Hybrid Warfare (merged thread)

[slapout9]

Quoth Slap:Practically and semantically, I agree and think most would do so. In the politico-military context though, the issue become who decides the "how." Many moons ago, Lincoln gave Grant the authority to make those decisions; from then forward, however, that has not been the case. In the last 100 plus years in ALL western democracies, the politicians have been very firm in retaining control over the "how" decisions. I doubt that will change and as Coldstreamer says:I agree but history and indications lead me to believe that the Politicians don't know enough, generally do not want to listen to the advice of non-politicians and are prone to make decisions based on domestic political concerns rather than the true geo-political or strategic issues at hand. So I think that's unlikely to change.

I was thinking more at the level of Grand Strategy(national Policy) it should be how we harness our national resources to avoid having to go to war in the first place, If our National Policy fails, somebody tries to stop us from achieving our goals peacfully..... then do as Coldstreamer says draw a line and say this is enough and if need be we will light the big candle. However as you point out practically one should not hold your your breath that this will happen. And yes I was a wild ass Buck Sergeant

[Coldstreamer]

I was thinking more at the level of Grand Strategy(national Policy) it should be how we harness our national resources to avoid having to go to war in the first place, If our National Policy fails, somebody tries to stop us from achieving our goals peacfully..... then do as Coldstreamer says draw a line and say this is enough and if need be we will light the big candle. However as you point out practically one should not hold your your breath that this will happen. And yes I was a wild ass Buck Sergeant

Bang on. Today's problem is a pretty average collection of decisionmakers in the political class of the West. Particularly unfortunate at this juncture of history...Remember the roll call at 9/11...Blair...Bush...Schroeder...Chirac....

Oh God...

[slapout9]

Coldstreamer, I am reminded by a remark John Maynard Keynes made when he was trying to help us out with a little economic problem we were having, sometimes called The Great Depression.

"America Is To Stupid To Be The World Leader" by JMK

[Coldstreamer]

I prefer the phrase 'last best hope'...!

If we were to banter, I'd recall Churchill's famous words
"America can always be trusted to do the right thing...after it has exhausted all alternatives"

..but I prefer the soldiers' maxim - 'lead, follow or get out of the way!'

and I don't see anyone else in the free world picking up the baton.

[slapout9]

I prefer the phrase 'last best hope'...!

If we were to banter, I'd recall Churchill's famous words
"America can always be trusted to do the right thing...after it has exhausted all alternatives"

..but I prefer the soldiers' maxim - 'lead, follow or get out of the way!'

and I don't see anyone else in the free world picking up the baton.

Yes, where is General Eisenhower?

[slapout9]

Ah the good old days when we new what we stood for. Noo-Ku-Lar Combat!


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ynY5NvYsZY

[Steve Blair]

Yes, where is General Eisenhower?

Building another military/industrial complex somewhere, no doubt....

[Tukhachevskii]

In the thread “ Is Irregular Warfare Really "Irregular" Anymore?” William F Owen made the comment that “The important thing is the political objective of the operations, and how to achieve them. Ways and means, not who and where”. I’d like to respond to this here in connection with co-called “hybrid wars” (about which, I too, for what it’s worth, am sceptical if not down right incredulous). Owen states that the political objective of operations is of central importance in military operations (agreed) but that it is “ways and means” not “who and where” that should determine operational planning (disagree). Very often the ways and means is determined by who and where; we would not fight tribal insurgents in Aden the same way we fought Hitler. The end states we fought for, the enemy we were fighting and the operational environment all affected how we fought as much as why. Borrowing from Clausewitz I’d like to make the following observations about so-called hybrid wars following on from the above. According to Clausewitz strategy is something that is framed within the remarkable trinity of People-Government-Army corresponding roughly to Passion-Reason-Violence. The European, or Western, way of warfare as it has historically developed (and this includes the laws of war) relies on a sharp bifurcation between the inside of the trinity (the state) and the outside (the environment composed of other states). In Schmittian terms this corresponds to the definition of friend/enemy. Thus State A fights State B for whatever reason (of state/ raison d’etat); it’s Us against Them. This form of warfare, call it conventional if you will, is predicated upon the assumption of relatively coherent political entities which can distinguish themselves from other entities regardless of the actual political composition of the state in question (thus whether a state is Absolutist, Dictatorial, Democratic, etc is irrelevant). But what I see as a crucial development is that such cosy bifurcations are no longer possible (and this has strategic effects) when the distinction between Them and Us breaks down. For instance, and this is really my point, would our current strategy in Iraq or more pertinently Afghanistan be different if there weren’t large number of Muslims living in NATO countries who can and do affect the policy forming process either passively (through threats of violence) or actively (by supporting left-wing or other parties that espouse policies more favourable to Muslims or by creating “moral panics” among our electorates or even providing intelligence and material support to their co-religionists)? Is our strategy abroad being hamstrung or held hostage by the representatives of the people we are fighting (abroad) at home and who claim the same rights (without fulfilling either the duties or responsibilities underpinning them) as Us and who use these to engage in what Brooke Goldstein calls “lawfare”? As William F. Owen and other qualified observers have noted, what we call hybrid wars, Irregular Wars, etc. aren’t really new phenomena. The British Empire, Russian Empire, the United States in its (dare I say, Imperial phase) of continental expansion all fought “irregular”/”asymmetric”/”whatever” threats. However, these threats did not have constituencies which they could rally to their cause within the political system of their opponents thereby undermining what Carl Schmitt called the will formation of the state (i.e., the government and the people). These, let’s call them, polemically, “fifth columns”, can undermine two legs or two corners of the trinity, the government and the people, by shaping their opinion or, even attacking it (i.e, 7/7 in Britain or Madrid or even the attempt in Britain to shame our brave soldiers returning from war who discover that, actually, our enemies line our streets booing us “over here”). This, I posit, is the real “mess” of Hybrid wars given that our (NATO) states are democracies within which, procedurally at least, minorities can exert political pressure upon politicians whose strategic sense is a long as their nose and who really only care about domestic re-election. This, I would submit is the real, or at least a significant factor, in the new circumstances within which we have to fight not the supposed tactical or operational asymmetries between our forces and those of our opponents. That’s just my penny’s worth, political correctness be damned, but it’s something I’ve been mulling over for a while now.