War From the Ground Up (13 page)

The 2006 war in Lebanon between Israel and Hezbollah is an alternative case study of the critical relationship between polarity and war's
ability to provide a decisive outcome. As Patrick Porter has argued in
Military Orientalism
(2009), Israel's war objectives, which were not defined consistently, ranged from the local to the regional.
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Certain Israeli war aims were defined against a polarised opponent—the enemy—in Hezbollah itself: the return of two Israeli soldiers abducted by Hezbollah; halting the firing of rockets against Israel; destroying Hezbollah as a military organisation.

However, other war aims were defined against audiences who were not part of the enemy, namely the Lebanese people and government: to show them the costs of allowing Hezbollah to operate from their soil; to create a zone cleared of Hezbollah forces that Lebanese or international forces could then occupy; and to turn Lebanese mainstream opinion against militants. To an extent Israeli aims were defined beyond Hezbollah and Lebanese audiences. As Porter notes, an Israeli foreign ministry spokesman after the war defined it as a ‘blow to all extremist jihadist forces in the region'.

Porter's account emphasises how Hezbollah, on the other hand, kept things simple. Hezbollah's Sheik Hassan Nasrallah claimed that survival would be victory: ‘he set a realistic goal, to pose as the vanguard of a Lebanese national resistance, who withstood Israel's coercion'.
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In the event, Israel successfully destroyed many of Hezbollah's long-range missiles. Israel claimed to have killed a quarter of Hezbollah's fighters, roughly 530. Israel also killed at least 1,000 Lebanese civilians and caused widespread wreckage in the suburbs of Beirut.
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Hezbollah was reasonably able to claim to have succeeded in its aim not to be destroyed; its reputation was in many ways enhanced. Israel's aims that were defined against the enemy, Hezbollah, could also legitimately be said to have partly succeeded, given the amount of physical damage to the organisation.

Yet the 2006 war was generally seen as a failure for Israel at the time. Although Israel did succeed in some ways against the enemy, its aims that were defined against audiences other than the enemy were not achieved. Israel's objective had been to send the intended political message to these wider audiences through a military defeat of Hezbollah. Israel's critical assumption was, therefore, that its actions in war would be interpreted by these other audiences in military terms: these audiences would form a political opinion based on the relative military balance of Israel and Hezbollah. In reality these audiences did not interpret Israel's actions in war in military terms.

Israel's actions in war were not interpreted by the Lebanese people and government, a key strategic audience, in accordance with Israel's interpretive structure of war. Thus what for Israel was part of a battle in Beirut was for the Lebanese the death of family or friends. The capture of a military objective for Israel was seen by various constituencies, particularly in parts of the Muslim world, as a heroic fight by Hezbollah for Palestinians in Gaza and Islamic militants generally.

Nor did the Lebanese people and government reserve their political interpretation of events until the war had produced a military decision. The residents of Beirut would not have subscribed to Israel's argument that the destruction in the city was an unfortunate military necessity; the world witnessed anger and mass civilian protests in Lebanon during the war. The
direct
political effect of Israel's actions had far more significance in terms of Lebanese perception than the military outcome of the fight with Hezbollah.

The 2006 war suggests that the meaning of military action is not self-contained if the audience subscribes to an alternative, non-military, frame of reference. This issue is illustrated in microcosm in a 2001 article written by General Dan Halutz, the Israeli Defence Force Chief of Staff during the war (who subsequently stepped down), which argued in 2001 that ‘victory is a matter of consciousness'.
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He advocated the value of air power, because it could ‘influence consciousness in a meaningful fashion', implicitly assuming that air power has a permanent cognitive quality.
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In Afghanistan today, the British military make the same assumptions. For example a ‘show of force' can be requested to deter any enemy actions; this involves a jet screaming overhead at very low altitude. This is normally effective in deterring any potential enemy, who will interpret that action in military terms. Yet the Afghan population, who are also a strategic audience, may not see it as a ‘show of force' within a military context; in my experience, especially in the countryside, they are usually worried and frightened by this bizarre event.

The Iraq War in 2003 exposed the problems of an operational approach focused on military success on the battlefield over political consequences after the initial high-intensity combat. ‘Shock and Awe' was meant to shock and awe the enemy: to shatter the will of Baathist Iraq. ‘Shock and Awe' worked very well in the initial phase of war between the US and Iraqi armies. However, ‘Shock and Awe' was not compartmentalised within the first phase of the war against Saddam
Hussein's regular forces. The Iraqi people were a critical strategic audience in a war fought for democracy, among other things.

‘Shock and Awe' was now a problem, because it had indeed shocked and awed the Iraqi people, but presumably not always in the way intended. The Iraqi people interpreted it in their own terms: some supported coalition troops, others fought them. The phases of war by which the military plans and distinguishes between high intensity combat and less violent postures are an irrelevance for the civilian who lives through them and sees the whole as one experience. In Iraq, people mattered to the coalition's own definition of the war's success; democracy, for one, would have required popular consent. While there were entirely legitimate considerations that clearly were military, such as defeating the Iraqi army, the activity of coalition armed forces in terms of its reception by target audiences went beyond the traditional notion of a compartmentalised military cognitive sphere.

In terms of military jargon, one has to distinguish between ‘means' and ‘effects'. Any action, whether in war or not, has an ‘effect'. The axiom that ‘one cannot not communicate' posits that any behaviour is a form of communication, whether intended or not. The ‘effect' of an action (from the highest to the lowest level of war, and indeed the war itself as an action) is thus its meaning as interpreted by an audience, whether that was the intended meaning of the actor or not.

The mistake is to assume that ‘effects' are contained within the ‘means', the action itself: assuming that an aerial ‘show of force', for example, will always be understood to have been a ‘show of force'—it is actually a low pass by a military jet—while the effect is how that is interpreted, which will vary. Israel assumed that its war in 2006 would ‘send a message'; in the event it sent messages, only some of which were the ones intended.
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The 2003 war in Iraq was intended, at least in part, to be seen as an intervention that would be understood by the Iraqi people as a signal to embrace freedom and democracy. The error of confusing means and effects can be witnessed in terms of the unintended consequences of an action: the angry Afghan villager after a show of force; the Israeli alienation of many Lebanese people after the 2006 war; and the actual Iraqi responses to the war in Iraq.

The confusion between means and effects relates directly to the interpretation of Clausewitz's dictum of war being an extension of policy by other means. The narrow interpretation of this dictum recognises only
the actual use of force as the ‘instrument' that war provides to policy. However, war itself as the interpretive structure which gives meaning to that force is equally an instrument. If the strategist fails to understand this, strategy will associate a ‘message' with a given means; that confusion of means and effects is intrinsically associated with a conception of war as a fixed, single, interpretive structure, in which the actions of armed forces will be interpreted in terms of their military significance.

Strategy can get away with the confusion of means and effects if the parties to a conflict have an essentially symmetrical understanding of the conflict, as was discussed in
Chapter 1
. If the fighters and the audience of our street fight all interpret the fight according to the same rules, the idea that there is a mutually recognised military outcome is sustainable. In these circumstances war can act as a mechanism in which the armed forces provide a military outcome which sets conditions for a political solution.

However, we have seen that not only can the enemy use an alternative interpretive structure, as the North Vietnamese did in Vietnam; so too can audiences beyond the enemy see the war in their own terms. In this case, if one wants to persuade that audience in accordance with one's policy aims, one needs to think in terms of how they will interpret the action. This is compounded by the fact that in many contemporary conflicts insurgents are also part of the civilian population. This informs the paradox in counter-insurgency that the ‘best weapons don't shoot'.
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The death of an insurgent can create many more insurgents from his family and friends. Lieutenant General Sir Graeme Lamb states in his guidance for commanders engaged in counter-insurgency:

If you think you are doing well then think again: for it's not what you think, it's what they think that matters. If they think you are doing badly then you probably are. Review your progress from your own front line, from domestic and international perspectives, then reverse the telescope and look at it from the insurgent, the local, Arab [this quotation is related to the context of Iraq] and regional point of view. Always weigh in favour of the latter and not your own assessment of the success of the plan.
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General Lamb's succinct guidance perhaps seeks to militate against the fact that war as a cognitive unit as it is employed today often fails to achieve purchase on a strategic audience because it seeks to allocate military meaning to situations in which force actually has a direct political effect on that audience.

Armed force has frequently in the past been used outside war for direct political effect; but these cases are not understood in terms of war, or a military outcome. This has often been the case with what is publicly known of direct political action sponsored by intelligence agencies. Even if direct political action is used within war, it is usually kept secret precisely because it is different from normal military action. The key point is that this direct political use of armed force has not employed the cognitive construct of war.

Where force has direct political significance, but is used within an interpretive construct of war in the Clausewitzian, or inter-state paradigm, war's mechanism is compromised. Clausewitzian paradigms of war stop working when they cannot invest the use of armed force with military significance. To use an analogy, the market is an interpretive structure whose function is to impose a specific type of meaning, a price, on a product. When the market cannot allocate a price (which is one of its basic functions), its mechanism breaks down and it loses utility. This happened in the financial crisis of 2008, when many derivatives were so complex that the market could not price them. The market seized up as its basic mechanism stopped working. When an action in war can be interpreted in a multitude of different ways depending on the prejudice of the audience, it is very hard to make armed force have political utility in a Clausewitzian conception of war: for a military outcome to set conditions for a political solution it needs to be recognised as such.

In summary, the extent and speed of inter-connectivity associated with contemporary globalisation has great potential to unhinge classical strategy because of the proliferation of audiences beyond the enemy. Just as Clausewitz emphasised that social forces were primarily what transformed war after the French Revolution, so too does globalisation in its contemporary form, as a social force, change war again.

Contemporary globalisation undermines the two pillars of war in the Clausewitzian paradigm: first, the assumption that strategic audiences are contained within the state; second, the principle of polarity. In an inter-connected world there is a massive extension of the size of potential strategic audiences beyond one's side/state and the enemy's, which strategy will struggle not to recognise as relevant. The fact that they are all very unlikely to see the war in the same way means that a notion of definite ‘victory' is significantly diluted; we speak instead more about ‘success'.

While the term ‘success' may indicate a middle ground between victory and defeat, the term is more revealing in the sense that it shares common ground with the language usually used to describe domestic politics. A party in office is not ‘victorious' but ‘successful' if it achieves its goals while balancing the interests of the government's various constituencies. This is not coincidental, but reflective of the politicisation of many contemporary conflicts down to the tactical level; indeed, more familiar political problems, such as the economy, are often continuously managed rather than having finite and definite solutions. If we now return to Afghanistan, it is clear that the dynamics that characterise contemporary conflict there, in which the ‘war' is better understood as a direct extension of political activity—the attempt to convince a set of audiences of a given political ‘narrative'—are not anomalous.

The political fragmentation that characterises the Afghan conflict is likely to point to the future of contemporary conflict rather than prove to be an anomaly. In Afghanistan the coalition, in partnership with the Afghan government, has to convince a disparate group of people, including insurgents, to accept its strategic narrative. In one sense this strategic narrative is in competition with the strategic narrative of ‘the enemy' in the insurgency. However, the conflict in Afghanistan cannot be described exclusively in terms of a polarised competition. A victory for one side is not necessarily a defeat for the other, particularly because there are not two clear sides. Rather than two polarised ‘sides' there are endless ‘actors' and ‘audiences', which often overlap. These can be individuals or groups. The conflict in Afghanistan is far more of a game of political musical chairs than a two-way fight.