The Committee of Public Safety

What is war?

A reformulation of the last post’s definition:

War is a strategy to make the enemy do what we want them to do when it is contrary to what they would do if they had the freedom to choose and sufficient knowledge about our true intentions.

A slightly narrower definition:

War is a strategy intended to make the enemy do what we want them to do conform to our political desires when it is contrary to what they would do if they had the freedom to choose and sufficient knowledge about our true intentions political desires.

This definition captures several aspects of war worth keeping in mind:

• War is a strategy. Strategy is always an instrument of politics. As such, its goals should be subordinate to political goals.
• The intention of war is to make the enemy as subordinate to our political desires as our strategy is: at the end of a war they should be yet another tool in our hands.
• War is intended to bring about a desired political end state. There is no guarantee, however, that what is intended will significantly correspond to what actually happens.
• The enemy may have knowledge about our true intentions but they may be powerless to resist our political goals.
• The enemy may be free to resist fulfillment of our true political desires but they don’t because they don’t know what those desires are (then again, maybe we don’t either). They may voluntarily acquiesce to our initiatives because they think we are motivated by something else. If they knew our true motives, they might resist achieving our goals.
• Politics is the division of power between competing desires. Therefore, as Carl von Clausewitz remarked, to secure our desires “we must render the enemy powerless” to resist our achieving them.

The two most important characteristics of the strategic power used in war are:

• Visibility: how easy it is for the enemy to perceive our strategic configuration of power and the political motive behind its use.
• Energy: how easy it is for us to make the enemy do what we want them to do, especially when they don’t want to do what we want them to do.

There seems to be a trade off between visibility and energy. The greater the energy potential of an operational method, the more visible to the enemy it’s likely to be. The less visible an operational method, the less energy potential that method is likely to have. It’s hard to hide an atom bomb. It’s easier but still hard to kill with a word.

There are two strategic methods involved in war, one following visibility and the other following energy:

• Knowledge shaping: the manipulation of the enemy’s knowledge of you and your political desires (deception is only a subset of knowledge shaping).
• Physical violence: the use of physical force to deny the enemy freedom.

All activities “generally designated as war” can be lumped into these two blobs. War itself is an amorphous blob that is constantly shifting between these two methods and, in practice, war is usually a mixture of the two. War will never, despite the cries of the fainthearted, be able to subdue the enemy with just knowledge shaping and without physical violence. The mind game alone will not win. Likewise, physical violence will be unable to win a lasting victory in war without knowledge shaping. The clenched fist alone will not win. These two form two ends of a spectrum, knowledge shaping being characterized low visibility and energy and physical violence by high visibility and high energy.

The Indian strategist Kautilya provides the broadest insights into the full reach of war in his Arthashastra. In it he identifies four forms of war:

• war by counsel: waging war through visible but mostly non-violent diplomatic means.
• silent war: seeking to make the enemy do our will through invisible and occasionally violent covert means.
• secret war: seeking to make the enemy do our will through semi-visible and violent irregular military means.
• open war: seeking to make the enemy do our will through visible and violent means.

While Kautilya is the broadest categorizer of war, Clausewitz is the deepest thinker, though he restricts his analysis to open war and some aspects of secret war. While Kautilya implicitly documents the subordination of war (and, to a certain degree, everything else) to the dictates of politics, Clausewitz details the subordination of strategy and war to politics in a deeper, more methodical analysis. (Clausewitz could achieve the broadness of Kautilya if his disciples expanded and redacted On War like Kautilya’s disciples did. The Arthashastra was added to and re-edited over 900 years. On War is the product of Clausewitz, his wife, his brother in law, and “Major O’Etzel”.). Sun Tzu, in his Art of War, covered secret and open war and hinted at silent war. The other six books that make up the seven classics of ancient China extend further into the realm of silent war.  Thucydides and Machiavelli also provide useful illumination of the full range of war. Thucydides, for example, used Brasidas as an excellant example of mixing war by counsel, secret war, and open war. Colonels Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui provide an up to date version for the 21st century in Unrestricted Warfare.

To prepare for the full range of possible war, you have to be organized to fight across the full spectrum of power:

Spectrum of Power

If your competitors use a broader spectrum of war than you have, chances are that a concentration on that part of your defenses could allow a decisive breakthrough that would leave you powerless at their feet. The worst part of it may be that:

1. You didn’t know you were at war.
2. You didn’t see what hit you.
3. You never knew there was a chance for victory.
4. You never knew that you’d lost.
5. You don’t believe in any of the above.

You don’t need the metaphysical fluff of 5GW to broaden war beyond open war and its overt use of physical violence. The concepts behind war by counsel, silent war, and secret war are grounded in historical reality and the best strategic thought.