Quote Originally Posted by William F. Owen View Post
a.)
The distinction I am attempting to make is that a useful description of warfare should account for what is attempting to be done, and how, versus purely technical description of the environment. Perhaps not usefully and perhaps I should think it through a bit more!

Thanks for that, although I have an inkling (no more perhaps) that the onus of responsibility for ignorance lies entirely with me. I think, in a nutshell, the distinction I was tryingto make was between politics and war as its continuation. Hence ‘who and where’ approximates to the political requirements as set down by a political authority/government (i.e., “Grand Strategy”/foreign policy) whereas ‘ways and means’ refers to the strategic goals thus defined (i.e., how to effectuate the desired suasion/destruction of a given enemy). For example, Bush’s National Security Strategy of 2002 defined the “who and where” which the military sought to bring about by deciding how (‘ways and means’). (At least this is what I was taught at Uni; perhaps therein lies the rub).

This is what I think I was getting at; in that defining the ‘who and where’ as non-traditional/conventional (whatever) threats NSS served simply to steer the military on the path toward new ‘ways and means’ of engaging with “new” target sets (who and where). Hence the drivers of the obsession with RMA/NCW/EBO was not so much a military (ways and means) issue but a political one (‘who and where’). OTOH, is this essentially a question of doctrine (i.e, Theoria vs. Phronesis)? By that I mean is it a case that the theoretical (doctrinal) ‘ways and means’ of, say, NCW was really about institutional ‘pork barrel’ politics and the military trying to protect its interests as opposed to the practical ‘ways and means’ of getting the job done with the tools in hand which didn’t require new doctrine just the innovative use of existing systems (rather than the innovative justification of existing systems and the acquisition of even more exotic ones)?

When ‘who and where’ was defined as regime A or state B the ‘ways and means’ of bringing about national goals could be comfortably framed in a ‘conventional’ mindset. Once political authorities became obsessed with the idea that the 11th September 2001 was the harbinger of a new kind of warfare then the military followed suite with trying to reinvent the wheel of ‘ways and means’ by trying to adopt a ‘non-conventional mindset’ to what was essentially still a practical military issue of destroying a given enemy. Of course, if by ‘ways and means’ you mean that the goal of the military is to ‘find, fix, and kill’ the enemy by whatever means necessary/available then we are in ‘violent agreement’. I do believe that I have now confused myself (!).

Nonetheless, as I stated before I think the issue is not just one of semantics (of us deploying similar language to say different things) but rather of concepts which are mutually exclusive in their use because they mean different things (thus we are using different languages, or more properly, vocabularies). Hence my civilian take on things vs. your (experienced) military take on things; IMO this is also the problem between policymaking and strategy which is a circle yet to be squared (‘Bohemian Corporals’ present a different problem altogether).

That’s why SWJ/B/C is a great medium through which civilians like myself can greater acquaint themselves with what war is actually about rather than what the theory says it is. For me that means reading more threads before I dare to write what I think I want to say without actually knowing what it is I am thinking (case in point). Anyway, thanks for the constructive feedback, very much appreciated.