The Illusion of Peacetime

[Bill Moore]

The following article is important, but it barely touches my concern with our collective illusion of peacetime, where we seek to deter and prepare for war, but fail to develop a strategy for the war we're in. The condition of peace is a relationship between two or more entities, throughout all of history I doubt if peace has ever been a condition that has existed worldwide between all entities. As for the U.S., it has not been at peace in the purest sense in decades (if ever). We have persistently used our military or intelligence services' paramilitaries' (and other means) to impose our will on other entities (state or non-state actor groups), and states and non-state actors have been at war with us.

The character of these wars vary considerably, but it can still be viewed as war. Chinese military theorists in "Unrestricted Warfare" wrote,

This kind of war means that all means will be in readiness, information will be omnipresent, and the battlefield will be everywhere [global]. It means that all weapons and technology can be superimposed at will, it means that all the boundaries lying between the two worlds of war and non-war, of military and non-military [involves more than military means], will be totally destroyed,

Articles on Russia's non-linear warfare argue that battles are only part of a larger strategy, they are rarely intended to be decisive in themselves. Not surprising, the U.S. being excessively influenced by Clausewitz's view of war and the center of gravity in "On War" seek victory by capturing an adversary's capital (Baghdad) or attriting the adversary's military so they can no longer resist. In short, we attempt to make battle decisive in all cases, because it fits our view of war. How war is supposed to be. When al-Qaeda and other groups present a situation where our traditional way of war fails to produce desired results we're perplexed. We fell back on colonial era COIN as a potential solution, with some even arguing it isn't war. Those arguing it isn't war can't define war, so it makes calling it something other than war a convenient argument, but one that isn't well supported.

I think we should simply embrace the reality that we're in a persistent state of confrontation, conflict, or war with a few adversaries and develop a strategy to appropriately wage it. That isn't a call to arms in the traditional sense, but a call to synergize all of the elements of national power with a greater degree of seriousness focused on defeating our adversaries. These wars in most cases will be waged differently than our preferred way of war where battle is decisive. Instead, they will be waged largely by shaping, political warfare, legal warfare, netwar, and an occasional requirement for a relative major combat operation.

Our adversaries have developed complex, global strategies to pursue their ends as we see in the South China Sea, Ukraine, and with various non-state actors such as ISIS, al-Qaeda, and Lebanese Hezbollah. To be frank their strategies and their ability to carry them out are quite limited, yet they often seem like they're 10 feet tall because we fail to develop comprehensive strategies to counter them. I suggest one reason we fail to adapt is because we fool ourselves with the illusion we're at peace and not at war.

There’s No Such Thing as Peacetime

http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/03/13/...vil-liberties/

As Dudziak puts it in War Time, “Military conflict has been ongoing for decades, yet public policy rests on the false assumption that it is an aberration. This enables a culture of irresponsibility, as ‘wartime’ serves as an argument and an excuse for national security-related ruptures of the usual legal order. If we abandon the idea that war is confined in time we can see more clearly that our law and politics are not suspended by an exception to the regular order of things.… Wartime has become the only kind of time we have, and therefore is a time within which American politics must function.” She adds, “A cultural framing of wartimes as discrete and temporary occasions, destined to give way to a state of normality, undermines democratic vigilance.”

Much more in the article.

[Majormarginal]

Excellent article. Thanks.

[davidbfpo]

The character of these wars vary considerably, but it can still be viewed as war. Chinese military theorists in "Unrestricted Warfare" wrote...

The discussion on Chinese military theories was awhile ago, there is a 2007 thread where this post appeared and is added for reference:

Unrestricted Warfare was written by two Chinese Colonels in 1999. The CIA translated the text and its been an ongoing area of concerned discussion ever since.

URW doctrine is a means by which a weaker opponent can defeat a stronger opponent through widely distributed attacks across multiple domains (i.e., computer networks, communications, financial markets, media, terrorist acts) and without abiding by any commonly-held rules of engagement.

There have been two symposiums held so far on URW, both organized by Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab and sponsored in part by DARPA and the National Intelligence Council, among others. Here are the links to the original book, as well as the papers presented at each symposium.

Unrestriced Warfare by Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui
Unrestricted Warfare Symposium Proceedings 2006
Unrestricted Warfare Symposium Proceedings 2007

There are many threads with 'unrestricted' in and only a few refer to the Chinese viewpoint.

[Bob's World]

"Political Warfare" "Gray Zone Conflicts" "The Long War" "Unrestricted Warfare" etc., etc., etc.

To what end? To what purpose? What do we possibly gain by allowing those who work within the military profession to convince us to label and think of all forms of competition between powerful organizations with diverse interests as some form of "war"?

Is peace so frightening? I have never seen a nation that is both so desirous of, and at the same time fearful of, peace as is the United States of America. It is an odd dichotomy.

Peace has always been a messy business. Are we still so mentally abused by our experience in Vietnam that we now must insist that every time our national leaders feel the need to employ our military forces in dangerous and violent competition that we must also burden our nation by making each of those situations also a "war" that we therefore must win?

We must not be Pollyannaish about peace, but nor need we fear it. Those who wish too hard for perpetual war may find to their chagrin that prophesies of that nature are all too often self-fulfilling.

Seeing every revolutionary insurgent and insurgent group as some form of "terrorist" has been a strategic disaster for the US over post 9/11 era. To see every state competitor working outside the lines of the rules and policies we have put in place to shape the global competition in our favor promises to produce strategic backlash of an even greater nature.

We have defined an approach to the world that has us in a posture of playing not to lose, while our competitors are all playing to win. We do not need a grand strategy of perpetual warfare, but we do need a grand strategy that defines a game we too can play to win.

[Compost]

Professor Michael Howard covered the subject well in The Invention of Peace, Profile Books, 2000.

[Bill Moore]

Professor Michael Howard covered the subject well in The Invention of Peace, Profile Books, 2000.

Yes he did, and basically said it was an illusion, a condition we attempt to construct via social engineering, but that process itself leads to war. The bottom line is we're not at peace and to pretend that we are can be likened to Chamberlain's willfulness blindness. To treat the lower end of war as strategically as important as the high end of war is a better way to prevent to escalation than pretending we're at peace. The post is intended to be provocative, because I'm searching for a more comprehensive lexicon that can describe the full spectrum of war. As for peace, that is easier (it isn't messy), we're at peace with Canada, we're not at peace with Russia and we're not in all out war with Russia. We're at war with al-Qaeda.

[Bob's World]

America is a nation at peace. Period.

We have interests in competition with a wide range of actors in a wide range of forms. But we are a nation at peace.

This call for perpetual war is far more dangerous than a naïve belief that peace means absence of conflict. If everything is war, then nothing is war.

America's biggest problem is not perpetual war; our biggest problem is that we think being a global leader means being in charge of everything and enforcing a family rules made up by us to facilitate our success.

We need to change our scope. We need to stop leading like the worst 2LT in the battalion who makes rules he is either unable or unwilling to enforce; attempts to exercise control over everything in his domain; delegates nothing; and is constantly telling everyone that he is in charge.

America's problem is not that we are at war with the world, or that the world is at war with us. Our problem is that we don't know how to be America in the world as it actually exists.