Strategy (42 page)

The perplexing situation in which American forces found themselves resulted in a resurgence of thinking about counterinsurgency, led by officers frustrated by the institutional barriers that had been set up to deny the relevance of irregular forms of warfare.
Military Review
, the house journal of the Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth, barely covered the issue before 2004. Soon it was averaging about five articles on the topic per issue.
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The old classics of guerrilla warfare—from T. E. Lawrence to David Galula—began to be rediscovered. Officers with a knowledge of past counterinsurgency practice (for example, John Nagl) began to advise on their application to Iraq.
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David Kilcullen, an Australian officer on loan to the U.S. military, became one of the first postcolonial counterinsurgency theorists, updating the more timeless lessons by incorporating the efforts by al-Qaeda and like-minded groups to establish a form of global insurgency that ignored national boundaries. Kilcullen explored the extent to which ordinary people turned into “accidental guerrillas” less because of their support of extremist ideologies than their resentment at foreign interference in their affairs. To prevent al-Qaeda turning itself into a global insurgency, it had to be disaggregated into separate, manageable pieces. To prevent it prospering within the information environment, the counterinsurgents needed to recognize this to be as important as the physical environment.
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The leader of the new counterinsurgency effort was General David Petraeus. He noted the problems that had arisen because the United States had become embroiled in a war for which it had not prepared, and he stressed the political dimension of the problem, emphasizing that it was not just a matter of military technique. “Counterinsurgency strategies must also include, above all, efforts to establish a political environment that helps reduce support for the insurgents and undermines the attraction of whatever ideology they may espouse.”
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At the start of 2007, when the United States appeared to be on the brink of abandoning Iraq to civil war, President Bush decided on one last push. Petraeus was put in charge of what became known as the “surge,” although this overstated the importance of numbers as opposed to a new strategy.
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Over the course of the year, there were definite signs of improvement, and this came to be seen as a turning point in the
conflict in terms of mitigating the push to civil war if not meeting the early American aspirations of turning Iraq into a liberal democracy.

The improvement was not so much the result of extra troops and the intelligence with which they were deployed, although these were important, but more due to the extent to which the Iraqis turned away from the logic of civil war, notably with a strong reaction among the Sunnis to the brutality of al-Qaeda. As the number of attacks on Shiite sites declined, there was less excuse for revenge attacks on Sunnis. Using American military strength to reinforce these trends required a more subtle approach to Iraqi politics than simply handing responsibility for security back to the Iraqi government as soon as possible, whether or not they were able to cope. This meant that the Americans were working with the grain of Iraqi politics rather than against it.

To what extent did the experience of the 2000s represent a trend or a set of unusual circumstances, unlikely to be repeated? For those who took the former view, there was a theoretical framework that had some credibility because it could easily accommodate international terrorism. It came under the broad heading of “fourth-generation warfare.” Like the RMA, this framework had parentage in in OODA loops and maneuver warfare, but it had taken a quite different turn, away from regular war.
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Its origins lay in an article by a group led by William Lind, a follower of Boyd and energetic reformer.
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According to this scheme, the first three generations had developed in response to each other (line and column, massed firepower, and then blitzkrieg). The new generation began in the moral and cognitive spheres, where even physically strong entities could be victims of shock, disorientation, and loss of confidence and coherence. This principle was then applied to society as a whole. In the fourth generation, attacks would be directed at the sources of social cohesion, including shared norms and values, economic management, and institutional structures. This was a move from the artificial operational level to a form of upside-down grand strategy, bringing in questions of rival ideologies and ways of life, and forms of conflict that might not actually involve much fighting.

With cataclysmic great power clashes apparently things of the past, the idea that new wars were wholly to be found in and around weak states persisted. A growing amount of international business appeared to involve states suffering from internal wars.
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The engagement of Western powers in these
conflicts was, however, considered discretionary (they were often described as “wars of choice”) and undertaken on a humanitarian basis to relieve distress. Though they raised issues outside of military operations, such as economic reconstruction and state-building, they had only a loose fit with the fourth-generation theory. If anything, they were distractions to the more tough-minded of the fourth-generation theorists.

Although the RMA shared the same origins, it could only point to a singular form of regular warfare, which was unlikely to be fought because it suited the United States. Fourth-generation warfare, on the other hand, pointed to almost everything else, which is why there were so many versions of the theory. One strand, most associated with Lind, focused on an eating away of American national identity as a result of unconstrained immigration and multiculturalism. He argued this was less a reflection of social trends and more the result of a deliberate project by “cultural Marxists.” Cultural damage appeared as the product of deliberate and hostile moves, by enemies aided and abetted by naïve and wrong-thinking elements at home, rather than of broader and more diffuse social trends or economic imperatives. Another, more influential strand, most associated with Marine Colonel Thomas X. Hammes, concentrated on irregular war, especially the forms of terrorism and insurgency which caused the United States such grief during the 2000s.
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There were five core themes in the fourth-generation literature. First, it followed Boyd's focus on the moral and cognitive domains as where wars are won or lost. Second, there was a conviction that the Pentagon was mistaken in its focus on high-technology, short wars. Third, tendencies toward globalization and networks were presented as blurring established boundaries between war and peace, civilian and military, order and chaos. War could not be contained in either time or space. It spanned the “spectrum of human activity” and was “politically, socially (rather than technically) networked and protracted in duration.” Fourth, the enemies were not easy to find or pin down. Chuck Spinney, another former associate of Boyd, described the fourth-generation warriors as presenting

few, if any, important targets vulnerable to conventional attack, and their followers are usually much more willing to fight and die for their causes. They seldom wear uniforms and may be difficult to distinguish from the general population. They are also far less hampered by convention and more likely to seek new and innovative means to achieve their objectives.
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Fifth, because these conflicts were played out in the moral and cognitive domains, any military action must be considered as a form of communication.
Lind argued in the original formulation: “Psychological operations may become the dominant operational and strategic weapon in the form of media/information intervention.”
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As a coherent theory it soon evaporated, not only because of the different strands but also because it depended on a historical schema which did not work. War had never been solely based on regular battle, supposedly at the center of the three previous generations. Moreover, even virtuosos of irregular warfare, such as T. E. Lawrence and Mao Zedong, still accepted that only regular forces could seize state power. The fact that there might be a number of groups relying on irregular forms, from terrorism to insurgency, was a function of their weakness rather than a unique insight into the impact of new technologies and socioeconomic structures in the modern world. There was also a tendency to assume that unwelcome developments had one guiding cause.

In a similar vein, Ralph Peters argued that Western forces must prepare to face “warriors,” whom he characterized colorfully as “erratic primitives of shifting allegiances, habituated to violence, with no stake in civil order.” He described their approach to war in terms familiar to students of guerrilla warfare. They only stood and fought when they had an overwhelming advantage. “Instead they snipe, ambush, mislead, and betray, attempting to fool the constrained soldiers confronting them into alienating the local population or allies, while otherwise hunkering down and trying to outlast the organized military forces pitted against them.”
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This overstated the problem. Some might enjoy fighting for its own sake, but the most fearsome warriors were likely to be fighting for a cause or a way of life they held dear. The performance of guerrilla bands, militias, and popular armies was mixed to say the least.

A key element in the discussion of asymmetric warfare focused on what were unhelpfully known as “information operations.” The term was unhelpful because it referred to a series of related but distinctive activities, some concerned with the flow of information and others with its content. Its potential range was indicated by an official U.S. publication, which asserted as a goal achieving and maintaining “information superiority for the U.S. and its allies.” This required an ability “to influence, disrupt, corrupt, or usurp adversarial human and automated decision-making while protecting our own.” The mix of the automated and the human was reflected in references
to electronic warfare and computer networks as well psychological operations and deception.
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All this reflected two distinct strands. The first was the traditional concern with changing the perceptions of others, and the second was the impact of digitized information.

When information was a scarce commodity it could be considered in similar ways as other vital commodities, such as fuel and food. Acquiring and protecting high-quality information made it possible to stay ahead of opponents and competitors. Such information might include intellectual property, sensitive financial data, and the plans and capabilities of government agencies and private corporations. This provided intelligence agencies with their raison d'être. While Clausewitz may have dismissed the importance of intelligence, it came to be of increasing value as improved means were found to gather information that opponents intended to keep secret. At first this depended on spies, and then the ability to break codes. As telegraphic communications came into use, their interception could provide evidence on enemy locations as well as messages. Breaking German signal codes during the Second World War gave the Allies a valuable advantage in a number of encounters. Then came the ability to take photographs from the air and later from space. It became progressively harder to stop opponents from picking up vital details about military systems and dispositions.

As more information began to be digitized—so that it became simpler to generate, transmit, collect, and store—and communications became instantaneous, the challenges became those of plenty rather than scarcity. There were large amounts of material that could be accessed, both openly and illicitly. Outsiders sought to hack their way through passwords and firewalls to acquire sensitive material, steal identities, or misappropriate funds. Another challenge was maintaining the integrity of information despite attempted disruption or tampering via the insidious forms of digital penetration known as viruses, worms, trojan horses, and logic bombs, which were often launched from distant servers for no obvious purpose—though there was sometimes a clear and malign intent. The bulk of this activity was criminal and fraudulent, but there were examples of large-scale downloading of government and corporate secrets by state-funded hackers, attacks that closed down governmental systems, mysterious viruses that affected weapons development programs, and damaged software that meant military equipment failed to work properly. Might an army of software wizards use insidious electronic means to dislocate the support systems of modern societies, such as transport, banking, and public health?

There was no doubt that attacks could cause inconvenience and irritation, and on occasion make a real difference. In the midst of operations, the
military might find air defense systems disabled, missiles sent off-course, local commanders left in the dark, and senior commanders confused as their screens went blank. If they had bought in to the idea that fast-flowing data streams could eliminate the fog of war, they could be in for a rude shock. Even without enemy interference, a fog could be caused by a superfluity of information—too much to filter, evaluate, and digest—rather than the paucity of the past. Certainly the new information environment posed problems to governments in terms of what they could hope to control and their efforts to influence the news agenda. Ordinary people could spread images with cell phone photos and news, often inaccurate and half-digested, could spread on social networking sites, while governments were still trying to work out what was going on and shape a response.
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Did this amount to the danger identified by John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt in 1993, when they warned that “Cyberwar is Coming!”
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Their claim was that future wars would revolve around knowledge. They distinguished between “cyberwar,” which they limited to military systems (although it became expanded in later use) and “netwar,” which was more at the societal level. The issue was the same as for any new form of warfare: could it be decisive on its own? Or, as Steve Metz put it, could a “politically usable way” be found to damage an “enemy's national or commercial infrastructure” sufficiently “to attain victory without having to first defeat fielded military forces?”
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