Metaheuristics of War

(by Adam Elkus)

I have been thinking about the problem of the “principles of war,” and various military authors’ differing takes on the viability of the concept. This is perhaps the best way to respond to the thought-provoking post Lynn Rees fashioned out of fragments of our gchat conversations.

Principles of war remain part of military manuals the world over, despite the fact that historical work has exposed substantial variance in their content. Principles of war evolve in time. John Alger’s work in particular is very interesting on this question. The basic pattern was, as one reviewer of Alger’s book argued, a canonization of Napoleonic principles followed by a grafting of midcentury combined arms warfare onto those already canonized Napoleonic principles. However, this element of relative consensus proved to be short-lived.

There has been widespread debate over whether “principles of war” are still valid for the so-called information age or irregular warfare. Military theorist William F. Owen‘s praise for Robert Leonhard’s late 1990s information-age update of the principles caused me to read it in college, and I found it very enlightening if overly optimistic about Transformation-era technologies. The principles of war are also being perpetually re-defined in countless books, articles, military college student monographs, and PowerPoint slides.

The way principles of war became proxies for principles of Napoleonic warfare leads us to question if there can be principles of war that generalize.  If we take Clausewitz’s injunction about politics seriously, then we realize while war may have a underlying logic everything else will vary. Hence the problem with Basil Liddell-Hart’s book On Strategy — it tortures every historical example so thoroughly until it yields to supporting the indirect approach. A recent criticism of John Boyd recently elucidated this point as well. Boyd indulges in the conceptual equivalent of German attrition strategy at Verdun to force military history to conform to his PowerPoint magnum opus. Not surprisingly, Boyd inflicts grave losses on his opponent but is unable to extract too much strategic advantage relative to his own costs.

To seek time-invariant principles of war  risks indulging in a John Yoo approach to military history . Indeed, books like Liddell-Hart’s own Great Captains Unveiled waterboard great military personages like Subotai and De Saxe until they cry “I’ll talk! I’ll talk! I won because I used the indirect approach! Just make the pain stop!”  Torture is immoral and ineffectual in public policy, so why apply it to military history?

So what to do? One solution is try to boil principles of war down to pithy nubs stripped of unnecessary detail that express timeless truths about the “best practices” of warfighting — and build a doctrinal scaffolding around them. It would prune even highly abstract principles of war seen in doctrine down to more defensible levels of abstraction. But this idea suffers from several problems.

First, we dramatically overstate our current ability to tell what is “timeless.” That is the core of Rees’ recent entry – we are far more confused than we believe. And if the current, aphoristic principles of war were enough, would we see such a frenzy to re-define the terminology? It strikes me that what defense professionals often seek is a way to take principles down from the 747 jet flight level to the granular world of practice. As a result, they often turn to vulgar novelty over tradition when they are really searching for a process that might help them navigate the mismatch between supposed timeless principles and the actual problems they face.

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