What she found is interesting: 'Although the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Russia and China were militarily superior to their opponents in every one of the 122 conflicts that Sullivan studied, these powerful countries failed to win an astonishing 39 percent of their wars against weaker opponents... For all the talk of "shock and awe" before the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, Sullivan's research shows that military power alone is not a useful predictor of victory. Sullivan found that powerful nations tend to win wars when all they seek is an opponent's submission, but tend to lose when victory requires an opponent's cooperation.'
Monday, January 29, 2007
The strong often lose
Lately I have been trying to working through why raw combat power is such a poor indicator of the likelihood of strategic success nowadays. I've just submitted an article; if it's accepted I'll bang on about it at length. The gist of it is captured by something Sir Michael Howard has argued recently: that warfighting and nation-building are not distinct and different things as we in the West have tended to conceive them. This leads us to strategic defeat because in reality ‘the two blend into one another and the conduct of each determines the success of the other.’ We do the war-fighting part quite well; what we don't do so well is establish the conditions in which the other side is inclined to accept defeat, which is to say the political objectives we have set (indeed there's a good case to be made for both Vietnam and Iraq that we entered the war with no political objective in the first place). So the war smoulders on until we get tired, or bored, and decide to go home. I was interested then to come across this article 'Twisting Arms Isn't as Easy as Dropping Bombs' which discusses the research of political scientist Patricia Sullivan who has looked at all post-World War II conflicts between the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council and weaker nations.
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Can't wait to read your article.
This whole issue reminds me of what Rupert Smith wrote in his recent book - The Utility of Force (although I note that Ilana Bet-El shares the copywrite and so I wonder whether she put it into academic speak for him). Smith wrote that, "to apply force with utility implies an understanding of the context in which one is acting, a clear definition of the result to be achieved, an identification of the point or target to which the force is to be applied - and, as important as all the others, an understanding of the nature of the force being applied".
He also talks about being "second is to lose". To my mind, to come first nowadays isn't necessarly to win!
On political objective and strategy he says that, "the political objective and the military strategy are not hte same, and are never the same: the military startegic objective is achieved by military force whilst the political objective is achieved as a result of the military success [and by politicians!].
All good stuff if you ask me and well worth a read!
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