Victoria University of WellingtonSTRA531 Strategic Studies

Assignment One, 2014

Due Date: 31 March 2014Length: 2500 words +/- 10%

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1. Name: Shane Wilcox

2. Student ID: 300309751

3. Question Answered: Using a significant number of the required readings from the first three sessions of the course, examine the extent to which there is a consistent approach tothe purposes of strategy in modern strategic studies.

4. Exact Word length (including any footnotes and bibliography): 2649

5. Date Submitted: 30/3/2014

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The Logic of Strategy

Since Clausewitz, strategy has been considered the handmaiden of policy. “Strategy is

the use of the engagement for the purpose of the war. The strategist must therefore define

an aim for the entire operational side of the war that will be in accordance with its

purpose” (Clausewitz, 1976, p. 177), a political purpose that “will remain the supreme

consideration in conducting” war (1976, p. 87). Its ultimate purposes, therefore, are

never its own, and strategy is given to function as a bridge or perhaps a hinge, articulating

ends and means which nevertheless remain external to it: “Strategy is the bridge that

relates military power to political purpose; it is neither military power per se nor political

purpose” (Gray, 1999, p. 17). It is in this sense that Gray can claim that “[t]he nature and

purpose, or function, of strategy are invariable throughout all strategic history” (1999, p.

16). Whether the means are war itself (Clausewitz, Gray), the threat of violence and the

power to hurt (Schelling, 1966), or even non-violent “instruments” such as belong to the

realms of the political, informational or economic (Diebel, 2007, p. 313), strategy

consists in the wielding of these tools in the achievement of practical objectives that

further political ends.

Political objectives, for Diebel, “can be simply defined as that subset of the

national interest that the statesman decides to protect or promote” (2007, p. 294). This

simple definition is immediately shown to be inadequate, as objectives are revealed to

differ significantly from interests and to exist in a complex and contingent relationship

with them. Interests are ends in themselves, corresponding in some sense to the values

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by which the polity, assumed here to be a “nation-state” or some such formulation,

establishes and maintains a sense of itself as a coherent entity and according to which it

ideally conducts its affairs, both internally and in relation to other such entities.

Objectives are subordinated to interests according to what might be termed an ethico-

political hierarchy, and function as ends according to which the state really conducts its

affairs.

Most important, although interests can and must be identified without reference to

the power necessary to protect or advance them, objectives cannot be set without

careful consideration of the power they require. … [O]bjective setting takes place

at the intersection of power and interests, the place where strategy becomes the art

of the possible (2007, p. 296).

On this account, interests and power appear much as independent variables, brought

into an almost algebraic relationship by the operations of strategy whose functional

outputs are specific objectives, and by a series of further similar operations, decisions

regarding the use of particular instruments, estimates of cost, risk, success and the like

(summarised in figure 7.7, 2007, p. 294). Power is to means as interests are to ends:

“Power is the motive force of statecraft, the capacity to act in foreign affairs” (2007, p.

157). Like interests, power must be operationalized, or “mobilized,” if it is to function as

“actual” rather than “latent” power, and the first strategic choice to make with respect to

power concerns “both the balance between these two forms of power and the kinds of

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actual power to be created” (2007, p. 169).

For Freedman, as for Diebel, power is central to the purpose of strategy, which he

defines as “the art of creating power to obtain the maximum political objectives using

available military means” (2008, p. 25). Their respective concepts of power, however,

are opposed. Diebel acknowledges “three basic ways of looking at power: first, as

control over resources; second, as control over actors; and third, as control over

outcomes,” adopting the first of these as his preferred sense precisely for its concreteness

and its focus on the possessor of power (2007, p. 159). Freedman occupies the third

camp: “My definition of power is the capacity to produce effects that are more

advantageous than would otherwise have been the case.” Furthermore, he emphasizes

the relational character of power: “So power is a capacity that exists to the extent that it is

recognized by others. It is a perceived capacity that cannot be independent of what is

perceived” (2008, p. 30, italics in original). Power exists only in the relationship between

actors; any action taken, to the extent that it is an exercise of power, implies a potentially

moderating reaction, and it is this that gives rise to Freedman’s rather modest claims

regarding the effects of power, and of the inherent instability of any such exercise (2008,

p. 31).

From Diebel’s perspective, this approach conflates power and influence. Power

inheres in the initiator of an action, the influence of which is its effect on the action’s

target. This is no idle distinction – those who fail to recognize it “court disaster” if they

assume that the generation and husbanding of power resources will automatically

produce influence, the latter being “ultimately most valuable” (2007, p. 162). Despite his

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assertion that the distinction is “cleaner analytically” (2007, p. 204), it becomes difficult

to sustain. Both power and influence lie at the “means” end of Diebel’s strategic

equation, but influence also functions as a kind of intermediate “ends” with respect to

power, which is a necessary but insufficient condition for the influence through which

foreign policy objectives might ultimately be achieved. The attempt at analytical

precision comes at the expense of a certain conceptual flexibility, and reduces the

analysis of power as such to the logic of the balance sheet. All that remains to carry the

conceptual burden of the interplay between states and their policies is influence, and on

this, Diebel has little of substance to say.

Although the term appears infrequently within the pages of his book, Schelling’s

title gives, as it were, the entire game away. Arms and Influence provides a careful

application of the taxonomy of the modes of influence, developed in the earlier The

Strategy of Conflict, to the interactions of states in the pursuit of interests. Schelling’s

central concept is that, in its essentials, conflict takes the form of bargaining; this is

obvious and explicit in diplomacy, and more typically implicit in the case of armed

conflict. In either case, the key bargaining chip is “the power to hurt” (1966, p. 1-2).

Schelling undertakes an examination of the myriad ways in which this chip can be played

in the exertion of influence, but I wish to focus on his description of a historical sequence

of “three stages in the involvement of noncombatants – of plain people and their

possessions – in the fury of war” in Western Europe over the past three hundred years

(1966, p. 27).

The first stage encompasses the period from the Treaty of Westphalia to the

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Napoleonic wars, in which the power to hurt, if apparent at all, was subordinated to the

requirements of military dominance, to the power of one monarch to take and hold

territory from another by means of engagements between largely mercenary forces

commanded by the aristocratic political elite. The people inhabiting the contested

territory were relevant only to the extent that they contributed to its value; violence

towards them was not therefore in the interests of either party to the conflict (1966, p.

27-28).

The second stage began with the mobilization of the population of Napoleonic

France; with this, war became truly national, the people serving not only as weapon and

potential target, but also, in a sense, as the prime movers of war: “in the second stage

people were were involved because it was their war … they were all part of a war-

making nation” (1966, p. 29). Thus violence (the expression of the power to hurt as

opposed to military force in Schelling’s lexicon) directed against the people comes to

serve a political purpose – if conducted as an element of the war itself, it might bring

about an early or favourable truce, or if reserved until after a military victory proper has

been achieved, violence or its threat (sometimes underscored by use of example) can

influence the terms of surrender (1966, p. 29-30).

The third stage describes the period from the end of Second World War to the time

of Schelling’s writing, and arguably (at least) until the end of the cold war. It is

characterized by a shift of emphasis in the relationship between military force and

violence, hinted at during the earlier stage, but made devastatingly clear with the advent

of nuclear weapons. During the second historical stage, even if employed during military

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conflict, violence served the primary military goal of victory, which was in turn the

precondition for the (restrained) violence of surrender and the exacting of political

consequences. Since 1945, “the occasion for restraint does not await the achievement of

military victory or truce” (1966, p. 30-31). The threat of cataclysmic violence hangs over

any military engagement, and has the effect of setting quite restrictive limits over its

conduct. Victory is a secondary goal, war itself becoming, in a sense, merely the pretext

for a political bargain struck on the basis of the power to hurt. “Even total victory over

an enemy provides at best an opportunity for unopposed violence against the enemy

population … [a]nd if a nation, victor or potential loser, is going to use its capacity for

pure violence to influence the enemy, there may be no need to await the achievement of

total victory” (1966, p. 31). This precipitates a complex, if not paradoxical situation for

those states in possession of nuclear weapons. There are two variant strategies according

to which one might seek violent coercion, whether deterrent or compellent. Violence

may actually be used as the primary instrument of war, with reliance for effect on the

pain and destruction caused. Alternatively, violence may remain the virtual backdrop to

an otherwise conventional use of military force. A pair of dilemmas follows: a choice

must be made between a prospect of total, unmitigated violence, and a degree of restraint

with the possibility of reciprocation; in addition, the enemy’s transgressive behaviour

must either trigger the countering violence automatically or be subject to a controlled

response requiring further decision points (1966, p. 32). The remainder of Arms and

Influence might usefully be read as an elaboration of the various permutations thus

entailed; indeed, the very stuff of strategy for Schelling lies in the manipulation of the

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threat of violence with respect to the two axes defined by these choices.

The complex articulation of power and influence in the generation of coercive

strategy is taken up again by Freedman in Deterrence. His aim is to “rescue” the concept

of deterrence from the ossification of cold war thinking, in which “institutionalization

and inertia, and the lack of major war, gradually removed the sense of the dynamic

interaction between the political context and the instruments of power that is at the heart

of strategy” (2004, p. 15). Freedman’s explicit references to Schelling’s work are

somewhat less than laudatory, but the logic at play in his analysis of the construction of

conditional threats that form the basis of strategic deterrence is essentially consistent with

that informing Schelling’s twin dilemmas, adding, in a sense, a further layer of

complexity by interposing a series of four distinctions that modify what for Schelling is

“the all-or-none character of deterrence” (1966, p. 32). These further choices lie between

the adoption of “narrow and broad, extended and central, denial and punishment,

immediate and general” deterrence strategies (Freedman 2004, p. 32). In each case, it is

not simply a matter of adopting one form to the exclusion of the other, but of allowing for

a degree of play between tendencies. For example, a broad interdiction against all war by

means of a threat of nuclear retaliation against any form of attack, may give way to a

narrow injunction against specific forms of violence, perhaps by means of the same

threat, if war is unavoidable; if an attempt to deny the possibility of a conventional attack

is thwarted, or risks being so, then resort to a punitive threat of violence to deter the

incursion may be necessary.

If Schelling’s biaxial analytic provides the general coordinates through which a

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strategic trajectory will pass, Freedman’s distinctions provide a means for the

determination of a kind of line of best fit, accounting for various aspects of the political,

social, military, technological, economic and geographic environments within which both

deterrer and deterred are operating. Crucially, the “challenge for strategic deterrence is to

create internalized deterrence in its targets” (2004, p. 32), and the choices made are based

on the strategist’s perception of the other’s position, and her assessment of how her own

position is perceived by the other. This is entirely in keeping with Freedman’s later

discussion of power, cited above, and with the reciprocal assessments made during

Schelling’s bargaining process. Far from being conflated, the distinction between power

and influence is maintained, and it is precisely in the complex dialectic that governs their

relationship, between mutually and contextually interdependent means and ends, that

strategy is developed. While being entirely subordinate to this dialectic, strategy must at

the same time attempt to wield it in the service of objectives beyond itself, by which

purpose it shifts the very terms that give rise to it, and to which it must once more adjust.

This paradox of a strategy which incessantly remakes and undoes its own

conditions was not lost on Clausewitz, who discussed it at some length as “the

culminating point of victory” (1976, p. 566). As an advance proceeds into enemy

territory, various factors affecting the fortunes of attacker and defender, some

advantageous and others disadvantageous, some symmetrical with respect to attacker and

defender and others not, a point is reached at which the balance of advantage will of

necessity pass to the defender of the invaded territory, and the roles are reversed, the

erstwhile attacker now defending in hostile country, and the new attacker now having all

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the advantages of home turf. In principle, this culminating point should be calculable in

advance of the engagement, and incursion beyond the point of the maintenance of

superior strength declined. But the logic of strategy, bound in pursuit of exterior

interests, must unwind.

The obvious answer is that superior strength is not the end but only the means.

The end is either to bring the enemy to his knees or at least to deprive him of

some of his territory – the point in that case being not to improve the current

military position but to improve one’s general prospects in the war and in the

peace negotiations (1976, p 570).

If the political objective has not been attained before the culminating point is reached, the

advance must continue to the detriment of material and psychological strength. But

because the enemy is subject to its own strategic logic, defeat is not assured; the opponent

may capitulate in spite of apparent advantage as a result of its own, doubtless now

modified goals, or to a miscalculation born of fog or friction.

A strange consistency binds strategic thought in the modern era. Throughout, there

is a clear sense that strategy must serve political interests, most typically those of states,

but the logic by which means are related to ends threatens to undercut any such

objectives at every turn.

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Bibliography

Clausewitz, C. von. (1976). On war (M. Howard & P. Paret, Trans. Indexed ed.). [Kindle

version]. Retrieved from Amazon.com

Diebel, T. L. (2007). Foreign affairs strategy: Logic for American statecraft. [Kindle

version]. Retrieved from Amazon.com

Freedman, L. (2005). Deterrence. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Freedman, L. (2008). Strategic studies and the problem of power. In T. G. Mahnken & J.

A. Maiolo (Eds.), Strategic studies: A reader (pp. 22-33). London: Routledge.

Gray, C. (1999). Modern strategy. Oxford: Oxford UP.

Schelling, T. C. (1966). Arms and influence. New Haven, CT: Yale UP.

Schelling, T. C. (1980). The strategy of conflict (2nd ed.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP.

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