Cliff, thanks trying to penetrate my thick seawater soaked brain!

I’ll try to give some specific responses as I get the chance. Some general philosophical differences we seem to be having:

The “why wouldn’t you want” argument. Your interpretation of Warden seems to be “given Warden might be right, why wouldn’t you want that to be the case”? This is a an increasing spillover from political debate to defense debate that I find very troubling. If you didn’t have to “choose 2” between quick, cheap and effective why wouldn’t you? Well because there are these things called the Laws of Physics and Economics… I don’t want to minimize your good arguments by painting them with that broad brush, but a warning from the school of hard knocks

The “if it’s necessary, why not aim for sufficient”? A variation on the above that I think is at the heart of what many find off-putting to Warden’s arguments. For a Navy guy I’m considered almost an airpower heretic. I have probably read more Airpower doctrine and concepts than I’ve read Navy doctrine and concepts (of course there is so much MORE of it…shame on my Navy brethren for their paucity of operational thought…). I have some rather radical notions of Air-Sea Battle that get at changing how we think about “Fleet Power” (or more broadly to the Air-Sea partnership “Expeditionary power”). I just don’t see what the problem is that makes “airpower is necessary AND sufficient to achieve strategic ends” a desirable goal?

Definition of “strategy”. I have a copy of Military Strategy by Wylie on my desk. I find it the most personally influential single source on the subject. Its purpose is stated as :

“One purpose of this book is to try and demonstrate that it is possible to study warfare, and be both fundamental and practical about it, without dissecting a battle or counting bullets or tracing the route of the nth division on a large scale map. What is necessary is that the whole of the thin, all of war, be studied. The fragments of war, the minor parts of strategy, the details of tactics are quite literally infinite. We know from the hard experiences of the physical and social sciences that if the parts are not ordered in some prior way, are not held up to some broad concept, all we can do is remain the prisoner of raw data.”
So I am receptive to the notion of transcending ‘battle’ as a concept but leery of Wardens desire to “replace it” with some as yet undisclosed ‘vocabulary”. This could just be semantics, but there is a difference to between eliminating the notion of battle, and getting beyond it to understand concepts at a higher level of abstraction.

Wylies preferred definition of Strategy is:

"A plan of action designed in order to achieve some end; a purpose together with a system of measures for its accomplishment”.
Note that it places ends first, and “war” and “means” do not appear in this definition. Also, as someone previously stated, it is something that transcends the purview of the military.

So two issues of definition: First is the apparent assumption Warden makes that the airpower strategist should formulate the ends. This is argued from a “why wouldn’t you want” point of view rather than acknowledging that at least some, if not most of the time, the desired end state is given to the military strategist by politicians, war being the “extension of politics by other means”. So there is an implied control over the end state in Wardens definition of strategy that is desireable but unrealistic.

Second, while Warden argues that means should be left out of the discussion, the fact that “airpower” is invoked implies means. It seems he wants to have it both ways, he wants strategy to be elevated beyond means to the realm of ideas, just so long as those are AIRPOWER relate ideas.

He almost makes the reduction absurdum jump, but pauses at the brink in his historical discussion about unlimited mobility changing the nature of land power and battles. Lets replace “airpower” with “transporterpower”. Taken to the extreme his argument appears to be that the ultimate form of strategy would be to think in terms of “beaming effector things instantly wherever you wanted”.

When you want to compel an adversary to do your bidding, you analyze his “system” you create a set of exactly appropriate “effectors” and you simultaneously “beam” them into precise locations in his system to so that the adversary is compelled to do what you say. If your method of compulsion is to “collapse his system” then that would be possible. The problem is, as we saw in Iraq, does “collapsing his system” actual get you to a desirable end state? If you only partially collapse the system, how do you know that your “pulse of power” is going to exceed the tipping point of coercion and not just piss the adversary off and cause an undesired vertical or horizontal escalation? This gets to teh unrealistic assumptions behind the "parallel is always cheaper" argument - a problme of not knowing what you don't know, not of "well 5 is cheaper than 6 is cheapre than 9". How do know to pick 5 for your only pulse of power?Where is the “theory of action” that actually links the “transport plan” to desirable strategic end states other than “collapse” or “paralysis”?


The “what alternative do we have” argument. Thanks for pointing out I grabbed an old JP 3-0. The newer one brings up the idea of “design”. I knew there are many that think the ideas of design are implicit in good operational art. I tend to agree, but to the extent it helps folks understand good operational art, the design metaphor has value as an alternative to overpromising on the limits of planning.

I would say to those who say “he doesn’t really mean to be as wedded to prediction and determinism as you make it sound”; if that is true than he should avoid making statements like: “It also opens another very exciting possibility: conflict with little or no unplanned destruction or shedding of blood.”

Positing that as a “possibility” is only possible if one assumes a level of predictability about the future that is known to be unattainable.

More later...