The Warden Collection (merged thread)

[pvebber]

But isn't War fundamentally about breaking PHYSICAL systems? Isn't that what it is all about? Like Warden says if you break enough physical systems the enemies will to fight isn't going to matter very much because they will be physically incapable of resisting. After the War is over you can get into transforming or redesigning Systems but that needs to happen in some kind of a peaceful and stable environment.

Ah! Now we see the violence inherent in the system!

Help!

The strategic approach gives us the freedom to consider and mix every conceivable way to change a center of gravity—a bribe, an aerial bomb, a hack, a proxy, a conference, an award, assistance funding, or a thousand other possibilities.

But only one example is a kinetic attack! This is obviously your evil plan, to make me lecture you on Warden and thereby assme the mantle of Wardenista myself. Fiendishly Clever!

War is fundamentally about convincing someone (or multiple people) to do something they don't want to do. There are some exceptions (i.e. Revenge), but in general its either "Give me something" or "stop doing something".

Killing people and breaking things is a way to achieve those ends that Warden suggests we don't have to resort to:

Knowing the strategic objective, we start looking for the means to achieve it. Our choices would range from war defined as bloody and destructive to cajolery of some kind. In the middle of this spectrum, we might find something (currently nameless) that makes it physically impossible for a possessor of something we want to withhold it but involves little or no bloodshed and destruction. To make discussion easier, let’s call this “bloodless force.” If we had this option at a reasonable cost, we would probably choose it in those instances when cajolery failed and when we could not reasonably argue that we should take the bloody war path as a first choice.

and

When we engage in conflict, we should always make our strategic objective the creation of a better peace. Normally, in a better peace the vanquished do not bear such hatred for the victors that another trial becomes inevitable. One way of reducing postconflict enmity involves lessening the suffering and recovery time of the defeated party. Traditional wars have perverse and long-lasting effects, but airpower may someday offer an alternative.

and

The objective of a conflict is to achieve a future picture, not to kill and destroy.

So we have a litany of appeals to "bloodless force" and as some have jokingly proposed "a theory of powerpoint power" (you just have to send the enemy the powerpoint detailing how you are going to dismember him, in parallel, and he will have no choice but to submit )

Yet we have a concept (outcome = physical (simple) X morale (complex))that deals only with physical systems and intentionally divorces "the hard part" because, well, its too hard. You can't bribe, cajol, confer with, give money or power to a physical gizmo.

All you can do is make so it doesn't work, or physically seperate it from the things it needs to work, or work upon. At the end of the day, if you restict yourself to physical systems, you pretty much restrict yourself to breaking them or breaking the connections to other things.

So one has to wonder just how literally Warden means us to take "bloodless"? He talks about airpower being the prefered means because it can "delievery energy with great precision". Yet seems to want to avoid to the extent possible killing people and breaking things. Particularly when he talks about things like:

In a few cases, we may find that just one or two will prove adequate, but in most instances we must affect several in a relatively compressed period of time. Notably, even in a large system such as the United States or China, the number of targets associated with strategic centers of gravity is rather small—considerably fewer than 1,000, more than likely.

If you do paralyze China by taking down their leadership, power and transportation networks (I would be amazed if that was 10,000 targets, let alone 1000, but I'll suspend disbelief , how many people will die from second order effects, even if none are killed in the initial attack? These do not seem to register on the airpower body count. This gets us once again to "nuclear warfare by conventional means" - the destruction of a states ability to function as a penalty for not doing what we want. WHy would such an attack not trigger a nuclear response by a country so equipped?

But, they will not, and they are not going to resent us for it, because everbody starved to death or sickened, rather than get blowed up by a bomb.

Of course if we sent them the powerpoint, they have nbody to blame but themselves