Austin Bay Blog

Hat tip and a thank you to realclearpolitics for pointing out this article. From Policy Review, “Extremism, Terror, and the Future of Conflict” by Michael J. Mazarr.

I’ll highlight key points and add a few comments.

Thesis:

There is a tendency, when considering “theories of war,” to default to tactical distinctions for a definition of the core event — tank war versus insurgency, massed attrition as opposed to agile maneuver. But warfare is a product of international politics, and the form warfare takes is closely related to its causes: In the reasons for war, we will find clues as to the sorts of wars we will fight. My argument builds on two facts: First, the form warfare takes derives from, and cannot be considered without reference to, its causes; and second, the fashionable theories of the future of war are mostly silent on those causes. Today, three concepts vie for the position of leading theory of conflict in the twenty-first century: tried-and-true realpolitik, the reliable province of traditional state-versus-state conflict; “transformation,” “network-centric” and information warfare; and Fourth Generation Warfare. None of them accurately describes the change now underway.

Another contention:

From a definitional standpoint, there are at least three concepts at work in any discussion of “warfare.”14 First is the character of battle — the clash of arms where one army physically meets another. This is the meeting point that generates statements about the “unchanging nature of war” — violence, blood, courage, willpower, and so forth. At a second level we find the form of warfare, the tactics and operational art governing units in battle — infantry war versus blitzkrieg, insurgency versus classical force-on-force duels. Whereas the character of battle may be eternal, the form of warfare constantly evolves, responding to new technologies, new tactics, and new social organizations. But then we come, finally and most fundamentally, to the nature of conflict. This is the highest strategic level of analysis and deals with the causes and character of severe political-military-socioeconomic disputes in the international system. International conflict generates the context for warfare, but also much else — Schellingesque bargaining games, coercive diplomacy, deception and artful dodges short of warfare and battle.

Most analyses of “the future of war” don’t adequately distinguish these three levels. Most of them, in fact, deal with the form of warfare, with some implications for the character of battle. But it’s misleading to tackle those issues without comprehending the evolving nature of conflict as a whole, because that larger strategic context sets the stage for warfare and battle.

Suppose, for example, we could satisfy ourselves of the truth of the following five propositions. First, warfare between major and medium-sized states is a thing of the past. Second, most such larger states will become increasingly inward-focused and isolationist in a consumerist era. Third, the number of states truly “left behind” by globalization will be vanishingly small. Fourth, states are vicious economic competitors. And fifth, information warfare capabilities are proliferating rapidly. If those five ideas accurately reflect the future of conflict, then a theory of warfare focusing on insurgency and counterinsurgency wouldn’t make a lot of sense: The “failed states” problem will recede, and in the meantime big states won’t want anything to do with messy counterinsurgency wars. A theory of warfare predicated on cyberwar for economic purposes would, however, match this hypothetical scenario quite nicely. I offer this example not to endorse it, but to illustrate the connection between the nature of conflict on the one hand — the political context and reasons for violent or quasi-violent conflict in the international system — and the character of warfare and battle on the other.

This, again, is the problem with most current approaches to the “future of war”: They are really talking about the future of warfare, or of battle, as I am using those terms. They are not talking about the nature of conflict more broadly understood — and yet, it is axiomatic that changes in the nature of conflict set the stage for everything else. The character of warfare and battle are merely its offshoots, its symptoms.15 There is no theory of world politics implied by these approaches; they do not, in fact, speak much to world politics at all. They talk in great depth about new tools of conflict — cyberwar, “network centric operations,” “information warfare” — without much attention to who would use them, or why.

Mazarr doesn’t believe the nation-state is fatally weakened (nor do I). He thinks many nation-states are quite resilient and adaptable (and I agree).

Excerpt:

The nation-state, in fact, is not losing its monopoly on force. In much of the world there is no such trend; states remain stubbornly devoted to providing order and preventing alternative forms of force from arising. Russia is hardly coming apart at the seams, nor are China or India. With better governance and a sometimes growing integration into the world economy, in fact, some state structures in Asia and Latin America seem actually to be regaining ground they had seemingly lost in the 1970s and 1980s. The old line that globalization makes that state irrelevant has proven to be too simplistic, if not in fact close to the opposite of the truth: more and more governments are discovering the tricks of the trade of institutional legitimacy in a globalizing world — and finding that their peoples, worried about the effects of trade and anxious about the fates of their cultures and desirous of border protections and safe finances, are looking as much to government as ever. Meanwhile, the supposed engines of the annihilation of borders and controls — trafficking in drugs, money laundering, and so on — are perhaps proving to be less omnipotent than once feared. Only in certain times and certain places, where things get disorderly or humiliating enough, is state control seriously threatened; and what most of the resulting armed movements want, anyway, is to seize control of the hollowed-out but still tempting state apparatus — a tendency very much on display in Hamas’s recent electoral victory in the Palestinian territories.

The class I teach at the University of Texas spends some time discussing the rise of the nation-state and the Westphalian system. I’ll quote this passage by Mazarr at length, in part because I want my students to read it for purposes of class discussion:

Changes in international conflict — and, by extension, warfare and battle — always come as a result of changes in the societies waging it. The major factors impelling the latest shift in the principles of conflict are very well-known and demand little elaboration—only the implications remain to be spelled out in detail. The trends include:22

Modernization as an accomplished fact in the industrialized world, an emerging trend in the fast-growing developing world, and a hopeless dream for 2 billion of the world’s people being left behind.

The rise of a global market to which countries are determined, and often desperate, to gain access.

Globalization of the world’s economy, polities, information exchange, institutions, and mindset, and the rise of worldwide markets in commodities formerly best acquired through conquest.

Democratization of the world’s political systems, and the creation of mass-based rather than elite-based decision-making processes.

A global information market that exposes people around the world to each others’ facts, lifestyles, and values.

The advent of nuclear weapons, which fundamentally changed the calculus of war among states that possess them.

The rise of international institutions to govern common issues and problems, from the World Trade Organization to the European Union to global health, sanitary, technological, and labor groups.

On one point, then, my analysis overlaps with many of the other visions of the future of war. Combined with parallel military trends — the rise of a hegemonic U.S. military power, the continued spread of nuclear weapons — these developments have tended to discourage aggressive, large-scale warmaking by major powers and to encourage restraint, especially among nuclear-armed states. One piece of this puzzle, for example, is the growing, though far from complete, consensus on a global territorial sovereignty norm: The agreed rule that countries do not any longer invade and conquer their neighbors (unless both countries are too small for the world community to much care, or unless the invader disregards the sovereignty norm to enforce another emerging norm of world politics — human rights, for example, or nonproliferation). This notion is now an official part of the national security doctrine of the United States, whose 2002 variant speaks to an emerging international community united by shared values and agreed on the inadvisability of mutual war. This suggests that the 4GW advocates have it exactly backwards: The growing predominance of insurgent-style warfare does not evoke the collapse of state authority. It shows the final and irrevocable success of the leading principle of the Westphalian system — territorial boundary norms.

As for the alienated individual:

Alienation generates security threats in a number of ways. One is by paving the way for aggressive, despotic movements to seize control of national governments and wage traditional war. Frustration and rage can also burst forth in the form of civil wars, revolutions, or ethnic conflicts. And of course today, the central security challenge of alienation is global terrorism, emanating from extreme, anti-modern Islamic groups.

The threat of alienation is a somewhat temporary menace, largely confined to the phases of modernization and cultural change that precede complete modernity, by which time most people are prosperous enough and safe enough and have sufficiently reliable avenues to identity to make a postmodern Nazi movement tremendously unlikely. But the risk never entirely subsides: There will always be a hyper-alienated few who turn to violence (the Unabomber comes to mind), and larger numbers of people whose footing in the identity-rich and identity-confused modern world is unsure enough to point them in the direction of hateful or xenophobic movements offering simple answers and comforting doctrines. More fundamental, though, are the global, transitional risks alive in societies still on their way to modernity in areas of the world stretching from Latin America across to Africa, through the Middle East and into South and Southeast Asia (and, as recent events have reminded us, within the immigrant ghettos of Europe as well).

The dominant feature of world politics and social development over the coming century will therefore be as it has increasingly been for a century or more — a saga of individuals, freed from the constraints of tradition and culture and repression, finding their place in a changing, globalizing world, doing so in the context of a global interdependence of awareness, information and communications, and then trying to shape the policies of their governments. The basic trend in conflict for which I am arguing might be summed up this way: When an international system arises that allows nations and other groups to conduct extensive and self-satisfying pursuits of power and security without territorial expansion, aggression, or large-scale warfare, the search for basic human needs like identity, belonging, dignity, and self-respect will supplant more traditional quests for political-military power, territory, and natural resources as the defining form of mass national expression; and when a massive, accelerating, and disorienting process of modernization creates enormous social discord around the world, that search for identity and dignity can and will generate conflict.

This is hardly the first time psychological problems sparked by modernization and modernity have ushered in a period of conflict. The pattern played itself out roughly from the 1880s through the 1930s, capped by the devastating illegitimacy and humiliation embossed on a number of states by the Depression, and it played the decisive role in generating the aggressive tyrannies that launched World War II. That war was a product of psychological issues far more than geopolitical ones: Its authors were totalitarian regimes caught in the grip of utopian fantasies — amalgams of romantic folk religions, imperialism, nationalism, ethnic and racial superiority, and a thirst for revenge for dishonors imposed by the “West.”

In the misnamed War on Terror we fight a “fantasy ideology.” What are the implications? Psychopolitik must inform realpolitik:

…What would be the principles of conflict fought against a mindset? The central route to war in such psychological dramas is national humiliation and society-wide alienation. “Fighting” such conflicts has just a little to do with winning “the close battle” — force-on-force engagements, however small they might be. We want to hunt down fully self-identified al Qaeda operatives, to be sure. But prevailing means to win a battle for the society, for its mindsets and psychologies, to address sources of grievance and anxiety, to shore up institutions of governance — and, recognizing that all of that will be extraordinarily difficult in the best of circumstances, trying, in fact, to absent oneself from such conflicts, to remain as free of the effects of these traumas as is possible for the worldwide exemplar of globalized modernity. It seems to me, then, that a theory of psychopolitik would point to three pillars of statecraft: restraint, compassion, and fiscal responsibility.

His prescripton:

If we take these three injunctions seriously, it becomes obvious that the military instrument will gradually become a secondary tool in efforts to “fight” the “conflicts” of the future.29 Its roles will include tracking down those few dedicated and violent foot-soldiers of alienation (such as al Qaeda) and destroying them; sweeping aside the decaying militaries of the handful of true rogue states when necessary; and, most of all, remaining ready during the long transitional period, in case an old-style force-on-force war does break out. An understanding of the principles of conventional warfare will thus continue to serve us well for some time — as will, it is worth reminding ourselves, the sorts of advanced conventional weapons systems, like the F-22 fighter and next-generation naval vessels, that populate typical policy-wonk lists of things we ought to razor out of the defense budget.

The great danger, though, is that, as we are doing now, we will persist in our faith that traditional conventional conflict is the dominant mode of warfare and assume that buying the thirty-eighth iteration of manned-precision-destruction-from-the-air capabilities will answer our security needs. Increasingly, it will not. One implication of this revised view of conflict could be crudely summarized as follows: We ought to shift $50 billion to $70 billion from the U.S. defense budget into a wider array of instruments of national power more attuned to the needs of conflict against alienation. These would include strengthened and expanded institutions of diplomacy, scholarship programs, a vastly reenergized Peace Corps, direct foreign aid, debt forgiveness, a restored and expanded public diplomacy program, and much else.

Mazarr’s point is well-founded and well-taken, though in these two grafs one might conclude he wants to have it “all ways at once.” The 2002 National Security Strategy emphasized three pillars: diplomacy, defense, and development. In many respects that’s what Mazaar’s advocating. I noted in a recent column that it should add a fourth D– Determination.

Mazarr notes his own agenda contains “contradictory requirements.” I would suggest the term “comprehensive requirements” rather than contradictory, but realbudgetpolitik (that should be a term) forces tough choices.

I disagree with his view that we aren’t fighting a war of ideas. An excerpt from that paragaph:

This is a conflict with roots in the condition of societies — issues like opportunity, effective governance, status in the world community, and so on. Fighting it as a “war of ideas” will merely be to treat, once again, a symptom rather than the cause.

Democracy and the rule of law are ideas –non-utopian ideas– that in substance and form address the issues of opportunity and effective governance. Given the world trends Mazaar describes, dictatorships are ultimately ineffective governance. As for psychopolitik: The “anarchist movement” in the 19th century also involved alienation, identity, and belonging issues. Wars of Identity are not a new phenomenon, either. Tribal identity is a powerful force.

But read the entire article– it’s well worth the time. Mazarr has produced a thoughtful article that does a superb job of discussing the psychological dimensions involved in “extremist” movements and extremist warfare.

UPDATE: I see Pajamas Media linked to this post and PJM’s summary says Mazarr claims the “state is back.” I think Mazarr believes –as I do– that news of its demise was more than premature. This is an argument I’ve made — “complete” states exhibit remarkable strength and resiliency; democratic states in particular exhibit extraordinary flexibility. Ths runs counter to much of the Conventional Wisdom among the “strategic gurus.” Why? Fear and catastrophe sell. I argue that one of the weaknesses in the Westphalian system is that the system has never really existed as a complete system. “Gap states” aren’t new– gaps aren’t new. (”Here be dragons.”) Tribes with flags have UN seats– and are one of the UN’s greatest weaknesses. Fake states aren’t new– consider the Congo. It’s a mark on a map. Mazarr notes that Westphalian rules, however, are increasingly accepted, though notions of what creates legitimacy have changed, to include “no genocide.” That’s why the UN is about to “invade” Sudan’s Darfur region (and based on recent statements by Sudanese leaders there’s a chance the looming UN assumption of Darfur peacekeeping mission may not be as figurative an invasion as my quotation marks around “invade” suggest). The US is not simply arguing that the nation state stands between 21st century order and 21st century anarchy; the US now argues that the quality of the nation state matters. Well, it always has, to a degree. In my own view failed states will either disintegrate (and then re-organize) or they will assimilate. Mazarr seems to make this argument, which is one reason I found his essay intriguing. The global interaction system (my term for linked economies, communications, and transportation) encourages and rewards stable assimilation. This is where Mazarr’s psychopolitik analysis of “fantasy ideologies,” identity, and alienation is very useful.