Major General Robert H. Scales:
World War IV will cause a shift in classical centers of gravity from the will of governments and armies to the perceptions of populations. Victory will be defined more in terms of capturing the psycho-cultural rather than the geographical high ground. Understanding and empathy will be important weapons of war. Soldier conduct will be as important as skill at arms. Culture awareness and the ability to build ties of trust will offer protection to our troops more effectively than body armor. Leaders will seek wisdom and quick but reflective thought rather than operational and planning skills as essential intellectual tools for guaranteeing future victories.
If the poet-soldier has fallen, is the diplomat-soldier rising? Scales calls this new conflict the “Social Scientist’s War,” a strategic paradigmn that hyperempowers leadership at the platoon and company level, and shifts the primary battlesplace away from nodes and directly into the hearts and minds of the enemy populace.
Technology is no longer the end all, be all in warfare. Psychology is just as important, if not more important, if winning enemy populations is the path to winning wars. And the technology that we do develop should center on amplifying tactical power, not strategic power.
Scales’ piece is indispensable, highly recommend you read the whole thing.
With all do respect, may I suggest that advanced technology is not the problem. The problem is how advanced technology is applied on the battlefield. Clausewitz had important insights into war, so did American General William T. Sherman.
In his September 12, 1864 response to Atlanta Mayor James M. Calhoun Sherman said:
“You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will. War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it; and those who brought war into our country deserve all the curses and maledictions a people can pour out.”
That statement embodies US troubles in Iraq and the flaw in current military theory. It is not enough to defeat military arms, destroy military equipment, crush an enemies command and control systems. You must destroy the enemies will to fight. You must bend the individual and collective will of the enemy to your purposes. Individually and collectively enemy soldiers and civilians must give up the thought of war.
Doug Santo
Pasadena, CA
Scales’ piece is interesting, but perhaps more clever than deep. I think many Americans – even some in the military – focus to technologically defeating the enemy by destroying his means of effective resistance. What that does not take adequately into account is that if the enemy’s will to fight remains undiminished, resistance will continue by whatever means are available, which is why we are fighting the sort of asymmetrical war we now face.
There is truth in Scales’ emphsis on the political will – in liberal democracies that means the will of the larger population and capturing the Zeitgeist. In our own concern not to cause civilian casualties and to avoid casualties to our own forces, for all of our technical advantages, and for all of the valor and toughness of the troops who are actually fighting, the enemy sees the weak will of the nations and is encouraged to use whatever means are at hand to further weaken our will.
I suppose this is still primarily a legacy of the First, but also the Second, World War, when Europe had to confront the utter devastation that the European way of war leads to when nations fight a l’outrance.
The loss of will, after winning the Great War, for the Allies was palpable. The first, and to my mind most significant, manifestation of that was the Amritsar incident in India in 1919. The revulsion of the British public to the use of force against demonstrators was the first hint that the Indian independence movement (and hence anti-colonialism generally) could be successful and was the beginning of the end of the Raj.
VMI ’70
Soldier diplomate
“Oh Crap, we are screwed now ain’t we!”
In the Belmont Club blog, Wretchard comments that terrorists can now take on nation states. I commented that terrorists can take on nation states as long as nation states keep wringing their hands over dead civilians in the enemy camp(s). It is really that simple. Just ask the ghosts of Dresden and Hiroshima if you don’t believe me.
Substantially agree with his take in psycho-social element of WWIV. Some of his comments like the ones on cultural sensitivity come a little too late. I asked my S2 for a picture of tribal areas/boundaries in 2003 and got nothing. Very stupid and big failure. His comment about the strategic corporal is substantially a technology and MSM ideology driven phenomena. The troopies at AG had cell-phone cameras to record their misdeeds. Yesterday hearings started about the rape-murder by 101 guys and today the LA Times runs a big story about US Army atrocities in Vietnam. Hmmm. The recent storm about Hezbollah control of the media in South Lebanon shows that they recognize the world population as a key target of their operations. Unmentioned by GEN Scales is that COIN is a hybrid of militayr and law enforcement ops and we have sucked over the last three years at figuring that out. The people we need in Baghdad running HUMINT are the people that took down the Crips and that kept the lid on the IRA, but the Police Teams are only weakly integrated into operational planning and collection if at all, the FBI rotate every 90 days and the Brit Govt won’t allow it’s civilian employees (like Yard folks) into country. Meanwhile, for WWIII we had Voice of America and now that we recognize the important of world perception, we’ve got no one except AP, CBS and a small federal effort that runs an Arabic VH1. We’ve got a lot to learn.
Actually I have always felt that our biggest enemy is ourselves and lack of faith in the superiority of Western civilization. This is most prevelent among those of the left side of the political spectrum. Unfortunately these seem to be the types that dominate the MSM media outlets that so willingly fall to prey anti-American propaganda spewed by the islamo-facists.
Someday when these clowns wakeup to the danger of that the islamo-facists represent they will stand with us instead of against us. it is the 1930s all over again and we are surrounded by a bunch of Neville Chamberlains all over again.
Gee, does this mean that the U.S. military should quit torturing enemy combatants and civilians, or does it mean that they should torture more of them more severely?
yawn.
strike 2.
topics. keep on them.
Sherman and LeMay and Patton and Halsey all understood, viscerally, what was required of warfighters and warfighting: you MUST DESTROY YOUR ENEMY. Fialing that, destroy their will to fight, and demonstrate to others not yet engaged the futility of engagement.
I’m a right-winger, and I am sickened by the tippy-toed warfighting I see. War IS about killing people, it IS about destroying things. It must be ececuted with the utmost ruthlessness, so as to bring about it’s earliest PERMANENT conclusion.
This is the great moral imperative (I think) that military leaders at the highest levels have to the soldiers they lead – get the war over as fast as possible. And by over, I mean OVER. No insurgencies, no organized resistance.
I refer to the great example of WW2 – the Nazi revanchists trying to terrorize post war Germany were dealt with HARSHLY and SWIFTLY. And their movement went away because the populace as a whole had NO STOMACH FOR THEIR MOVEMENT OR IT’S POPOSITION.
We have ignored this.