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The Utility of Force (Gen. Sir Rupert Smith)

Edward Campbell

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I have just finished General (ret’d) Sir Rupert Smith’s* new book: The Utility of Force (Penguin, London, 2006).  It is worth a read.  Those who found themselves challenged by Thomas P Barnett (The Pentagon’s New Map – Putnam, New York, 2004) will get much the same rush from Smith.  He lays out the existing paradigm (and, as he speaks English, he actually knows what the word means and where/how it ought to be used) and explains why it is obsolete.  He then describes War Amongst the People, which he believes is the model within which we, this generation plus, must fight its battles.

Smith lays out a series of trends which define his new paradigm:

• The objectives for which we fight are changing from the hard objectives which define a political outcome to those of establishing conditions in which an outcome may be decided;

• We fight amongst the people, not on a battlefield;

• Our conflict tends to be timeless, even unending;

• We fight so as to preserve the force rather than risking all to gain the objective;

• On each occasion new uses are found for old weapons and organizations which are the products of industrial war

• The sides are mostly non-state, comprising some form of multi-national grouping against some non-state party or parties. (pps. 17 and 169)

Although section, company and brigade commanders will all find something they recognize from operations in the Balkans or Afghanistan in Smith’s writing his target audience, I think, comprises people like Tony Blair, George Bush, Robert Gates, Stephen Harper, Rick Hillier, John Howard, and Gordon O’Connor.

Smith posits that Washington, especially, and Canberra, London and Ottawa, too, as followers, are pursuing a strategy of failure because they do not understand why they are fighting – they do not understand, according to Smith, the utility of the force they apply to this, that or the other problem.  He goes further and, in the final section, he offers some concrete suggestions for the institutional thinkers.  They are not radically new – in fact, in part, he returns to some basic Principles of War which ought to be familiar to Canadian soldiers, beginning with Selection and Maintenance of the Aim.

In part this book is a severe indictment of the Bush/Rumsfeld campaign against Iraq.  Smith suggests that since they didn’t understand their own AIM (they did not, he appears to think, know ‘why’ they wanted to invade Iraq, depose Saddam Hussein, etc) they could not possibly develop a strategy and tactics to achieve anything but failure.  He is equally critical of the US led, sometimes UN approved campaigns in the Balkans, where he was, in 1995, Commander UNPROFOR.

In the main, however, Smith avoids direct criticism and uses his own experiences and his readings in history to illustrate the nature, uses and then enduring utility of force.  It is not force which is obsolete – sorry Taliban Jack and the Canadian Peace Alliance, but your heads are still firmly up your rears, according to Gen. Smith – what has changed is the paradigm within which we still need to apply force to accomplish our national/alliance aims.  The industrial war model, for which we (Canadians included) prepared and within which we fought for nearly a century is, Smith posits, as dead as a Dodo.  The new model, existent since 1945 he suggests, is War Amongst the People.  We, soldiers mostly, have been very successful at adapting out industrial war equipment and organizations to fight battles in this new paradigm but Smith argues that we must change our political/strategic thinking if we want to win the wars.

  Here is a comment from The Sunday Times of about a year ago (September 2005), reproduced under the Fair Dealings provisions of the Copyright Act:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2092-1785151,00.html
Interview: Jasper Gerard meets General Rupert Smith
You’re fighting the wrong war, Tony

This is a man who feels at home with violence. As a young paratrooper, he hugged his commanding officer who was engulfed in a tower of flame until the fire was extinguished. As one of the finest generals of his generation, he used industrial strength force against Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic. And with his bomber jacket and masculine good looks — Jeremy Irons with a shot of testosterone — General Sir Rupert Smith could be a Hollywood action hero rather than an old British war dog.

This human fighting machine, plastered with more decorations for gallantry than Tony Blair has been with rotten eggs, is about to spring his own offensive in the literary world. “War,” he declares “no longer exists.” Violence exists; indeed, it flourishes. But war will not be waged and won between states. Instead we will fight “among the people”. The enemy will be tottering regimes and terrorism. To defeat them, we might even “franchise” the fighting to local warlords.

The problem, Smith suggests, is that governments and their armed forces haven’t really noticed the shift yet. So they maintain vast monolithic military structures as absurd and anachronistic in their way as the Maginot line.

The problem, Smith suggests, is that governments and their armed forces haven’t really noticed the shift yet. So they maintain vast monolithic military structures as absurd and anachronistic in their way as the Maginot line.

Our leaders no longer employ violence efficiently, says Smith, so every conflict continues in confusion without conclusion. He warns that because of the disastrous lack of planning, Iraq will not end in anything that can be trumpeted as “victory”, prompting soldiers to quit Britain’s armed forces more swiftly than Australia’s finest departed the crease this summer. Until ministers swap their Armani suits for flak jackets and join the troops on the front line, Smith suggests, their political objectives will never be properly formulated, let alone achieved.

Having retired in 2002 he sets out his controversial theory in a book, The Utility of Force: The Art of War in the Modern World, that is sure to let off a few explosions of its own. He rather enjoys the flak, but in these dangerous days he must plan raids carefully. We meet at his house in a foreign capital that he asks us not to reveal.

“I have finally got rid of the men in black with earpieces and I don’t want them back,” he says, peering intensely with boyish blue eyes. He clearly relishes the freedom that goes with exchanging an army commission for a book commission. He was never a soldier who instantly clicked his heels to authority: he was too clever. His school report read: “A fair amount of discipline still required.” Even as a general he could be subversive. When ordered to write a CV, he made it read like his career had been a fiasco.

Rebelling against years of convention, his life now seems rather bohemian. After a long marriage that produced two children, he lives with Ilana, a raven-haired Israeli-born intellectual whom he met while blasting Slobo out of Bosnia, where he commanded United Nations forces.

The couple have a five-year-old son and there is still a little of the Famous Five in Smith, 61, as he darts between trams in his tiny car, but this is a cerebral soldier. General Sir Mike Jackson’s catchphrase is “Let’s crack on”; Smith is more likely to say, “Let’s crack heads together”. While soldiers revel in their latest gizmos, Smith says the most effective weapon of recent years has not been the smart bomb but the dumb old machete. Take Rwanda, where it killed tens of thousands. How else, pray, should you measure a weapon’s success?

Smith’s manner may be gentle but he really does have a masterful understanding of violence. It is probably in the blood: his father, a New Zealander, was a battle of Britain pilot who blew up the Gestapo HQ at Amiens. His great-uncle was one of the few survivors of Captain Scott’s ill-fated expedition to Antarctica.

“From Robert Capa’s photographs to television news, we have equated technology with the use of force,” he says. “Planes and tanks are iconic images. But force can be achieved by throwing rocks.”

Soldiers feel obliged to use all their toys, but does this advance their objectives? In Iraq, says Smith, they patrol in tanks, trying to establish normality but actually signalling to locals that the situation is anything but normal — and that the people are their enemies. If you treat folk like enemies, they become enemies.

“We don’t understand how to use the weapons we have,” sighs the ex-para, who won plaudits from American generals as commander of the 1st Armoured Division chasing Saddam’s forces back towards Baghdad in the first Gulf war.

Despite billions spent on defence, we are almost back where we started: defenceless. When a terrorist can detonate a bomb with a mobile phone, our battalions are useless: “Terrorists don’t have their own transport system. They use yours and adapt some of it into a weapon to attack you.”

Smith offers a striking word for the spread of terrorism: “rhizomatic”. It propagates like a weed, by the root below ground, swiftly and unseen. You can chop heads off, but it carries on spreading down below. So is the hunt for Osama Bin Laden a distraction? “Well, Al-Qaeda isn’t hierarchical. The idea (of militant Islam) is already franchised.”

How do you destroy Al-Qaeda? “The Romans sowed salt into the soil of their enemies’ land to stop the grass growing, making it impossible to live there.”

Where have we gone wrong in the war on terror? “The use of force must be more closely aligned to the political objective,” Smith says sternly. “There have been operations in northwestern Iraq in the past week where it is claimed a number of terrorists were killed. Were they really terrorists? Who was actually driven out, other than rightful occupants? What political acts are taking place now to take advantage of whatever has been gained? I suspect very little. And I suspect when (coalition forces) go away, there will be a brief silence until it all goes off again.”

Do such offensives advance the cause? “My suspicion is no.” Is the situation in Iraq impossible? “Not impossible, but it might be beyond our resources. The longer the mistrust continues, the harder it is.” To establish a democracy we approve of, we need order. But by sweeping away civic society, the only home-grown authority left is that of the militant mullahs. “So who is providing order? I don’t think we ever asked that question.”

How does this failure hit troop morale? “Morale for me is about overcoming adversity; it is not about a sense of happiness,” he says, just to get that straight. “But soldiers might not sign on for the pleasure of returning. It might well have an effect on whether they want to stay in the army.” Because of a lack of direction? “Exactly. It is unrewarding. Where can be the sense of progress?  People like to be on the winning side,” he laughs. “Sure, you might win particular battles but does this contribute to the whole?”

Has war in Iraq helped to spread our values? “It is probably too early to say but the indications are that it is not helping.” Why? “It is likely that we are spreading the cancer (of terrorism), combined with a demonstration of our own ineffectiveness. Plus, in Britain, a lack of popular support. These,” he says dryly, “are all negatives.”

Smith resists blaming Blair personally, instead highlighting “institutional thinking” that does not “recognise the nature of these conflicts”. But, as he suggests, our armed forces are infinitely adaptable — “show me another little army in the world that can fight Northern Ireland, Iraq twice and Bosnia all in 15 years” — and he clearly thinks it is a failure of government to bring about change.

Unusually for a soldier, he blames the stalemate of recent operations, such as in Afghanistan, on too little, rather than too much, political interference. “The outcome we want is political. No political involvement is worse than too much and I have been in both situations. Generalship is about riding the line between military and political objectives. You cannot possibly discharge your duty to your political masters if you don’t understand what they are about.”

Take the attack on Goose Green in the Falklands war. “Julian Thompson, brigade commander, did not want to attack. But he kept being told to do so and he couldn’t understand why. What he didn’t know was that there was about to be a very important meeting of the United Nations where Britain was seeking a licence to fight and we wanted to show we were going to fight anyway.”

He suggests that we should learn from empire, so when we go into places like Iraq we appoint a modern-day governor-general who directs military and political operations. But are politicos competent? “John Major had never been near the military but didn’t miss a beat. My problem with politicians is that they don’t reach down far enough.”

His big point on Iraq is that while Britain may have been consulted on matters military, British — and perhaps even American — politicians seem to have had little influence on the overall political strategy. The reason? There wasn’t a political strategy: “Administering an occupied country was seen as part of the military operation, which denies the political purpose of your force.”

If Britain joins America as international policeman, how can we influence a country that powerful? “Is it so powerful?” But America is the world’s only superpower. “Can you show me in every case that America is powerful or is that just your assumption? It is not very powerful in Iraq. As Foucault says, ‘Power is not a possession, it is a relationship’.”

Blimey, quoting French philosophers is hardly standard banter in the officers’ mess. If it were, perhaps we wouldn’t be in such a, well, mess: we may have all the military hardware, but if it fails to force others to bend to our will we are actually no mightier than Mali.

Unfashionably, Smith believes that the European Union has the potential to become more effective than Nato “because it has levers on other forms of power. Nato just does force. You might not approve of Europe but I find it hard to see why it can’t use force if it wants. Europe has been disturbing the world for centuries. There is nothing in the gene bank that says it can’t do these things”.

If this were not enough for the top brass to chew on, Smith says the hardware will grow increasingly unaffordable so they will have to adapt commercial equipment to military ends: “There are no longer budgets for arms manufacturers to keep production lines rolling. They will build a certain number of fighter aircraft to meet specific orders. There is no longer an industrial military machine and, even if there were, it would be a target of weapons of mass destruction.

“So the military will have to buy equipment from the commercial sector. Already electronic technology in the private sector is more advanced than anything in the military world.” Our equipment can be civilian because our enemy will also be civilian. In the battles ahead we will seek to gain information, not territory.

How will the war on terror be won? “I don’t know,” admits Smith, “but we have to do better than we are.” At least he is teaching us to ask the right questions. His is a lesson in violence that Blair and George W Bush need to learn pretty quickly, before the inferno engulfs us all.

I would like to add to two points, repeating myself, I know:

• While I do not suggest that we need to repeat Scipio’s treatment of Carthage I think the way to deal with al Qaeda is to return its attention inward, to Arab societies and states.  To this end I think an Iraqi disintegration and civil war will serve our larger purposes.  Al Qareda, busy in Iraq and Saudi Arabia and other Arab states, will lose interest** in the Great Satan and its friends in the West; and

• The proposal to bring democracy to Iraq and, consequently, make Iraq a democratic beacon for the rest of the region was, always, from the get go, pie in the sky and poorly conceived pie in the sky, to boot.  Experience shows that Arabs, like most people, want to have a say in deciding how they will be governed.  Given that choice they will opt for an fairly strict Islamist regime – that happened in fairly Westernized states like Algeria, Egypt and Iran; it will happen in Iraq, too.  Democracy, as we know it, has taken root and prospered only in societies which already have strong legal and regulatory institutions – such as Germany and Japan had before World War II.  Russia, for example, has never had such institutions and it struggles, to be kind, with attempting to implement some sort of democracy – my guess is it will fail.   

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* General Sir Rupert Smith retired from the British Army in 2002. His last appointment was Deputy Supreme Commander Allied Powers Europe 1998-2001, covering NATO's Balkan operations, including the Kosovo bombing, and the development of the European Defence and Security Identity. Prior to that he was the general Officer Commanding in Northern Irelnd, 1996-1998; Commander UNPROFOR in Sarajevo, 1995; the Assistant Chief of Defence Staff for Operations, 1992-1994; and General Officer Commanding 1 (UK) Armoured Division, 1990-1992, including the Gulf War.

Born in 1943, Rupert Smith was educated at Haileybury, ISC, and the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. He enlisted in 1962 and was commissioned into the Parachute Regiment in 1964. He has served in East and South Africa, Arabia, the Caribbean, Europe and Malaysia.

He holds an honorary doctorate from Surrey University and is a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. His interests include history and sailing.

** Added note: Al Qaeda et al will not lose interest as much as they will have much more compelling interests in reforming Muslim societies which, in the main, they regard as apostate, degenerate, etc, etc.  This will take priority over 'us' (the Great and lesser Satans in the West); they'll still hate us and pray for our downfall, pit of fire, etc but they will be preoccupied with the purification of the umma.

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Edit: added note
 
The utility of force concept goes both ways - if a non-industrial warfare proponent wants to do something they`d best think it through also.

A recent book review I did for your background - read Sageman - save your $ on Gerges - see link  http://www.donlowconcrete.com/CDAC/Utlity.htm
 
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