When Social Science Substitutes For Strategy

By Steve Hynd

National security analyst Adam Elkus has an interesting piece today over at openSecurity, part of the openDemocracy website. His thesis is that the U.S. military has been over-enamoured of the "science of war" to the point of ignoring basic precepts of strategy, for decades now - and that love of techno-war has even spilled over into the new COIN fandom.

Critics of American counterinsurgency (COIN) theory have often charged that it is a new �science of war� rooted not in systems analysis or technobabble but �progressive� sciences such as anthropology or sociology (See Edward Luttwak, �Dead End: Counterinsurgency as Military Malpractice,� Harper�s, February 2007 or Gian P. Gentile, �A Strategy of Tactics: Population-centric COIN and the Army,� Parameters, Autumn 2009).  There is truth in this charge, though more so in the political than purely military arena. Charges to intervene in Yemen and ritualistic calls to pacify every �ungoverned space� with a combination of development and surgically applied force show that policy elites have misunderstood both the nature of counterinsurgency warfare as well as the relationship between operations and strategy.

The issue is not necessarily the merits of counterinsurgency or conventional warfare, but the substitution of science for strategy. The post-Cold War strategic vacuum of American grand strategy allows vacuous concepts and management-speak to take the place of detailed strategic plans and concepts. Everyone is favor of �smart power� and the �whole of government approach� for example, but no one agrees about how to properly implement such concepts.

Adding to the problem is the unpleasant fact that the more the Army necessarily specializes in counterinsurgency, the more attractive a notion the idea of a �global counterinsurgency� will be to policymakers. As Mark Safranski predicted in a review of David Kilcullen�s book The Accidental Guerrilla, even doctrines that eschew heavy foreign involvement can be co-opted by those looking for an easy fix for complicated issues in foreign policy (�The Kilcullen Doctrine,� Zenpundit, May 28, 2009). Most COIN gurus do not favor committing general-purpose forces to pacify foreign lands, but their wishes are meaningless if their political masters see COIN as a substitute for strategy.

Cynically, there's no doubt that enrolling the "progressive sciences" in the science of warfare has made preventative and preemptive warfare more palatable to a whole slew of liberal voices who should know better - and there's no doubt the Pentagon is well aware of that.

Elkus cites the Second Law of Thermodynamics - the law of entropy - to observe that there's a problem with the establishment science of war, though. It doesn't cope well with chaos, because it has a vested interest in seeing its carefully constructed edefice of theory as "the way things are" :

We cannot escape from chaos, rather we are most successful when we embrace it by shattering the rigid mental patterns that have built up and then synthesize the new realities we observe to create a new understanding. Such a process of structuring, dissolving, restructuring, and dissolving again must be repeated endlessly.

Contemporary American strategic problems flow from the fact that we cannot adjust the ossified thinking of Washington D.C. to the constantly shifting observed reality of the outside world. A failure to match concepts to observed reality has amplified the already formidable entropy of the American political system. The corresponding failure to make strategy results in a search further inward towards the �science� of war.  Better strategy will come about only when the process by which strategy is made becomes supple, flexible, and less dominated by sacred cows and special interests.

Ignoring the law of entropy - simply stated in military terms as "no plan survives contact with the enemy" - is one of the specialities of the current crop of COINdinistas as much as it is their conventional warfare colleagues, despitre all their fine talk about OODA loops and suchlike. Time and again, we see senior defense and national security figures appear nonplussed when the enemy reveals itself to have a plan to circumvent their own plans, almost blissfully unaware that the other guy is always just as keen on doing to you before you can do to them as you are. Taliban messaging successes in Afghanistan, Al Qaeda shifting methods and areas of operation, even extremists using double agents - all seem to catch the powers-that-be by surprise, as if there's no room in their scientific edifices for the idea that things change.

Elkus has a proposal for a partial solution:

Widening the circle of discussion is a necessary step for improving American strategy. Largely absent, for example, from the uninformed debate about counter-terrorism measures in Yemen are regional experts who have studied, lived, or worked in the region. Another happy outcome would be the breaking of the political double standard that marks skeptics of intervention abroad as �unserious� and grants the aura of statesmanship to those who reflexively call to send in the Marines. Until the process of conceiving strategy is characterized more by �destruction and creation� than closed debate, the science of war will continue to substitute for realistic strategy.

Amen to that. Read the whole thing.