Strategy for Action: Using Force Wisely in the 21st Century

War is nothing but a duel on a larger scale. Countless duels go to make up war, but a picture of it as a whole can be formed by imagining a pair of wrestlers. Each tries through physical force to compel the other to do his will; his immediate aim is to throw his opponent in order to make him incapable of further resistance. War is thus an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will.

Carl von Clausewitz

Although at its heart war is political, no individual has managed to develop a unified theory of strategy and war. Indeed, with the complexity of the factors involved, it is doubtful that this will ever be possible, even if it were politically (or morally) useful. But as we shall see, there are, scattered throughout the practice of the great strategic leaders and the writings of the great strategic thinkers, enduring insights for our conceptual jigsaw. If we can identify these, piece them together and add others from first principles and experience, then we may have the basis for something less ambitious but more immediately useful, a theory for rational strategy making.

As we start to think about armed conflict and war, our first challenge is the unpredictable nature of it all. Notwithstanding war’s capricious personality, if we are to bring rigour to our strategic calculations on how to use armed force to pursue political objectives in a rational way, we need a means of organising our thinking.

As a first step, we need to explore the strategy makers’ world. We need to consider more deeply the elemental nature of armed conflict and war, this complex environment in which leaders and strategists operate. In particular, we need to clarify what we mean by the term ‘war.’ We need also to clarify what we mean by ‘policy’, a term that is all too often conflated with strategy. This done, we can then examine the need for and the role of strategy in arms conflict and war. This, in turn, will allow us to deduce a contemporary definition of strategy. Taken together, these analyses will provide a starting point for our historical examination and help build the basic foundations of a theory of modern strategy making.

During the 19th century, international politics had a polar character: peace reigned or you were at war and there was not much in between. Whereas now, at any modern moment, a spectrum of conflicts of differing intensities exists. Some of these conflicts may be popularly characterised as war and others not.

This leads us to an important observation. The term ‘war’ is popularly used as shorthand for three interrelated, but nevertheless distinct, ideas:

· First, war is an instrumental act which uses armed force for the violent settlement of international disputes.

· Second, war is a political condition that is caused by the use of armed forces but that had an elementally different nature to the political condition of peace.

· Third, war is a legal institution or international regime of agreed norms, values and rules, that sets legal boundaries on armed conflict.^[1]

These ideas overlap but are nevertheless distinct and the distinctions matter. It is important to understand the idea of war as a framing legal institution as, although there have been no recent formal declarations of war, the laws of armed conflict apply in circumstances where war has not been declared. And war crimes fall within the jurisdiction of the newly established International Criminal Court. But for strategy, the key distinction is between war as an instrumental act and war as a political condition.