The battlefield between our ears

Patricia Sullivan has written a fascinating piece in the Journal of Conflict Resolution entitled "War Aims and War Outcomes: Why Powerful States Lose Limited Wars" (pdf). I learned of it from this Sunday's Toronto Star, in an article by Andrew Chung.

Sullivan's research attempts to answer some daunting and critical questions:

When do militarily powerful states achieve their foreign policy objectives through the use of force? What conditions limit the utility of military force as an instrument of statecraft? Why do strong states lose small wars?

Sullivan's piece goes into a great deal of detail on the methodology of her research and modeling, which will really only interest academics in the field. The rest of us are a lot more curious about the conclusions of the study. But elements of Sullivan's research design are worth noting, even for the casual reader, if only to understand the limitations of the study's conclusions:

I test these hypotheses about the determinants of asymmetric war outcomes with original data on all military interventions by the permanent members of the U.N. Security Council (China, France, the United Kingdom, the United States, and the USSR/Russia) against both state and nonstate targets between 1945 and 2001. I define foreign military intervention as the foreign deployment of at least 500 combat-ready, regular military troops (ground, air, or naval) with the intent to participate in hostile action against a target government or substate group for the purpose of achieving immediate-term political objectives. This definition excludes peacetime arms transfers, military aid, military training operations, the forward deployment of military troops, the evacuation of military or civilian personnel, and disaster relief. The dataset contains 127 cases but, because I am testing a theory of asymmetric conflict outcomes, I drop the five cases in which the target is another major power.

In short, this study draws conclusions from only 122 cases where the five permanent member nations of the UN Security Council deployed more than 500 troops to achieve their aims, and only those cases between 1945 and 2001. If the walls of that experiential box seem too tight to you, take the results with the appropriate dose of salt.

Having said that, the conclusions are thought-provoking at the very least. First of all, the empirical results:

Despite their immense war-fighting capacity, major power states have failed to attain their primary political objective in almost 40 percent of their military operations against weak state and nonstate targets since 1945. In every case, the major power chose to terminate its military intervention short of victory despite the fact that it retained an overwhelming physical capacity to sustain military operations.

...

The primary political objective sought by the major power state is at least moderately coercive in approximately half of post-WWII major power military interventions. As predicted in hypothesis 1, the probability that a major power attains its war aims when it uses military force against a materially weaker target decreases the more coercive the state’s primary political objective. Holding all other variables constant, a militarily strong intervening state is 34 percent less likely to achieve moderately coercive objectives and 58 percent less likely to achieve the most coercive objectives than they are to attain brute force political objectives. When the intervening state has a brute force war aim, the predicted probability of success is over 75 percent. The probability that the intervening state will prevail declines to only 20 percent when the major power has an entirely compliance-dependent political objective.

There's a lot in there to consider. The key to understanding it from Sullivan's perspective is that the type of political objective is more predictive of success or failure than either the relative military strengths of those engaged in the conflict or the relative levels of resolve of the combatants. In other words, it's about which objectives play to which strengths.



With this political objective spectrum in mind, Sullivan makes the following statement:

When a state pursues war aims that can be attained with brute force, its material resources and war-fighting capacity relative to that of the adversary are the primary determinants of success and failure.

The more compliance dependent the objective, however, the more difficult it is to translate that political objective into operational military objectives and to establish a link between battlefield military effectiveness and overall strategic success. Materially weak but resolute targets can thwart a strong state’s ability to achieve coercive objectives simply by refusing to comply no matter how high the cost.

To pick one example relevant to Canadians, military superiority counts more when you're overthrowing the Taliban in the first place, and resolve counts more when you're trying to rebuild Afghanistan afterwards.

Moreover, because "strong states alone have the luxury of choosing to fight wars over marginal interests," whereas weak states or non-state actors only get into fights with powerful states when they figure it's critically important to do so, both the military balance and resolve balance are likely predisposed to a certain slant in such conflicts. According to Sullivan, this makes the objectives of the conflict the determining factor.

The logical conclusions from this study seem to me to fall into two general options: the idea that we should choose our conflicts based upon the likelihood of success as determined by our political objectives, and the idea that we can change the balance of power in such conflicts by actively managing our own resolve, no matter what the objectives.

As you might suspect, I'm in the latter camp. Even advocates of a "soft power" Canada should remember: abandoning "coercive objectives" - ones that require some level of compliance from the target - would mean abandoning our much-vaunted peacekeeping operations, since as Sullivan states:

Most peace enforcement and peacekeeping operations are also primarily coercive in nature. The intervening state or coalition does not attempt to eliminate or even forcibly disarm either of the warring parties but instead seeks to increase the costs and decrease the benefits of continuing to fight for one or both parties.

Coercive missions are central to Canada's influence in global matters, regardless of the level of intensity entailed in those operations. Unfortunately, our understanding of the difficulties and costs associated with such missions has been dampened and confused by the prevailing balance of power through much of the last century. We deployed military forces in Europe in a coercive role, to dissuade the Soviet Union and its client states from invading the free and democratic western Europe. We deployed military forces in Cyprus and the Sinai for decades, in purely coercive missions. But with the spectre of war between the nuclear superpowers hanging over such conflicts, they never escalated to the point where the cost in blood and treasure to Canada was deemed too high.

We should not confuse that lack of open warfare with success in our aims, however: the underlying conflicts in most of our peacekeeping missions still simmer beneath the surface. In that aspect, Afghanistan isn't so different from the Balkans. It's just that in one instance we've stuck around long enough to get them to at least temporarily forego violent resolution of their conflict, and in the other, we haven't.

No, instead of abandoning those missions, I'd suggest we simply gird ourselves for their realistic costs and prepare our society accordingly.

Surprisingly enough, Lawrence Martin touches upon the single biggest challenge we face in pursuing that objective in a column today:

Without a big powerful army, you can't do conventional warfare. You engage, like terrorists, in psychological campaigns. They are directed more at the audience than at the victims - the victims being tiny in number compared to normal warfare.

To gain the audience, you need mass media compliance. If the media are turning your sporadic bursts of violence into fantastic causes célèbres, you're winning the psychological war. Without the media, your message doesn't get across, you remain on the margins, you are a much smaller part of the public consciousness.

...

The media cannot be in the business of censoring news. To cut off the terrorists' supply of oxygen, to deprive them of headlines, would be ideal in that it would frustrate them beyond belief. The psychological victory would be our own. But, while there is occasional media co-operation with authorities in limiting the release of security information, news is news. It's going to get out.

But the temperature has to be lowered. Journalism can't be about censorship, but it can be about perspective. Journalists can start to come to grips with the likelihood that overexposure is aiding the terrorist cause - and they can take steps to do something about it.

They can play news stories about terrorism more modestly - on the inside pages, say. High up in the stories, they can insert background reminders to the effect that, in terms of threats, of leading causes of death, terrorism ranks about 250th, or whatever the statistic happens to be.

The stories can draw far more on historical perspective to show that terrorism has always been around in one form or another and that any comparison of the terrorism threat of today to the Nazi or Soviet threat is excess in the extreme.

The media, particularly in the United States, can be more skeptical about parroting the fear talk of political leaders who see advantage in such talk. It was fear, threat inflation that went uncorrected by the American media, that helped trigger the Iraq war.

In the media business, it is often said that perspective is our most important product. Nowadays, when we can be used as a weapon in the terrorist arsenal, it has never been more true.

His reasons for calling for restraint by the media are different than mine - he's concerned about the potential for domestic political abuse of power through fearmongering, whereas I'm concerned about our will to see through important coercive missions - but his methods are similar: our society needs less instantly-spun news and more long-term perspective, and the media have a huge role to play in that transition.

Unfortunately for us, they have no incentive to play it.

It is much, much easier to cater to short attention spans and the desire for instant gratification than it is to stand against that tide and bring depth, context, and perspective back to reporting - witness the recent push for shorter articles at the Toronto Star, among other news outlets.

What that means is that we can't rely on the media to do the right thing for the Canadian population. Like a parent who feeds his child Twinkies all day because the kid doesn't like anything more nutritious, the media will cater to the public's desires rather than its needs because they've determined it's just not worth the hassle to do anything else.

How do we change this dynamic? Well, I'd say that those with a vested interest in cultivating a more informed Canadian public start to make telling the news in a more in-depth manner easier for those doing the telling and for those doing the reading, watching, and listening. Whether that means doing the research news rooms won't do anymore and giving it to the reporters with the story, or whether it means making your issues into stories - with characters, a plot, and some satisfying conclusion - we should be doing it.

Because if Sullivan's research showed us one thing, it's that in asymmetric conflicts, the real worry isn't what's happening on the battlefield: don't worry, the CF is going to kick their ass. As I've said before, the Taliban can't defeat the Canadian Forces, only the Canadian public can.

No, our most critical objectives in coercive conflicts must be how to diminish the target's resolve while also bolstering our own. Because in every other area of an asymmetric conflict, from military to economic to governance, we hold all the cards.

Welcome to the new paradigm, folks.