HOW DOES ONE WIN?

Theoretically, how one wins a war is fairly straightforward—it is doing it that is difficult.

Clausewitz pointed out that war is both a physical and moral struggle. His recipe for victory was simple: “If you want to overcome your enemy you must match your efforts against his power of resistance, which can be expressed as the product of two inseparable factors, viz. the total means at his disposal and the strength of his will.” (italics in original)¹⁷ One can express that as a mathematical formula:

R = M x W

In the formula, R represents the power of resistance, M is the total means available, and W is the strength of will. Victory then, is achieved as R approaches zero; that is, as the power of resistance drops to an ineffective level. One can push R toward zero by reducing either M or W (or both). In some respects one might think of a strategy designed to attack the M aspect of the equation as a physical approach and a strategy designed to address the W aspect as psychological, although making such a distinction too starkly can be dangerous, since both elements will appear in any strategy. We will examine briefly both approaches.

The traditional concept of winning a war is based on reducing the enemy’s means of resistance.

This is generally done physically. Typically, it involves destroying or neutralizing the enemy’s military or at least attriting it to the point of ineffectiveness. The underlying purpose is to remove the enemy’s capability to resist so you can impose your will on him directly. The theorist of deter-rence, Thomas Schelling, wrote about the use of military power to hurt. His point was that one function of militaries is to inflict pain on the enemy. Inflicting pain is easiest when the enemy cannot resist—that is, after you have beaten him in battle.¹⁸ Thus, the real significance of the loss of one’s army is that it leaves you vulnerable to whatever pain the enemy wants to inflict. That is why nations surrender when their armies are defeated. The trick has always been how one goes about destroying or attriting the enemy. Another physical approach attempts to avoid the issues of

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destruction or attrition through paralysis. The concept is that one paralyzes vital enemy systems, especially command and control, to make their resistance ineffective. Postulated by advocates of the indirect approach and some air power enthusiasts, the intent is to avoid hard fighting by maneuver or by precise attacks on specific targets.¹⁹ However, the final mechanism for achieving victory is still placing the enemy is a situation in which your armed forces can directly impose their will. In every case, winning by reducing the enemy’s physical means of resistance comes down to an evaluation of whether you can hit and hurt the enemy, the cost to do so, and the effectiveness of the resulting damage. The underlying theoretical rational is always that removing the enemy’s ability to resist allows one to directly impose his will without the possibility of effective resistance.

Attacking psychologically to reduce the enemy’s will to resist works somewhat differently. The intent of all action is not to place oneself in position to impose one’s will but to cause the enemy to lose his will and quit. All strategies designed with this intent share two major issues. First, is whose will should one attack? If we accept Clausewitz’s description of the forces interacting in war as the people, the government, and the military, then we can ascribe a will to each.²⁰ Whose will counts most? The French general and theorist André Beaufre wrote:

Whom do we wish to convince? Ultimately it must be the enemy government but in some cases it may be easier to work on leading personalities (e.g. Chamberlain at Bad Godesberg or Munich), choosing arguments to which they are most susceptible. Alternatively it may be best to work directly on a certain section of public opinion which has some hold over the government or an influential Allied Government or through UNO [the United Nations].²¹

Regardless of the route he followed, Beaufre was focused ultimately on breaking the will of the enemy government. That is a very state-centric appreciation of a means of winning that deserves reconsideration in a world where non-state actors play increasingly significant roles, especially in war and warlike activities.

The recent rediscovery of counterinsurgency (COIN) theory provides other possibilities. COIN theory generally acknowledges the population as the objective—in terms of a theory of victory, it is the population that decides what victory is and who prevails. Winning hearts and minds is how one wins COIN because the people’s will counts most. That is not the case in all wars.

The examples imply whose will matters most may be largely an issue of the type of war one is fighting. This goes back to Clausewitz’s famous dictum about the first and greatest act of a com-mander and statesman being to understand the nature of the war in which he is about to engage.²² In a total war, one probably has to break at least the government and the people’s will. You may have to break all three, and certainly must to achieve a lasting settlement that is viewed as just. In limited wars for limited objectives, one may only have to break the will of the government—as-suming sufficient governmental control—to prevent the people and/or the military from ignoring the government’s decision and re-initiating the fight. As a caveat, there is no guarantee either that breaking the will of one of the trinitarian legs will produce victory or that both sides will be contesting over the same will. A second caveat is that the model may not fit non-state actors well.

The second issue in reducing the enemy’s will is understanding how to break will. There is a classic approach that is highly physical. One physically seizes, perhaps preemptively, what he wants or what is important. That is, he directly imposes his will on the enemy. In its purest form, the idea is that the enemy will concede the political point (i.e., his will breaks) without further con-test. This is the most easily understood concept and makes postwar assessment simple—you either have or don’t have what you said you wanted. Execution is also theoretically simple. It involves directly taking or doing what you want. If the enemy’s will persists, you are still presumably in a better position for the fight that follows than you were before the opening of the gambit. There

is nothing wrong with this concept of winning, and it is a very useful approach when the desired end is suitable. It is, of course, both most useful and common when there is a significant disparity between opposing forces, since the enemy will presumably try to counter your move.

In other will-oriented approaches, physical effects are also important and are typically a pri-mary method. Remember that Clausewitz said physical means and will were inseparable.²³ The distinction is in intent. The desired result of a psychological approach is the collapse of will rather than rendering the enemy incapable of resistance as in the physical approach. Some examples may help clarify. Early strategic air power theory as represented by the Italian theorist Gulio Douhet was based on the use of strategic bombing to directly attack the will of the enemy people and gov-ernment. The bomber could fly over fielded forces and directly attack enemy cities. The intent was to break morale.²⁴ This theory, which is at the heart of all strategic bombing theory, has yet to work unambiguously. As with any attempt to produce psychological effect, the results are unpredict-able. Similarly, John Warden’s theory of directly attacking the will of the government or military (striking leadership) as manifested in spinoff concepts such as “Shock and Awe” should work the-oretically—if you convince the government that you have an invincible capability to overwhelm it and the will to use that capability, the government should surrender—it just never has worked exactly like that.²⁵ The only proven way to break will is to convince the enemy that resistance is futile—the cost of resistance exceeds the potential gain. That is the real point of overwhelming force and related concepts. It may make the physical job easier, but is also an important element in the psychological equation of will.

The only method currently available to attack will directly is information operations; all the other options attack indirectly through some other aspect presumed to influence will. However, information operations are very blunt instruments whose impact is incredibly difficult to predict or target reliably. Second- and third-order effects are always present and may produce exactly the opposite of the intended result. Conversely, if victory is an assessment, information operations are strategically critical in deciding the winner. Our inability to come to grips intellectually, physical-ly, or psychologically with this aspect of war in an age when control of information is impossible is a huge part of our current perceived inability to achieve positive strategic results.

What role do ethics play in winning? This is not the classic question of whether war is really a no-holds-barred fight to the finish, or whether there are or should be rules/ethical limitations.

The ethical component of winning, if one exists, is limited to two aspects. The first, is how much weight, if any, the decider gives to the ethical conduct of the war. If the entity making the victory assessment uses ethics as a standard of measurement, ethics are significant in victory; if the de-cider ignores ethics in his analysis, ethics will play no role in victory. A second way ethics figure in the victory equation is that ethical (or unethical) conduct may have second- or third-order effects that influence durability. Thus, a war that initially looks like a victory may become something less as evidence of unethical conduct emerges. Like every other aspect of the victory assessment, the ethics standard does not necessarily apply equally to both sides, is a sliding scale rather than a binary ethical/non-ethical assessment, and considers or ignores acts/issues serendipitously. The American people expect ethical conduct of war and might very easily assess a war conducted in an unethical manner as a loss regardless of battlefield outcomes. That appears to be at least a portion of the attitude behind the resistance to the Iraq war, which rages as I write. Ethical considerations in the victory assessment are self-imposed and self-enforced, but they are real.

What is the bottom line? Victory in war is about breaking will. Eliminating means of resistance completely is impossible. Theoretically there will always be one enemy soldier armed with at least a knife who is willing to give his life to continue the fight. Destroying the enemy’s means

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without breaking his will leaves you with a less capable but still hostile foe. Conversely, breaking the will to resist ends the war regardless of the enemy’s remaining combat capability. The issue then becomes the much more practical one of how does one break an enemy’s will? This is where we loop back on our argument. Will is a difficult concept to define—much less attack directly—so militaries invariable attack the enemy military as a means not to reduce his power of resistance to zero and win, but as a means to destroy his will. Concepts like classic strategic air power theory that attempts to bypass fielded forces to attack enemy will (either government or people) directly or John Warden’s strategic rings that add to the classic approach the idea of striking command and control and other vital systems to make resistance ineffective are tempting, because theoretically they should work. They should not be ignored, but if one is looking for promising alternative ap-proaches to victory, the field of information operations is the most fertile available. We just need to get out of the technological emphasis (or perhaps fixation) and approach it from the direction of understanding how one influences opinion, especially political will.