Any discussion of grand strategy must begin with a common understanding of the finer points of the eternal logic for keeping and employing arms. Western political elites responsible for recent defense policy have been sadly innocent of this field of knowledge, believing that new weapons and modern concepts have overturned ancient wisdoms.

Strategy is the central and unique idea that pursues the ends of an intervention by using specific ways and means to exploit the unique characteristics of the given situation. We "appreciate" the particulars of the case, design a "best fit" strategy and tailor the form of the intervention to suit the case. This means we replace the strategic formula with design. As long as other states or groups exist and are capable of advanc- ing hostile agendas by violent means, they will keep arms and the ability to use violence to serve them in four es- sential ways: to deter others from using arms against them; to defend themselves when others attack; to attack others; and to pacify armed internal subgroups. These basic purposes apply to nation- states and alliances of states as well as modern tribes, clans and families when states do not exist or fail to secure their safety and property, as in ancient days. It also applies to stateless political and aiminal movements, as well as to statebased insurgent movements. Success in deterrence, defense, attack and pacification requires a logic unique to each. Knowledge of the finer points of this logic is not widespread among modern Western political elites, judging from recent history. And we have suffered for it.

Deterrence

Military capability-in-being deters others from using force to advance their own hostile ends. The mere existence (without the need to act) of sufficient capabilities can guarantee a status quo and free the state from coercion by the violent threats of others.

The art of deterring is based on understanding only two fundamentals. Deterrence, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. The image he sees must count toward a judgment of deterrence. As difficult as it might be to project the fully deterring image, under the right circumstances such images of a military force-in-being exert the power to influence events as usefully as any other. In fact, a properly constructed deterrent is the most economical use of military capability; a well-designed deterrent is a less costly way to preserve the status quo than to be forced to defend it. In many cases the same military force standing in "uncommitted" readiness can project a deterring image to more than one potential adversary when an active diplomacy prevents collusion among them. In a strategic sense, such forces are hardly uncommitted.

Deterrence is wholly psychological. What matters is the image, not the reality. For example, if Country A can convince its neighbors that it has a terrible weapon which it would unleash if attacked, then it need not actually have it - maintaining the illusion of having it is enough.

The second fundamental of deterrence is that the deterrence value must exceed the threshold of acceptable cost in light of anticipated gain. Humans generally value life and limb, especially their own or those of people they know and care about. Historically, however, political leaders have bargained the lives and limbs of their citizens, up to a point, for ends they value more. Policemen, firemen, airmen, sailors, marines and soldiers risk life and limb daily to do their duty.

It is equally important to appreciate that some people, in some circumstances, simply cannot be deterred. In fact, in some societies individuals willingly sacrifice life and limb because the reward for the sacrificial act itself is greater than the goal for which it is offered. Such attitudes confound the usual logic of deterrence, as with today's Islamic fundamentalist suicide bomber.

In every case, a deterrent has to be tailored specifically to those people who are most likely to decide whether or not to act. The projection of deter- ring images plays an important com- plementary role in all other uses of military force at all levels, from the grand strategies of nation-states to the single combat of armed individuals. For instance, a force could more easily pursue any number of intentions merely by positioning a detachment of force just large enough to check sev- eral options of its opponent. The art, of course, is to know how to project the right image so that it is appropriately recognized and therefore sufficient.

Defense

When deterrence is not enough to check the several options of each of several equally potent dispersed enemy forces, the first fallback is to defend and thus buy time for other options.

Military capability employed defensively is the status quo guarantor of last resort. When deterrence, cornbined with diplomacy and all other peaceful means, fails to preserve the status quo, people will fight others to preserve it. These others who choose to use force rather than peaceful means to change the status quo may be external powers, internal insurgents or a combination of both, as in the Vietnam War.

Like deterrence, defense has its own peculiar logic. While deterrence depends on the adversary's interpretation of an image of potential, what matters in the art of defense is the real potential and how best to bring it to bear in order to defeat the attack.

In general, it is less costly for the defender to retain the status quo than it is for the aggressor to change it. All other things being equal, the defender merely has to cause the attack to fail to achieve its aim. Well-prepared defenses tend to improve the reach, accuracy and protection of weapons and the morale of their operators. Those who defend their home turf usually know the ground better, can find concealed positions and are more likely to surprise their opponents.

During the 20th century, military professionals widely believed and often proved - that tactical military forces defending a position could deny success to a force three times as large if they were equal in quality, composition and leadership. This, of course, is not always true. Small, determined, poorly armed but well-led defenders have held off capable forces exponentially larger than themselves. A relatively poor, small nation without aggressive designs but strong determination can create a strong defense against invasion by combining its geography and its infrastructure of cities, towns, canals, roads, railroads and other man-made obstacles to make military invasion difficult. In addition, its regular forces can specialize in one thing - defense of their homeland. Finally, the defender can create an inexpensive paramilitary "home guard" that complements the regular force by avoiding and hiding from the attacker's strength only to emerge after being bypassed to attack supporting forces and functions, the intent being to avoid losing as long as possible in the hope of a negotiated peace or some other kind of relief.

The challenge and major preoccupation of the defense is to seize the initiative from the attacker and to cause the attack to culminate before it succeeds. Successful defense depends on leveraging inherent advantages: better knowledge of the country; increasing vulnerability of the attacker's logistics and other supporting structures as these extend into the defender's country; the support of the population for regular, paramilitary and irregular defenders; and the greater motivation of fighting for home and family. (Just because a regime is unpopular doesn't mean it can't claim the "home-court advantage" against foreigners.) These advantages, when aimed systematically at eroding the attacker's momentum and constraining his freedom of action, cause the attack to culminate. The problem then is to restore lost towns and territory through counteroffensive action, perhaps with the aid of allies who, by this time, have managed to respond. When this is not possible, counteroffensive action can be begun "underground" by initiating a resistance movement. Early initiation of guerrilla action and subversion in occupied areas can cause the attack to culminate short of victory and then provide leverage to the conventional counteroffensive. This can also establish the basis for a viable insurgency.

This struggle is also a contest of will. Success by either side in the physical clash hardens will. Early losses dishearten the attacker disproportionately because they suggest misjudgments about the defender's potential and cast doubt on other judgments yet to be tested. The defender must capitalize on these.

In the contest of will, evidence of success or failure indicates a trend and foretells the future. Evidence of a coming culmination of the attack short of success emboldens defenders arid depresses attackers. In the contest of will, time is on the side of the defender: The attacker needs to complete his business before the people at home tire of the effort; the defender merely needs to outlast the attacker and deny him his goal.

Ultimately it is the defender, not the attacker, who decides when to end the fighting, and he does so when either of two conditions occur: He has given up hope of success, or the attacker has eliminated all means of resistance. All of these factors combine to support Clausewitz's assertion that defense is the stronger form of war.

Attack

Military forces also fight to change the status quo when persuasion, compensation, bribery and intimidation fail and others choose to defend it by force. This is the purpose of offensive wars, campaigns, battles and even offensive engagements within defensive wars.

Offense has its own peculiar logic as well. For instance, to change the status quo is the most ambitious of all intended uses of military forces, requiring the most preparation, effort, expertise and good luck.

What matters in the art of attack is also real potential and how best to bring it to bear in order to defeat the defense. Once launched into his enterprise, the attacker will test his own potential against the image that failed to deter.

To counter the defense's strengths, the attacker has the advantage of deciding when and where initial engagements will be fought. The defender is obliged to react and either shift and expose reinforcing forces or meet local attacks with inferior forces in prepared positions.

All offensive endeavors - any effort to change the status quo - require a two-armed approach. One arm communicates threats or inducements aimed at the intellect, or will, of the opposing chief decision makers. Such communications - whether through actions, words or images - are intended to shape decisions and elicit desired responses. For best results, the intended recipient must perceive the communication, understand it and interpret it in such a way that the message compels him to act in the way intended by the sender.

Because of the extraordinary difficulty of achieving the desired change in the status quo through this arm alone, the other arm must act to force the desired change in the status quo regardless of the decisions or actions of the opponent. This arm creates new and very relevant facts, sometimes in plain sight, sometimes hidden until a new reality is in place.

The real enemy of the attacker is culmination before ends are achieved. Sound intelligence is vital to the attack: Misjudging the situation is the most frequent cause of premature culmination. While understanding physical systems such as transportation, industrial, financial and communications infrastructures is challenging for modern intelligence, it is relatively easy compared with learning how a complex society will react to attack. The logic of such networks can only be learned through a combination of very intrusive intelligence sources prior to action and purposeful interaction during offensive operations. Even then, it is imperfect.

The single advantage of the offense over the defense is having the initiative to optimize all available potential, but knowing what potential is available and relevant and how to optimize it depends on a sound theory of the situation. Such theories then become the provisional "truth" upon which optimum plans are made and actions taken. The trick is to understand the provisional nature of such truths and revise them as the situation changes and learning takes place, adapting plans and actions accordingly.

All of this takes time, which is the enemy of the impatient attacker. The traditional answer to such complexity has been shock and overwhelming force, simplifying complexity by treating much of it as irrelevant. Such methods require the willingness to accept heavy collateral damage and the potential loss of internal allies as the acceptable price for the desired change in status quo. The alternative is to be patient, but modern democratic states lack patience when wars are costly, and they have difficulty accepting the heavy collateral damage associated with traditional ways of simplifying complexity. Nonetheless, when sufficiently aroused, modern democracies will send their troops to war for a change in the status quo, even though they do not fully comprehend the complexities they will encounter. So will violent political movements, tribes and clans, and when that happens, it pays to understand the logic of the offense and its dilemmas.

Pacification

The fourth basic purpose of military forces is pacification. Pacification is necessary because groups of people within a state have gone to war and normal policing agencies can no longer enforce the peaceful and lawful behavior of potentially hostile forces, warring factions or violent criminals.

In the past, great powers always treated insurrections with overwhelming force, often exterminating offending cities, towns, villages, ethnic groups, tribes or clans to eliminate the source of resistance swiftly - at least for a generation - and to "advertise" a deterring example. Pacifying the "oldfashioned way" does not work for modern democratic states that hope to remain influential and popular in this transparent, globalized world. (Weak states are still compelled to wage war on their insurgents.)

This means compensating in two ways, both difficult. First, the armed forces of the state have to seize the initiative from the strategic level down to the tactical, and their application of force must be very focused and discriminating. This means knowing the enemy very well, having very good intelligence and being more creative and strategically savvy than he. In addition, the state has to separate the enemy from the support of the people; it must know the people and retain their trust. The worst possible conditions for making war on irregulars occur in the wake of changing regimes, when the fundamental choice of legitimate government is between a foreign occupier and a homegrown competitor. The key to regime change is not the knocking down of the regime and its forces, but immediate pacification of the resultant power vacuum.

The principle of policing violence is to suppress it (and resulting property damage) to tolerable levels by creating and reinforcing the perception that perpetrators will face a high probability of being caught and prosecuted and that there is no honor in this.

Pacifying unruly ungoverned space is very difficult; there are no shortcuts. It takes keeping people safe and getting them on the side of peace. It is also very expensive in terms of trained and armed manpower. Some studies, based on rare historical successes, have judged the price to be no less than 20 security personnel per 1,000 citizens. This approach also requires legitimate and efficient courts and prisons. It takes patience, evenhandedness, and consistency of word and deed. The benefit, however, is that the state decides when "normal" is attained and when warring factions, as well as insurgents, have been integrated into a peaceful society.

The far more complex practice, and the one actually more common today, is simultaneously warring and policing in the same area of operations. This requires keeping straight whom you are fighting and with whom you are enforcing the law of the land; confusing the two incurs great penalties.

If the definition of power is the ability to influence human decisions and behavior, then the real root of military power is not destructive force but the constructive use of force alongside other instruments of power.

© 2009 Association of the United States Army Provided by ProQuest LLC. All Rights Reserved.