Clausewitz & The Triangle

Kind-hearted people might of course think there was some ingenious way to disarm or defeat an enemy without too much bloodshed, and might imagine this is the true goal of the art of war. Pleasant as it sounds, it is a fallacy that must be exposed: war is such a dangerous business that the mistakes which come from kindness are the very worst. The maximum use of force is in no way incompatible with the simultaneous use of the intellect.

The author of these words was a Prussian military office named Carl von Clausewitz. He is regarded to this day as one of history's most brilliant military thinkers.

Everyone has noticed the recent escalation of the insurgency in Iraq. We also saw this week General Officer of Marines James T. Conway giving a sharp rebuke to the politicians who meddled with the operations of I MEF in Fallujah.

What follows is a very long piece. It argues that much that is commonly understood about guerrilla war and the state of things in Iraq is wrong. If the claims it begins with seem outrageous to you, consider them in light of Clausewitz's military theories. They may change how you think about the trouble in the Triangle.

We will consider the situation in Iraq according to four of Clausewitz' concepts: friction, the "fog" of war, culimnating point of victory, and the "fascinating trinity of war."

Friction

"Friction" remains a core concept for American warfighting (and not only American). The National Defense University has devoted a great deal of time and effort to examining and explaining it. We will be brief here.

Friction is Clausewitz's term for the difficulties that arise in executing war. These include: competition between officers, or camps of opinion (e.g., the State / Defense Department split we've had to endure, now further complicated by the addition of an Iraqi state government); the weather (e.g., sandstorms that hamper operations or ruin gear); misunderstanding of orders by lower-ranked soldiers; the length of time it takes to get battlefield intelligence to the commander, and then his orders back to the people who have to execute them. These are all parts of "friction," which complicate the fighting of war.

The Coalition suffers from several sources of friction, some of which have been named above. We have also some international pressure, as Coalition members respond to political events at home; a few language difficulties between international units; and some of the poorer countries in the Coalition do not have the right gear to participate in joint operations, which limits their usefulness.

However, the Coalition's front line fighters -- such as I MEF -- have the lowest level of friction in human history. Operations between services are integrated more completely and successfully than ever before. The military has invested heavily in what is known as C4ISR technoloty (command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillence, and reconnaissance). The US military has also pushed decision-making down the chain of command to an unprecedented degree. We have all the advantages in ability to get battlefield intel to the people who need it, have informed decisions made, and get orders that are understood. Frequently the people giving those orders are there on the spot.

The Coalition's friction arises almost entirely from the levels above the fighting forces (we will get to government's place in war in the section on the trinity). As LTGEN Conway said:

"When you order elements of a Marine division to attack a city, you really need to understand what the consequences of that are going to be and not perhaps vacillate in the middle of something like that," he said. "Once you commit, you got to stay committed."

Noting that six Marines were killed and six wounded in those first three days, he added: "We were quite happy with the progress of the attack on the city. We thought we were sparing civilian lives everywhere and anywhere that availed itself to us. We thought we were going to be done in a few days. That's the Monday morning quarterbacking."

The damage done in Fallujah was done by the friction of the higher levels. The fighting forces were repeatedly ordered to do things that they did not wish to do, attacking before they had laid the groundwork (e.g., the "information environment") according to political pressure, and then being forced to back off before they had finished their execution due to political pressure.

If we are serious about winning in Iraq, the answer is clear: the levels that produce this serious friction must be removed as much as possible from the decision making in Iraq. The business should be left to the Marines and soldiers on the ground, with the politicians clearly instructed to stay out of it. In that way, friction on our side will be reduced to only that low level that the military has not succeeded in eliminating, and we shall have every advantage over the enemy.

Friction is not all on one side, however.

The Fog of War

In his most famous work, On War, Clausewitz wrote:

all action takes place, so to speak, in a kind of twilight, which, like fog or moonlight, often tends to makes things seem grotesque and larger than they really are.

This is never truer than in guerrilla warfare. One of the primary tools of the guerrilla is the ruse of appearing more dangerous than he really is.

Hit and run attacks, sniper attacks, bombings and the like give the appearance of a foe who is everywhere, when in fact his numbers are limited.

They give the appearance of a foe who has the ability to command the battlefield, when in fact he must hide.

They give the appearance of a foe who is invunerable, when in fact his casualty rates are likely to be very high. Guerrillas suffer casualties at much greater rates than conventional soldiers.

The regular "drumbeat" of attacks also, by hitting you with repeated sensory input of being hit, can mask the fact that your losses are not very high. You become focused on the regularity of the hits, to the degree that you don't notice that the hits do little damage. The United States military mourns every lost solier, but the focus on the mourning causes American citizens not to realize that the combat loss rate in Iraq has only been between one and two percent in more than a year of sustained combat, depending on which factors you calculate.

The fog of war frequently causes you to overestimate the enemy's strength, just as it did when pundits calculated that Baghdad would not be taken without Stalingrad-style losses. The fog of war is never more potent than when fighting guerrillas, who rely on the mystique to appear dangerous.

In fact, the guerrillas also suffer from friction, much more than our forces do. They lack C4ISR technology better than radios. Whereas I MEF can rotate home, replaced by a fresh unit of trained warfighters, the enemy must deal with continued exhaustion. They can recruit from the populace, but have little time and no safety for training their replacements. Supplies must be scavanged from Saddam-era ammo dumps, or smuggled in at substantial risk. And their casualty rates are high, far higher than our own. Every aspect of war is more difficult for them.

The guerrilla relies in very large part on the fog of war to present an illusion of power. Orwell wrote that, "Power-worship blurs political judgment because it leads, almost unavoidably, to the belief that present trends will continue." The guerrilla desperately needs people to believe in his power, and that his strength will grow forever, that his success is inevitable.

In fact, current trends cannot continue. The difficulties the guerrillas face on the battlefield are tremendous. The Marine Corps can manage operations at this level indefinitely; the guerrilla must expand, or collapse. It is important not to lose sight of that fact. Our enemy is weaker than commonly believed. The very act of fighting us creates powerful friction for him. He cannot fight this way forever, nor even for very long.

Culminating Point of Victory

But, the objection will be raised, he will not have to carry on forever. The sentiment in the country will turn against us, as people grow angry at American raids and the destruction wrought by our forces. This rage will ensure the wrath of the people, which will flood guerrillas with willing recruits, and cause them to expand like a virus through the country until there is nowhere safe for us.

Clausewitz recognized this dynamic, not limited to guerrilla war, which he called 'the strategic aspect of defense.' This article explains:

However strongly an offensive may start out, it inevitably weakens as it advances from its original base. The need to provide garrisons, to maintain the lines of supply and communications, the greater physical strain on troops in the attack, all degrade the aggressor's force. Meanwhile, the defender falls back upon the sources of his strength. Every offensive, however victorious, has a "culminating point." If the defender has enough time and space in which to recover (and Russia offered an excellent example, which Clausewitz noted long before Napoleon's disaster there in 1812-13), the aggressor inevitably reaches a point at which he must himself take up the defense. If he pushes too far, the equilibrium will shift against him. The aggressor, in his own retreat (often through devastated territory), cannot draw on the defender's usual sources of strength -- physical or psychological.

Moreover, public opinion is more likely to favor the strategic defender, since significant conquests by one contender will threaten the rest. Eventually, the conqueror will reach a "culminating point of victory" at which his successes provoke sufficient counteraction to defeat him.

The essence of the defense is waiting: waiting until the attacker clarifies his own intentions; waiting until the balance of forces shifts; waiting for any improvement in the defender's situation, whether from the culminating process described above, from outside intervention, from mobilization of his own resources, or from some chance development. Time is almost always on the side of the defender.

Waiting, however, does not imply mere passivity, and a passive defense is not at all what Clausewitz was describing. His vision of any effective defense was profoundly active. If the defense functions essentially as a shield, it is best "a shield made up of well-directed blows." Defense must shift at some point to the offense, the "flashing sword of vengeance." Thus it is easy to find in On War isolated quotations which seem to glorify the offensive. It is nonetheless the interaction of the two forms that concerned Clausewitz.

That dynamic is what the enemy is counting on. It needs to present itself as the army of vengence -- it need not prevent American incursions, nor even resist them, so long as it can bill some later atrocity as a punishment. The hope is that the populace will turn to them, support them, and uphold them.

Indeed, it often does work out that way in wars of national liberation. While we were fighting the Ba'athists in Iraq, which is to say the tribes of the Sunni Triangle, it was the core danger. That situation has now changed.

Our current foe is not the Ba'athists, but the Islamists. For all the worrying about the things we do that might turn the populace against us, it is rarely remembered that the enemy can turn the populace against it too.

There is cause to think that it is doing so.

Consider this: the Sunni Triangle, as mentioned, is largely tribal in culture. People who grew up there are strongly attached to the tribal system, which to them seems as natural and morally right as the sun rising in the east and the moon waxing and waning. The enemy of the tribe is your enemy -- and it is not our side that is wrecking the tribal strength.

An anti-war piece by paleoconservative site Lewrockwell illustrates this:

Last spring, the Marines made a deal with the Baath Party in Fallujah: Keep the place quiet and we?ll let you run it while keeping our hands off it. As has so often been the case in the history of war, it was the right move, too late. Throughout Iraq, the balance had already swung away from the Baath and any other forces that might have been able to re-create an Iraqi state, to non-state, Fourth Generation elements. The experiment in Fallujah was worth trying ? the only other option was destroying the city in order to save it, as we recently did in Najaf ? but the Baath was by then already a fading force. Of its Fallujah Brigade, the [New York] Times writes:

The Fallujah Brigade is in tatters now, reduced to sharing tented checkpoints on roads into the city with the [Islamic] militants, its headquarters in Fallujah abandoned, like the buildings assigned to the national guard. Men assigned to the brigade, and to the two guard battalions, have mostly fled, Iraqis in Fallujah say, taking their families with them, and handing their weapons to the militants.

Instead of the Baath, what we now face in Fallujah is a genuinely dangerous opponent. Its idol is not Saddam, but Allah. The Times reports that:

The militants? principal power center is a mosque in Fallujah led by an Iraqi cleric, Abdullah al-Janabi, who has instituted a Taliban-like rule in the city?with an Islamic militant group, Unity and Holy War [Tahwid and Jihad -- Zarqawi's group -Grim], that American intelligence? [has linked] to al Qaeda?

By invading Iraq, the United States in effect took Fallujah and much of the rest of Anbar Province from Saddam and gave it to Osama bin Laden... From the standpoint of our forces in Iraq, the main problem the third stage in the war there presents is that we have no one to talk to, no one to make deals with. As we saw in Fallujah in April, it was possible to make a deal with the Baath ? a deal the Baath genuinely wanted to carry out, though it proved unable to do so.

We all remember how the Taliban was scorned by the average Afghan -- how men rushed to shave their beards, women to go forth into the sun. We remember how many of the men impressed into service with the Taliban surrendered at first chance to the National Alliance, who embraced them like brothers and then summarily killed the "foreign fighters" who were there.

It is the guerrillas in Iraq who are undoing the tribal structure, scorning the traditional authority, and bringing chaotic change to the Sunni Triangle. The US military has negotiated with tribal leaders, not only in Fallujah but constantly. Had the assualt on Fallujah been completed, we would have emplaced tribal leaders over a town secure enough for them to control, instead of one that still contained a large enemy force. We would not have occupied it ourselves, any more than we have occupied Najaf.

The scorning of the tribes is an offense to the natural order in the minds of many Iraqis. Some will join, heart and mind, with the guerrillas -- they will accept that the tribal order was wrong and deserved to be overturned, in favor of Allah's divine sha'riah. Most will not, though while the guerrillas are present in numbers and with guns, they will be silent. Even the Afghans, a well-armed and fiercely independent people, did not toss out the Taliban, though they were very glad to see the back of them. The guerrillas in the Sunni Triangle, likewise, are their own worst argument.

That is another way of saying: American arrogance, for all we hear about it, does not match the arrogance of the guerrillas. We overthrew a national government that enjoyed some broad support in the Sunni triangle, but we did not try to overthrow the tribes. The insurgents are doing just that, turning the order of daily life upside down. If we allow our forces to defeat them on the battlefield, without turning aside from the horrible face of violence, the people of Iraq will not arise to defend them.

"Inkblots"

"Friction" arises here as well. We have heard the complaints that the United States has not adequately reconstructed Iraq. Fair enough; but how much reconstruction will these guerrillas do? How much can they do? How many electricians, plumbers, and masons do they have? We have heard that security is a problem for our reconstruction efforts -- how much security do they have to operate?

The Newsweek article we opened with included this fearful analysis:

Another ominous sign is the growing number of towns that U.S. troops simply avoid. A senior Defense official objects to calling them "no-go areas." "We could go into them any time we wanted," he argues. The preferred term is "insurgent enclaves." They're spreading. Counterinsurgency experts call it the "inkblot strategy": take control of several towns or villages and expand outward until the areas merge.

There are several things to be said about this. The first is that it is wrong.

Inkblot strategy developed in the Vietnam war, under the hand of Marine General Charles Krulak (later the Commandant of the Marine Corps in the early 1990s). It was based on two generations of USMC experience, which had been distilled into a publication called "The Small Wars Manual."

The strategy requires something more than creating a "no-go" area, which the Marines can enter whenever they want but inside which they don't stay. It requires taking and holding territory, so that life in that area can be stable and pleasant for the civilians. By reducing their exposure to the horrors of war, you help prevent the "culminating point of victory" for guerrillas -- the populace will not support the guerrillas, as it sees no need for vengeance, and regards guerrilla violence instead as an unwelcome disruption of order.

Newsweek has mistaken a counterinsurgency technique for an insurgency technique. Once again, the mainstream media's failure to comprehend any aspect of military science has caused them to portray the insurgents as stronger and more dangerous than they are.

What is happening in the Triangle is not an attempt to reduce civilian exposure to violence so that they can live the lives they want to live, the way they want to live them. What is happening is an attempt to remake the order of society and force people to live in a Taliban-style arrangement. It is not only plumbers they lack, however. They are not equipped to govern.

Although this piece is about the Sunni Triangle, a moment's digression to Najaf is useful. Many of the same arguments about the guerrillas in the Triangle were also offered about al Sadr's forces in Najaf. Yet when the city was cleared of them at last, what Iraq discovered was that their "courts" had involved mass graves. They do not have the resources or the stability for prisons; they can only kill their opponents. Just as "American arrogance" masks the fact that the guerrillas employ far more offensive arrogance, the worries about American bloodshedding mask the fact that the guerrillas employ far more horrifying bloodshed -- horrifying to the Iraqis, particularly.

The guerrillas must try to regulate the regions they now control. They are not set up to do it even in peacetime, and the friction challenges they face complicate the situation greatly. They will not win the hearts and minds of the majority of people in the Triangle.

Clausewitz's "culminating point of victory" is not available to them.

The Trinity of War

We have established that the guerrillas will not be able to exploit the culminating point, and that the American military can fight them to best effect if the politicians stay out, so that friction is reduced to a very low level. Politics and government, however, have a place in war. This is explored in Clausewitz's Trinity:

War is more than a true chameleon that slightly adapts its characteristics to the given case. As a total phenomenon its dominant tendencies always make war a remarkable trinity--composed of primordial violence, hatred, and enmity, which are to be regarded as a blind natural force; of the play of chance and probability within which the creative spirit is free to roam; and of its element of subordination, as an instrument of policy, which makes it subject to reason alone.

The first of these three aspects mainly concerns the people; the second the commander and his army; the third the government. The passions that are to be kindled in war must already be inherent in the people; the scope which the play of courage and talent will enjoy in the realm of probability and chance depends on the particular character of the commander and the army; but the political aims are the business of government alone.

These three tendencies are like three different codes of law, deep-rooted in their subject and yet variable in their relationship to one another. A theory that ignores any one of them or seeks to fix an arbitrary relationship between them would conflict with reality to such an extent that for this reason alone it would be totally useless.

Our task therefore is to develop a theory that maintains a balance between these three tendencies, like an object suspended between three magnets.

One thing to recognize, in achieving this balance, is that the rational aspect of war -- which is "likened" to government -- is not government as we understand it. The rational aspect is the thing to be balanced and preserved, not the politics. Friction is an enemy of rationality, as it takes rational decisions and distorts their effect. By yielding control of military operations to the front-line forces, the government chooses a very rational course: their policy goals are more likely to come about. The military can more effectively impose its rationality on the field. The government need only be clear about the end state it desires.

The real danger of defeat in Iraq comes not from the insurgency's effect on the Iraqi people; it certainly does not come from the guerrillas effect on our soldiers. As explained above, the Iraqi people are likely to be driven to hate the insurgents far more than us. The real danger of defeat lies in the irrational aspects of the American people, including both her voters and her political class.

The irrational aspects are out of balance because few Americans have the background to evaluate war in a rational way. The military science is absent from teaching at the high-school level, and taught to only a minority of college students. Americans in general do not know what to do with the information they get from the media, and so they are especially vunerable to fear, anger, anguish, and worry -- the irrational aspects.

This dynamic is worsened because the media presenting those facts has no grasp of the military science. Not only do Americans not know how to evaluate the information they are getting, but the people conveying that information don't understand it either. They can tell you what happened, but not what it means.

Not only do they not understand how to achieve victory, or how to evaluate how close or far we are from victory, they also do not understand the price of failure.

Briefly, it is this: we are now engaged in a ground war against al Qaeda's allies and fellow-fighters. Al Qaeda grew as strong as it did because of the perception that it could beat America. If it actually does beat America, due to a failure of the national will to win, al Qaeda and groups of its sort will grow to an order of magnitude never imagined. If we lose Iraq, we lose the war on terror: or, at the very least, we will turn it into a kind of war far worse than anything now possible.

If we focus our mind on that, we find rationality beginning to reassert itself. Now it is not simple horror at all the violence: now we understand we have a cause to be there. We have a reason to fight, and a need to win. How do we get from here to victory?

Conclusion

We get there through military science. We get there by bringing the magnets back into balance.

Rationality demands these things:

1) That we commit to winning at any cost.

2) That we fight to destroy the enemy, remembering that their own brutal and extreme behavior will lose more hearts than any warfighting on our part.

3) We reduce friction, by laying into our politicians to stay out of the military's way. Call and write your Congressmen and other officials. Your message: Let the Marines and soldiers win this one.

The war will end sooner, with fewer overall casualties for all sides, if we fight with maximum force. Suffering of civilians and noncombatants will be reduced to the greatest degree possible by vigorous military action to destroy the insurgents in the field. We must be bold, and we must be absolutely steadfast.

We must also remember the words of Clausewitz with which I began:

Kind-hearted people might of course think there was some ingenious way to disarm or defeat an enemy without too much bloodshed, and might imagine this is the true goal of the art of war. Pleasant as it sounds, it is a fallacy that must be exposed: war is such a dangerous business that the mistakes which come from kindness are the very worst.

Kindness is a virtue, and a sweet one. But true kindness to the people of the Triangle is ending the war, destroying the insurgents, and returning order to the land.

The road before us is now mapped. We must ride forth.