The Tyranny of Doctrine and Modern Strategy: Small (and Large) States in a Double Bind

ABSTRACT

The formation of doctrine and strategy is usually regarded as the exclusive province of the major powers. Small states and their militaries have little choice but to conform. This article, however, argues that small, developed states possess an unprecedented opportunity independently to form doctrine and pursue strategy. The reasons are a worldwide trend of devolution in political power and a concomitant democratisation of violence and reduction in the scale of military means and conflict. However, seizing this opportunity is powerfully constrained by the tyranny of outmoded ideas of how war and strategy work.

KEYWORDS:

• War and Politics
• Strategy
• Military Doctrine
• New Wars
• Small States

Acknowledgements

The author gratefully acknowledges the support for his research from the Swedish Armed Forces Forskning och Teknik (FoT) research programme. The views expressed in this article, however, are the sole responsibility of the author.

Notes

¹ James Sheehan, Where Have All the Soldiers Gone? The Transformation of Modern Europe (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2008).

² Antulio J. Echevarria II, After Clausewitz: German Military Thinkers before the Great War (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2000).

³ To cite the subtitle of an early trendsetter in the genre: John Mueller, The Retreat from Doomsday: The Obsolescence of Major War (New York: Basic Books, 1989).

⁴ Sheehan, Where Have All the Soldiers Gone?, xvii, xx.

⁵ Bruce Russett and John Oneal, Triangulating Peace: Democracy, Interdependence, and International Organizations (New York: Norton, 2001). For a critical discussion, see Heinz Gärtner, Jan Willem Honig and Hakan Akbulut (eds), Democracy, Peace and Security (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015).

⁶ Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: A History of Violence and Humanity (London: Penguin, 2012), 219–20, 839–40. See also Joshua S. Goldstein, Winning the War on War: The Decline of Armed Conflict Worldwide (New York: Plume, 2012).

⁷ For example: Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (London: Simon & Schuster, 1997); John J. Mearsheimer, ‘Back to the Future: Instability in Europe after the Cold War’, International Security 15/1 (1990), 5–56; David Rapkin and William R. Thompson, Transition Scenarios: China and the United States in the Twenty-First Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).

⁸ Martin van Creveld, The Rise and Decline of the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

⁹ See the Swedish volunteer who kept the world appraised of his exploits in Ukraine on Twitter: <https://twitter.com/MikaelSkillt>.

¹⁰ This theory underpins classic accounts of Western state formation and constitutional development: e.g., Brian M. Downing, The Military Revolution and Political Change: Origins of Democracy and Autocracy in Early Modern Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992).

¹¹ E.H. Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919–1939: An Introduction to the Study of International Relations, 2nd edn (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), p. vii. See also Francis Fukuyama, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution (London: Profile Books, 2011).

¹² Hence the popularity of the idea of the ‘risk society’. See Mikkel Vedby Rasmussen, The Risk Society at War: Terror, Technology and Strategy in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

¹³ See the section on ‘Strategy from Below’ in Lawrence Freedman, Strategy: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

¹⁴ Jan Angstrom and Jan Willem Honig, ‘Regaining Strategy: Small Powers, Strategic Culture, and Escalation in Afghanistan’, Journal of Strategic Studies 35/5 (2012), 663–87.

¹⁵ For a positive view, see Theo Farrell, Frans Osinga and James A. Russell, Military Adaptation in Afghanistan (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013); and, more sceptically, Jan Willem Honig and Ilmari Käihkö, ‘The Likely Lads: The Joint Swedish–Finnish Provincial Reconstruction Team in Mazar-e Sharif’, in Bernhard Chiari (ed.), From Venus to Mars: Provincial Reconstruction Teams and the European Military Experience in Afghanistan, 2001–2014 (Freiburg: Rombach, 2014), 209–20.

¹⁶ See the contribution by Harald Høiback earlier in this issue.

¹⁷ General Staff, War Office, Field Service Regulations, Pt I: Operations (London: HMSO, 1909); idem, Field Service Regulations, Pt II: Operations (London: HMSO, 1924).

¹⁸ Vegetius, Epitome of Military Science, trans. N.P. Milner (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1993), 3, 9, 80 (I have slightly amended Milner’s translation). For the Latin text, see Vegetius, Epitoma rei militaris, ed. M.D. Reeve (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004), 84.

¹⁹ For an attempt to explain the moral-strategic utility of medieval battle, see Jan Willem Honig, ‘Reappraising Late Medieval Strategy: The Example of the 1415 Agincourt Campaign’, War in History 19/2 (2012), 123–51.

²⁰ Machiavelli, The Prince: A Bilingual Edition, trans. Mark Musa (New York: St Martin’s, 1964).

²¹ Honig, ‘Reappraising Late Medieval Strategy’.

²² Cf. the important contribution (even though he draws the intellectual traditions differently) by Azar Gat, The Origins of Military Thought from the Enlightenment to Clausewitz (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989).

²³ Carl von Clausewitz, On War, trans. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976), 70 (note of 10 July 1827).

²⁴ Compare the textbooks produced by the successive captains who taught the art of war at St Cyr from the 1820s to 1860s: J. Rocquancourt, Cours complet d’art et d’histoire militaires, Ouvrage dogmatique, littéraire et philosophique à l’usage des élèves de l’École royale spéciale militaire, 4 vols (Paris: Anselin, 1837–41); Éd. de La Barre Duparcq, Éléments d’art et d’histoire militaires, comprenant le précis des institutions militaires de la France, l’histoire et la tactique des armes isolées, la combinaison des armes et les petites opérations de la guerre (Paris: Ch. Tanera, 1858); J. Vial, Cours d’art et d’histoire militaires, 2 vols (Paris: Dumaine, 1861). The first ran to over 2400 pages, the second to only 450 and the third, for a course that ran over two years, to just under 800 plus a 70-page appendix on the general staff.

²⁵ The formal adoption of the term ‘doctrine’ in European armies seems to be of recent vintage and mostly a result of US influence. Perhaps its current popularity can be read as an indication of a growing sense that what were once believed to be indubitable verities now seem to be more akin to articles of faith whose incantation may ward off the uncertainties created by strange contemporary wars.

²⁶ John Stone, Military Strategy: The Politics and Technique of War (London: Continuum, 2011).

²⁷ Colin Gray, Another Bloody Century: Future Warfare (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2005), 370; Thomas G. Mahnken, ‘Strategic Theory’, in John Baylis et al. (eds), Strategy in the Contemporary World: An Introduction to Strategic Studies, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 67.

²⁸ Quoted in Jan Willem Honig, ‘Clausewitz and the Politics of Early Modern Warfare’, in Andreas Herberg-Rothe, Jan Willem Honig and Daniel Moran (eds), Clausewitz: The State and War (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2011), 45.

²⁹ For example: Hew Strachan and Sybille Scheipers (eds), The Changing Character of War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). This volume is a product of a multi-year Leverhulme-funded interdisciplinary research project carrying the same name at the University of Oxford.

³⁰ Fred Kaplan, The Insurgents: David Petraeus and the Plot to Change the American Way of War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013), 161–64.

³¹ The US Army and Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual, US Army Field Manual No. 3–24, Marine Corps Warfighting Publication No. 3–33.5 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 294.

³² Except perhaps for the Americans, this appears to hold for all International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) contributions to Afghanistan. See the chapters on various countries in Bernhard Chiari (ed.), From Venus to Mars: Provincial Reconstruction Teams and the European Military Experience in Afghanistan, 2001–2014 (Freiburg: Rombach, 2014). For the Nordics, see Karsten Friis and Sanaa Rehman (eds), ‘Nordic Approaches to Whole-of-Government in Afghanistan and Beyond’, Norwegian Institute of International Affairs, NUPI Report, Security in Practice, No. 6, 2010; Jan Willem Honig and Ilmari Käihkö, An Exemplary Defeat: The Swedish–Finnish Provincial Reconstruction Team Experience in Afghanistan (forthcoming).

³³ For a discussion, see Jan Willem Honig and Ilmari Käihkö, ‘Challenges of Command: The Rise of the “Strategic Colonel”’, in Harald Haas, Franz Kernic and Andrea Plaschke (eds), Leadership in Challenging Situations (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2012), 89–108.

³⁴ Emile Simpson, War from the Ground up: Twenty-First Century Combat as Politics (London: Hurst, 2012).

³⁵ As favoured by Hew Strachan, The Direction of War: Contemporary Strategy in Historical Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

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Notes on contributors

Jan Willem Honig

Jan Willem Honig is a senior lecturer in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London. Between 2007 and 2011, he was the first holder of the Chair in Military Strategy at the Swedish National Defence College. He has held visiting research fellowships in the Department of Peace and Conflict Research at Uppsala University, the Center of International Studies at Princeton University and the Remarque Institute at New York University. He taught for many years at the Royal College for Defence Studies in London. His recent publications include an edition of Sun Tzu, published by Barnes & Noble in New York, a volume edited with Andreas Herberg-Rothe and Daniel Moran on Clausewitz, the State, and War, and another one edited with Heinz Gärtner and Hakan Akbulut on Democracy, Peace and Security. He is currently completing two major research projects, funded respectively by the Swedish Research Council and the Swedish Armed Forces, on the phenomenon of organised armed groups (OAGs) and on the Swedish and Finnish military experience in Afghanistan.