Strategy (36 page)

The main threat his group had in mind was the use of American air power. At the time, the government was still trying to avoid using ground forces. But that could not achieve much of direct military value, as the supply lines were hard to disrupt and mass air attacks on civilian populations were considered unacceptable. McNaughton came up with the idea of coercive air strikes with a political purpose, which he described as “progressive squeeze-and-talk,” orchestrating diplomatic communications with graduated military pressure. Even if the United States eventually gave up, it was important to show that it had been “willing to keep promises, be tough, take risks, get bloodied, and hurt the enemy badly.”
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McNaughton was thus trying to find ways of giving the impression of commitment without being truly resolute, of following one course while not closing off others.

At the start of 1965, McNaughton consulted Schelling on exactly how the North could be coerced in these unpromising circumstances. According to one account, the two men wrestled unsatisfactorily with the question of “what could the United States ask the North to stop doing that they would obey, that we would soon know they obeyed, and that they could not simply resume doing after the bombing had ceased.” Kaplan comments, with some satisfaction: “So assured, at times glibly so, when writing about sending signals with force, inflicting pain to make an opponent behave and weaving patterns of communication through tactics of coercive warfare in theory, Tom Schelling, when faced with a real-life ‘limited war,' was stumped, had no idea where to begin.”
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In fact, Schelling was highly skeptical about the likely value of a bombing campaign against the North. He noted the weak diplomacy accompanying the bombing and hoped that there had been private communications to Hanoi of a less ambiguous nature.
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Schelling's reasoning, while suggestive and provocative, could not by itself generate strategies because that required the introduction of levels of complexity that his theoretical structure could not handle.

The new civilian strategists had some influence on the early stages of the U.S. policy regarding Vietnam, but the overriding influence was American military preferences. In some respects, the two came from the same starting point: a focus on techniques and tactics separate from political context.
Counterinsurgency theory, like nuclear strategy, developed as a special body of expertise geared to discussing special sorts of military relationships as if they were special types of war. As discussed, Mao and Giap never saw guerrilla tactics as more than expedients for when they were weak. They did not think they could win a “guerrilla war”—success at this level would allow them to move on to the next stage defined by the familiar clash of regular armies. What they thought was truly distinctive to their type of warfare was the attention paid to political education and propaganda.

Vietnam, a war for which the civilian strategists had not prepared and on which they had relatively little of value to say, marked the end of the “golden age” of strategic studies. Just as the arrival of mutual assured destruction and a period of relative calm took the urgency out of the Cold War, Vietnam “poisoned the academic well.”
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Colin Gray charged the civilian “men of ideas” with being overconfident about the ease with which theory might be transferred to the “world of action.” The prophets had become courtiers, living off their intellectual capital. Their “dual-loyalty” to the needs of problem-oriented officials on the one hand and the disinterested “policy-neutral” standards of scholarship on the other “had tended to produce both irrelevant policy advice and poor scholarship.”
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In response to this criticism, Brodie praised policy engagement and defended the small group of civilian strategists who had accepted the burden of making sense of the new nuclear world, because the military were incapable of doing so. Yet having left RAND in 1966 bemoaning the “astonishing lack of political sense” and ignorance of diplomatic and military history among the engineers and economists, he readily accepted Vietnam as a consequence of these tendencies.
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Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat
.

—Sun Tzu

W
ITH THERE APPARENTLY
being little more to say on nuclear strategy and Vietnam having turned into such a bruising experience, the civilian strategists in the United States withdrew from the field. The think tanks began to dwell more on immediate issues of policy and more technical matters. The civilians had never had much to say about the classic questions of regular warfare, though this was a natural focus for the professional military. It was the one area that had been left relatively untouched by the literature of the 1950s and 1960s due to the preoccupation with the unconventional areas of nuclear and guerrilla warfare.

One exception was a retired French general André Beaufre. Whereas the tendency in the United States was to turn strategy into a series of technical and practical issues, Beaufre's approach was broader and more philosophical. This was reflected in his definition of strategy as “the art of the dialectic of two opposing wills using force to resolve their dispute.”
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This put strategy at the highest level of policy, taking in not just a clash of arms but all possible elements of power. Strategy appeared as the supreme function of the state, requiring choices between different forms of power and their coordinated
employment to ensure that their effects were maximized. Success could be achieved by means other than physical force. The target was the enemy's will to start or continue a fight. Psychological effects were therefore critical.

The dialectic was composed of three interconnecting parts—nuclear, conventional, and cold-war. As a friend of Liddell Hart, Beaufre picked up on the possibilities of an indirect approach but gave it a broader frame, looking to actions in fields other than the military to make an impact. He therefore had a traditional view of conventional warfare as being about a victory but also assumed that in an age of nuclear deterrence this had become less interesting. By contrast, the cold war intrigued him, because it was a new but apparently permanent phenomenon. It was pushing the conflict out into all areas, including the economic and cultural, where the two sides might encounter each other. In this respect, stirring up discontent in colonies or making humanitarian appeals could be part of the same strategy. The risk in this formulation was that events that had quite other causes were explained by this particular “dialectic of opposing wills.”

American readers found Beaufre's philosophical approach, with its Cartesian and Hegelian influences, hard to follow. Bernard Brodie, with his pragmatism and view of strategy as “the pursuit of success in certain types of competitive endeavor,” described himself as uncertain of Beaufre's meaning. Brodie also found it hard to take Beaufre's dismissal of military history and his disinterest in the collection of technical data as a distraction. This went against the “general consensus that awareness of technological and other types of change is a top-level requirement among strategists.”
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Brodie's reaction to Beaufre may help explain the limited attention paid to a contribution by James Wylie. Wylie was an American admiral who wrote a short but lucid guide to contemporary strategy in the 1960s. His approach was compared at the time to Beaufre's.
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James Wylie's
Military Strategy
retains a following, but its impact has been marginal.
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Wylie first began to set down his ideas in the early 1950s, partly as reflections on his Second World War experience. He worked in concert with another admiral, Henry Eccles, whose thoughts followed a similar path. Both of them put questions of power at the heart of their analyses. Both wondered what that meant in terms of an ability to assert “control.” As naval officers in the Mahan tradition, they believed that control was the objective of strategy.

Eccles recognized that the issue of control went beyond the purely military sphere and was both inward and outward. The distinctive sources of power that had to be addressed internally included not only politicians and the public but also logistics and the industrial bases. The external sources, not only adversaries but also allies and neutrals, were even harder to control.
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In these circumstances, control could clearly not be absolute and had to be considered as a matter of degree. Wylie understood strategy as being about ends and means; it was “a purpose together with a some measures for its accomplishment,” and war in terms of competing patterns of activity, in which one side would gain advantage by imposing a pattern on the enemy. This did not require actual battle. It could work through shows of coercive force, which could progressively constrain the enemy.

Wylie's main claim to originality lay in a distinction between two types of strategy. The idea was prompted by a comment from the German-American historian Herbert Rosinski in 1951 distinguishing between “directive” and “cumulative” strategies. Rosinski was certainly aware of Delbrück, and he may well have been thinking about updating the distinction between wars of annihilation and exhaustion. Wylie developed his ideas first in a 1952 article. “It landed with no splash at the time,” he lamented, “and has lain on the deck ever since.”
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He tried again in his book. The distinction he drew was between a linear sequential strategy, tending to the offensive, and a cumulative strategy. A sequential strategy would involve discrete steps, each dependent upon the one before, which together would shape the outcome of the war. This offered the possibility of forcing the enemy to a satisfactory conclusion, but it also required an ability to plan ahead and anticipate the course of a conflict. The risk, of which Wylie was well aware, was that once one step turned out differently, the remainder of the sequence must follow a different pattern likely to lead to less satisfactory outcomes than the one originally sought. By contrast, a cumulative strategy was more defensive. It involved “the less perceptible minute accumulation of little items piling one on top of the other until at some unknown point the mess of accumulated actions may be large enough to be critical.” These items would not be interdependent, so a negative result in one area need not put the whole effort into reverse. This strategy could counter a sequential strategy, denying an enemy control, but it could not offer a quick, decisive result. In practice, Wylie did not consider the two to be exclusive. He did see a cumulative strategy as providing a useful hedge against a bold plan going wrong.
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Although this distinction was potentially richer than others that became more prominent in strategic debate in the United States, it is not hard to explain Wylie's limited influence. The concepts were abstract and did not particularly address the preoccupations of the 1960s. It was well into the 1970s before serious debate revived on regular warfare. By then, the classic questions were ripe for reappraisal. Regular warfare was still the area of greatest military expenditure and effort, and new technologies were starting to challenge established doctrine.

The starting point for the revised interest was one of the most elemental and iconic encounters of contemporary warfare. The aerial dogfight combined the hunt and the chase with advanced technology. Colonel John Boyd, an American fighter pilot with experience going back to the Korean War, wrote the definitive manual on the subject. As he did so he hit upon an insight which he developed into a formula of considerable influence. Boyd began with the premise that the U.S. air force had become too preoccupied with speed. This became apparent during the early stages of the air war over Vietnam when apparently obsolete Soviet-built MiGs were prevailing in dogfights because they were more maneuverable. After an intensive analysis of the competing aircraft, Boyd concluded that the key quality was not absolute speed but agility. In a series of moves during the course of a dogfight, the most responsive fighter would be able to get on to the opponent's tail, ready for the kill.

Boyd summed all this up as the “OODA loop.” OODA stands for observation, orientation, decision, action. The sequence started with observation, as data concerning the environment was collected. This was analyzed in the orientation stage, leading to a decision and then to the execution of an action. The loop became more complex as it developed, especially as Boyd came to appreciate the pervasive importance of orientation. It was a loop because the action changed the environment, which required that the process be repeated. Ideally, the progressive improvement of the orientation and the consequential action would result in getting closer to reality. For the fighter pilot, this brought home the importance of getting to the action part of the loop faster than the opponent. Boyd felt the OODA loop applied to any situation in which it was necessary to keep or gain the initiative. The aim was always to disorient the opponent, who would be unable to grasp a situation developing more quickly than anticipated and in unexpected ways and thus paralyzed into indecision.

Eventually books were written to explain, and in some cases apply, Boyd's theories. He never produced a definitive text of his own. His basic ideas are contained in several hundred slides entitled
Discourse on Winning & Losing
.
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They formed the basis of briefings given over almost two decades to numerous audiences, including most of the senior figures in the American defense establishment. Their impact was accentuated because they were spread by enthusiastic acolytes who shared Boyd's commitment to a combination of
hard cost-benefit analysis and broad strategic vision, as well as disdain for the bureaucrats and careerists who by definition lacked both. In addition, at least at first sight, the OODA loop had a compelling simplicity and sustained the gathering complexity of Boyd's theories. After retiring from the air force, the autodidactic Boyd read widely and moved from his engineering background into mathematical theory and on into history and the social sciences.