Control
Adam Elkus linked to this Small World Journal article by Justin Kelly and Michael Brennan. A.E. observes that Kelly and Brennan:
…vault past the increasingly obsolete US COIN/Irregular warfare debate to get to the heart of what a new strategic paradigm for today’s conflicts will look like.
The COIN (counter-insurgency) debate deserves to be buried. Deep. Like most American defense debates, the COIN debate is merely another demonstration of the American propensity for determinedly working their way deep into quagmires and then wallowing in them. Such debates are diversions. They lack an eye for the main chance and strike fiercely and bravely for the mighty capillary.
William Tecumseh Sherman observed of John Bell Hood after the capture of Atlanta, “Damn him, if he will go to the Ohio River, I’ll give him the rations. Let him go north, my business is down South.” While most American defense thinkers rush north to the Ohio in search of generational vaporware, budgetary vindication, magic bullets, and other monsters to destroy, Kelly and Brennan go south towards Clausewitzian-Wylian synthesis. Their article is notable for drawing heavily on the work of Rear Admiral J. C. Wylie in his often overlooked classic Military Strategy. He provides them rations aplenty.
It’s not even ironic that Kelly and Brennan are foreigners. Like the original blues musicians that inspired the British Invasion, Wylie is a prophet without honor in his own country. Foreigners such as Colin S. Gray have been more openly appreciative of Wylie than most Americans. Wylie’s improvised combination of radar, gunnery, and torpedo control during the naval battle off Guadalcanal and Tassafaronga while serving as executive officer of USS Fletcher should be as much an emblematic part of American strategic lore as John Boyd’s perception that the situational awareness created by the wider view of the F-86′s cockpit gave it an edge over the otherwise superior MiG-15 during the air war over Korea. Indeed, Wylie’s improvisation led to the creation of the first Combat Information Center in the U.S. Navy. He helped write the manual in 1943: CIC Manual for Destroyers. Here’s a helpful diagram:
CIC Diagram
Where would Captain Kirk be without J.C. Wylie?
CIC
(For that matter, where would the CIC be without Captain Kirk.)
Here and in his later writings, Wylie’s central theme was control. This first passage from Military Strategy should be as ubiquitous in the minds of American defense thinkers as Clausewitz’s “War is the continuation of policy by other means”:
The primary aim of the strategist in the conduct of war is some selected degree of control of the enemy for the strategist’s own purpose; this is achieved by control of the pattern of war; and this control of the pattern of war is had by manipulation of the center of gravity of war to the advantage of the strategist and the disadvantage of the opponent.
The successful strategist is the one who controls the nature and the placement and the timing and the weight of the centers of gravity of the war, and who exploits the resulting control of the pattern of war toward his own ends.
The following passages are just as notable:
This was purposely a very general statement. If we accept the premise that a strategy is a plan for doing something in order to achieve some known end, then it seems an adequately precise postulation. The aim of any strategy—land, sea, air, diplomatic, economic, social, political, a game of poker, or the way of a man with a maid—is to exercise some kind or degree of control over the target of the strategy, be it friend, neutral, or opponent. I have used the word “control” because I can’t find a better. The vocabulary is not wholly adequate to the need. In many cases, “influence” might be more nearly the word; less often it could even be “dominance”. Take your choice, or find other words that better fit your situation. I have settled on “control” simply as an umbrella to cover the full span of possibilities.
In the case of maritime strategy (which was understandably my first interest), the aim is the extension of control from the sea onto the land. Note here that the more frequently discussed control-of-the-sea is a necessary prelude, a means, to this end. And remember also that the control extended from the sea onto the land, which is where people live, can be political, or economic, or psychological, or military, or any combination of various pressures toward control. It can be direct or subtle, overt or covert, or immediate or slow or delayed in its working. And, again, some forms of it might be more accurately described as direct or indirect influence.
Probably the most slippery and lease precise bit of this postulated theory has to do with “manipulation of the center of gravity”, or control of “the nature and the placement and the timing of the center of gravity”. Another way to say this is that the strategist needs some leverage to induce or force the other fellow to accede, wholly or in part, to what the strategist wants.
The President, seeking a particular piece of legislation from the Congress, may adopt a strategy in which his leverages include both a carrot (to induce) and a stick (to force) in hopes of reaching some mutually acceptable agreements.
The diplomat engaged is arms control or trade negotiations follows essentially the same path in his strategy.
The man a-wooing the maid uses as his leverage the carrot.
The armed force at war depends on the stick.
And that brings up another matter. The principle stick available to armed forces is some kind of destruction. The correlation between destruction and control, which varies widely from one situation to another, has been emotionally neglected in public discussions of military strategy.
It is not too difficult for an army on a battlefield to resolve one aspect of this: just use a bazooka and destroy that tank. With one less enemy tank, the army is a little closer to control of the battlefield.
In my own profession, we can often use the same reasoning: sink a hostile ship or submarine and we are that much closer to control of that part of the sea.
The Air Force problem (and the Navy for some of this, too) quickly gets more difficult the farther it reaches beyond the battlefield. The tank shot up by a plane in “close interdiction” just substitutes the aircraft weapon for the bazooka. But what about the so-called “deep interdiction” and “strategic bombing”? How, and how much, do these destructions contribute to the control that is the aim of war? Monday-morning quarterbacks today still question the Dresden and Hamburg firestorms and (to my private fury since most of them were not then living, much less at risk) noisily question not only the need but morality of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs.
Here let me clearly state that, by bringing up these matters, I am not automatically opposing “deep interdiction” or “strategic bombing” or opposing nuclear missiles in submarines or silos…What I am trying to do is indicate this basic aspect of the use of armed force, which necessarily involves many different kinds and degrees of destruction, needs a lot more thought and analysis than I think it has had either in public or in organizational privacy.
What are the relationships, the correlations, between destruction and control? What will this show of force (which is potential destruction) or that segment of actual destruction contribute, directly or indirectly, now or later, to the control we seek as our aim in peace or war? Only by facing up to that kind of question, clinically rather than emotionally, can we move from profligacy toward efficiency in the planning and conduct of war…
Any degree of control is a tug of war between three conflicting forces:
- tacit control: control obtained (perhaps) unconsciously
- contingent control: control obtained from chance and probability
- explicit control: control obtained consciously
Each force on its own would hypothetically push control towards extremes. Tacit control would push control towards complete blind unconsciousness, the control of pure primordial instinct. Contingent control would push control towards total randomness, the total negation of control. Explicit control would push control towards absolute rationality, the perfect translation of intention to environment.
Each force, however, is kept in check by the conflicting tendencies of the other forces to do the same thing. Explicit control, the control sought by the conscious human mind and through conscious human action, is frustrated by fluctuations in opportunity and unseen mental constraints. Tacit control is frustrated by conscious decisions that are contrary to habit and instinct and the unpredictable shift of the environment away from the one that formed them without hands. Contingent control is frustrated by conscious and less than conscious attempts to bring control to the uncontrolled.
This pattern should be familiar to the student of strategy. Clausewitz advanced a narrower application of this same concept in Book I Chapter I of On War:
28. THE CONSEQUENCES FOR THEORY (Bassford translation)
War is thus more than a mere chameleon, because it changes its nature to some extent in each concrete case. It is also, however, when it is regarded as a whole and in relation to the tendencies that dominate within it, a fascinating trinity—composed of:1) primordial violence, hatred, and enmity, which are to be regarded as a blind natural force;
2) the play of chance and probability, within which the creative spirit is free to roam; and
3) its element of subordination, as an instrument of policy, which makes it subject to pure reason…These three tendencies are like three different codes of law, deep-rooted in their subject and yet variable in their relationship to one another. A theory that ignores any one of them or seeks to fix an arbitrary relationship among them would conflict with reality to such an extent that for this reason alone it would be totally useless.
The task, therefore, is to keep our theory [of war] floating among these three tendencies, as among three points of attraction…
Control, at least when explicit, is not the end goal of most human action. Control is a means to the end. Both Clausewitz and Wylie emphasize this. Clausewitz starts On War with this definition of war:
War is thus an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will.
Here we see three elements necessary for human action:
- Power: the “act of force”
- Control: compelling the enemy
- Purpose: “our will”
Wylie’s passage quoted above echos this definition:
The primary aim of the strategist in the conduct of war is some selected degree of control of the enemy for the strategist’s own purpose…
Here we see the same three elements:
- Power: “the conduct of war”
- Control: “some selected degree of control of the enemy”
- Purpose: “the strategist’s own purpose”
Power and control can be the ends of human action but usually only so that they can be converted into means for achieving a more overriding purpose. The attempt to fulfill such a purpose is usually an act of conscious choice. However, any such rational conscious act is frustrated by the irrationality of tacit forces and the arationality of contingent forces. In Book I Chapter I, Clausewitz focused on a hypothetical tendency of the irrational violence of war to push to extremes as an illustrative device. He then demonstrated that this hypothetical tendency is circumscribed and regulated by chance and rationality.
The unusual virulence of violence, the particular means of war, made it sufficiently distinct that Clausewitz categorized it as “other” or “additional” means. But the attempts by all human beings to fulfill their conscious personal agendas, whether by “not other” or “other” means, are subject to the same forces of chance and tacit passion as war. Crossing the street may not necessarily present the same level of danger as invading Russia but under certain conditions it may present chances and passions that are as consequential for the individual as invading Russia is for a polity.
The degree of control sought by Wylie’s strategist depends upon by the means and ends that control is intended to connect. Control is the Tao, the way, between power and purpose. In this context, power can be understood (paraphrasing Max Weber) as the possibility of control while purpose can be understood as the scope of control.
If we map these two, with power on the horizontal axis and purpose on the vertical axis, we’d end up with:
Along the vertical axis we can mark several degrees of purpose. From the most narrow scope to the broadest, these are:
- interaction
- positioning
- reconciliation
- division
- prioritization
Or, alternatively:
- tactical
- operational
- strategic
- political
- cultural
Along the horizontal axis, you can mark several degrees of power. It’s helpful to illustrate the degrees of power relative to the degree of purpose. On the level of interaction, the realm of tactics, this ranges from the absolute passivity of the Taoist sage king to the universal destructive potential of an antimatter Galactus/Richard Simmons hybrid. Everything is tactical. Other scopes of purpose exist only as the accumulation of tactical effects and their cumulative building towards higher purposes.
The average human existence is largely taken up with tactical interaction after tactical interaction. Tactical thinking is natural. In the realm of nature, red with the pointy tooth and sharp claw of the good Reverend Thomas Malthus, life comes at you fast. Living from moment to moment is living from tactic to tactic. Higher purpose was only achieved at rare moments when mankind got its head above water while fighting against the tide in Rev. Malthus’ swirling vortex of blood. Tactic control is natural. Any higher form of control is extremely unnatural.
Purpose in positioning power for tactical interactions, the realm of operations, may or may not exist. Assuming operations was never just an invisible interrupting alien, the dead body of operations is lying over there in the corner, Kelly and Brennan’s blood stained finger prints are all over it, and an APB is out for their arrest. We will pass from this scene of storm and stress and move on to a purpose as equally nebulous as operations but with more historical traction.
The purpose of reconciliation, generally known as strategy, is matching ends to means or, in a more extended taxonomy, ends to ways to means. This fit is never perfect, hence it is a process of reconciliation rather than achieving an absolute fit. While one square peg of power may not fit another round hole of purpose, the act of strategic control attempts to bring them into some kind of alignment, however ugly. The possible means available for conversion into the control necessary for achieving strategic ends range from influence at one pole to violence on the other pole. Most strategies are a smear across the spectrum of power between the two. The midpoint is probably hurt, coercion, or “compellance” as Thomas Schelling called it. Kelly and Brennan echo similar work as James Kiras, A. A. Svechin, and Wylie in delineating strategies of exhaustion or attrition (moral or physical), annihilation, denial (the strategy of Pericles), and inducement. All of these are strategies of control, as Wylie postulated back in 1967:
…the strategist needs some leverage to induce or force the other fellow to accede, wholly or in part, to what the strategist wants.
The President, seeking a particular piece of legislation from the Congress, may adopt a strategy in which his leverages include both a carrot (to induce) and a stick (to force) in hopes of reaching some mutually acceptable agreements.
The diplomat engaged is arms control or trade negotiations follows essentially the same path in his strategy.
The man a-wooing the maid uses as his leverage the carrot.
The armed force at war depends on the stick.
CNAS Care Bear Stare
Such strategies are never exclusive. Even in war, there is usually some type of influencing going on even amidst violence. I ♥ people COIN as propounded by the CNAS school and I hate people COIN as applied by almost everyone else are both smears across the spectrum of power, though, when it’s Hama time, u can’t touch this much influence besides the greater role of violence.
Hama Care Bear Stare
Winning hearts and minds may involve creating warm feelings in some hearts and minds and violently removing the hearts and minds from the chests and skulls of others. Capturing someone’s heart means different things depending upon whether your Romeo, a beatnik hippie, or a priest of Left-Handed Hummingbird. Leveling a city with conventional arms or passing out candy to suspicious locals are both expressions of overall strategic control. Drawing a binary division between the two only creates a gap in the spectrum of available strategic power and represents the sort of silly strategic thinking that only an American or someone in thrall to American strategic thinking would indulge in.
Strategic power is gained or lost through the process of dividing power, the realm of politics. The power used to achieve political control ranges from autocracy to anarchy, which usually consists of small islands of autocracy. Strategy is a continuation of politics with the addition of politically derived means. Whether those means include the dread “other means”, enabling a strategy of war, is a result of the interaction of chance, tacitness, and reason in striving for political control.
The ultimate purpose is the purpose of prioritization, the realm of culture. Such priorities may follow the natural course like the apparently discredited Dark Lord Maslow’s Dark Pyramid of Self-Actualization or Aherring’s Existence-Relatedness-Growth Non-Dark Inverse Non-Pyramid of Non-Doom. Or they may be curiously inverted. What is certain is that the priorities may be entirely tacit. Culture is the art of the unspoken assumption: absolute priority of purpose is absolute tacitness of purpose. Said John Maynard Keynes:
The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas.
Keynes was also kind enough to explain the difficulty in achieving political control:
- “The power to become habituated to his surroundings is a marked characteristic of mankind.”
- “The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds.”
- “Worldly wisdom teaches that it is better for reputation to fail conventionally then to succeed unconventionally.”
- “Most, probably, of our decisions to do something positive, the full consequences of which will be drawn out over many days to come, can only be taken as the result of animal spirits—a spontaneous urge to action rather than inaction, and not as the outcome of a weighted average of quantitative benefits multiplied by quantitative probabilities.”
- “Education: the inculcation of the incomprehensible into the indifferent by the incompetent.”
There is a sort of convex curve between tactics on the low end and culture on the high end. On either end, tacit control seems to predominate. In the curve between tactics and culture, the realm of politics, strategy, and ghostly operations, explicit control has more scope. The explicit, being more tangible, is what makes the material certainty of political control more easily grasped than the intangible uncertainty of cultural control. But, as Keynes also observed, “It is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil.” Cultural control can only be achieved by striking at its material artifacts. As Clausewitz said of war:
Essentially war is fighting, for fighting is the only effective principle in the manifold activities generally designated as war. Fighting, in turn, is a trial of moral and physical forces through the medium of the latter. Naturally moral strength must not be excluded, for psychological forces exert a decisive influence on the elements involved in war.
The same principle can be broadened and applied to control: control is a trial of purposes through the medium of power. While purpose, especially the tacit purposes prioritized in culture, are intangible, their expression in the material world is quite tangible. To strike at the tangible expression of an idea is to strike at the intangible essence of an idea. When acting on a cultural artifact, whether through influence or violence, the purpose is not the application of the means or the control such application might achieve. The purpose is the purpose, perhaps equally intangible.
Said Alexander Hamilton in Federalist 23:
This is one of those truths which, to a correct and unprejudiced mind, carries its own evidence along with it; and may be obscured, but cannot be made plainer by argument or reasoning. It rests upon axioms as simple as they are universal; the MEANS ought to be proportioned to the END; the persons, from whose agency the attainment of any END is expected, ought to possess the MEANS by which it is to be attained.
In Federalist 31, Hamilton is even broader:
In disquisitions of every kind there are certain primary truths or first principles upon which all subsequent reasonings must depend. These contain an internal evidence, which antecedent to all reflection or combination commands the assent of the mind. Where it produces not this effect, it must proceed either from some defect or disorder in the organs of perception, or from the influence of some strong interest, or passion, or prejudice…Of the same nature are these other maxims in ethics and politics, that there cannot be an effect without a cause; that the means ought to be proportioned to the end; that every power ought to be commensurate with its object; that there ought to be no limitation of a power destined to effect a purpose, which is itself incapable of limitation.
These are the principles underlying control, the mighty hedgehog of war and life.
One Big Thing
A lesson for the future.
The wars of the future will not be fought on the battlefield or at sea. They will be fought in space, or possibly on top of a very tall mountain. In either case, most of the actual fighting will be done by small robots. And as you go forth today remember always your duty is clear: To build and maintain those robots. Thank you.
- Military school Commandant’s graduation address, “The Secret War of Lisa Simpson“
