CSF 2014 | Sir Lawrence Freedman: Classical Military Strategy

thank you very much it really gives me great pleasure to be here my father was a naval aviator and in December 1941 he after quite a tough time in Malta he was in Jamaica and after Pearl Harbor he was told to go over to the US and give some advice that seems to be no trace of this advice all I can find is a picture of him dancing for war bonds in New Jersey so he did make a contribution it's a great III was enormous ly grateful as you might imagine for Admiral Greenert for his kind words about my book I'm encouraging you to read it indeed it may even have been an order I wasn't I wasn't quite sure but particularly it was particularly comforting because I don't think what I'm going to say is going to be enormous Lee at variance with what he says it's always was one thing about giving advice is another thing about contradicting the Chief of Naval Operations but I think what I'm going to say is going to follow but it's slightly different and it's really to challenge some of the ways that we do think about strategy and try to suggest some ways forward and I will indeed talk about the Dominion aspects of this strategy offer some sort of confidence that with the right measures demanding objectives can be achieved on a regular basis and that's how the word tends to be used and there's a constant demand for more and better strategy and a common lament that it has become neglected by our leaders they're chastised for being myopic and short term and if only they could rediscover the importance of strategy then the country could be inspired by a vision and resources would be geared to well-crafted but realistic goals without strategy would appear policy is doomed it's going to be coherent and incoherent this magic agreed ingredient and everything will fall into place sometimes it appears is if almost any strategy will do because at least then there will be clarity although of course the demands for a strategy often assume have a very strong view of what the strategy would look like and all of this I'm a skeptic Russia and China may have a view about a world that we'd be better accommodated to their interest but the Americans and the British are essentially status quo powers and so their grand visions are always going to look like improved versions of the present with some of the nasty bits taken away also in we've got to be realistic about how strategy is count going to come together we shouldn't dismiss normal organizational practices of muddling through trial and error and consider them a strategic as the CNO explained budgets do inevitably drive strategy and they do force people to make choices and work out their priorities there's always going to be a need to forge consensus amongst government departments negotiate with allies and anticipated ponents and nor should we feel contentious if politicians worry about public opinion and future elections they're the ones who have to explain the links between distant events and national while being Kennedy's speechwriter Ted Sorensen concluded that the quarantine was the best response to missiles in Cuba in 1962 because he couldn't write the alternative speech explaining air strikes there was a time when the big decisions of peace and war were matters for hide policy and the public was excluded this was the case for example in July 1914 well if political leaders have been required to make a compelling case to their people at that time they might have been more careful in their choices autocrats often make terrible decisions Brickhouse precisely because they don't have to worry about accountability and those around them are too scared to make a challenge so we have to be careful to avoid this sort of reification of strategy as some super intelligent product around which all activity can be organized it's about shifting political relationships and how to get the best outcome out of them if strategy is presented as setting as the setting of noble and ambitious objectives we then find ourselves working backwards to work out how we can get there we formulate a plan a sequence of steps that is supposed to get us to the desired place Vaughn Walker's famous observation was that no plan survives contact with the enemy I opened my book with Mike Tyson everybody's got a plan until they get punched in the mouth it's the same basic problem my argument is that we should recognize that whatever our goals not saying we shouldn't have them by any means strategy in the first instance will always be shaped by current circumstances and start with the specific problem at hand and if there's no pressing problem there'll be an absence of strategy this is why the status quo powers strategy as often as not it's quite reactive but we can distinguish I think between strategy is sort of an orientation to our environment which is something that can be written down in documents and thought about and then strategy as a campaign which is how I think the military inevitably are often going to think about it these are two different ways of thinking about strategy obviously if you thought about your environment properly then your campaign should be getting off to a better start whether two the two are different in a strategy as a campaign can result either from a radical objective a readiness yourselves to destabilize the environment or because somebody else has destabilized it and then it becomes a much more defensive reaction either way in my view it's likely to move forward in stages each changing the environment and therefore requiring different response as one stage closes off and another one opens and new possibilities arrive as well as old options no longer being available so it's an argument basically for flexibility and a degree of improvisation now what I want to do in this lecture is take this view of strategy and look at the problems particularly for a campaigning strategy that this creates for the armed forces before embarking on a campaign where we're told that the the military like clear objectives they're like clear objectives for to be set they want victory rather than a draw certainly not a defeat the enemy must be left with no way back obliged to surrender and comply with our wishes now this view draws on a long-established conceptual framework I call this the classical model largely because it derives quite explicitly from the classical works in our field even the more influential contemporary writers on strategic Theory john-boy dead load vote Colin gray placed themselves clearly in this classical tradition it's a striking feature of our field one can't imagine a contemporary business strategist insisting on the primacy of early 19th century text when marketing new products or launching a takeover bid a political strategist would find a guide to election campaigns from the 19th century quaint but no more of historical interest yeah few self-respecting military strategists feel able to ignore clouds of its many we'll go back to some zoo the daringly modern might get as far as basil little heart from the middle of the last century now that's good reason for this military strategy is still dominated by major Wars and these are rare events the most substantial were Napoleonic Wars which inspired the classics and then the first and second world wars one of which began a hundred years ago and the second of which ended 69 years ago the arrival of nuclear weapons encouraged truly innovative thinking this was more concerned with deterring Wars than fighting them and the other sub field has been guerrilla warfare and counter insurgency which has its own revival over the past decade but by and large these have been seen as diversions from core business the reassertion of classical military strategy in the 1970s was in some respects a reaction against the prevalence of a deterrence mentality in official thinking and the miserable experience of Vietnam although this reassertion was described in terms of military reform in key respects it was reactionary the ideal type of military practice was found well in the past in forms of warfare the pitted regular forces against each other prized inspired commanders kept non-combatants out of the frame and assumed that the fate of nations would be determined by the result the complaint from the Reformers was the decades of preoccupation with irregular forms of warfare had led to the neglect of the classical warfare and at the senior levels they said that generalship had become about management and management had superseded generalship and systems analysis had superseded strategy they've come to see warfare not as a chance to display the arts of high command but as a grand scheme of accounting with firepower as currency and body counts as output this critique found a responsive audience as the American armed forces sought to rebuild after Vietnam the classical approach was embraced reflected in demands for more maneuver and less attrition captured in field manuals and doctrinal developments such as air land battle and in this approach we can note the influence of a number of great figures from the past from Germany a conviction that battle could be decisive from the elder von Malka a belief that the operational conduct of war should be free from political interference from Sun Tzu and little heart a preference from the for maneuver over attrition and from clouds of its a description of military objectives in terms of centers of gravity the context was the return to was the cut was the Cold War and the residual possibility of a third world war the adversary in mind was the Warsaw Pact with its substantial armies and doctrines that could also be traced back to the 19th century thinking the Soviet focus on the operational art and maneuver helped validate the Western approach if these two great forces had clashed they would have been prepared to fight along comparable comparable lines at least until the nuclear question came to be asked but since the end of the Cold War there's been good reasons to doubt whether there will be another major war of this type and therefore whether these concepts will be of relevance meanwhile issues of nuclear deterrence and counter insurgency will remain furthermore we've had examples of force being used in a great variety of distinctive ways for purposes of coercion to establish new facts on the ground that don't a staff that don't fit neatly into these established approaches new forms of conflict cyber war for example are actively being explored and from this one might in conclude that the problem of the classical model was simply one of obsolescence this is the suggestion for example behind claims that we've now entered a fourth generation of warfare but that's not my argument I'm not saying that we should ignore the cloth the classics or alternatively that they're now being rendered irrelevant as a result of some transformation in warfare the activities associated with the fourth generation for example can be traced back to centuries while the possibility of major war still animates military preparations and it's not too difficult to think of contingencies where it might come back anyway a much the adherents of the classical model there's no suggestion that it is only for major war it's greater the expectations for the conduct of all or conflicts of which the armed forces are employed my argument instead is that there is a flaw in the model derived from the classics one that's been there from the start and has always caused problems the floor lies in the separation of the military and political strands of strategy in ancient times individuals combined the two and of course they were also combined in the single person of Napoleon although he was much better at the military than the political the separation of the two reflects the fact that there are distinct competences so that their integration is always going to be a challenge for civil military relations politicians who fancy themselves as generals have been almost as disastrous as generals who fancied themselves as politicians the development of a special field that came to be known as strategy was a consequence of the steady professionalization of Western navies and armies and me increasing Lee complex tasks they faced in moving large fleets and mass armies or in understanding the technical demands of their fields whether in gunnery or sieges in the Western tradition the fit between the political and military strands is seen as a top-down problem an issue of civil military relations only at the highest level the issue is raised directly in the clouds of Incheon axiom that war is a continuation of politics by other means the problem lay in in problem in this lay in the assumption behind the classical model that once the politicians had handed down objectives for war the military should take full responsibility for actual conduct and expect a minimum of political interference while doing so and one reason for this was there was another assumption that political girls would best be delivered by the comprehensive defeat of enemy forces in battle victory would leave the enemy state no choice but to agree terms from military gains political gains would follow naturally and so the heart of this model was the concept of the decisive battle as an encounter that would produce a clear result and shape the subsequent political settlement this was elaborated with the greatest clarity by Germany whose important is overshadowed by Klaus votes but in the 19th century he was the one to go to particularly in the United States we know of Denis man's influence at West Point as a teacher of civil war generals and of course Alfred Thayer mark man's influence over thinking about sea power and the younger man's influence over air power theorists such as do a on on how aircraft and air power should be used the idea of a decisive battle was extremely influential and shaped thinking from a long way back in Germany who wrote very clearly in a textbook he sort of way was I think the main reason for this but Clausewitz didn't disagree although he was aware of of circumstances where it might be hard to achieve a decisive result and this of course was where the German historian della Brooke came in building on these doubts of clouds of it and had a furious argument with the German General Staff when he argued that maybe some Wars might be won by exhaustion rather than by annihilation of enemy armies to his opponents to Doug Brooks opponents annihilation of the enemy was the only satisfactory approach not least because they doubted whether they could cope with a prolonged ak' campaign of exhaustion or attrition picking away at enemy strength in the hope of wearing it down distaste for this form of warfare remains prevalent hence the focus in recent years on maneuver which has been celebrated as supposedly cleverer less costly and casualties are much more likely to achieve a quick result there's a crucial moment during the franco-prussian war after more van Welker the great exponent of the decisive battle had achieved fantastic results first of Metz and then its down and approaching Paris Bismarck wanted the battle over quickly because he was worried that the French might bring an allies if it started to drag on whereas Vaughn Malcolm wasn't happy with the idea of achieving what he wanted to achieve through bombardment he thought it was possible to lay siege and virtually get the answer he wanted that wasn't the point was that he was furious of being overruled by Bismarck and the Emperor that his professional advice was not followed so he drew two lessons from the episode one of which was a belief this was the time of the Paris Commune as well that social forces would now start to make regular warfare as he had known it more and more difficult which is one reason why he Thiet a future European war although his successors were very careful to play down this aspect of what Marquez thought but the other was very clearly that it was important that strategy must be fully independent of policy he identified the operational level of war as one within which the commander must expect no political interference and for his successes this became a core principle I've just been reviewing as many others have the whole slew of books about the origins of the First World War I'm honest struck how little interrogation there was by political leaders of the military plans which they were being asked to implement the Kaiser briefly asked whether it was really wise for the German forces to push through Belgium he was told it was essential and let the matter drop the Tsar wondered whether the mobilization that he was being asked to approve was a bit too aggressive but he was told it was essential and he let the matter drop and even after the First World War this idea of the operational level as a politics free zone remained strongly in force so in its ideal form this classical military model would have clear political objectives passed over to the military who would inflict knockout blow on the enemy preferably through a brilliant maneuver and then Hamlet defeated the enemy back to the politicians to agree terms and there are obvious and familiar problems with this model which I won't go through in detail but it's clearly hard always to win a truly decisive victory should one be achieved it can be equally hard to translate this into desired political effects pacifying opponents to the point whether unable to resist your will is extremely demanding and rarely achieved battles can be inconclusive opponent and expectedly resilience the balance of Alliance can be as important as the balance of military strength conflicts can end in messy and unsatisfactory ways the classical model still persists and the most obvious example of this lies in the insistence that the planners task is to identify an enemy's centre of gravity clouds of its concept was taken from the physics of its day of his day and became I think one of his most unsatisfactory contributions to strategic thought in physics the center of gravity represents the point at which the forces of gravity could be said to converge within an object where its weight was balanced in all directions if struck there it could lose balance and fall but one obvious problem was that whereas it was quite easy to identify the center of gravity of a solid and static object it was much harder to do so with a complicated shape made up of moving parts for Clausewitz the center of gravity represented the source of the opponent's power and strength and therefore the point against which all our energies should be directed here the application of force should result in the enemy's defeat unfortunately he was never wholly clear on the spot to look for it could be a major concentration of physical strength and therefore a challenging place to mount an attack or a point where the enemy's forces came together and we're given direction might make more sense or perhaps it was something more political say a capital city or a particular member of an alliance that once defeated could cause the hole to crumble over the past few decades this has turned into a search for the knockout blow the limited but well directed and brilliantly executed thrust but could take down the enemy's forces without the bother of a prolonged and bloody campaign of attrition reflecting changing views about receiving and inflicting casualties it fitted in with the idea the strategy has to be smart and sophisticated avoiding the crude application of brute force now I don't want to spend time reviewing the very many versions and variations on the center of gravity theme that have been explored by our armed forces over the past few decades I'm prepared to be corrected but I've seen no evidence that the effort has improved the conduct of military operations there has been no consensus about what commanders should be looking for or the methodology required to find it is the aim to seek out or avoid them enemy's enemy's strengths was it about finding the enemy's weakest points but only if they represented a critical vulnerability rather than marginal assets when I reviewed all this literature for mark for my book it seemed to me the center of gravity could refer to a target or a number of targets which might consider source of enemy strength and a critical vulnerability found the physical psychological or political spheres which might if attacked are by itself alternatively in combination with other events a decisive event a decisive affect or else possibly result in consequences with potentially decisive event countries or indeed any political entities all their armed forces do not have centers of gravity as a metaphor it encourages a search for some vital core that holds the enemy system together if this core can be identified and successfully attacked its supposed the enemy system will unravel this assumes an interconnected and interdependent system incapable of adaption and regeneration once some key element is removed all systems don't necessarily collapse there may be a transformation but possibly into something more robust and durable the removal of an enemy regime for example may not result in a pliable and cooperative state but instead a new entity that is as unfriendly and less manageable could it be that there has been a tendency to look at what could be attacked most effectively and then work backwards and proclaim that these targets do indeed constitute the enemy's center of gravity all this therefore seem to me to reflect the classical assumption that the most important task of the Armed Forces must be to defeat those of the enemy this may seem obvious to you but I just want you to think a bit that it isn't necessarily so it follows from the this follows from the conviction that the key to unlocking the enemy state was the elimination of the enemy army in order to impose a favorable political settlement yeah this stage does not invariably have to be reached in order to achieve desired political effects especially in a campaign for limited objectives short of all-out war there are roles for armed force in protecting civilians from danger intimidating and coercing comforting friends and reassuring allies prodding disputants to negotiations and strengthening bargaining force can have an instrumental value even when it is not decisive in itself there is always a need to understand enemy objectives and capabilities but that does not always month date ensuring a total collapse if their forces might be deterred denied deflected and displaced without being threatened with a terminal defeat so my argument is that the classical model as always been inadequate because of the separation of the military from the political strands of strategy and that the narrowly military focus has become even more problematic in contemporary circumstances 'm reflecting my approach to strategy it must start with a problem at hand and move forward rather than consider the eventual goal than work backwards and again that's the questions we can consider some of the current crop of crises but I think it's interesting to note how many of them have been prompted not I think by some clearly thought-out sequence of steps that lead you to the ultimate goal but a very clear sense of something needs to be done and this is what we are doing it certainly I think this is how Putin has been operating in Ukraine where in response to a problem that he saw in Kiev he took a step and when one step leads to another and gets him to a position but I don't think he particularly wants to be there was a interesting discussion before the break on on China but China has got itself in the position where it is asserting its rights what it believes is its territorial boundaries by a series of measures without it seems to me thinking through about the consequences of the inevitable incidents at sea that are going to happen and how these are going to be handled or we look at Iran and we find that a country that was slated to be next on the list of the axis of evil to be chopped off is now suddenly being spoken of as a potential partner not an ally in dealing with a deterioration of the position in Iraq so we have plenty of evidence of political moves after a strategic moves involving the armed forces that are moving forward but without necessarily being clear where the end state is supposed to be a methyl providing lots of opportunities for creative imaginative sometimes bold sometimes cautious responses so to conclude the classical model was revived during the Cold War in conditions of bipolarity with a political context that was well understood and not expected to change significantly we are now in a very different context an international situation that's dynamic and uncertain with rising and falling powers competing economic systems and forms of government complex interdependencies and constant media coverage and intensive social networking countries are factions that have been demonized one moment turn up at the next as potential partners and vice versa all of this makes it difficult to set long-term goals other than the most general sort and the risk is if strategy is about problems solving that will take on an ad hoc character and becoming coherent because of the interactions between these various sets of problems and I think this is a real danger and a danger with the approach that I would follow nonetheless if we the way to get around this I think is to work for a much more intensive integration of the political and the military strands of strategy if we fail to do this they'll always be the temptation in military rhetoric to promise definitive solutions to problems that can't be solved by military means and in political rhetoric to set aspirations that fit with core values and principles but far exceed available means of implementation I mean make for quick suggestions that flow from the analysis the first is that while it may be unrealistic to have some sort of grand vision of the future it is important to have a keen sense of the present and the core interests that might be under threat I would say for the United States that these are to sustain its network of alliances and partnerships and an open trading system this is not to exclude other interests whether promoting human rights easing distress but unavoidably this have to be discretion about how they are addressed my concern is only with two broader definition of vital interests which risks taking American credibility or matters which are not essential and in areas where it can be difficult to get you away we turn to armed force as a last resort when all else has failed and then expect a lot from it complicated and intractable disputes do not become simple and tractable just because force has been employed second as a status quo power it's unlikely you'll be taking the initiative although it does happen this means you'll be thinking you'll need to think of where potential crises could erupt part of the challenge for a national security establishment is to scour the world for problems and think about what they might mean even more important when a crisis does break the real challenge is to read it this is quite different from the job of an intelligence agency which is to focus on intentions and behavior of others reading a crisis requires understanding the interactions between all those involved including yourselves if this seems to me to be the height of the strategists art it's the area where experience really counts and judgment makes a different third making sense of a crisis requires as I keep on saying integrate integrating the political with the military and puts demands on both the idea that the political and military levels of strategy can only the strands of strategy can only be brought together at the top it's clearly outdated we've become aware of the strategic corporal who's apparently tactical decisions are replete with wider implications all down the chain of command it should be habitual to be trying to understand this relationship fourth lastly I've said that the wrong question to ask at the start of the campaign is what is the enemy center of gravity the term should henceforth be bound see what happens what should be put in its place I have a suggestion which will undoubtedly strike you as being anticlimactic and banal I'll pose a much more mundane simple and straightforward question what is the position you wish to reach this presumes nothing about tasks and allows for the integration of the particular military strands it's relevant to port visits and joint exercises as much as humanitarian missions and regular warfare it can be asked of any level of command I like the term position precisely because it means little and therefore requires the hard work to be done by those who must explain what they are doing and why when considering a possible position questions can be asked about the options and risks it raises the term in fact has a history positional war was associated with pre Napoleonic forms it appeared as pre-modern associated with the pre will the earlier age of more tentative confrontations limited objectives slower and tempo and cautious in method as a result of the Napoleonic Wars positional warfare got a very bad press associated with weak and indecisive leaders and to be contrasted with in much bolder ways of maneuver of the modern era yet this seems to me to be an appropriate way to think about many contemporary conflicts above all it reminds us that conflicts do develop through stages that the first move rarely turns into a knockout blow and that later moves will depend on how the first moves affect the situation including unintended consequences and the unintended anticipated responses of others and the what count is whether or not we can turn a situation to our advantage this seems to me the promise and the challenge of strategy not as a means of making our dreams come true or bringing focus and vision to government but as a reliable guide for the perplexed when dealing with situations which are challenging and complex evaluating risks and responsibilities and then achieving much more the might have otherwise been expected given your available resources so my concluding comment in out with centre of gravity welcome to position thank you very much we probably we've got 10 minutes so any questions good morning sir with this form gathered to roll up our sleeves down the current maritime strategy I wonder if you could expand specifically as a strategist when looking at your charge II what are some ways to tell that your strategy is no longer foundational but stale and in turn when you're developing new strategic games what are some ways to tell that you're being truly an innovative visionary advice evolving into the world of a chaotic reaction somebody once asked me that the difference between mindless eclecticism and creative synthesis and you know I know that there aren't clear rules what the best way to develop a strategy is to start with the diagnosis of the problem what is the problem you're trying to solve and if you've forgotten the problem you're trying to solve when you're doing things as a matter of routine then it may well be that the strategy has become stale if this is the way we always do it sometimes that's because it's the right way you know not you know this always talked about the need to think about the box sometimes there's lots of great stuff in the box and you need you need you need to know it but it but it's got to be addressing the problem at hand and I think that's where there's always there is a risk of routines and standard operating procedures and so on and I think for for navies I think there's I think the Vantage of this sort of approach I'm talking about for navies is actually an awful lot of what navies have to do is about presence is about it is actually about establishing positions is reminding people of of that you're around that you've got capabilities and things of the CNO was talking about before and actually it's quite useful to have a way of incorporating that into a much more challenging idea of what happens if a crisis actually does develop because this may be just your first stage is is having demonstrated an interest in a particular part of the world but if you're doing that then again you have to think why am I going here for my presence rather than somewhere else what is it that I'm trying to achieve with this visit that couldn't better be achieved somewhere else that's all I'm really asking is for those sort of questions to say to the four [Music] hmm that's very interesting and what I argue is that because my strategy is a word that's used for very trivial circumstances not a Ghamdi or a Martin Luther King bird you know how to how to bring up your children or fill in your tax forms which I appreciate in this country doesn't need extensive effort but it's not really a strategy so what I did is like that I talked about when either you want to destabilize the environment or the in somebody else has done it and the interesting things about the things about people you mentioned Gandhi Martin Luther King is that they were dissatisfied with the status quo but the challenge for them was to mobilize people now Gandhi mobilized Martin Luther King came in as a mobilization started and he provided a face and leadership for the movement I gave that talk the other day on Mandela and I just want to leave it's not in the book I wish it have been I've tried but some research into this but it's quite interesting if Mandela had been executed in 1964 which was entirely possible he had a little speech prepared if that had been the court's decision then we would remember him as a failed Marxist revolutionary he's probably a member of the Communist Party at the time he he'd read all the all the standards had been to Algeria for training and he wasn't very good at it he was he gave himself away far too easily but he didn't get executed and he went to prison and he describes this extraordinary moment in 1984 when he decides there has to be negotiation with the Nationalist Party with the government and what's extraordinary is he's taking opportunity of his incarceration to do this he wouldn't have been able to do it as an active leader of the ANC because he would have been told he couldn't he would have been told this was unacceptable that they haven't agreed to our conditions equally he wasn't going to agree to the condition to put down by the Nationalists he did it because he had the standing to make the move but also he decided he could be denounced if it all went wrong does a foolish old man this strikes me as an extraordinary example of leadership but it was quite autocratic it wasn't democratic at all I mean later as things moved on he involved others now I don't its circumstances that made this possible Martin Luther King would have been a pastor following his through in his father's footsteps were it not for the fact the fact that a bus boycott had already been started and the church became available to provide the leadership so its circumstances which which create these possibilities and I think was one of the things just to bear in mind going back to the strategic corporal is that the leadership of these circumstances comes from unexpected places when the circumstances are there is the leadership can be an unexpected individual can make all the difference [Applause]

Channel: U.S. Naval War College

Views: 27,745

Keywords: Military (Film Genre), Strategy, Lawrence Freedman, King's College London (College/University), Naval War College (College/University), Current Strategy Forum, Military Strategy (Video Game Genre), Military History (Field Of Study), Lecture (Type Of Public Presentation), Strategist (Profession)

Id: wKRSKh888go

Length: 44min 2sec (2642 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 18 2014