Adaptability is crucial if Western military theoretical and procedural frameworks are to keep up with the burgeoning challenges of contemporary political warfare.

Adapting Western Militaries’ Theoretical and Procedural Frameworks to the Demands of Contemporary Political Warfare

The hegemonic power of the United States has underwritten the international system since the conclusion of the Cold War. China’s stunning rise and the West’s relative decline have brought into sharp relief the different ways authoritarian and liberal states choose to interact and compete with one another. This paper will argue that extant theoretical and procedural frameworks of Western militaries can enable adaption to the influence of political ‘warfare’ on actual war (henceforth ‘war’), but not adaption to the intrinsic demands of political warfare. The first part will define political war as it relates to conventional war, with the two concepts overlapping in the ‘grey zone’. War is then situated along a spectrum of political intercourse and nested within the concepts of conflict and competition. The neglected legacy of political warfare among liberal democratic states will be contrasted with the uninterrupted and very much alive practices of authoritarian states. The paper’s second part will trace the origins and development of Western militaries’ theoretical and procedural frameworks. This evolution will demonstrate how militaries adapt to the changing character of war, but within the boundaries of the Clausewitzian definition of war.

Contemporary political warfare, as characterised by the quickening influence of the digital information age, seeks asymmetric advantage by remaining below the threshold of a state’s kinetic response. US diplomat and historian George Keenan coined the term in the wake of the Second World War as competition with the Soviet Union intensified. The top secret memorandum was called ‘The Inauguration of Organised Political Warfare’, which he described as ‘the logical application of Clausewitz’s doctrine in time of peace’.^[1] Seventy years later, Robinson’s modern definition of political warfare is ‘the intentional use of one or more implements of power … to affect the political composition or decision-making of a state’ with the main implements of national power being diplomatic, information, military, and economic (DIME). Contemporary political warfare employed against the West today is preponderantly non-military, increasingly informational, and accelerated by unattributable cyber tools. Militaries contribute to political warfare through their intelligence and psychological arms as well as through conflict short of outright war. War, conflict, and competition are concepts that can be nested within one another along a spectrum of political intercourse, ranging from coercion to persuasion.^[2] Conventional war is the narrowest of these concepts with violence featuring as the primary means of coercion. Encompassing the concept of war, conflict features political coercion up to and including violence. Coercion and persuasion are blended in political conflict, as reflected by the terms ‘grey zone’ and hybrid warfare. Competition, encompassing concepts of war and conflict, prioritises activity at the persuasion end of the intercourse spectrum, including non-violent political coercion.^[3]

The long-neglected term ‘political warfare’ seems novel in the West today as it grapples with adversaries’ ‘grey zone’ activities. Throughout the Cold War, the US government and its Western allies waged political warfare against communism through a variety of covert and overt, non-military and non-kinetic mechanisms. Activities like subversion, propaganda, and the funding of dissidents were considered vital tools of statecraft up until the 1960s. The long-term effectiveness of political warfare came under challenge after several operations were bungled, which fuelled anti-American sentiment in some contested regions.^[4] Regardless of their legality, ‘black’ operations were increasingly considered unethical and contrary to the values their societies were supposedly promoting. Societies of liberal democracies found it difficult to reconcile the underhanded nature of political warfare as the Communist International threat subsided. The scrutiny of free media and demands for more transparent government led to political warfare being phased out in the West by the mid-1970s.^[5] Political warfare practices of armed forces continued under the euphemisms ‘military operations other than war’, ‘psychological warfare’ and ‘hybrid warfare’.^[6] Other government agencies of the West remain sensitive to the historical connotations of the term ‘political warfare’ and the oxymoronic labelling of statecraft as any kind of warfare.

Political warfare is largely understood by the West today as an effect emanating from its adversaries rather than a capability of one’s own to be nurtured. State and non-state actors alike are attracted to political warfare for the asymmetric advantages it promises. The West’s collective preponderance in nuclear and conventional military power is so great that asymmetric approaches are logical if not necessary.^[7] Despite relative decline and several conspicuous defeats, the United States remains unmatched in the high-intensity, kinetic kind of warfare it chooses to pursue. The Western concept of war, as a subset of conflict within a subset of competition, enables the rest of society to exist in harmony with its liberal values while its professional military maintains its advantage in more narrow terms. Western societies conceive of peace as their normal condition, periods of war as the exception, and the ‘grey zone’ an anomalous gap between the two. In stark contrast, the West’s main adversaries of China and Russia conceive of international relations as perpetual struggle.^[8] The Marxist-Leninist revolutionary origins of contemporary China and Russia have shaped their authoritarian centralised governments, geopolitical outlooks, and long-term strategic goals.^[9] For more than a century, political warfare in these countries has been honed by their respective Communist Parties through maintaining control over their populations, crushing internal challengers, and countering external threats. The divergence between the West’s narrow and finite conception of war and its main adversaries’ all-pervading and perpetual coercive competition creates space for asymmetric exploitation.

Historically, Western militaries have proven to be adaptable organisations in war. From the combined arms learning of the Great War, through inter-service coordination of the Second World War, to the counter-insurgency transformation of the Iraq War. As an attribute of military success, adaptability will become increasingly important for at least three reasons: the uncertainty of resurgent great power competition, the integration of cyber and outer space domains, and the accelerating influence of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.^[10] Western military thought has been heavily influenced if not dominated by Carl von Clausewitz since the 19th century, whose writings are at once enlightening and predisposing. The Prussian General’s theory of war helps explain adaptability within armed forces, with respect to the mechanics that drive it as well as the factors that may limit it. War’s changing character is driven by the process of learning and adaption, which itself is a consequence of war’s enduring nature as a violent, interactive, and fundamentally political phenomenon. By consciously applying Clausewitz’s theory to the Cold War, Keenan downplayed the nature of violence to a potential or threshold short of conventional war. The potential of violence—even that of the ultimate violence exacted with nuclear weapons—challenges Clausewitz’s calculus of adaption, but need not invalidate it. On the other hand, war’s political nature is accentuated within the bounds of his concept.

The concepts of war, adaptability, and military art are especially contextual. Armies’ ability to solve problems and organise for action became increasingly sophisticated as they adapted to their adversaries against the backdrop of war’s evolving character. Modern warfare emerged in the 19th century as the mass mobilisation unleashed by the French Revolution and technological advances in firepower rendered the single battle of annihilation impossible. The Franco-Austrian War of 1809 was the first in which successive battles needed to be coordinated across multiple theatres. Thereafter, strategy and tactics became discrete activities for coordinating sequenced and often simultaneous engagements.^[11] The imperative of restoring battlefield mobility and ending the sheer waste of industrial warfare made the First World War a period of exponential learning and adaption. Joint operations came to the fore in the interwar period and Second World War as advantage was sought at the interface of land, sea, and new air domains. Modern war’s increasing scale, lethality, and complexity created conceptual space between campaign strategy and engagement tactics. Soviet theorists conceived operational art as an intermediate function of tactics and administration in the 1920s and ’30s.

Contemporary Western militaries’ theoretical and procedural frameworks for planning and conducting campaigns impede their ability to adapt to the demands of contemporary political warfare. The main reason for this concerns their original motive for rediscovering the operational level of war in the 1980s. Although Clausewitz had firmly established war as an extension of politics and the military subordinate to the government, many 20th century theorists and politicians conflated strategy with policy. In the interwar years, Liddell Hart defined ‘grand strategy’ as ‘practically synonymous with the policy which guides the conduct of war’.^[12] Such grand strategy was manifested in the Second World War with the process of total mobilisation, by fascist and democratic governments alike, blurring the distinction between strategy and policy.^[13] The Cold War saw the advent of deterrence strategy, which merged strategy with foreign policy, and limited war, which sought to constrain strategy in order to mitigate superpower escalation. In the wake of its bruising defeat in Vietnam, which it partially attributed to political interference, the US military established training and doctrine command to modernise its forces and return to professional values. The outcome of this reform was the operational level of war first incorporated into US doctrine Field Manual 100-5 of 1982. This revaluation, according to Hew Strachan, was to deliberately create a ‘politics-free zone’ to situate the ‘acme of [military officer’s] professional competence’.^[14] It was in this context that liberal democracies established staff colleges to educate middle-ranking officers in these theoretical frameworks of operational art. In response to perceived intrusion into military affairs, the operational model was originally designed to curtail politics.

Western militaries’ procedural frameworks for planning and conducting military campaigns were developed and consolidated through the 1990s. The spectacular success in the Gulf War 1990-91 appeared to vindicate the focus on the operational level and its minimal political inputs. The United States’ keystone joint doctrine publication JP 3-0 Doctrine for Unified and Joint Operations was trialled during this war and published by General Colin Powell in 1993.^[15] JP 5-0 Doctrine for Planning Joint Operations was published two years later.
Australia derived its Joint Military Appreciation Process (JMAP) from its major alliance partner, introducing it and the term ‘operational art’ into doctrine in 1998.^[16] The Gulf War appeared to demonstrate that ‘revolutionary’ advances in precision munitions and information systems were changing the very nature of war and dissipating the ‘fog of war’.^[17] Western military thought became dominated by a technocratic, hard-systems approach that reduced operational problems to their constituent parts. By implication, this systems approach regarded adversaries as ‘complicated machines isolated from their broad context rather than open complex human systems’.^[18] Procedural frameworks evolved into diagrammatic plans resembling engineer project schedules: horizontal lines of operation directed at enemy centres of gravity, with an arrangement of predetermined decisive points leading to a neatly defined end state.^[19] The technocratic approach proved highly effective in the purely conventional, one-sided war against Saddam Hussein. Martial hubris and the absence of political interference enabled the refinement of managed violence, but by insulating the invading forces from human politics and competition, confused the character and nature of war.

The inadequacies of technocratic operational doctrine and methodology were revealed when the US and partners returned to Iraq in the first decade of the 21st century. America’s military overmatch in the Iraq War was even more pronounced than the Gulf War a decade earlier, with higher precision and near-immediate peaked intensity.^[20] The ‘shock and awe’ air campaign enabled a much smaller invasion force to overwhelm Saddam’s regime in a matter of weeks. However, the size of the invasion force, optimised for lethal efficiency, proved inadequate for occupation as the conflict persisted beyond the proclaimed ‘mission accomplished’. This unfavourable outcome was the consequence of the independent operational level wedging politics from strategy.^[21] The strategy for Iraq was circumscribed by an operational theory with a war-peace dichotomy, and planning processes with an artificial end state. Beyond the failure to prepare for the occupation and anticipate the insurgency, the procedural framework of JP 5-0 failed to factor in the complexity of human interaction. War as a continuation of politics ‘must [accommodate] the same randomness and individuality as [is found in] the human condition’.^[22] This fact was belatedly recognised with the publication of Field Manual 3-24 in 2006 and the appointment of its lead author, David Petraeus, as Commander International Security Force. This bold new doctrine drove intellectual change in the US Army by introducing the Marine Corps concept of operational design, improving the capacity of both organisations to adapt to the changing character of modern insurgency.^[23]

The West’s most recent war in Afghanistan highlights an aspect of modern conventional war’s character; ‘the consequence of confusing Clausewitizian war with armed politics outside war’.^[24] Clausewitz’s maxim ‘war is not a mere act of policy but a true political instrument, a continuation of political activity by other means’ is a key feature of the Western concept of war.^[25] While contemporary conventional warfare is not the same as contemporary political warfare, the concepts overlap and influence one another. Militaries adapt with the changing character of war but are still bound by its violent, interactive, and political nature that endures through all conditions and time. For traditional war to serve as an instrument of policy it requires an obvious enemy as well a clear objective. The strategic confusion of the Afghanistan War superimposed a traditional concept of war over a violently fragmented political environment. The confusion was compounded with political considerations of the Coalition pervading into the operational and even tactical levels. Rather than setting the conditions for an ultimate political solution, the NATO-led security mission became an instrument of direct political outcomes.^[26] Political warfare is not the next stage in the evolution of contemporary war, but it did influence the war in Afghanistan. An imprecise conception of war that leeches into other forms of political competition risks reversing Clausewitz’s maxim to make future political activity an extension of war.

Grey zone operations surged from the late 2000s through the 2010s, most notably Russia’s protracted subversion in Georgia and Ukraine from the late 2000s along with China’s militarisation of the South China Sea in the 2010s. Such trends are influencing the evolution of war but are themselves beneath the threshold of war. The military is but one lever of national power, alongside diplomacy, information, and the economy; and the most ‘suboptimal for resolving conflict’.^[27] Political warfare strategy necessarily transcends both the operational and strategic levels of war, to the pure policy described by Liddell Hart as grand strategy. In an era of growing strategic uncertainty and exponential technological change, the doctrine that enables learning and adaption is essential. Unconventional or irregular warfare will persist but it would be unwise to assume they will displace conventional warfare entirely.

The West’s planning process and methodology are rooted in obsolete Cold War doctrine originally designed to resist political interference. However, the recent introduction of the operational design concept synthesises traditional approaches with complex adaptive systems theory, reconciling amorphous problems with structured courses of action. Operational design is a framework for thinking about complex problems but is not in itself a problem-solving tool.^[28]

Despite being incorporated more than two centuries ago, Western militaries’ extant theoretical and procedural frameworks can be applied to grey zone operations in conventional, modern war contexts. The strength of the dominant Clausewitzian theory of war is that it clearly articulates the enduring features that define war while allowing the phenomenon to evolve in congruence with its specific political, social, and technological contexts. Theories and processes for planning and conducting campaigns are optimised for their own specific contexts but can be adapted changes within the bounds of war’s definition. The operational level, operational art, and manoeuvre warfare were designed to halt the Soviet Union’s mass armies on the plains of Europe. The military appreciation process was born out of the Gulf War’s effects-based operations and rapid dominance doctrine, mechanistically breaking down complicated problems into linear solutions. The aftermath of the Iraq War required Coalition forces to become better learning organisations in order to adapt to complex human terrain problems. In addition to its own non-binary complexity, the Afghanistan War underscored the danger of confusing war with violent political conflict. Operational design promotes situational understanding and guides planners’ thinking. Doctrine adapts to its context within the bounds of war as a concept. Existing frameworks for planning and conducting military campaigns will enable adaption to irregular war in the grey zone. Political warfare is not just exponentially more complex for being global and perpetual, but exists beyond actual war and transcends operational and strategic levels. While politicisation of war at the grey zone accords with classical Western theory, the real enemy of liberal democracy is the militarisation of politics.

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Footnotes

^[1] George F. Keenan, The Inauguration of Organized Political Warfare [Redacted Version], National Security Council, History and Public Policy Program Digital Archive (Wilson Center, 30 April 1948), 1.

^[2] Nicolas Bosio, "What Is War? Defining War, Conflict and Competition," Australian Army Research Centre, Land Power Forum (2020), https://researchcentre.army.gov.au/library/land-power-forum/accelerated-warfare-and-puzzle-future.

^[3] Bosio, “What Is War? Defining War, Conflict and Competition.”

^[4] Max Boot and Michael Doran, Political Warfare, Council on Foreign Relations (New York NY, 2013), https://www.cfr.org/event/rise-and-fall-great-powers-america-china-and-global-order.

^[5] "The 'Grey Zone':  Political Warfare is Back," The Interpreter, The Lowy Institute, 2019, accessed Feb 13, 2021, https://www.lowyinstitute.org/the-interpreter/grey-zone-political-warfare-back.

^[6] Linda Robinson et al, Modern Political Warfare: Current Practices and Possible Responses (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2018), 304.

^[7] Mark O’Neill, "Punching at Air: The military and the Grey Zone," Australian Army Research Centre, Land Power Forum (2020), https://researchcentre.army.gov.au/library/land-power-forum/accelerated-warfare-and-puzzle-future.

^[8] Clive Hamilton, '"Political Warfare," Indo-Pacific Defense Forum 44, no. 3.

^[9] Thomas Mahnken, Ross Babbage, and Toshi Yoshihara, "Countering Comprehensive Coercion," Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments  (2018).

^[10] David Barno and Nora Bensahel, "Falling into the Adaption Gap," Strategic Outpost (29 September 2020).

^[11] Christopher R Smith, Design and Planning of Campaigns and Operations in the Twenty-First Century (Canberra: Land Warfare Studies Centre, April, 2011), 15-17.

^[12] BH Liddell Hart, "The Theory of Strategy,' Dalam BH, The Classic Book on Military Strategy (hal. 319-333). London: Meridian Book  (1991): 321-22.

^[13] Hew Strachan, "The Lost Meaning of Strategy," in Strategic Studies: a Reader, ed. Thomas G. Mahnken and Joseph A. Maiolo (Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon;New York, NY; Routledge, 2008), 42-43.

^[14] Strachan, "The Lost Meaning of Strategy," 47.

^[15] Rick Rowlett et al, "The Way Ahead for Joint Operations and Planning Doctrine," Joint Force Quarterly 77, no. 1 (1 April 2015), https://ndupress.ndu.edu/JFQ/Joint-Force-Quarterly-77/Article/581888/the-way-ahead-for-joint-operations-and-planning-doctrine/.

^[16] Department of Defence, 5.0.1 Joint Military Appreciation Process,  (Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia, 2019).

^[17] Michael Evans, "The Closing of the Australian Military Mind: the ADF and Operational Art," Security Challenges 4, no. 2 (2008): 108-09.

^[18] Smith, Design and Planning of Campaigns and Operations in the Twenty-First Century, 32.

^[19] Smith, Design and Planning of Campaigns and Operations in the Twenty-First Century, 32-33.

^[20] Mark Hilborne, "Gulf War II," Military and Defence Studies Program (Canberra: Australian Defence College, 2 June 2021), Lecture.

^[21] Wilson C. Blythe, "A History of Operational Art," Military Review 98, no. 6 (September-October 2021 2018): 46-47.

^[22] Craig Beutel, "Why Non-U.S. Militaries Should Adopt the U.S. Army Design Methodology," The Strategy Bridge (16 August 2016). https://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/campaign-planning-unconventional-warfare-thoughts-new-approach-indirect-action.

^[23] John A Nagl, "An American View of Twenty-First Century Counter-Insurgency," The RUSI Journal 152, no. 4 (2007).

^[24] Emile Simpson, War From The Ground Up: Twenty-First Century Combat as Politics (Oxford University Press, 2018), 66.

^[25] Carl von Clausewitz, Michael Howard, and Peter Paret, "On the Nature of War (Book I)," in On War (New Jersey Princeton University Press, 1976), 87. 87

^[26] Simpson, War f\From The Ground Up: Twenty-First Century Combat as Politics, 5-6.

^[27] Smith, Design and Planning of Campaigns and Operations in the Twenty-First Century, 36.

^[28] Nicolas Bosio, "Strategic Planning," Military and Defence Studies Program (Canberra: Australian Defence College, 15 October 2021), Lecture.