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ABSTRACT
At the origin of every war is an existential conflict and a recourse to violence that opens the “ontic” door of the enemy to transform him. Judgement corresponds to political logic, and violent existential transformation to the logic of war, which is engendered in that political matrix throughout the duration of hostilities. The objective nature of that logic structures the rationale of the theatre in terms of “performative” praxis, with two inseparable aspects: a violence that while destroying one order imposes an alternative one. The subjective nature of that logic is generated in its political matrix throughout the duration of the conflict, determining, in a dynamic way, its most basic formalization. Since war is engendered in politics, it adopts its character, a subjective nature that leads it to seek a peace treaty or a victory. In short, when the war begins, the political totality of each one of the belligerents starts to incorporate a new situation and, therefore, two logics coexist: one engendered in the other, and both conditioning each other. The symbiotic relationship between these two rationalities does not allow politics to dominate it according to the parameters of an instrumental reason.
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Notes
1. “The paradigms of war are of great importance because they are the structures, conceptual and factual, through which force is applied, whilst military forces are the means with which force is applied” (Smith Citation2006, 28).
2. I believe “the political” is a dimension of antagonism that “politics” resolves with its own logic, and “war” with a very different one. The first tries to maintain and evolve an existing order in conditions which are always potentially conflicting, and the second tries to violently change the order of the parties involved, when the conflict is extreme and cannot be mediated or resolved.
3. This “object” which takes the form of “imposing our will” constitutes the political purpose or aim to be achieved by the war.
4. “I have already said that the aim of warfare is to disarm the enemy” (Clausewitz Citation1984, 77).
5. For the Prussian thinker, the struggle in itself, unaware of the conditioning factors derived from its space-time materialization and the political environment in which it is generated, is only subject to that unequivocal purpose of “rendering the enemy powerless” which, according to three extreme situations inherent to the interaction of war, necessarily leads to unlimited escalation. The first as a result of the principle of action and reaction, the second derived from the need to push the enemy into a situation even worse than the sacrifice required of him, and the third resulting from the interaction between the effort to be made and the enemy’s capacity to resist (Clausewitz Citation1984, 75–77).
He then takes advantage of this supposed tendency toward the extreme to declare the ideal character of that essence, which could only occur if war consisted of a single isolated and brief act that reached a definitive result. On the contrary, since real war is made up of several successive acts that are moderated both by their internal deficiency and by their mutual relationship, and whose result is far from being irrefutable, then these real conditions allow the art of war to break free of the theoretical requirement that extreme forces must be applied. Once the extreme is no longer feared or sought after, the degree of effort that must be deployed becomes a matter of judgment, in which the political purpose comes into play as the ultimate foundation of the limited course of war (Clausewitz Citation1984, 78–81).
6. “The often quoted sentence of quantity transforming into quality has a thoroughly political meaning. It is an expression of the recognition that from every domain the point of the political is reached and with it a qualitative new intensity of human groupings” (Schmitt Citation1996, 62).
7. “We speak of ‘violence’ and not simply of ‘force’ precisely because violence is the force that opposes something” (D’Ors Citation1987, 74).
8. PETRAEUS, David. COMISAF’s Counterinsurgency Guidance, Kabul: ISAF Headquarters, 2010.
9. Remember that for Clausewitz, war is made up of countless duels. The character of reciprocal action of this confrontation of forces gives physical violence in war an intrinsically unrestricted character: “since each of the contenders seeks to impose its will on the other, since neither of them can do less than the other, they will both logically be pushed to act to the maximum” (Aron Citation1986, 63).
10. “The strategic outcome takes shape only when the fragmented results have combined into a single independent whole” (Clausewitz Citation1984, 206).
11. For the last Clausewitz, war is only a grammar, a grammar that, in extreme situations, is introduced into the flow of the political transit to which logic belongs. Thus, there is only political logic; war is only one of its grammars: “[…] war is only a branch of political activity; that it is in no sense autonomous. […] Is war not just another expression of their thoughts, another form of speech or writing? Its grammar, indeed, may be its own, but not its logic” (Clausewitz Citation1984, 605).
12. “The purpose of command is to maintain social cohesion, harmony and peace within the community, and to protect its members against any threat from outside. It cannot accomplish this task except with its power […] as soon as the power ceases to ensure protection, obedience also ceases” (Freund: 183–184)
13. “During his last years […] Clausewitz reflects on what I shall call the problem posed by Montesquieu: how to reconcile the concept – the definition – of war in terms of its own permanent nature with the diversity of wars. Is this a problem of praxis as well as of theory? The two types of war represent extreme ends: to impose peace or negotiate it” (Aron Citation1986, 60).
14. “[…] in the “Notice’ of 1827 he asserts that there are two radically different kinds of war: one (Absolute War) in which the aim is the complete ‘disablement’ of the enemy, so that we can impose upon him whatever terms we choose, the other in which the aim is to gain certain advantages (particularly territorial) over the enemy which can later be used as bargaining counters at the peace table. Clausewitz remarks that ‘transitions’ from one kind of war to the other will always occur, but that, nevertheless, the dominant tendencies of war for such different ends will always be apparent. This would suggest that there are two ways or styles of fighting wars, corresponding to the two aims, yet admitting of a transition or slide from one to the other in the course of any actual war. But, as already noticed, Clausewitz did not develop this line of thought in his final revision of Book 1 chapter 1” (Gallie Citation1978, 57).
15. Normally a supranational or more or less formal political space that includes them and is binding for all the contenders.
16. “So that the passions inherent in any armed struggle do not escalate it to extremes disproportionate to the object being disputed, the phenomenon of war undergoes a profound process of ritualization aimed at creating a codification in the modes of confrontation that ensures symmetry between adversaries and that circumscribes the violence of their actions to well-defined limits” (Valdés Citation2011, 106).
17. This is the case with the Napoleonic invasion of Spain in 1808, which from a conventional confrontation to impose a new ruling House led to an all-out war for national survival. The same could be said of most of the conventional warfare of the 20th century, which spurred on by the growing magnitude of the clashes, the political ambitions of the belligerents and the passions unleashed by ideologies, ended up leading to unconditional surrender and the most extreme exercise of violence.
18. “The very emergence of justice and law, the founding and justifying moment that institutes law implies a performative force, which is always an interpretative force […] Its very moment of foundation or institution (which in any case is never a moment inscribed in the homogeneous tissue of a history, since it is ripped apart with one decision), the operation that amounts to founding, inaugurating, justifying law (droit), making law, would consist of a coup de force, of a performative and therefore interpretative violence that in itself is neither just nor unjust and that no justice and no previous law with its founding anterior moment could guarantee or contradict or invalidate” (Derrida et al. Citation1992, 13).
19. In this context, it is interesting to analyse “the operational interpretation of the desired end state” between the first and second versions of COPD (NATO Comprehensive Operational Planning Directive): “to understand strategic and operational conditions required to establish an acceptable self-regulating solution” (V.1, Citation2010, 4–24) and “to understand strategic and operational conditions required to secure NATO’s security interests” (V.2, Citation2013, 4–22). Moving away from what I postulate here, it seems that the balance leans outwards of the theatre.
20. A paradigmatic example is the last Allied intervention in Libya´s civil war in 2011, which left behind a chaos that may have been profitable for some, but which in no way can be equated with a victory that cancels the conflict.
21. “The Roman élite is considered to have been involved in a series of connected political actions that enabled members of various native societies to define their identities in new and original ways. […] The empire is recovered and reconstructed, from the literature and the archaeological remains that it has left behind, as an imperial power with a flexible strategy of incorporation that defined relationships with its subjects in order to encourage their peaceful development along indigenous lines” (Hingley Citation2005, 119).
22. “Imperium was the supreme military power in the state and empowered a magistrate with absolute regal authority, including the power of life and death, over citizen-soldiers, allies, and enemies assigned to him by the state. The tremendous power of imperium was, however, carefully limited by the sacred boundary of the pomerium, into which imperium (except in exceptional circumstances) did not extend. Imperium remained outside the city with all other things military, while within Rome magistrates functioned by right of their potestas to undertake their assigned duties. […] Only in the gravest of situations did the senate authorize the emergency use of imperium and martial law within the boundary of the pomerium, but these occasions were considerable exceptions to the norm” (Drogula Citation2007: 451).
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Pedro Valdés Guía
Pedro Valdés Guía is an Infantry Lieutenant Colonel, with a diploma in General Staff and a doctorate from the University of Navarra. He was born in Madrid in 1970, is married and has two children. Between 1989 and 1994 he studied at the General Military Academy (Zaragoza, Spain). Promoted to infantry lieutenant, he occupies various posts in armored units and publishes different studies on the training of these units. After graduating in 2007 as a general staff officer, he combines operational planning in various headquarters, or the command of an armored battalion, with a long reflection on the conduct of the war, culminating in a doctoral thesis defended in March 2020. Throughout his military career, he has taken part in various missions with NATO or the UN in Bosnia, Lebanon, Afghanistan, and Rumania. He is currently assigned as a professor at the Spanish Joint Staff College (ESFAS).