoint of grand strategy, while Clausewitz was mostly concerned with sub-strategic matters.
Despite his meritorious efforts to salvage Clausewitz, Handel was forced to reluctantly conclude:
"Sun Tzu's comprehensive framework for the analysis of strategy and war is much more relevant to our own time than that of Clausewitz." On the eve of 9/11, Handel could only express the hope to see the emergence of a "unified theory of war" – that very unified theory the absence of which General Barno would lament a decade later. Meanwhile, while keeping an eye on the ongoing American Revolution in Military Affairs, the Chinese military was busy rediscovering its own strategic tradition and, in the process, elaborating something bigger: a Revolution in Strategic Affairs. As a result, the academic subfield of "strategic studies" dissolved into an amorphous "security studies" and, in the process, not only did the concept of "grand strategy" altogether disappear, but the concept of "national security" itself dissolved into the nebulous (UN- and EU-sponsored) concept of "human security." As for War itself, it was increasingly treated, in civilian circles, as a subset of "risk management."
In the post-cold War era, in fairness, neither the academic nor the military world had any (monetary) incentive to invest intellectual efforts in grand strategy. For academics, research
money from the major foundations was available only to those willing to wax lyrical about "global governance" and/or "human security" – the very negation of grand strategy. Within the military, against the backdrop of drastic budget cuts, the official strategic debate was quickly reduced to a "Clausewitz vs. Computers" faux debat pitting the manpower-intensive Army and Marine Corps against the platform-centric Navy and Air Force.
Except for a few fundamentalists convinced of the "inerrancy" of Vom Kriege, most U.S. military intellectuals were by then aware of the increasing inadequacy of the Clausewitzian
straight-jacket but, given the rhetorical self-intoxication of the supporters of a Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA), the old Prussian looked like a lesser evil. At the Naval War College,
influential professor Michael Handel, in a well-meaning attempt to reconcile Clausewitz and Sun-Tzu, the Western and Eastern tradition, did not hesitate to push the interpretative envelope and to highlight the "complementarity" between the two authors: Sun-Tzu approached war from the standpoint of grand strategy, while Clausewitz was mostly concerned with sub-strategic matters.
Despite his meritorious efforts to salvage Clausewitz, Handel was forced to reluctantly conclude: "Sun Tzu's comprehensive framework for the analysis of strategy and war is much more relevantto our own time than that of Clausewitz." On the eve of 9/11, Handel could only express the hope to see the emergence of a "unified theory of war" – that very unified theory the absence of which General Barno would lament a decade later. Meanwhile, while keeping an eye on the ongoing American Revolution in Military Affairs, the Chinese military was busy rediscovering its own strategic tradition and, in the process,elaborating something bigger: a Revolution in Strategic Affairs.
=========
I wonder : Is our India's TOT and Make in India campaign counter to the Logistic Strategy which could be employed by a foe or foe in disguise?
Obama is doing the OIL PRICE game same as did by his former Reagan. Its all in the game!!
In the linear conception of history - which remains the dominant conception in the discipline of military history - the idea of "major wars" is usually associated with one particular period: the Clausewitzian era, i.e. the period from the levee en masse of Valmy (1792) to the dropping of the absolute weapon at Hiroshima (1945).
For this period, the master narrative of Western military historians is that of a gradual process of escalation, in which societal mobilization (from the French revolution on), coupled with industrial mobilization (from the U.S. Civil War on), eventually combine to produce the Total Wars of the twentieth-century in which the military and civilian spheres become blurred. In Hegelian parlance, the underlying philosophy of history of the Valmy-to-Hiroshima narrative is that of a gradual historical realization, in the form of Total War, of the concept of Absolute War elaborated by Clausewitz (1780-1831).
In the field of military history, this "Road to Total War" from Napoleon to Hitler is fairly straightforward, and has been well-traveled by scholars, particularly in the past two decades. The post-Hiroshima era, by contrast, does not easily fit in a single master narrative. To the extent that one major theme has dominated the 1945-1989 period, it is that of the waning of Major Wars and the proliferation of Small Wars. And in truth, in the second half of the twentieth-century, major inter-state wars have become the exception (even among non-nuclear powers) while intra- state wars have become the norm - whether in the form of revolutionary, ethnic, religious, or criminal/resource wars. But this Major Wars/Small Wars narrative is in fact only half of the storyat best.
There is another possible narrative, one that diplomatic history has failed to fully articulate to date: the mutation of kinetic Total War into non-kinetic Total Strategy in the second half of the 20th century. The first part of this narrative - from the birth of the National Security State of the Truman era to the Total Cold War of the Eisenhower era – is by now reasonably well- known. By contrast, the second part - the so-called "Second Cold War" of the Reagan era –remains accessible only in a fragmentary manner, mostly though the accounts of insiders. Yet, as formalized in NSDD-75, Reagan's grand strategy was in fact the prefiguation of Unrestricted Warfare - with American Characteristics. To make a long story short:
In the aftermath of the Great War, as Western strategists began to analyze in earnest the different aspects of the total war they had just experienced, the concepts of "economic
warfare," "psychological warfare," and "political warfare" began to enter the lexicon of strategy. In revisionist powers like Germany, the shared goal was to find a more effective way to win a repeat of the Great War. Hence the theory of an offensive Total War developed by General Ludendorff, in which policy ends up being subordinated to strategy, and War itself is seen as "the highest expression of the racial will to life."
In status quo powers like Britain, by contrast, the goal was to win a "better peace" while avoiding a repeat of the destructiveness associated by many with the Clausewitzian ideology in vogue during the Great War. Hence Liddell Hart's systematic re-evaluation, at every level (tactical, operational, strategic), of an "Indirect Approach" which eventually led him to formulate his concept of Grand Strategy. Like Ludendorff's Total War, Liddell Hart's Grand Strategy leads to a blurring of the distinction between wartime and peacetime; but the two conceptions radically differ in that, in Grand Strategy, the military dimension proper only plays a supporting role in what will later become known as the DIME spectrum (diplomacy, military, information , economy).
Overrated during the interwar era, Liddell Hart's reputation suffered an eclipse after WWII for reasons having to do with both theory, history and policy. Theory: unlike Clausewitz, Liddell Hart never offered a systematic treatise on Grand Strategy. His theory remained sketchy, and scattered in a series of books published mostly between 1929 and 1954. History: his theses on the "indirect approach" rests too much on dubious historical claims regarding an alleged "British way in war" – which historians have only been too happy to demolish. Policy: to this day,Liddell Hart is best remembered for his advocacy of "appeasement" in the late 1930s - even though, upon closer scrutiny, his theoretical work itself can be said to anticipate Georges Kennan's "containment."
After WWII, Western officials will stay away altogether from the concept of "grand strategy" and adopt instead the more nebulous concept of "national security strategy." With the advent of the first hydrogen bomb (1952) and for the next decade, the official strategic debate in the West will focus quasi-exclusively on nuclear strategy and will quickly become an exercise in strategic theology.
Meanwhile, Liddell Hart will go on to arguing that an "indirect" grand strategy is now more than ever a matter of necessity: "The H-bomb, even in its trial explosions, has done more than anything else to make it plain that "total war" as a method and "victory" as a war aim are out of date concepts (p.xviii). The common assumption that atomic power has cancelled out strategy [other than in the form of deterrence] is ill-founded and misleading. By carrying destructiveness to a "suicidal" extreme, atomic power is stimulating and accelerating a reversion to the indirect methods that are the essence of strategy."
But his book on Strategy (1954) will only devote a few pages to the subject of Grand Strategy, on the ground that "to deal adequately with this wider subject would require not only a much larger volume, but a separate volume – for while grand strategy should control strategy, its principles often run counter to those which prevail in the field of strategy." (p.353). By the time of the revised edition (1967), his interest in the Indirect Approach has shifted from the national- strategic level (grand strategy) to the theater-strategic level (guerrilla warfare).
In 1963, French General Andre Beaufre, the main disciple of Liddell Hart on the Continent, will try to bring greater theoretical rigor by re-framing Grand Strategy in terms of Total Strategy (in an explicit opposition to Ludendorff's Total War). While Beaufre's book is too dense to be done full justice here, two things are worth noting here:
First, his distinction between "interior maneuver" (the Area of Operations proper) and "exterior maneuver" (mostly, strategic communication on the world stage) anticipates today's distinction between "battlefield" and "battlesphere."
Second, long before Stefan Possony published the blueprint for technological warfare that will constitute the core of the Reagan strategy in the Second Cold War, Beaufre presciently remarked: "a new form of strategy is developing in peacetime; a strategy of which the phrase 'arms race' used prior to the old great conflicts is hardly more than a faint reflection. There are no battles in this strategy; each side is merely trying to outdo in performance the equipment of the other. It has been termed 'logistic strategy'. Its tactics are industrial, technical, and financial. It is a form of indirect attrition; instead of destroying enemy resources, its object is to make them obsolete, thereby forcing on him an enormous expenditure...A silent and apparently peaceful war is therefore in progress, but it could well be a war which of itself could be decisive."
Though not without merits, Beaufre's work was definitely "too French" for American audiences. The closest thing to an American version of Total Strategy is to be found in The New Frontiersof War: Political Warfare, Present and Future, a book published in 1962 and co-authored by the most improbable odd couple: Colonel William Kintner, a West Point graduate and Omaha Beach veteran, and Joseph Z. Kornfeder, a founding member of the Communist Party of America and aformer representative of the Comintern. In retrospect, the book both captures well the spirit of the Total Cold War of the Einsehower era and, at the same time, anticipates Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui's Unrestricted Warfare by a generation:
"'The new frontiers of war' defines political warfare as a form of conflict between states in which a protagonist nation seeks to impose its will upon its opponents without the direct use of armed force...Political warfare has been defined as consisting of diplomacy, international commerce, information, and other civilian activities, governmental as well as non-governmental, as well as military action....The higher frequency and intensity of present-day actions call for new descriptive labels. Let us therefore substitute new terms: for diplomacy, political action; for commerce, economic warfare; for information, psychological warfare. And let us extend the term "military action" beyond its traditional scope to include intervention to aid foreign governments and populations, and guerrilla and partisan warfare."
Kintner's book never got the attention it deserves, for two reasons. On the one hand, in the aftermath of the Cuban missile crisis, American strategists became less interested in grand strategy than in its opposite: crisis management. (McNamara: "Today, there is no longer any such thing as strategy; there is only crisis management"). On the other hand, with the ongoing escalation in Vietnam, grand strategy took a back-seat to something more urgent: counterinsurgency.
In IR theory, meanwhile, due to the victory of the "numerates" (social scientists) over the "literates" (historians) in the 1970s, classical realism - and its attention to statecraft - gave way to a mechanistic structural realism in which, by definition, there was no room for a concept like "grand strategy." Despite the meritorious efforts of British historian Paul Kennedy (Liddell Hart's former assistant), the study of grand strategy will be relegated to the margins of both international relations theory and diplomatic history.
Then came the "Second Cold War" of the Reagan era, and with it, a grand strategic shift from Containment to Rollback
By 1979, the conventional wisdom in the West was that the Soviet Union was on the offensive, and America in terminal decline; by 1989, it was the Soviet Union's turn to be in terminal decline, and the U.S. to be in the position of "lone remaining superpower." Even more than the Eisenhower era, the Reagan era's Second Cold War deserved to be called a Total Cold War. Surprisingly enough, though, there is still not a single book-length, strategic study of this grand strategic "surge" formalized by NSDD-75.
In part, this absence is due to the fact that the Second Cold War was waged essentially covertly, and that some elements remain classified to this day. For the most part, though, it is due to the academic world's tendency to give excessive credit to Gorbachev, and to see in Reagan nothing more than a Hollywood actor "sleepwalking through history." Thus, in their account of the end of the Cold War, most historians have focused on the role of Gorbachev (i.e. from 1985 on), and neglected Reagan's role during his first term (1981-1985). To put it differently: by defining the Second Cold War as the period between 1979 and 1985, academics have managed to give the impression there was no causal relation between the Rollback strategy of Reagan and the end of the Cold War itself.
The truth is that, even as Reagan warmed up to Gorbachev, the grand strategy devised during the early 1980s by Bill Clark (NSC), Bill Casey (CIA), and Cap Weinberger (DOD) continued to produce effects at the working level long after the departure from the scene of these policy principals. The debate over the Second Cold War Even is further muddied by an endless debate opposing those, on the Right, who argue that the hard power surge (SDI in particular) were the decisive factors, and those, on the Left, who credit the soft power surge made possible by the "third basket" of the Helsinki Accords. In truth, while both the military build-up and democracy promotion constituted important pillars, the core of the Reagan strategy was an elaborate economic warfare a outrance ranging from restricting technology transfers to Russia, to enlisting third parties to keep oil prices artificially low so as to deprive Moscow of hard currency earnings.
From a functional standpoint, Reagan's grand strategy ranged from patent warfare to petro- warfare, and from low-intensity warfare to "theological warfare" (through the weaponization of religion in both Poland and Afghanistan). From a geopolitical standpoint, Reagan's strategy went beyond rolling back Soviet gains in Central America, undermining Soviet control of Eastern Europe, and forcing Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan: with the help of China, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, Reagan's strategy included a campaign of subversion within the Muslim republics of the USSR, which hastened the demise of the Soviet empire. Last but not least, Reagan's combination of ways and means not only ran along the whole DIME spectrum (diplomacy, information, military, economy) at the horizontal level, but also from IGOs (NATO, COCOM, IEA) to NGOs (NED, AFL-CIO, Solidarnosc) at the vertical level. In short, the Reagan Rollback offensive was a prefiguration of Unrestricted Warfare. But there was a flaw.
Though from a formal standpoint, Reagan's total strategy was extremely sophisticated, wide- ranging, and terribly effective, the downside of this "unrestricted war" was the absence of any cost-benefit analysis, leading to what can only be described, in retrospect, as a Pyrrhic victory. Domestically, America, once the world's main creditor nation, had become by 1986 the main debtor nation. Internationally, America's empowerment of China and of the Muslim world (particularly Pakistan and Saudi Arabia) against Soviet Russia created unexpected consequences that we are still living with thirty years later.
As military strategist John Arquilla recently pointed out, since Pakistan "served as a haven for the rebels resisting Russian occupation of Afghanistan, Reagan was unwilling to pressure the ruling Pakistani military dictator to forgo his efforts to develop such deadly [nuclear] weapons. The consequences of this error have resonated in ever more troubling ways, as an illicit proliferation network originating in Pakistan has played a powerful role in the secret struggles of North Korea, Iran, and even the al Qaeda terror organization to acquire weapons of mass destruction of their own."
In addition to this blind spot concerning WMD proliferation, the Reagan administration gave a blank check to U.S. armed forces for a post-Vietnam conventional rebuilding and, Arquilla argues, neglected the then-emerging problem of counterterrorism: "For the most part, these funds were spent preparing for a cataclysmic conventional war in the heart of Europe that was never more than a remote possibility, while at the same time terror was emerging as a form of warfare in its own right. And when some members of Reagan's team urged a retooling of the military to launch a commando-style preventive war on terrorism – more than twenty years ago – they were loudly shouted down by traditionalists." In short, the Reagan administration was instrumental in creating the Sino-Islamic nexus identified by Samuel Huntington a decade later (more on that later).
For two reasons, Reagan's grand strategy (engineered mostly by the intelligence community) failed to register with either the academic or military community. From 1979 on, the interest of IR academics massively shifted from policy-making to theory-building, and structural realism ("the science of Realpolitik without politics") became hegemonic in the field until the end of the Cold War. Around 1979 as well, a freshly-defeated, but newly-professionalized, U.S. military decided that the job of the professional soldier was to focus exclusively on conventional tactical and operational matters and, drawing the wrong lessons from Vietnam, took refuge in Clausewitzology - the science of War without strategy.
With the end of the Cold War, the concept of strategy and, a fortiori, that of "grand strategy," became even more neglected in both academic and military circles.
On the military side, as Carl Builder remarked in the mid-nineties: "With the end of the Cold War and the political constraints imposed by the risks of nuclear confrontation, one might have expected a renaissance in strategic thinking in the American military. It hasn't happened. Both the Persian Gulf War and Bosnian conflict have been approached mostly in operational and tactical terms....Strategic thinking by the American military appears to have gone into hiding... Three decades ago, strategic thought burnt bright in the sanctuary of the national security temple. And for three decades prior to that—back to the 1930s—strategic theorizing dominated military debates in this country....If the operational thinking of our military is secure and without peer, and if tactical thinking has come to the fore, strategic thought has been all but abandoned. The difficulty lies in seeing the strategic side of national security increasingly as the province of politicians and diplomats while the operational and tactical sides belong to the military, free from civilian meddling...."
On the academic side, meanwhile, noted scholars like Richard Betts began to wonder out loud whether – given the declining strategic literacy of Western elites, the diminishing fungibility of military force, and the increasing nonlinearity of war itself - strategy as such had become an "illusion."debates in this country....If the operational thinking of our military is secure and without peer, and if tactical thinking has come to the fore, strategic thought has been all but abandoned. The difficulty lies in seeing the strategic side of national security increasingly as the province of politicians and diplomats while the operational and tactical sides belong to the military, free from civilian meddling...."
On the academic side, meanwhile, noted scholars like Richard Betts began to wonder out loud whether – given the declining strategic literacy of Western elites, the diminishing fungibility of military force, and the increasing nonlinearity of war itself - strategy as such had become an "illusion.") As a result, the academic subfield of "strategic studies" dissolved into an amorphous "security studies" and, in the process, not only did the concept of "grand strategy" altogether disappear, but the concept of "national security" itself dissolved into the nebulous (UN- and EU-sponsored) concept of "human security." As for War itself, it was increasinglytreated, in civilian circles, as a subset of "risk management."
In the post-cold War era, in fairness, neither the academic nor the military world had any (monetary) incentive to invest intellectual efforts in grand strategy. For academics, research
money from the major foundations was available only to those willing to wax lyrical about "global governance" and/or "human security" – the very negation of grand strategy. Within the military, against the backdrop of drastic budget cuts, the official strategic debate was quickly reduced to a "Clausewitz vs. Computers" faux debat pitting the manpower-intensive Army and Marine Corps against the platform-centric Navy and Air Force. Except for a few fundamentalists convinced of the "inerrancy" of Vom Kriege, most U.S.
military intellectuals were by then aware of the increasing inadequacy of the Clausewitzian straight-jacket but, given the rhetorical self-intoxication of the supporters of a Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA), the old Prussian looked like a lesser evil. At the Naval War College, influential professor Michael Handel, in a well-meaning attempt to reconcile Clausewitz and Sun-Tzu, the Western and Eastern tradition, did not hesitate to push the interpretative envelope and to highlight the "complementarity" between the two authors: Sun-Tzu approached war from the standpoint of grand strategy, while Clausewitz was mostly concerned with sub-strategic matters.
Despite his meritorious efforts to salvage Clausewitz, Handel was forced to reluctantly conclude:
"Sun Tzu's comprehensive framework for the analysis of strategy and war is much more relevant to our own time than that of Clausewitz." On the eve of 9/11, Handel could only express the hope to see the emergence of a "unified theory of war" – that very unified theory the absence of which General Barno would lament a decade later. Meanwhile, while keeping an eye on the ongoing American Revolution in Military Affairs, the Chinese military was busy rediscovering its own strategic tradition and, in the process, elaborating something bigger: a Revolution in Strategic Affairs. As a result, the academic subfield of "strategic studies" dissolved into an amorphous "security studies" and, in the process, not only did the concept of "grand strategy" altogether disappear, but the concept of "national security" itself dissolved into the nebulous (UN- and EU-sponsored) concept of "human security." As for War itself, it was increasingly treated, in civilian circles, as a subset of "risk management."
In the post-cold War era, in fairness, neither the academic nor the military world had any (monetary) incentive to invest intellectual efforts in grand strategy. For academics, research
money from the major foundations was available only to those willing to wax lyrical about "global governance" and/or "human security" – the very negation of grand strategy. Within the military, against the backdrop of drastic budget cuts, the official strategic debate was quickly reduced to a "Clausewitz vs. Computers" faux debat pitting the manpower-intensive Army and Marine Corps against the platform-centric Navy and Air Force.
Except for a few fundamentalists convinced of the "inerrancy" of Vom Kriege, most U.S. military intellectuals were by then aware of the increasing inadequacy of the Clausewitzian
straight-jacket but, given the rhetorical self-intoxication of the supporters of a Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA), the old Prussian looked like a lesser evil. At the Naval War College,
influential professor Michael Handel, in a well-meaning attempt to reconcile Clausewitz and Sun-Tzu, the Western and Eastern tradition, did not hesitate to push the interpretative envelope and to highlight the "complementarity" between the two authors: Sun-Tzu approached war from the standpoint of grand strategy, while Clausewitz was mostly concerned with sub-strategic matters.
Despite his meritorious efforts to salvage Clausewitz, Handel was forced to reluctantly conclude: "Sun Tzu's comprehensive framework for the analysis of strategy and war is much more relevantto our own time than that of Clausewitz." On the eve of 9/11, Handel could only express the hope to see the emergence of a "unified theory of war" – that very unified theory the absence of which General Barno would lament a decade later. Meanwhile, while keeping an eye on the ongoing American Revolution in Military Affairs, the Chinese military was busy rediscovering its own strategic tradition and, in the process,elaborating something bigger: a Revolution in Strategic Affairs.
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I wonder : Is our India's TOT and Make in India campaign counter to the Logistic Strategy which could be employed by a foe or foe in disguise?
Obama is doing the OIL PRICE game same as did by his former Reagan. Its all in the game!!
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