Featured Download
Speak Like a CEO
This chapter describes ten helpful actions and behaviors that will bring you...
Content provided in partnership with
Government Industry
From Kadesh to Kandahar: military theory and the future of war
Naval War College Review, Summer, 2003 by Michael Evans
In expeditionary warfare, the main need is to reconcile operational versatility with organizational stability. Western forces must be capable of undertaking joint, multidimensional missions ranging from shaping the environment to air-ground operational maneuver, to all-out conventional warfare. The demands of operational versatility are likely to place a premium on organizational change.
Multifaceted Conflict: Counterwar Theory and Mastery of Violence
- Most Popular Articles in News
- The Ten Best Laptop bags
- Tata plans cheapest-ever car for Indian market
- GLOBALIZATION AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF UNDERDEVELOPMENT OF THE THIRD WORLD
- Corn is good for you; Corn is not only a tasty treat, but also a cereal that ...
- THE 50 BEST STYLISH HANDBAGS TO CARRY
- More »
Recent trends in European-American military theory toward multidimensional operations have also been applied to what some European military thinkers now call "counterwar theory," or the "mastery of violence" as an operational military strategy. (38) In France, the development of counterwar theory reflects the perception that war in the twenty-first century has become "a mixture of phenomena." Some French military thinkers believe that in contemporary armed conflict it is largely impossible to treat war as merely a clash between rival forces; that the conventional cannot be separated from the unconventional; and that traditional lines of authority between military control and political responsibility are becoming blurred.
A military force may now be required to conduct intervention operations in conditions that correspond to neither classical warfare nor traditional peace-support operations. Extremely complex political conditions may arise in which law and order are lacking but the law of armed conflict must nonetheless, and at all costs, be upheld; in such a case a counterwar strategy, the disciplined control of violence, may have to be imposed. As French military analysts Brigadier General Loup Francart and Jean-Jacques Patry observe, "Military operations are now completely integrated with political, diplomatic, economic and cultural activities. Strategy is no longer simply a matter of defense. The problem is now, more than ever, to conceive military operations in a political framework." (39)
General Wesley K. Clark, the American commander who prosecuted Nato's 1999 war against Serbia over Kosovo, has argued that politics in modern war now pervades all of the three levels of war--tactics, operations, and strategy. In the past, politics was mainly a factor at the strategic level, where statecraft guided the military instrument. However, in the early twenty-first century, politics also now impinges on the operational and tactical levels of war, Clark believes, to the extent that it may be necessary to speak of a "political level of war." If General Clark is right, the implications for future civil-military relations are profound. (40)
In an age of increased military-political integration and twenty-four-hour electronic media, the goal of force may be not annihilation or attrition but calibrated "elimination of the enemy's resistance" by the careful and proportional use of counterviolence. The use of armed force in a surgical manner--the rapier rather than the broadsword--would require that military thinking and action be politically sophisticated, legally disciplined, and ethically correct. These needs were among the main lessons of the Kosovo conflict. (41) As French military theorists have argued, the aim must be to ensure that the application of force in intervention operations--especially in an age of instant images--can be modulated and shaped by professional militaries to accommodate rapidly shifting politics and flexible operational and strategic objectives.
