War is War

[Ken White]

To some, "war" (and perhaps "armed conflict" - neither defined exactly as I have defined them in two sentences) includes certain basic military principles - whereas warfare (literally, the conduct or journey iinto war) varies over the ages. That is what I glean from Wilf.

I agree with Wilf.

I also read your two links Michael C.. I believe your intellectual arguments are persuasive. Unfortunately, war tends all to often to discount the intellectual aspect. You provided a Sherman quote. Here are two more:

Every attempt to make war easy and safe will result in humiliation and disaster.

War is cruelty. There is no use trying to reform it. The crueler it is, the sooner it will be over.

And here's one from Thomas Jonathan Jackson:

War means fighting. The business of the soldier is to fight. Armies are not called out to dig trenches, to live in camps, but to find the enemy and strike him; to invade his country, and do him all possible damage in the shortest possible time. This will involve great destruction of life and property while it lasts; but such a war will of necessity be of brief continuance, and so would be an economy of life and property in the end.

That is a historical truth. However, as a more modern General said

If you go to war, to do less than your very best is immoral.

And here's a quote from you:

To be clear, the “war is war” crowd isn’t usually allied on their points. It just happens to be a rhetorical device tons of people use about war. I think your first iteration is what most people mean when they say “war is war.

That was said in reference to this: "Is the statement meant to convey that war is essentially violent and thus death is implyed? (sic)"

Yes. True in my case at least. If you do not want violence, do not start wars, avoid them if at all possible. It isn't really sloppy thinking, it is shorthand, it's purpose is only to remind people that in any war, death and destruction, to include unnecessary and unplanned dollops of both, are BOUND to result. That should never be forgotten. It too often is...

P.S.

I normally only use the block quote capability to quote the individual(s) to whom I'm responding and use double quote marks for quotes from others, particularly if I have quotes from more than one other. No matter, here, thanks, David.

[William F. Owen]

I agree with Wilf.

Funny dat!

I use the words to warn folks off disappearing down the dead-end rabbit whole of seeing "new types of war" or assuming there are different kinds of war. There isn't. War is War. Warfare however alters all the time.

There are very many different characters of warfare, but all are essential either a form or blend of regular and irregular.

[Bob's World]

I too believe that war is war, and that it must be executed in its extremes.

Where I differ from most is that I do not believe that COIN is war, but rather a civil emergency and should be addressed as such; perhaps with equal vigor, but with a very different focus. In COIN one is not defeating some other state to preserve one's own; one is repairing the failures of governance to preserve the populace in the longterm, while protecting them from immediate threats in the near term.

Defeating an opponents military while breaking the will of his populace to continue the fight is victory in war.

Defeating an insurgent organization while breaking the will of ones own populace to make a political challenge through illegal means when legal means have been denied to them is tyranny. Such suppression avoids the enduring problem for some period of time as it fails in large part to address the conditons of insurgency that allowed a violent insurgent movement to arise to begin with; making the rise if a new insurgent challenger inevitable.

So yes. "War is War" But all violence is not war, and certainly approaching COIN as war is a common (and U.S. Doctrine), but I believe tragic mistake.

So, if COIN is not war, then FID is not war either, as it is the support of another's COIN effort.

Paradoxically perhaps, I believe that Insurgency often rises to the level of war. For the insurgent he must either make the state evolve or make it go away to prevail; while the counterinsurgent can merely address his shortcomings internally to prevail.

So, if insurgency is often war, then Unconventional warfare to support such insurgency can be war as well.

The state has none of the constraints in dealing with the UW actor that he does in dealing with its insurgent populace, so that can be war, which is straight forward when the UW actor is a state, not so straight forward when the UW actor is a non-state as Al Qaeda is for so many states where they are waging UW today.

More important then to "separate the insurgent from the UW actor" (so that one can deal civilly with one, while waging war against the other); than the tired cliché of "separating the insurgent from the populace." This is the largest problem with the current drone campaign in Pakistan; it makes no such separation and wages war in equal parts against both the insurgent and the UW actor as if they were one. (see thread on Conflation I started a couple days ago for more on that).

[SteveMetz]

I too believe that war is war, and that it must be executed in its extremes.

Where I differ from most is that I do not believe that COIN is war, but rather a civil emergency and should be addressed as such; perhaps with equal vigor, but with a very different focus. In COIN one is not defeating some other state to preserve one's own; one is repairing the failures of governance to preserve the populace in the longterm, while protecting them from immediate threats in the near term.

Defeating an opponents military while breaking the will of his populace to continue the fight is victory in war.

Defeating an insurgent organization while breaking the will of ones own populace to make a political challenge through illegal means when legal means have been denied to them is tyranny. Such suppression avoids the enduring problem for some period of time as it fails in large part to address the conditons of insurgency that allowed a violent insurgent movement to arise to begin with; making the rise if a new insurgent challenger inevitable.

So yes. "War is War" But all violence is not war, and certainly approaching COIN as war is a common (and U.S. Doctrine), but I believe tragic mistake.

So, if COIN is not war, then FID is not war either, as it is the support of another's COIN effort.

Paradoxically perhaps, I believe that Insurgency often rises to the level of war. For the insurgent he must either make the state evolve or make it go away to prevail; while the counterinsurgent can merely address his shortcomings internally to prevail.

So, if insurgency is often war, then Unconventional warfare to support such insurgency can be war as well.

The state has none of the constraints in dealing with the UW actor that he does in dealing with its insurgent populace, so that can be war, which is straight forward when the UW actor is a state, not so straight forward when the UW actor is a non-state as Al Qaeda is for so many states where they are waging UW today.

More important then to "separate the insurgent from the UW actor" (so that one can deal civilly with one, while waging war against the other); than the tired cliché of "separating the insurgent from the populace." This is the largest problem with the current drone campaign in Pakistan; it makes no such separation and wages war in equal parts against both the insurgent and the UW actor as if they were one. (see thread on Conflation I started a couple days ago for more on that).

I've been thinking along the same lines. Here's a framework that I rolled out at a workshop at the National Defense University last week and am developing into a chapter for a forthcoming Routledge Book.

For the US, there are three alternative ways of conceptualizing counterinsurgency: 1) as a variant of war; 2) as a violent competition for political support; 3) as a manifestation of a deeper and broader social pathology.

Which one we use has immense implications for strategy, operations, and organization.

My sense is that we use some blend of #1 and #2, but #3 is probably most accurate.

[Tukhachevskii]

If I'm not mistaken wasn't the phrase "War is War" originally penned by Colin S Gray? He defiend war and warfare as specific activites or some such. I'll try and find an artile of his as I don't immeidately have the reference to hand(I'm sure it's a Strategic Studies Institute product).

[SteveMetz]

Colin often makes that point. His SSI monographs are here.

I'm in the "war is war, but not all use of organized violence is war" school.

[Rex Brynen]

Does it make a difference that the insurgents almost always think of insurgency as war?

[Eden]

I've been thinking lately that what distinguishes "War" from "war" is the alignment between the targets of violence and the objects of the conflict. In conventional wars violence is directed at the warmaking capacity of the enemy regardless of the overall object of the war itself, partly in an effort to insulate civil society from the destructiveness of violence. In less conventional wars, violence is applied directly to the object, and warmaking capacity is often only targeted indirectly.

Examples from opposite ends of the spectrum: The cabinet wars of the eighteenth century, where being placed at a military disadvantage through the loss of a fortress or a battle was often enough reason for one side to give way and settle whatever political, dynastic, or economic dispute led to the military contest; Vietnam, where political opponents of the communists and their supporting populations were targeted directly.

Obviously, because we are speaking of a spectrum here, the examples bleed into each other, and you can always find an exception, but this idea of using violence to directly gain your objectives (rather than indirectly when two militaries clash) seems to me to be a useful analytical tool.

[reed11b]

Your Post

I am not sure if I agree with you, but you have succeeded in causing me to pause and reassess my opinion.
Reed

[Dayuhan]

the dead-end rabbit whole

As opposed to the open-ended half rabbit?

Sorry, couldn't resist that one...

The utility of any 3-word phrase is obviously going to be limited, but I'd have to say that an occasional reminder that "war is war" is a necessary counterweight to the morbidly obese jargon-laced psuedo-intellectual rambling that has become so pervasive in the modern military discourse... unless of course we propose to beat our antagonists into submission with a super-empowered asymmetric 7G post-positivist heuristic.

I wonder if it would be possible to posit a historical proportion between the number of kilos of equipment a soldier carries into combat and the number of superfluous words used by home-front analysts to describe the nature of that combat...

[SteveMetz]

In a few weeks the Strategic Studies Institute will publish our extended report from our spring conference on the meaning of war. I suggest those interested in this topic take a look at it.