sun tzuish, war what is it good for.

Since it is a significant military history day tomorrow (yup, D-Day), and since I have occasionally opine on military affairs or strategies, I figured I'd outline some distinctions between the military philosophy of Sun Tzu and the current systemic problems of American geo-political strategy.

1) "Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win". America has not often followed this sort of basic dictum. We embroiled ourselves in an un-winnable conflict in Vietnam for example (and contributed to the problem by not committing resources to make that mistake a shorter one which would have less damaged public will against it). We currently are sitting with two major wars in Central Asia (and a third or fourth possibly on the way).

I argued at the time against the Iraq invasion, principally because the strategy was vaguely defined, the victorious terms non-existent, and the rationale poorly laid out (as in, there was no convincing case to do it). But once the war started, there was then the problems of how to conduct it, how to win, if possible. A war with an asymmetric foe is always going to be conducted in asymmetric battles. We call much of this "terrorism". But the reality is that in small sporadic doses, such efforts can call upon the people of a land to resist and oppose an occupying force, particularly if it operates like a traditional army and tries to wage war on symmetrical terms. It will lose if it does this. The dictum of Sun Tzu in part reads never to allow one's enemies to define the terms of an engagement. We managed in Afghanistan (at first) to wage war in this manner. We used firepower and mobility (two things American forces have traditionally been supreme at), and combined these with decent to hard intelligence and conducted a war using quite a bit fewer troops, and those mostly of high quality special operations training. That's more or less how the shooting portion of a war against a numerous but unspecific foe should be fought. The difficulty in Afghanistan was not running the rest of the counter-insurgency playbook (or one could say, not having a counter-insurgency playbook in the first place). Iraq was a different case. The war was conducted on something more like a conventional arms set piece battle at first. Despite any evidence that suggested such a setup was fruitless at best and convincing evidence from Afghanistan that such efforts were unnecessary to defeat another undeveloped nation's organized military forces quickly and efficiently. In both cases, we went into a war without a playbook that defined any victory or proclaimed our ability to achieve one.

2) Torture. I didn't quite beat this one to death. But quite bluntly, I'm not sure how well our policies of torture to seek out information would be carried over. Sun Tzu's primary interest was speaking to the likelihood that a war being conducted would result in a dominion level control/annexation or at least alliance with the conquered state. That's basically what our two wars seem aimed at. A state which resolves itself through inhospitable treatment at the hands of a conquering occupier to resist and object to the advances and requests of that occupier isn't much use to conquer. Or rather, it hasn't actually been conquered in the ancient sense of the term. And torture isn't exactly welcoming treatment of citizens. Even where those citizens live under a pre-existing system that endorses torture, it does not represent an improvement to sidestep the protections created by rule of law. Where this comes up: "Treat the captives well, and care for them. This is called winning a battle and becoming stronger." The idea being that you do not gain allies and additional forces to marshal for future conflicts (even those of diplomacy and ideas) by treating your enemies with disdain and indolence. Mao Zedong, of all people, even endorsed that type of effort in his text on Guerrilla Warfare. When Mao is higher on the sort of moral scale than America for any reason, that suggests we've made an egregious error of judgment.

3) Sun Tzu does endorse the necessity of gathering vital intelligence. But he does this with a specific chapter on espionage. And not through the more protracted battle over conquest and the ancient struggle over "hearts and minds". His primary focus is also not on gathering more information. One can use scouts to do that in a battle. But on preventing the enemy from gathering information through deceptive and unpredictable tactics. Strike where unexpected, that sort of thinking. Back to espionage: "It is essential to seek out enemy agents who have come to conduct espionage against you and to bribe them to serve you. Give them instructions and care for them. Thus doubled agents are recruited and used." Based on my understanding, we have far too few Arabic and Islamic scholars in the employ of our national policies to be trying to understand the objectives our enemies through espionage type tactics, much less to explain those objectives plainly to our public to galvanize support for a long and protracted war. Something Sun Tzu explicitly says to avoid starting, long and protracted wars are not good wars. Indeed his counsel suggests that the very best generals would win battles without actually fighting.

4) And of course this one: "Know thy self, know thy enemy. A thousand battles, a thousand victories." We went into this protracted engagement without a clearly defined sense of who and what we were fighting. As such, that already suggests a 50/50 battle. The problem as I see it: we also did not clearly define what we ourselves were fighting FOR. Who are we? What did we want? What could we do? And how would they fight, and what for? Thousands of questions left to the "soldiers" of both sides to resolve rather than the philosophers and politicians on our side to proclaim. These are questions that we indeed grapple not without difficulty every day in America. A diverse nation with thousands of significant demands of its body politic is inherently difficult to divine out a single articulate goal in any one endeavor. It is likewise a mistake to presume and to act, as we have often done, that our enemies exist on this sort of monolithic and empirical plain where they have properly identified and organized themselves and gathered all plausible supports to their cause over ours. My reading of many Islamist responses to Obama's speech is that they have not done so. There are indeed members of Islamist majorities in some countries that do not condone violent measures and threats against the "infidels". It may be possible over a period of time to parse out the violent extremists from more moderate extremists, and to obtain for them actual goals that still remain within our own international interests (namely: democratic self-rule and some acceptance of general human rights conventions but carried out by Islamic governments instead of the brutal dictatorships we presently support). I saw quite a bit more interest from oppositional forces in Saudi Arabia and Egypt in particular that suggest we (America) might be better off dropping support for the Wahabbi hardliners in Saudi Arabia or the 30 year reign of Hosni Mubarak in favor of more democratic strangeness like we saw in Palestine with support for Hamas or the present election season in Iran (which has a secular Constitutional government that sort of obeys some wizard beyond the curtain theocratic regime). I'm not totally sold that this is a great argument for regional or international stability, but it certainly holds somewhat greater consistency as it regards human rights records and our foreign allegiances. And I would suspect getting our own affairs on these matters in order would be of great help. We're not always going to get to talk to wonderful people when we come to want something to progress or to defend that which has already evolved in the world (see: Cold War or Stalinist Russia as an ally during WW2). And that includes the sometimes crazy Islamic populism of our present enemies. Some of those populists only exist out of convenience, and can shift their support to more tolerable levels (within the greater philosophical "consensus" on human rights) in exchange for a greater sense of regional autonomy and stability. Others are fighting "to the death" in what may be characterized as a clash of civilization. We will have to conduct ourselves on our own rules within a good sense of who we are and what we are fighting for, even where that conflict is within the world of ideas instead of that of bombs and bullets. And we will also have to determine what our opponents really want, if only to seek to deny it to them.

When I have a good sense that this has been happening, maybe I'll be more confident when we attack other nations for no apparent reason that we're going to war for a good reason. But the track record of the past decade is not very reassuring.