Today we face a world which some tell us is new and different. We have been assured by some that the ideas of the past have little relevance and must be changed to adapt to the future. Yet, if we discard the past, we are left with no foundation to build on. The most recent example of this is the growing use of a new concept labeled “gray wars” or the “gray zone.” Leaders from the special operations community are telling us that the world is new and different. But there are some very important concepts foundational to past military and national strategy that should not be ignored in the rush to the new buzzwords. As Colin Gray writes in his latest book, “problems in contemporary strategy are ever changing, but they all have common roots.”
Here at War on Rocks, Adam Elkus made an excellent critique of the squishy, nascent concept that has been labeled gray war (“50 Shades of Gray: Why the Gray Wars Concept Lacks Strategic Sense”). Elkus suggests that if we properly understood the work of previous strategists, we would better analyze the conflicts this buzzword is trying to describe. Whether or not you want “gray wars” to become an accepted part of the lexicon alongside asymmetric, hybrid, irregular, unconventional, fourth-generation, fifth-generation, and wicked conflict, Elkus’s piece is a must-read to help build the conceptual foundations for the discussion. In a follow up piece, “Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here: You Can Not Save The Gray Zone Concept,” he continued his blistering but systematic dismantling of the novelty of the idea.
The gray wars dialogue is just the most recent in a trend toward turning our back on historical precedent and previous strategic concepts. This past summer in the pages of Infinity Journal (free subscription), I attempted to make a similar case regarding to the idea of Air-Sea Battle, (or JAM-GC as it is now called). Debate over the operational concept which came to be known as Air-Sea Battle has been a large part of naval strategic discussion of the past several years. Despite the volume of words that have been spent on the subject, few have engaged with the actual theory and classical concepts of naval strategy. In my article, “D-All of The Above: Connecting 21st Century Naval Doctrine to Strategy,” I make the case that a better understanding of contemporary naval discourse’s place within the ideals of classical naval strategy will not only help us better understand proposals and counter-proposals, but it will also help strategists to better evaluate and develop future thinking.
In order to understand these debates in their appropriate context, we must also look to the difference between the nature and the character of war. For that, we must turn to Christopher Mewett’s indispensable 2014 War on the Rocks article, “Understanding War’s Enduring Nature Alongside its Ever Changing Character.” Despite the clarity of the concepts involved, in recent months we have continued to hear knowledgeable and well-meaning experts ignore the important nuance of a proper description and to tell us the nature of conflict is changing. Perhaps a quarterly read of Mewett’s excellent explanation is in order for all of us.
Admittedly, the importance of the history of our ideas, and the background of the words we use in our national security discussions, are not new observations. As World War I came to a close, Adm. William Sims returned to his home in Newport, Rhode Island. He commanded all U.S. naval forces in the war, the Navy’s equivalent of Black Jack Pershing, and his coordination and cooperation with the British Admiralty had been central to the defeat of the German U-boats in the North Atlantic. However, when he returned to America, his temporary promotion to full admiral was rescinded. He dropped back to rear admiral and assumed his previous position as president of the Naval War College.
In his first convocation speech at the War College after the end of the war, Sims knew his audience was full of what today’s navy would call “fleet operators.” They were the men who had spent years implementing strategy and national policy, both in combat and in peacetime operations around the world. But, like Sims himself when he arrived as a student in Newport in 1912, they had little knowledge of the conceptual foundations and intellectual frameworks that surrounded the pursuit of their chosen profession. Experts in the material and the execution of naval tactics, most had little understanding of history, international relations, or policy.
In order to be successful senior officers, and to contribute to their profession, and strategy and policymaking at the highest levels, they were going to have to learn. Sims addressed the class, saying:
Some officers complain that they do not understand the terms, the strange words, used by the [naval war] college. I do not understand any of the strange words used by golfers, because I have never played the game, but I understand that some such words are necessary. They are equally necessary for the game of war. Every art must necessarily have its own rules, principles, and methods, and these must have names if we are to talk about them — and we cannot practice an art or play a game without talking about it.
In many ways, the Navy thought they were keeping Sims in his place. He had been advanced ahead of several more senior officers during the war and he was already known as a troublemaker who spoke his mind. Instead of advancing him to Washington (where he would end up anyway, testifying before Congress about American mistakes in the war), Sims was put in charge of educating the next generation of officers. Looking back with the hindsight of history, Sims likely wouldn’t have had it any other way. By caging him up in Newport, the Navy gave him the space to set the foundations for the War College and wargaming systems for the interwar years that would produce the American strategy and operational concepts that won World War II. Sims was correct that we must understand the “strange words” and ideas of previous strategists and policy thinkers in order to build the foundation under how we face the character of modern conflict. As John Bew states in the conclusion of Realpolitik: A History, “effective foreign policy is better served by a more textured analysis — a sense of patterns, interactions, and connections — than by new theories.”
There is a good chance that many will see these observations as pedantic. But this discussion is not offered up to exclude efforts to define the present or look to the future. Development and understanding of modern challenges requires us to think in new ways. If the Clausewitzian description of the nature and character of war is accurate, then war’s changing character requires constantly changing approaches. It is this balance, between the enduring elements of the nature of war and the changing elements of its character, which requires us to find a balance in how we describe and analyze today’s strategic issues using the foundational concepts of the past to inform the present.
Some readers might ask: When should we look to history for a guide? Perhaps those questions should be turned on their heads. Let’s instead ask: When or why shouldn’t we? It is clear that history does not repeat itself. It does not, and cannot, provide a chart or checklist for success in the present or future. As I’ve suggested before, history instead offers us guideposts and the background needed to ask the right questions. If others have asked similar questions in the past and we ignore what they learned, we are less likely to find the right questions today. And without good questions we will never get to good answers.
The future will surely have differences from the past. But that doesn’t mean we should disregard the ideas and concepts previous generations have built. They provide vital foundations. As Alfred Thayer Mahan wrote in his 1900 book The Problem of Asia:
… the instruction derived from the past must be supplemented by a particularized study of the indications of the future.
BJ Armstrong is a senior editor at War on the Rocks and an active duty U.S. Navy officer who is reading for his PhD in War Studies with King’s College, London. He has served as a search and rescue and naval special warfare helicopter pilot, the Officer-in-Charge of an amphibious helicopter gunship detachment, and in the Pentagon as a strategic analyst and staff officer. His book “21st Century Mahan: Sound Military Conclusions for the Modern Era,” on the writing and thinking of Alfred Thayer Mahan, was published in 2013. This article represents his own opinions, which are not necessarily those of the Navy, the Department of Defense, or U.S. Government.
norse 
This piece is a wonderful summary follow-on two Elkus’s two recent articles.
The creation of new vocabulary and jargon by specialists is nothing new, of course, but in our age of instant media reporting, tipping points, viral ideas, etc., it’s taken on what I judge to be an unstoppable momentum.
In line, then, with your own idea of not abandoning good ideas from the past, I’ll refer to an ancient Taoist proverb: “The wild horse is most easily ridden in the direction it wants to go.”
You cannot defeat this trend; you can only remain determined to master it by providing the clarity that’s ultimately what’s being sought no matter the particular vocabulary in use at the moment.
This is something that was touched upon in the introduction of the first chapter of world system analysis, and is a very important concept or phenomena.
“World-systems analysis originated in the early 1970s as a new perspective on social reality. Some of its concepts have been in use for a long time and some are new or at least newly named. Concepts can only be understood within the context of their times. This is even more true of whole perspectives, whose concepts have their meaning primarily in terms of each other, of how they make up a set. New perspectives are, in addition, generally best understood if one thinks of them as a protest against older perspectives. It is always the claim of a new perspective that the older, and currently more accepted, one is in some significant way inadequate, or misleading, or tendentious, that the older one therefore represents more a barrier to apprehending social reality than a tool for analyzing it.
Like any other perspective, world-systems analysis has built on earlier arguments and critiques. There is a sense in which almost no perspective can ever be entirely new. Someone has usually said something similar decades or centuries earlier. Therefore, when we speak of a perspective being new, it may only be that the world is ready for the first time to take seriously the ideas it embodies, and perhaps also that the ideas have been repackaged in a way that makes them more plausible and accessible to more people.
The story of the emergence of world-systems analysis is embedded in the history of the modern world-system and the structures of knowledge that grew up as part of that system. It is most useful to trace the beginning of this particular story not to the 1970s but to the mid-eighteenth century. The capitalist world-economy had then been in existence for some two centuries already. The imperative of the endless accumulation of capital had generated a need for constant technological change, a constant expansion of frontiers—geographical, psychological, intellectual, scientific.
There arose in consequence a felt need to know how we know, and to debate how we may know. The millennial claim of religious authorities that they alone had a sure way to know truth had been under challenge in the modern world-system for some time already. Secular (that is, nonreligious) alternatives were increasingly well received. Philosophers lent themselves to this task, insisting that human beings could obtain knowledge by using their minds in some way, as opposed to receiving revealed truth through some religious authority or script. Such philosophers as Descartes and Spinoza— however different they were from each other—were both seeking to relegate theological knowledge to a private corner, separated from the main structures of knowledge.
While philosophers were now challenging the dictates of the theologians, asserting that human beings could discern truth directly by the use of their rational faculties, a growing group of scholars agreed about the role of theologians but argued that so-called philosophical insight was just as arbitrary a source of truth as divine revelation. These scholars insisted on giving priority to empirical analyses of reality. When Laplace in the beginning of the nineteenth century wrote a book on the origins of the solar system, Napoleon, to whom he presented the book, noted that Laplace had not mentioned God once in his very thick book. Laplace replied: “I have no need of that hypothesis, Sire.” These scholars would now come to be called scientists. Still, we must remember that at least until the late eighteenth century, there was no sharp distinction between science and philosophy in the ways in which knowledge was defined. At that time, Immanuel Kant found it perfectly appropriate to lecture on astronomy and poetry as well as on metaphysics. He also wrote a book on interstate relations. Knowledge was still considered a unitary field.
About this time in the late eighteenth century, there occurred what some now call the “divorce” between philosophy and science. It was those defending empirical “science” who insisted upon this divorce. They said that the only route to “truth” was theorizing based on induction from empirical observations, and that these observations had to be done in such a way that others could subsequently replicate and thereby verify the observations. They insisted that metaphysical deduction was speculation and had no “truth” value. They thus refused to think of themselves as “philosophers.”
It was just about this time as well, and indeed in large part as a result of this so-called divorce, that the modern university was born. Built upon the framework of the medieval university, the modern university is really quite a different structure. Unlike the medieval university, it has full-time, paid professors, who are almost never clerics, and who are grouped together not merely in “faculties” but in “departments” or “chairs” within these faculties, each department asserting that it is the locus of a particular “discipline.” And the students pursue courses of study which lead to degrees that are defined by the department within which they have studied.”
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/world-systems-analysis-immanuel-wallerstein/1118709119#
Thanks for that book reference. (HOW had I never heard of that book?!)
I checked it out on Amazon, and it’s available there more cheaply and in more formats.
Thanks again!
BJ, nice summary. But why not Martin Van Crevald, the Israel military historian? In his “Why War?” he’s basically answered your question. It’s human nature. Men like to kill. And they especially like to kill each other. Over treasure and women (although it seems the latter has been “internalized.”)
He also said the force-on-force battles and war are the aberration, not the norm. Insurgencies are the norm. From what I can see, most insurgencies were localized because they centered on tribal or “nation-state” regime change. Today’s religious wars has not such constrain and lashes out at everyone and anyone interfering in its political activities. In that sense, it acts like a virus. How does a military defeat or contain a virus? Smart weapons (like those we are using in Syria and Iraq against ISIS)? I doubt it. That’s some military and defense contractor’s wet dream. Won’t happen. Because we are fighting IDEAS! The same philosophy we employ in those who attack us (and our “American exceptionalism”) is now being used against us. Do you really expect more “think tank” rationalizing about it and calling it “strategy” will make something different happen?
But all the different words DO sell a lot of books and articles!