A little over a month ago, I made the argument that the military’s purpose is not to kill people and break things but instead to serve and protect America, Americans, and American interests. Fair winds and full sails carried the message far and wide.
From the same sea, a thoughtful naval officer (and War on the Rocks contributor), Matthew Hipple, raised a rebuttal, arguing that the “core purpose” of the military is to kill people and break things. While allowing high praise for his excellent podcast, as well as all things Navy football related, I respectfully dissent. Ironically, I find myself doing so on behalf of his beloved Navy, as this week we found out the only ship left in our seafaring force that has sunk another is a 200-year old frigate, which, of course, is in dry dock for two years. If we were to accept Hipple’s argument, and judge our military services by killing and breaking figures, then that does not bode well for our Navy. So, in defense of sea power and Sea Control, we will apply one more intellectual strainer to this sopping wet idea, wring out the wrong, and let the mistakenness run into the drain of history. Let us keep the logic dry, and simple. Here goes:
What we do – and who we are – is different from why we do it.
The military fights in order to protect America. Fighting is an active, physical task. Protecting America, the purpose. Here is a helpful tip for identifying a purpose: ask why (as a 4-year old might) until you cannot anymore and you will have ultimately arrived at a purpose (i.e. Why destroy that tank? Why fight this war? Why defend that or this?).
Thankfully, Hipple is halfway there. Consider his summation: “Our home, family, and allies are only able to find peace because our military has demonstrated that it will be there to break and kill when that tenuous reality is threatened.” Let’s deconstruct that, and focus on the critical word because as the hinge point between task and purpose. Task: “our military…will be there to break and kill.” Purpose: for “our home, family, and allies.”
Beyond basic misidentification, it seems much of this problem’s wickedness lies with a limited lexicon. Perhaps we in the military should hold our noses and borrow from business literature, and consider using “core competency,” which is said in the Harvard Business Review to be “a complex harmonization of individual technologies and production skills” that is “difficult for competitors to imitate.” Translated, core competency describes distinctiveness and competitive edge, which for the military seems to be its unique ability to effectively kill and efficiently break things; actually, pretty much anything, anytime, anywhere (i.e. killing mercenaries in their sleep on Christmas). To update our logic: what we do (task) – and who we are (core competency) – is different from why we do it (purpose).
Yet lurking under the surface is an even bigger problem. Sharing the War on the Rocks screen with Hipple’s argument is Keith Nightingale’s essay asking why the U.S. military is so “tactically terrific” but “strategically slipshod.” This writing seems like distant sonar echoes of historian Richard Kohn’s assessment from 2009: “The excellence of the American military in operations, logistics, tactics, weaponry, and battle has been manifest for a generation or more. Not so with strategy.” Ben FitzGerald of the Center for a New American Security calls this our “Michael Bay problem” where we often focus on “special effects technology to make our movie better instead of in the script.” In short: great with our hands, not with our minds.
It might well be this is the by-product of a not insignificant number of those in uniform who have difficulty parsing task from purpose, which suggests day-to-day combat decisions are similarly marred by an inability to connect tactical action with strategic objectives. Colin Gray tells us, “Strategy is the bridge that relates military power to political purpose; it is neither military power per se nor political purpose.” If one cannot tell the difference between the two, between dynamic steel and the grand design, how could they become Gray’s strategic bridge builder? This answer might just satisfy Nightingale’s call.
In sum:
Yes, we are the philosophers of firepower.
Yes, we are the authors of destruction.
Yes, we are the ones with a plan to kill everyone we meet.
Yes, we are the conductors of the symphony of violence.
Yes, we are capable of many tasks and a distinct core competency, which support our military’s sole purpose: to serve and protect America, Americans, and American national interests.
Major Matt Cavanaugh, a U.S. Army Strategist, has served in assignments from Iraq to the Pentagon, and New York to New Zealand. He writes regularly at WarCouncil.org and looks forward to connecting via Twitter @MLCavanaugh when his self-imposed exile is up.
This essay is an unofficial expression of opinion; the views expressed are those of the author and not necessarily those of the US Military Academy, Department of the Army, the Department of Defense, or any agency of the US government.
Image: tOrange.us, Creative Commons
A former (long retired) Navy Officer (Surface Ships) I am not certain of the underlying purpose of this ongoing discussion / debate.
Each branch of the U.S. Military has as its primary strategic objective to protect the nation and to secure its national interests around the world. How it proceeds in achieving that result is situational and dependent on many factors. I cannot speak for the ground forces as my expertise and experience lie elsewhere.
The primary strategic mission of the Navy is to ensure that we can secure control of the sea(s) where necessary and for the Air Force to ensure that we can secure control of the air over any noted geographic land area in which the U.S. Military intends to operate.
If possible and enabled by budgetary allocations and accompanying investments in weapons systems and manpower training the Navy’s objective is to achieve its operational results without the need for combat. To paraphrase Sun Tzu, the epitome of military success is not demonstrated by efforts in or excellence in actual warfare, but instead by achieving results without the need for actual combat. In all instances strategic positioning of the necessary capabilities such that they prevent an opponent from challenging that investment is goal number one. For all practical purposes, with some minor exceptions, since World War II the Navy has achieved its strategic results in the manner described by Sun Tzu.
Achieving Control of the Sea (and Sea Lanes) is a mission that relies heavily on a Nation being willing to invest in the costly but needed (ship, submarine, or aircraft based) search and weapons systems that permit for successfully discovering, successfully targeting, and destroying the ships or small craft, submarines, missiles, and aircraft possessed by any potential opponent who may contest our use of a given area of the Sea. Further we have the requirement to provide the Amphibious capability needed to enable Sea Borne Marines to temporarily operate ashore in given areas of the world to secure some temporary political goal. Achieving this result requires not only an investment in platforms and weapons systems, but in providing the necessary funds needed for personnel training and platform and equipment maintenance. In addition to the preceding, the Navy also needs to secure and maintain an overseas base structure allowing it to forward station many of its ships and aircraft to enable their timely presence where required — in the numbers and with the onboard capabilities needed. It appears that in the current era the budgeted amounts being provided the military, and in this case the Navy, are woefully inadequate for the task at hand.
The political goals in this civilian run government of ours are the domain of and emanate from the Office of the President and as Commander in Chief of the Military he (or she) accordingly determines the military force structure they want in place and determine its locations and use. That said, the apex of Navy success results when it is obtained through the influence of its capabilities rather than by engaging in the actual process of combat or breaking things.”
Also, from an operational perspective, successful warfare in the so-called elctro magnetic specturm or in the undersea environment results from preventing one’s opponent carrying out its mission, not necessarily destroying the platform from which its capabilities are brought to bear. For instance, at the conclusion of World War II the German Navy had hundreds of operational submarines and some with advanced operating capacity, but they were operationally uselass. USN and RN ASW capabilities insurred their almost immediate detection and destruction were they tto attempt attacking Allied Shpping.
In America’s experience since the Cold War, we have been hamstrung by a lack of strategic thought. I hypothesize that the generals who came up in the Cold War had much less use for strategy, as they already had an enemy in the Red Army that would test their operational and tactical skills to the maximum. The Soviet Union collapsed over thirty years ago, so we may now have some junior generals who didn’t come up during that period, but our three- and four-stars were still all commissioned as Cold Warriors. Our wars since Desert Storm have been marked by operational skill and tactical mastery, as would have been needed to stop thousands of Soviet tanks, but less elegance of thought at the strategic level, because we spent so long thinking in absolutist terms to change.
America has also had a “peacetime” military for decades, not because we are a peace, but because there are few existential threats to either the nation or the military. It really doesn’t matter how badly a general does, even the loss of a thousand men in his command tour in the Middle East wouldn’t wreck the U.S. Army–we’re too big and too tactically proficient to suffer too much. This also seems to have bred a complacency and stasis in many of our leaders, because agitating for change can be worse for a career than mediocrity.
Both Matt Cavanaugh and Matthew Hipple are wrong on this issue. I think that in order to answer this question, we have to take a step back to answer some more basic questions. Those questions are, what is a government? And what is the purpose of the government? When we answer that, then we will get a clearer understanding of what the purpose of the military is, which is one part of the government.
The government is the institution which we have vested in the power to use force within a given geographical area. It is the only institution within that are with that power, in short it has a monopoly on that power. In essense the government is force, that is all it is. But it is not just mindless force directed by whim, at least it is not intended to be in the U.S. Government, it is directed by certain principles.
According to the Declaration of Independence, Governments are instituted among men to secure their rights. So the basic functions of our government is to protect the rights of Americans, domestically with a court system to arbitrate disputes, a police system to protect people from criminal, and a military to protect against foreign aggressors.
So the militaries job is not just to “kill people and break things”, nor is it to just ” serve”, which is such a broad and loose term as to be almost useless. The militaries job is to protect the rights of Americans from foreign aggressors through the means of force, which means “killing people, and breaking things”. That is how the military serves, or is intended to serve America.