Is ”Military Strategy” Becoming an Oxymoron?

In the contemporary strategic context the most likely operations involving the military are responses to complex emergencies in one form or the other. Although complex emergency is a terribly wide term involving everything from natural disasters to civil wars, the responses to them all have in common highly complex political objectives. Military operations are therefore no longer about defeating the enemy or "winning", it is about introducing democracy, assisting humanitarian relief operations, and to restore security in failing states. Such operations require the use of all instruments of power – economic, diplomatic and military.

The problem is that military strategists by tradition are not very good at planning military operations in order to achieve political effects. Instead, the traditional notion is that where diplomacy and politics end, wars begin. When the war is over diplomats and the politicians are welcomed back to negotiate peace agreements and to clean up the mess. However, the results of these traditional ways of war in a new context can be seen in the US operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. Both were great military victories followed up by weak and rather incompetent post-conflict operations. This would obviously be fine if the objectives did not stretch further than toppling the regimes, but in both cases the aims of the operations involved introducing stability and democracy – something that has hardly been successful in either case despite recent elections.

The question is how one plans for intended political effect rather than victory. It certainly requires politicians with an understanding of how to use all instruments of power - including the military. Sending peacekeepers in order to give the impression of “doing something” is not fair to anyone involved. It also requires enormous understanding of how military operations affects foreign leaders and populations. It moreover requires deep political understanding on the level of each individual soldier. Everyone involved must understand the consequences of his/her actions, especially since evertything is done under the watchful eyes of global media. Perhaps must planning for political effect requires a new breed of civilians strategists and operatives with and understanding of military affairs. At this point in time there simply are no such people.

Strategy will always have to involve all instruments of power and planning the operations of one instrument in isolation is like a carpenter using a hammer without nails. The complex political objectives will never be accomplished. The highest level where military operations can be executed in isolation from the other instruments of power is the tactical level of up to battalion size units. The term military strategy is therefore useless as strategic level planning and execution must always include all instruments of power. The consequences of this argument are that not only must civilian and military strategists work together on the highests levels, they should also form joint staffs in the operational and perhaps even tactical level command centres. Not a very popular idea in an organisation that argues that the divide between political decisions and military implementation is the very foundation of their professionalism.

(c) Robert Egnell