Asia-Pacific, New Initiatives, Tactical Concepts, Theory

Stumbling on Peace: The exposition of strategic misstep

February 18, 2015 Guest Author Leave a comment

This article is part of a series hosted by The Strategy Bridge and CIMSEC, entitled #Shakespeare and Strategy. See all of the entries at the Asides blog of the Shakespeare Theatre Company. Thanks to the Young Professionals Consortium for setting up the series.

David Greig’s Dunsinane, while set in the centuries-ago land of Scotland, offers a modern perspective on the nature of war, peace, language, and politics. The events of the production explore the interplay between Siward, commander of English forces in Scotland, Malcolm, the English-installed King of Scotland, and Gruach, formerly both Lady Macbeth and queen of Scotland. Through several rounds and layers of intrigue, Gruach sows enough discord and mayhem to keep English forces at bay. Malcolm, for his part, does his best to engage with Siward in an attempt to illustrate that the use of overwhelming force is not always tenable. After a betrayal late in the first act, the second act functions as an extended denouement, with less action and less emotion. Indeed, the conclusion of the play, with a wandering Siward numbly stumbling out of the scene, parallels the endings to French and U.S. operations in Vietnam, Russian and ISAF campaigns in Afghanistan, UN experiences in Somalia, and the US adventure in Iraq.¹

Nuanced allegiances come to the fore in the first act when Siward and Malcolm discuss their own perceived strengths. Siward wishes for Malcolm to act forcefully and seriously, rather than be thought of as a drunken playboy. Malcolm’s subsequent lecture on the desirability of being perceived as weak while operating from a position of strength mirrors current discussions on the rise of Chinese power in the Pacific, echoing Sun Tzu’s exhortation to “appear weak when you are strong.”

The arbiter of the legitimate exercise of violence in Scotland owes more effort than simply appreciating Gaelic songs and lilts.

That Malcolm channels Sun Tzu is not an accident — throughout the play, Malcolm uses a longer, strategic vision of conflict, whereas Siward focuses on the operational level. Siward initially senses that, having “ended” the fighting through the regime change at the end of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, peace is nigh for Scotland and its clans. Throughout the play, Siward’s lack of vision and misunderstanding of the country that he now occupies enables Gruach and the Scottish clan leaders to undermine the English vision for peace. Gruach’s admonition at the end of the play — “you’ve been in Scotland a year, and you still don’t know the language!” — drives home the point that Siward, as the arbiter of the legitimate exercise of violence in Scotland, owes more effort than simply appreciating Gaelic songs and lilts.

Siward’s lieutenant, the tactical supervisor, has no appreciation for Scotland beyond its resources and his survival. He realizes through collaboration with his ostensible foes along with exploitation of war trophies that he has no investment in Scotland, and indeed survives through tactical fits of inaction. His inaction comes back to haunt him at the end of the first act, when, after witnessing a brutally treacherous and suicidal act, he helplessly cries out “we have got to get the fuck out of here,” an exclamation that could be heard on any of a dozen fields of quagmire.²

The slower, more deliberate second act has a scene with the line

“We win because if we don’t win – we lose – and if we lose – then what?”

Here again the play foreshadows discourse about assumptions of a zero-sum world of power. In instances such as China’s increasing influence in the Pacific and the adventures of Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, there exists a tendency to leave alternatives to military-centric actions on the table. This unexamined default course of action leads to a path dependency wherein strategic leaders are stuck; they cannot simply withdraw, nor can they simply win. Strategic leaders in those situations, as Malcolm remarks about the English in Scotland, are committed to an extended dance of saving face. In this case — as well with Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, et al — peace operations entail vastly increased losses of materiel, personnel, and treasure.

Greig acknowledges the creeping existential dread that has accompanied interventions since Korea.

Put another way, assumptions of power as a zero-sum game are increasingly outmoded.³ Dunsinane anticipates requirements for transitioning towards alternative concepts of power and peace. Interestingly, through Siward’s downward spiral, Greig acknowledges the creeping existential dread that has accompanied interventions since Korea. In doing so, he makes the case that hard, coercive methods may only have existed as an effective means of exerting power and making peace for a narrow slice of the early 20th century.

Dunsinane’s last and most vivid impression — that of the formerly upright and powerful Siward stumbling around a frozen loch, trying to “find a new country” — conjures images of Africa, Southeast Asia and the Indian subcontinent in the mid 20th century, with former powers retreating from far-flung lands and their subsequent search for a new identity. At the same time, Siward’s search for “a new country” calls to mind Hamlet’s “undiscovered country” of a life after death. Judging from Grieg’s narrative, newly post-colonial countries may indeed have to undergo a rebirth if their Siwards are to find peace.

LT Vic Allen serves at the U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command and serves as CIMSEC’s Director of Social Media. He can be followed at Medium here. All posts contain the authors’ opinions alone and do not represent any of the military services or the Department of Defense.

1. Ramberg, B. (2009). The Precedents for Withdrawal: From Vietnam to Iraq. Foreign Affairs, 88, 2.

2. The mostly civilian audience laughed at this line, which struck me as oddly incongruent with the sad and violent end of the first act.

3. Read, J. H. (2012). Is Power Zero-sum or Variable-sum? Old Arguments and New Beginnings. Journal of Political Power, 5(1), 5-31. Retrieved from http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1900717

Beans Boots Bullets, Europe, Global Analysis

The Gutting of Ukraine

February 18, 2015 Guest Author 1 Comment

By Norman Friedman

China has consistently supported Ukraine during its agony at the hands of Russian-supported separatists. One of the less-publicized reasons why is that China has relied heavily on Ukrainian firms to help modernize its military.

For example, the active phased-array radar on board Chinese Type 052C destroyers was developed by a Ukrainian company. The current Chinese main battle tank is essentially the current Ukrainian one. The firms involved are all in the heavily-industrialized area in which the Russian-backed forces are operating; it may even be that the Russians are specifically targeting particular Ukrainian towns and companies. From Mr. Putin’s point of view, the Ukrainian companies may be unwanted competitors with the military industrialists on whom he depends for much of his power. At the least, he is trying to put them out of business. The white trucks supposedly carrying humanitarian aid into Ukraine from Russia were actually arriving to plunder Ukrainian factories of their modern machine tools. What the West may not want to sell to Mr. Putin, his forces can steal.

The Ukrainian plants and development companies exist because of policies implemented long before the Soviet Union broke up. The rulers of the Soviet Union were always worried that nationalism would break up their country — as, in the end, it did. One of their insurance policies against breakup was to make it difficult or impossible for those in any one of the republics making up the Soviet Union to build key items independently. For example, gas turbine ships built in Leningrad (St. Petersburg) in Russia were powered by gas turbines made in Ukraine. Their torpedoes came from Kazakhstan. Sonobuoys came from Ukraine, as did helicopter dipping sonars. Some ballistic missiles came from Ukraine. The only shipyard in the old Soviet Union capable of building carriers was in Nikolaev, in Ukraine. However, any carrier built there was armed with weapons and sensors from elsewhere in the Soviet Union, mainly from Russia.

In Soviet times, none of this really mattered. The Ukrainian factory making gas turbines responded to commands from Moscow to deliver engines to St. Petersburg, just as any factory in Russia did. There was little or no distinction between what happened in Moscow and what happened in, say, Nikolaev — no border, no transfer of cash. To a considerable extent design organizations were set up in Ukraine in the early 1960s or the late 1950s because Nikita Khrushchev, who ran the Soviet Union, was Ukrainian. For example, Khrushchev decided to reward his homeland by transferring the Crimea to it. Unsurprisingly, Russians applauded its seizure, since they had never considered the transfer legitimate. Ukrainian independence is a much more substantial issue, although most Russians apparently consider it a spurious notion, its separation a penalty imposed by the West at the end of the Cold War.

Once the Soviet Union broke up, the Soviet -era distribution of facilities suddenly mattered a great deal. All of the constituent republics of the old Soviet Union were suddenly plunged from a world of command by Moscow to a world of cash purchases. The Ukrainian plant could still make gas turbines, but if Moscow wanted a set for installation in St. Petersburg it suddenly had to pay up with real money. That was not easy. In time the Russians built their own gas turbine factory, but while that was happening they had to power ships with steam plants, because the steam plants were being made in Russia.

Conversely, key components of the carrier Varyag, afloat at Nikolaev, could not be delivered because they could not be paid for. The yard had no way to complete the carrier. Parts of her weapon system were visible for some years on the pier alongside, incomplete and hence impossible to install. In much the same way the Ukrainians had no way of completing a Slava class cruiser left nearly completed when the Soviet Union broke up. The carrier proved saleable — its transfer may have been the beginning of Ukrainian arms exports to China — but the cruiser did not. Even Ukrainian governments clearly favoring the Russians could not conjure up the resources to give the Russians weapon systems or platforms they wanted, because it took cash to move equipment over the border.

With their Russian (ex-Soviet) customers no longer paying, Ukrainian firms looked elsewhere, and they seem to have found their main customer in China — which certainly did have lots of cash. Exports were not so much finished equipment (which would probably have required components from elsewhere in the former Soviet empire) as innovative designs, such as the active phased-array radar. From time to time the Russians have tried to police the export of military data and know-how from their country, but once the Soviet Union broke up Ukraine must have made such controls a mockery in many cases. That might not have mattered had Russian military R&D kept advancing at its pre-collapse pace, but the cash shortage stopped most of that, too. Ukrainians who knew what the Soviet Union had developed by the time of its collapse could sell just about anything Russians could.

For a time, the Russians recovered to the point that they did have cash, but Russian military producers faced much higher costs at home, not least to feed an extremely corrupt political system. Now that a plunging oil price has cut Russian cash resources, it is even more difficult for them to buy from Ukrainian firms. It must be doubly difficult if they have to compete with much wealthier Chinese buyers. Theft is a much easier way to obtain the necessary products. Since it includes the theft of production tooling, the plants in question can be re-established in Russia, where their products will be far more affordable. Hence the systematic looting of plants in Ukraine. Looting also circumvents the effect of a falling price of oil, which drastically reduces hard-cash resources in Russia.

If the Ukrainian agony were all about money and access to technology, it would be unhappy enough. However, a major the driving force is nationalism. Vladimir Putin’s only important attraction for Russians is nationalistic: he is seen as a strong man who will restore the strength of the motherland, and he will also expunge all of those unhappy guilty memories of the Soviet past. In this narrative, the West is the enemy who broke up the Russian Empire and thus sought to crush Holy Russia. Anyone familiar with Russian history before the Revolution can recognize the sort of policy Mr. Putin is following. It takes a very committed Russian nationalist to say, as some have in recent days, that the falling price of oil is part of a deliberate plot on the part of ‘certain organizations’ in the West intended specifically to weaken Russia. Ukraine was the oldest part of the Empire, and its recovery excites Russian nationalists. Before he annexed Crimea, Mr. Putin was extremely unpopular. People in Russia saw him for what he was: a thief working with larger thieves to plunder their country. Afterwards his popularity soared, and old-style raw Russian nationalism became a ruling force.

Russian nationalism is opposed by Ukrainian nationalism. It may not be particularly powerful in the Eastern Ukrainian regions in which the Russians and their friends are operating, but in much of the country it is alive and well. Ukraine has a distinctive culture and language. The language and the alphabet are similar to Russian, but by no means identical. Ukraine enjoyed brief independence after the Russian Revolution. During the late 1920s and early 1930s the government in Moscow created a famine in Ukraine that killed 6 to 10 million people in the name of collectivizing farming. Ukraine had been the breadbasket of Europe, its wheat exports the major source of foreign currency to Czarist Russia. After collectivization, the Ukraine was badly enough ravaged that in the 1950s the Soviet Union found itself buying wheat abroad.

The horrors of the 1920s and 1930s remained fresh in Ukrainian minds when the Germans invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941. Initially Ukrainians understandably welcomed the Germans as liberators, only to discover that the racist Germans lumped them with the Russians as sub-human. Even so, they hated the Russians even more, and a low-level insurgency continued well into the 1950s. The Ukrainian view of the man-made famine is somewhat analogous to the Polish view of the Soviet massacre of Polish military officers in 1941 at Katyn. Each was a horrific crime committed by the Soviet Union and then buried. Under Soviet domination, denial that the Soviets had committed such crimes became a test of political loyalty. Once Ukraine and Poland were free of Soviet control, memory of such crimes helped generate nationalist hatred for the Soviets. When Mr. Putin glorifies the Soviet Union which produced him, he enrages those it tortured. Victims inside the Soviet Union are less than popular in the current nationalist climate, but victims outside are in a very different position.

To further complicate matters, another Soviet-era strategy for binding together the Soviet Union was to encourage ethnic Russians to settle in the various republics forming the Soviet Union. That produced large ethnic Russian minorities in countries like Latvia and Ukraine. Mr. Putin is encouraging the ethnic Russian minority in Eastern Ukraine to revolt against the government in Kiev. Although he is enjoying a short-term advantage, surely what he has done has made other post-Soviet governments uncomfortably aware that they may be harboring hostile minorities. They may decide to do something about them before they can revolt.

If that seems an extreme extrapolation, remember that before World War II Hitler exploited the manufactured resentments felt by a large ethnic German minority in Czechoslovakia (in the Sudetenland) to dismember that country (he did not have to resort to invasion or even to proxy invasion, as in Ukraine). Governments who remembered what minority Germans had done in the 1930s expelled them after Germany collapsed in 1945. Many Germans found themselves walking all the way across Poland from what had been East Prussia, and for years the cry to recover that territory resonated through German politics. What is likely to happen now in places like the Baltic states? Their governments lived through decades of repression in the name of the Soviet Union, but up to now they have been relatively restrained about the Russians in their midst.

Norman Friedman is author of The U.S. Naval Institute Guide to World Naval Weapon Systems. This article can be found in its original form at the Australian Naval Institute here and was republished by permission.

Podcast, Sea Control: East Atlantic

Sea Control 68: Falklands Series 4 – Peter Babbington

February 18, 2015 Guest Author Leave a comment

Alex Clarke interviews Peter Babbington, former commander of K Company in 42 Commando during the Falklands War. His unit was the first in the assault at Mount Kent and was the assaulting company for the Mount Harriet operation.

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Falklands Series 4 – Peter Babbington

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New Initiatives, Tactical Concepts

Scotland, Counter-Insurgency, and Sea Control

February 17, 2015 Guest Author Leave a comment

When curtains close on Shakespeare’s 1606 The Tragedy of Macbeth, audiences are left to ponder the fate of Scotland. Contemporaries of the playwright were well aware of the Union of the Crowns a mere three years prior in 1603, uniting the rule of England and Ireland under James the VI, King of the Scots. But few could claim to know the events that followed Macbeth’s toppling by the hands of an English army half a millennium earlier. Part of the problem is that as with many popular pieces on Scottish history, such as Braveheart, a factual recounting – if one could be determined in the first place – is sacrificed to good story-telling.

Dunsinane, written by David Greig and playing in an excellent National Theatre of Scotland production at the Shakespeare Theatre Company’s Sidney Harmon Hall in Washington, DC, through February 21st, brings a few elements of the story closer to what is known: Macbeth ruled for over 15 years and wasn’t widely considered a tyrant. The narrative largely picks up where Macbeth left off, chronicling England’s attempt to establish a friendly regime across its northern border and the subsequent insurgency and counter-insurgency campaigns. Greig uses this context to explore military, political, and moral themes (more on those later) quite familiar to those who’ve lived through or in the shadows of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But what does sea power have to do with a land war and occupation of physical territory? A monologue from a boy soldier opens the show:

“We boarded our ships at the Thames mouth.
There were two thousand of us and also
Some horses for the knights to ride and animals
For us to slaughter on the way.

We stood on the Essex shore a mess of shingle,
Some of us new and eager for a fight and others
Not so sure but all of us both knowing and not knowing

What lay ahead of us.

Scotland.

Scotland. Where we would install a king.

…..

Of the river Forth and we landed in a place called Fife –
Which is wild compared to Kent –
And there we camped in woods near the abbey of Inchocolm.

And waited until at last he came to us – Siward
Our commander – and he told the sergeants it was time
To prepare us to fight.

Clearly sealift and local sea control can smooth the path for an initial military assault. The sea journey described above is just shy of 400 nm, and would have taken far less time than a northward march, thereby increasing the chance the expedition maintains some element of surprise. Whether the landing force is completely unexpected or merely arrives sooner after word reaches Macbeth and his advisors at Dunsinane, seat of his power, the force would have faced less entrenched and ready resistance. Additionally, had Macbeth received early warning, the mobility afforded by the sea would still have allowed the expedition some latitude in choosing where to disembark – a perennial complication for military planners facing an amphibious landing, from the American revolutionaries accounting for the movements of the British to Nazi Germany awaiting the Americans.

Invasion by sea would also have impacted the campaigns’ logistics. The initial requirements for foodstuffs and military supplies would have been greater than on a march, which could have offered a mix of supplies provided by other vassals when available and foraging in their absence. But the fact that the force set off from Essex indicates many of the forces were raised by southern nobles, easing the burden on the expedition’s northern commander, Siward, Earl of Northumbria. A march through his lands, bordering Scotland, would also have risked engendering a hostile populace enroute that might have joined Macbeth’s cause.

As in a later invasion of Scotland during the (2^nd) English Civil War, the sealift could have been retained for resupply over open sea lines of communication (SLOCs) to limit the need of the expedition to disperse and forage after landing. It is unclear in Dunsinane whether the ships were kept at hand. But indications are that the English did not anticipate a long phase of contested nation-building to defend their installed king’s regime, and likely expected to rely on Siward’s neighboring realms as the situation changed. They may also have believed local sea control and predictable SLOCs would be challenged by other powers such Norway, which commanded more allegiance from some Scottish chiefs than the king at Dunsinane. This allegiance in turn was easier to command when, due to Scotland’s extensive coastlines, sea control could be no more than a localized or transitory thing, meaning other foreign powers could provide even overt support to prop up local proxies with little risk of interception.

Whether fleeting or near-absolute, a mastery of the waves confers both advantages and dangers. When it comes unchallenged at the start of a campaign it can breed an overconfidence that the rest of the endeavor will be as easy. Additionally, while command of the seas can be a great enabler in projecting power against an enemy state, it is of more limited use if a war transitions to a counter-insurgency phase where the nexus of success resides with the support of the people. This is not to say it’s of no use – the success of the U.S. counter-insurgency campaigns in the Philippine-American War were possible only through extensive naval activities – but unhindered SLOCs could only set the stage in cases such as Vietnam and Iraq, where what happened ashore was in many ways divorced from what happened at sea. It’s a lesson those eying an enemy (or wayward province) across the waters would do well to remember.

In Dunsinane, sea power is a minor character, and the end of major combat operations it supported does not mark the beginning of peace. That comes with acceptance of defeat by the enemy, which as Clausewitz notes cannot always be imposed through the mere “total occupation of his territory.” And, as the German states learned in the Franco-Prussian War, the destruction of a regime’s forces can create a power vacuum filled by those even more loathe to throw in the towel. In the face of a recalcitrant foe, an occupier that increases its stay tempts provoking the people and swelling the ranks of the enemy.

While Siward and the English may have factored in the risk of rising resentment in their decision to invade by sea, they seem to overlook that of outlasting their welcome. In lines that could have been taken from The Accidental Guerilla, a book by Gen. Petraeus’s senior counter-insurgency advisor, David Kilcullen, Siward’s subordinate Egham says:

They’re not fighting us because of their Queen. They’re fighting us because we’re here. The Scots will fight anyone who’s standing in front of them. They like fighting. In fact – they’re fighting us partly because we’re stopping them from fighting each other.

Successful insurgencies and counter-insurgencies make this fighting personal. The former try to provoke an emotional (over-) response from the latter, while the later try to win the hearts and minds (or at least acquiescence) of the people through a return to a semblance of normalcy. In the forthcoming novel Ghost Fleet, by Peter Singer and August Cole, which also draws inspiration from the recent decades of counter-insurgency, a colonel chides another commander for “taking the losses from the insurgency personally…missing [the] greater responsibilities.” The death of Siward’s son at the beginning of the play makes the campaign immediately personal for him. While he and Egham both try to protect their men from harm by seeking accommodation with their former enemy, once the blood of their comrades is spilled in the insurgency phase Siward quickly goes through the seven stages of grief to punitive violence.

I don’t have as much experience with counter-insurgency as others writing in this series do, so I can’t say with certainty how I would handle the personal nature of it. Twice – in 2009 and in 2015 – I was ordered to spend a year with the war in Afghanistan, but twice those orders were cancelled – after 1 week and 4 hours respectively (I learned after the first time to wait awhile before telling my wife, just to be sure). But I’ve been lucky. Sailors by the thousands have been called from Active Duty assignments and the Reserve to serve in the counter-insurgency campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, and some are still being sent to the latter to this day. This is to say nothing of the contributions of the U.S. Marine Corps. Sea control may not make much difference in the counter-insurgency campaigns of Dunsinane or Afghanistan, but at the individual level the line between sea power and land power, between sailor and soldier, has blurred.

Scott Cheney-Peters is a surface warfare officer in the U.S. Navy Reserve and the former editor of Surface Warfare magazine. He is the founder and president of the Center for International Maritime Security (CIMSEC), a graduate of Georgetown University and the U.S. Naval War College, and a member of the Truman National Security Project’s Defense Council.

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Fostering the Discussion on Securing the Seas.