Combined Arms and ‘Joint’ Warfare

The discussion that follows is a somewhat artificial exercise, rather than a description of reality. This artificiality is owed mainly to the invention of the aeroplane, and secondarily to the mastery of wireless communications. Nowadays good armies and navies never operate without seeking to control the skies over their heads. Major naval weapons systems are in fact aerial weapons (aeroplanes, missiles, etc.), tactically indistinguishable from those of an air force. An air force in turn depends on a ground-based infrastructure whose establishment and defence will generally be the work of an army. Forces operating on land, sea, and in the air also communicate constantly with each other, tailoring their operations accordingly. Such practices are at the heart of ‘joint’ military operations, in which land, sea, and air forces cooperate to their collective advantage. The superiority of joint operations is now taken for granted by military planners. Left to their own devices, armies, navies, and air forces each present a limited set of strategic capabilities. Their individual strengths are offset by equally distinctive weaknesses. Joint warfare is now the norm, or rather the ideal, because it allows military organizations to exploit the strengths and mask the weaknesses of their component parts.

p. 257Armies Exist to Control Territory and People

Armies are the only armed forces intended to seize and hold, and not merely to destroy, their objectives. That armies seek to destroy each other is also true, as it is for navies and air forces. But death and destruction in war are always a means to an end, and if the end is to gain control of a human population, then only an army will do. Once an army has established such control, the difficulty of dislodging it can be considerable. ‘Regime change’ is inherently an army mission, and cannot be contemplated by any state that is not prepared to commit its land forces to the fight on a sufficient scale to dislodge and replace the ground forces of the enemy.

Such a commitment is now considered an especially weighty one. For a country like the United States, which is able to inflict massive damage and suffering by means of naval and air forces, the decision to employ its army is often more politically perilous than the decision to fight in the first place. Any military operation involving what are sometimes called ‘boots on the ground’ will have a heightened significance for public opinion in a democratic society, if only because of the additional risk of friendly casualties. Such a step is normally considered only after some form of strategic bombardment has been tried and found wanting. The major American interventions in Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq (in 1990–1) all began with an initial decision to employ air and naval forces, followed by a separate, independently considered decision to send in the army. No such step-wise approach occurred in the invasion of Iraq in 2003 because in that instance the overthrow of the enemy state was the objective from the start.

The Politics of Land Warfare

Additional political scrutiny attaches to land warfare because the use of land forces has a kind of finality about it that does not apply to naval and air operations. If the outstanding advantage of armies is their ability to hold their ground, their outstanding disadvantage is that they are difficult to move. Employing them requires enormous determination, and one reason to employ them is because you want to convey such determination to the enemy. Once the commitment has been made, however, it is difficult to undo. Land forces engaged with an undefeated adversary cannot disengage without incurring tactical risk. They are also liable to present a spectacle of failure for the world to see. Ships and aeroplanes come and go. An army comes and stays. That is its nature and purpose, both tactically and strategically.

The defensive resilience of armies renders the delivery of a successful attack extremely difficult. War on land is almost always a grinding, wearisome business. The ‘art of war’ is devoted to figuring out how to make it less so (see Box 15.1). The goal of all warfare, as the sixteenth-century Austrian field marshal Raimondo de Montecucolli said, is ‘victory’, an observation that stood out when it was made because it cast aside a variety of other objectives—honour, glory, plunder, prestige—that the aristocratic elites of those times rated highly. In strategic terms victory is a political and not merely a military concept. This is one reason why Montecucolli’s modern successors tend to add the word ‘decisive’, meaning victory that goes beyond the accomplishment of tactical goals, and achieves results that alter the political conditions that brought the war about. For an army, victory of this kind cannot usually be gained by pushing the enemy around, or even away. It requires that his powers of resistance p. 258↵be broken and disorganized, so that he confronts the possibility that, at some point in the future, he may become defenceless.

Operational Art

In modern times military theorists have identified three general paths to this kind of success. The first, which emerges in the strategic literature of the eighteenth century, is to manoeuvre against the flanks and rear of the opposing army. The fighting elements of land armies represent only a fraction of their manpower. The rest are devoted to maintaining the complex logistical system required to keep the army moving, eating, and fighting. Attacks directed against that system often have disproportionately disruptive effects. Precisely because the vulnerability of an army’s logistics is so well recognized, however, it usually proves difficult to exploit. Armies take good care to protect their communications if they can. Nor is it easy to engage in bold manoeuvre against the enemy’s rear while protecting one’s own against similar assault. Modern armies work hard to outmanoeuvre each other, and when they have succeeded, as in the German offensives against France in 1870 and 1940, the results have been impressive. But such outcomes are historically rare, because armies of similar size, fighting with similar methods, have little chance of wrong-footing each other so grievously as to win all at once. When such efforts fail, the grim realities of attrition swiftly reassert themselves (see Box 15.1).

An obvious solution is to have an army that is not of similar size to your opponent’s, but is instead much larger. Modern states possess extensive means of mobilizing their populations for war, either by persuading them to fight or by coercing them to do so. Until the turn of the nineteenth century, governments were reluctant to call upon the mass of their subjects to bear arms, because they could not afford to equip the huge armies that would have

p. 259↵resulted, and because doing so entailed political risks: people mobilized for war might expect political concessions in return. The fact that a country’s inhabitants had just been trained and equipped for fighting also seemed to increase the possibility that they would seize those concessions for themselves. It is not surprising that universal conscription was first attempted by a revolutionary government, that of France in 1793. The resulting army dwarfed those of France’s adversaries, and could only be defeated once Europe’s other great powers adopted similar methods.

Firepower

During the nineteenth century major land armies grew dramatically in size. The consequences of this development were amplified by modern weaponry, whose range and lethality increased dramatically. As soldiers pondered this new reality, they recognized that it cut against the possibility that they might outfox their opponent. Forces numbering in the millions could scarcely be manoeuvred in any meaningful sense, and once they got within range of each other no outcome seemed possible except massacre on an epic scale.

If there was a way out, the best observers concluded, it could only be found at the outset of hostilities, when you might catch your enemy unprepared for action. The best chance for decisive victory seemed to lie with the side that could strike hardest right at the start. Here was a third path to victory, one whose attractiveness has survived a considerable record of historical disappointment. Many of the major wars of the twentieth century began with massive attacks designed to achieve swift and decisive success. Examples include the Japanese offensive against Russia in 1904, and against America and Great Britain in 1941; the German offensive of 1914, and the so-called blitzkrieg of 1939–41; the North Korean invasion of South Korea in 1950; the Iraqi invasions of Iran in 1980, and of Kuwait in 1990; Israel’s attacks against Egypt and Syria in 1967, and those by Egypt and Syria against Israel in 1973. This list could be expanded without difficulty, but the basic impression would not change, which is that on the whole the advantages of attacking first have not proven sufficiently decisive to outweigh more fundamental sources of military strength. Land armies are voracious consumers of men and materiel. In general, victory on land has gone to belligerents with sufficient political determination, social resilience, and economic productivity to sustain military effort over the long haul.

Many thoughtful soldiers nevertheless remain convinced that it is their duty to win quickly if they can. Not all, however. Revolutionary insurgency is a form of land warfare that embraces protraction as a source of strategic leverage, by which an opponent may be worn down. Insurgents take advantage of a terrain feature that conventional forces prefer to avoid: the civil population, within which the insurgent conceals himself, and which he holds hostage. Such methods are timeless. Whenever the weak have fought the strong they have relied on ambushes, traps, terrorism, hit-and-run attacks, and so on, in the hope that, just by staying alive and engaged, victory may come to them.

Unconventional Warfare

If such unconventional warfare has loomed large in recent years, it is partly because of the decline of conventional land warfare as a feature of the international system. Since the end p. 260↵of the Second World War advanced societies have avoided fighting each other, so that major wars have only been waged by or against second-rate powers. It is also true that the insurgent’s chances have improved owing to better technology, above all in the area of communications. A few radios connecting isolated rebel bands or terrorist cells can make an enormous difference at the tactical level, while the ability to communicate with the civil population via the public media has gone some distance towards evening up the odds in a contest whose basic terms are always defined ideologically.

Counterinsurgency can fairly be numbered among the most important missions of contemporary armies. This is a reality that professional soldiers are often reluctant to embrace, however. The swift overthrow of an enemy army remains the acme of professional military achievement. Setting this traditional standard aside will require a re-examination of the basic assumptions on which land warfare has been conducted for three hundred years.

p. 261The Age of Sail

The development of sailing warships capable of traversing the world’s oceans transformed this ancient picture. Sailing navies were the instruments by which European overseas empires were created. The highly integrated world system that we know today is descended from them. The role of navies in this process was twofold: to transport soldiers, merchants, missionaries, and settlers to the far corners of the world; and to protect or prey upon the network of seaborne trade that resulted.

The inelastic agrarian economies of continental states could offer nothing like the wealth generated by long-distance trade, which sailing navies made possible. Sailing navies were instruments of economic warfare, and achieved strategic effects mainly through their impact on international trade. When the American naval officer and theorist Alfred Thayer Mahan coined the term ‘sea power’ at the end of the nineteenth century, it was the synergy between naval power, commerce, and colonial expansion that he had in mind. From Mahan’s perspective, states whose navies could ‘command’ the sea—that is, employ it for their own purposes while denying its use to others—were destined to dominate those who could not.

By the time Mahan was writing, however, the organic relationship between naval power and maritime trade was beginning to break down. This was owed partly to the Industrial Revolution, which allowed continental states to match the economic productivity of overseas commerce; and partly to the increasingly intricate economic dependencies that trade itself created. Mahan and his contemporaries thought the strategic significance of sea power was destined to increase in proportion to the value of the goods that moved across the world’s oceans. In practice, however, the world economy gradually became too large and complex to be coerced by direct military means.

Blockade and Economic Warfare

One can see this by comparing the operations of the Royal Navy against Napoleonic France at the start of the nineteenth century, and against Germany at the start of the twentieth. Naval warfare in the first of these contests centred on a close blockade of the enemy’s coast. British warships, too powerful and numerous to be driven off by their French counterparts, lurked in the maritime approaches to French ports, cutting them off from seaborne trade. British ships also stopped and searched any commercial vessel on the high seas that was suspected of trading with the enemy. Neutral powers had no choice but to accept this interference, since their own navies were no match for the British. In time, businessmen in Europe and the Americas came to prefer transporting their goods in British ships, or under British licence. Naval superiority also allowed Britain to seize France’s overseas colonies, whose trade shifted to the British side of the ledger. None of this could prevent Napoleon’s armies from running roughshod over opposing armies in the short run. But over the longer term the financial leverage that accrued to Britain and its allies proved overwhelming. The final campaigns that brought Napoleon down were not conducted by British armies, but they were paid for by the British treasury, grown rich from the exercise of maritime strategy in its classic form.

Nothing remotely similar was possible a century later, when Britain found itself at war with Germany. Close blockade of the German coast had been rendered impracticable by the new weaponry of the industrial age—long-range guns, mines, torpedoes, etc. Britain instead p. 262↵attempted a ‘distant’ blockade of the entire European continent, which affronted the rights of neutral states, who were no longer willing to knuckle under so easily. Britain’s own ability to wage war depended on access to world markets, and the prospect that Britain’s neutral trading partners might refuse to do business with it, or even enter the war on the other side, set strict limits on how British sea power could be exercised.

Against Napoleon, the British had grown rich by cornering the market on overseas trade. Against Germany they grew poor, borrowing money from the United States to finance their own war effort. The task of depriving a great industrial nation of the means to carry on war proved to be beyond the power of the Royal Navy; to which was added the defensive burdens of Germany’s retaliatory submarine campaign, which seriously threatened Britain’s own overseas trade for the first time in centuries. Britain’s centrality to the global economy that it helped to create had ceased to be an unambiguous source of strategic leverage, and was shown to be a strategic vulnerability as well, one that is now shared to some degree by every advanced society.

Economic warfare has declined as a naval mission, as its political and economic consequences have become increasingly unmanageable. The strategic advantage afforded by sea power in wartime has accordingly become less distinctive—though it goes without saying that any nation separated from potential adversaries by an ocean will require a navy if it wishes to get across. Nowadays the high seas have become a zone of safety across which an enormous share of world trade can pass unmolested—a fact that should not be obscured by incidental concerns about piracy, or speculation about the supposed vulnerability of maritime straits to closure by terrorists. Systemically, the sea today is part of the ballast that keeps the world economy, and global order generally, on an even keel. If that should cease to be true, the world would quickly become a different and more dangerous place (see Critical Thinking).

Good Order at Sea

At present the only nation that possesses a navy of global strategic significance is the United States. That significance rests on the leading role that it plays in maintaining good order at sea, and on its ability to project power from sea to shore. In this latter role it functions like a specialized sort of air force, which compensates for the short range of its weapons by the ability to move its bases around. The advantages of being able to do this should not be underestimated. Land-based air forces require a massive fixed infrastructure, whose location may limit how those forces can be used. Aircraft operating from land bases sufficiently remote to be safe from enemy attack may have to fly through neutral airspace to reach their targets, for which permission may be denied in a crisis. Forward bases constructed to avert this problem take time and resources to build, and are no more defensible than any other fixed asset within range of enemy weapons. If such bases are built on enemy territory, then the territory must first be seized. If they are built on neutral or allied territory, then operations again become subject to political requirements that may be difficult to control. Warships do not suffer from these liabilities, but can approach their targets directly from international waters. Once on the scene, they can sustain operations almost indefinitely, being continuously replenished and resupplied at sea (see Box 15.2).

There can be no guarantee that such advantages will last forever. The strategic utility of a powerful navy is ultimately subject to the continuing evolution of long-range strike systems and other weapons of ‘access denial’, which are designed to hold warships so far off shore that they cannot fight effectively against an enemy on land. Such weapons are easy to envision, but they are difficult to realize in practice. In the meantime, naval forces offer a combination of striking power, speed, and flexibility that is well suited to a security environment in which threats cannot be anticipated long in advance. The ability of naval forces to perform the kind of constabulary function required in a world of brushfire conflicts and rapidly emerging crises is one of their most distinctive contributions to the contemporary world picture.p. 264↵

Theory vs Practice

Coercive Bombing

Whether or not this is a good thing depends on how one views the gap between peace and war, which has narrowed by virtue of the ease with which aerial strike operations can be conducted. The use of bombardment to punctuate a diplomatic demand or enforce a sanctions regime may pose little risk to the personnel involved, but the possibility that such attacks will inspire an escalatory response from the other side cannot be dismissed. The aim of violence in war is always to break the enemy’s will. Yet it may equally well harden his heart, stiffen his spine, and stimulate his imagination.

Which of these will happen is never easy to anticipate. Strategic theory concerns itself with the way political communities use (and experience) force. Strategic effectiveness is p. 267↵thus dependent, to some extent, on how accurately belligerents understand each other. Strategic bombing, as originally conceived, envisioned the enemy society as a single entity mobilized for war. Enemy governments were seen as authentic expressions of those societies, all of whose members were complicit in the violence of war. This view provided a moral justification and a tactical rationale for the far-reaching destruction that aerial bombardment entailed, in which damage inflicted anywhere was supposed to make itself felt everywhere. An army could be disabled without the ugly necessity of confronting its weapons, by demolishing the factories that made those weapons, along with the homes and bodies of the people who worked in the factories. Civilian deaths were not just tolerated, but sought.

Liberal democracies, at least, are inclined to think of their adversaries differently now. They no longer take the psychological unity of armed forces, state, and society for granted. On the contrary, these are now often seen as being artificially stitched together by political expediency, brute force, or some other fragile thread. The resulting seams have become the main targets of strategic bombardment in its current form. The aim of an air campaign conducted with precision weapons is to disable the government, the armed forces, and the critical infrastructure that supports them, while sparing as much of the surrounding society as possible. Apart from its greater humanity, this approach has the additional advantage of making the reconstruction and rehabilitation of a defeated enemy easier. But whether these strategic assumptions are more reliable than those that prevailed in the past is an open question. Today’s understanding of how air power works has been refined in campaigns against isolated, despotic regimes. Such experiences may have made democratic countries too quick to doubt the moral resilience of their opponents. Totalitarian and criminal regimes may be quite firmly rooted in their surrounding societies, and correspondingly difficult to coerce without inspiring the kind of escalatory reactions that lead to general war.

Space as a Battlefield

Whether space holds strategic possibilities independent of the contribution that space-based systems already make to the conduct of war is a matter of speculation. The military use of space is governed by two international legal norms. The first holds that claims of national sovereignty do not apply beyond the Earth’s atmosphere; the second that actual weapons (as distinct from sensors and control systems) cannot be deployed there. These provisions are not so much barriers to action as reflections of a prevailing consensus. The first has contributed to the exploitation of space for reconnaissance and communications. Any country capable of launching a satellite is free to peer down on its neighbours. This arrangement contributed to the stability of strategic deterrence during the cold war, by affording the United States and the Soviet Union a high degree of confidence that each knew what the other was up to.

The ban on putting weapons in space is less a matter of perceived mutual advantage than of apparent futility. The transparency that makes space such an ideal environment for reconnaissance and communications means that weapons placed there would be highly vulnerable to detection and destruction, without offering tactical capabilities significantly different from those available on the planet’s surface. War in space could also end up creating conditions that make its continuance impossible. Once satellites take to destroying each other, the low-orbital space in which most of them operate will rapidly fill up with junk, even small bits of which pose a lethal risk to whatever working systems remain in orbit. This problem already exists, to the point where scientists have become concerned about the cascading effect that will result if existing bits of junk start smashing into each other. The immensity of space should not conceal the fact that only small slices of it are currently of practical use to humanity. Those slices are already becoming contaminated by human use.

For now, the strategic application of space appears likely to remain confined to the collection and distribution of information, for purposes of precision targeting, and for the collection of general intelligence. Challenges in the latter area lie less in collecting data than in employing it effectively. It is easier to launch satellites capable of recording every mobile phone conversation in Afghanistan, or of photographing every flatbed truck in Shanghai, than it is to field the army of Pashtun speakers and photo-analysts required to interpret the results. Those who have gone to war have always hungered for more information. Technically speaking,p. 269↵

that hunger is now on the verge of satiation. Yet the results may prove less digestible than our ancestors imagined.

Information Warfare

What if it were otherwise? What if war could be fought without the need to store up and discharge massive amounts of kinetic energy? What would that be like? No one has the faintest idea. But the flourishing of information technology has at least removed the question from the realm of fantasy. Whether ‘cyberspace’ really deserves to be treated as an independent realm of war may be disputed. It is a wholly imaginary place, originally conceived in a work of science fiction, and now conjured up by physical systems that are no less subject to direct attack than other military or civilian objects. Yet the centrality of those systems to the conduct of war today is beyond dispute. To that extent ‘cyberwar’, like ‘space war’, already exists.

One reason information warfare has come in for so much scrutiny is the uneasy realization that complex information systems, on which even mundane military operations now depend, are unusually vulnerable to attack compared to other military assets. This is a grave problem, but it remains a tactical one, and should not be confused with the direct use of information as a strategic weapon. The latter is also readily distinguishable from propaganda (also known as ‘the war of ideas’). Strategy is not about persuasion, at least not primarily. It is about the forcible imposition of one’s will on an adversary.

‘Confusion to Our Enemies’

Whether such imposition can be accomplished by the manipulation or disruption of information alone is difficult to say. A computer virus that disabled a national stock exchange p. 270↵might have consequences comparable to those of a military attack. If such a blow were delivered during a ‘shooting’ war it would require no explanation, and would merely be another means by which one side sought to injure the other. On its own, a cyberattack of this kind would be difficult to exploit for strategic purposes, if only because, once its source and purpose were revealed, it might invite a conventional military response by way of rejoinder. Nevertheless, it is becoming increasingly clear that information is becoming one of the ‘arms’ whose effective combination is crucial to the conduct of war. A computer terminal may not look as alarming as a warship or an M-16, but appearances can be deceiving.

Like most forms of modern warfare, information attacks seek precision. And like most new forms of fighting (think of aeroplanes) they often fail to achieve it, producing general havoc and distress whose effects may be difficult to exploit for any defined purpose. An example of successful precision is the cyberattack mounted in 2010 against the Iranian nuclear programme, by parties still officially unknown. The attackers employed a computer ‘worm’ known as Stuxnet, specifically designed to disable the control systems of centrifuges used to enrich uranium. Such an effort requires a great deal of money and time, plus painstaking intelligence. If you take those things away, a cyberdevice set loose on the world might end up anywhere. In this respect information war suffers from some of the same limitations as biological warfare, which has loomed ominously on the strategic horizon for over a century without ever having been realized in practice, because its fratricidal risks have outweighed its prospective benefits. In this sense, at least, the metaphor of the ‘virus’ is well chosen.

Until now no information attack in any form has been regarded as an act of war by the victim. ‘Cyber’ weapons have so far been deployed exclusively within the gray zone of provocation, harassment, and intimidation that have always separated peace and war. Whether this will remain true is impossible to say. For now, the strategic geography of cyberspace remains terra incognita. It is a place where it is cheap to operate, and to fight undetected, provided you are willing to settle for mostly incidental confusion as your desired result. Its greatest appeal for now may be to terrorists and weak states who lack the means or opportunity to fight openly on a scale commensurate with their ambitions; who do not mind if they are not given public credit for their deeds; and who are not especially dependent on information technology themselves. For the rest, information warfare currently presents itself mainly as a defensive problem for advanced societies, and its value as a tool of strategic coercion remains unproven.