zenpundit.com

(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.

Traditionalists (often correctly) believe this desire for novelty stems from fads, pressure to conform to political or bureaucratic directives, and personal empire-building. But in the last 12 years there has been a sincere outpouring of angst from soldiers, intelligence analysts, and civilian policy analysts in the government sector who find that principle of war aphorisms are not enough. One might not agree with Emile Simpson’s contentious take on war and politics, but he wrote the book because so-called timeless truths obviously did not help Simpson do his military job in Afghanistan. And I have often seen Mark Safranski argue here over the years that the concept of Fourth Generation Warfare was necessary as a forcing mechanism to get the US military to adapt to challenges it faced in Iraq and Afghanistan.

It is tempting to respond to this by saying “they need to read ___ old strategy master  I like and study military history in the subjective way I like until they can understand strategy.” But this is a recipe for indoctrination since “understanding” = agreeing with old strategy master + the aforementioned fuzzy and didactic approach to extracting timeless or eternal ideas from military history. Instead, we might introduce metaheuristics of war as a complementary concept to the principles of war:

Metaheuristics is a rather unfortunate term often used to describe a major subfield, indeed the primary subfield, of stochastic optimization. Stochastic optimization is the general class of algorithms and techniques which employ some degree of randomness to find optimal (or as optimal as possible) solutions to hard problems. Metaheuristics are the most general of these kinds of algorithms, and are applied to a very wide range of problems.

What kinds of problems? In Jacobellis v. Ohio (1964, regarding obscenity), the United States Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously wrote,

I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.

Metaheuristics are applied to I know it when I see it problems. They’re algorithms used to find answers to problems when you have very little to help you: you don’t know what the optimal solution looks like, you don’t know how to go about finding it in a principled way, you have very little heuristic information to go on, and brute-force search is out of the question because the space is too large. But if you’re given a candidate solution to your problem, you can test it and assess how good it is. That is, you know a good one when you see it.

– Sean Luke, Essentials of Metaheuristics, (self-published lecture notes), 2013, 7.

Metaheuristics are not heuristics of heuristics, as Luke notes in a parenthetical comment. Rather, they are algorithms that select useful solutions for problems under the difficult conditions Luke specifies in the above quote. Let’s see an example:

For example: imagine if you’re trying to find an optimal set of robot behaviors for a soccer goalie robot. You have a simulator for the robot and can test any given robot behavior set and assign it a quality (you know a good one when you see it). And you’ve come up with a definition for what robot behavior sets look like in general. But you have no idea what the optimal behavior set is, nor even how to go about finding it.

The simplest thing you could do in this situation is Random Search: just try random behavior sets as long as you have time, and return the best one you discovered. But before you give up and start doing random search, consider the following alternative, known as Hill-Climbing. Start with a random behavior set. Then make a small, random modification to it and try the new version. If the new version is better, throw the old one away. Else throw the new version away. Now make another small, random modification to your current version (which ever one you didn’t throw away). If this newest version is better, throw away your current version, else throw away the newest version. Repeat as long as you can.

Hill-climbing is a simple metaheuristic algorithm. It exploits a heuristic belief about your space of candidate solutions which is usually true for many problems: that similar solutions tend to behave similarly (and tend to have similar quality), so small modifications will generally result in small, well-behaved changes in quality, allowing us to “climb the hill” of quality up to good solutions. This heuristic belief is one of the central defining features of metaheuristics: indeed, nearly all metaheuristics are essentially elaborate combinations of hill-climbing and random search.

One must use caution. When Clausewitz uses a metaphor, he does so because it helps us understand some dimension of the problem being discussed — not because a Center of Gravity in war maps exactly onto the meaning of the Center of Gravity in physics. Boyd does not make this distinction, and thus is vulnerable to criticisms from those that accurately point out that his interpretation of scientific concepts do not match their original usage. The level of abstraction I am discussing with in this post must be qualified in this respect, as I hope to avoid repeating Boyd’s mistake.

However, the following aspects of metaheuristics are still appealing in abstract. In many real-world problems, we do not know what an optimal solution looks like. We don’t know how to find it. We have a nub of information we can use, but not much more. Most importantly, the space of possible solutions is too large for us to just use brute force search for an answer:

A brute-force approach for the eight queens puzzle would examine all possible arrangements of 8 pieces on the 64-square chessboard, and, for each arrangement, check whether each (queen) piece can attack any other.

While hill-climbing and random-search are inherent in most metaheuristics, there are different types of metaheuristic algorithms for different problems with varying performance in climbing the “hill of quality.” Hence it is customizable and recognizes variation in performance of methods. Some methods will perform well on some problems, but will get stuck at a local optima instead of a peak when faced with others.

One gigantic caveat: the idea of peaks and valleys in the solution space is derived from the assumption of a static, not dynamically evolving, landscape of candidate solutions. A perfect example is the application of the Ant Colony Optimization method to the notoriously hard Traveling Salesman Problem or the use of genetic algorithms to optimize the Starcraft tech tree’s build orders. When the solution space you are searching and climbing evolves in time, algorithms that assume a static landscape run into problems.

However, this is also why (in more mathematically dense language) nailing down principles of war is so perilous.  A solution that you might have used a principle of war to get to is  fine at time T. But it loses validity as we shift to T+1 and tick upwards towards T+k. And should you use a principle that better fits war’s grammar in 1830 than 2013, then you are even more screwed.

The advantage of metaheuristics of war compared to principles of war is that, while both consider solutions to problems with discrete (not continuously shifting) solution landscapes, metaheuristics are about how you find solutions. Hill-climbing is (oversimplified) method of moving through solutions that exploits heuristic information, and random search is  (also oversimplified) “try and see what happens.” The process of a metaheuristic involves a combination of both.

In contrast, principles of war are not really a process as much as a set of general guidelines designed to dramatically and a priori shrink the possible space of solutions to be considered in ways far more sweeping than hill-climbing. They imply a very, very restricted set of solutions while still being too vague to help a practitioner think about how the solutions fit the problem. Principles of war generally say to the practitioner, “generally, you do ___ but how you apply this is up to your specific situation and needs.” It has a broad set of do’s and don’ts that — by definition — foreclose consideration of possible solutions when they conflict with a given principle.

Yes, they are suggestions not guidelines, but the burden of proof is on the principle-violating solution, not the principle of war.  It may be that many problems will require flagrantly violating a given principle. The Royal Navy’s idea about distributing its forces to deal with the strategic problem posed by early 20th century imperial geopolitics potentially runs afoul of several principles of war, but it still worked. Finally, many principles of war as incorporated in military instruction are shaped more by cultural bias than timeless warfighting ideas.

As noted previously, metaheuristic algorithms are flexible. Different metaheuristics can be specified for differing problems. Additionally, when we consider past military problems (which the didactic teaching of principles of war concerns), metaheuristics can serve as alternative method for thinking about canonical historical military problems. Algorithms are measured against benchmark problems. One can consider abstract “benchmark” military problems and more specific classes of problems. By doing so, we may shed light on conditions impacting the usefulness of various principles of war on various problems of interest.

I will stress again that the loose notion of metaheuristics of war and the the principles of war should be complementary, not an either-or. And they can be combined with methods that are more interpretive and frame-based, since you will not be able to use a metaheuristic without having the “I know it when I see it” understanding Luke referenced in the beginning of his quoted text. On a similar note, I’ll also stress that an algorithm makes up only one part of a software program’s design pattern. A strategy or strategic concept is a larger architecture (e.g. a “strategy bridge“) that cannot simply be reduced to some narrow subcomponent — which is how the principles of war have always been understood within the context of strategic thought.

That being said…….what about war in real time, the dynamic and nonlinear contest of wills that Clausewitz describes? Note the distinction between the idea of principles of war that reasonably explain a past collection of military problems/offer guidance to understanding reasonably well-known military problems and the conceptual ability to understand the underlying dynamics of a specific present or future military contest.

The principle of objective, unity of command, or mass will not tell you much about the context of the strategic dilemma Robert E. Lee faced as a Confederate commander because geography, technology, ideology, state policy, the choices of neutral states, etc all structured his decision. They are much better when applied to the general class of problem that Lee’s dilemma could be abstracted into.

This is the difference between Clausewitz’s “ideal” and “real” war. Ideal war lacks the constraints and context of real war, and real war is something more than the sum of its parts. For example, maneuverists often argued that the US should implement an German-style elastic defense to defeat the Soviets in Central Europe. But such an solution, while perhaps valid in the abstract, would not be tolerated by European coalition partners that sought to avoid another spate of WWII-like demolition of their homelands.

Principles of war tell us very little about the Trinity’s notion of passion, reason, and chance, or the very political, economic, geographic, and technological conditions that might allow us to understand how Clausewitz’s two interacting “duel” partners move from the start of the match to conclusion. We need to think about how the duel plays out in time. And for reasons already explained metaheuristics also have some big limitations of their own with respect to dynamically evolving solution spaces.

An entirely different set of conceptual tools is needed, but that’s a problem for another post. For now, I leave you with a NetLogo implementation of Particle Swarm Optimization. Look at those NetLogo turtles go!!

[by Mark Safranski, a.k.a. “zen“]

Octavian Manea, the interviewer par excellence of Small Wars Journal, steps up with an interview with COIN guru and former USG senior adviser Dr. David Kilcullen:

Future of Warfare in a Post-COIN Conflict Climate

[….]

SWJ: Should we expect that when we see all these clustered elements conflict is more likely, the societal environment more conflict prone?

David Kilcullen: There are two different ways to look at this set of relations. If we look at this from the standpoint of the military or law-enforcement, then it is pretty clear that we really need to get comfortable with operating in a very littoral, very urban and very highly networked environment because that is where the bulk of the people on the planet are going to live in the next generation. If you are not comfortable operating in such an environment you are not going to be effective. But this doesn’t mean that the solution to this problem is a military one. Seen from the perspective of the city in itself, it is pretty clear that the solution is not to bring the hawk cops in, and apply hard power tools to stabilize the environment. This is often a recipe for disaster. The paradox is that, on the one hand, there are no military solutions, but at the same time there are no solutions at all without security. Someone will provide that security and it is better for it to be the locals, but if the locals cannot do it, then history suggests that we will be drawn into this kind of conflict with about the same frequency as in the past.    

SWJ: You emphasized in your book, and also at the New America Foundation launching event that in the future we will face operational continuity and environmental discontinuity. What if the environmental discontinuity can in itself be a variable able to change the operational continuity?

David Kilcullen: That’s possible, to the extent that we have data — information based on historical patterns. On one hand, it seems that there is a lot of unwillingness on behalf of the American politicians to contemplate future engagements like Afghanistan and Iraq. Congress has no appetite as we’ve seen in the case of Syria for further military activity overseas. The military leadership is very reluctant to recommend that kind of operation. But going back to the 19th century we see a cyclical pattern in American military history where we repeatedly have leaders coming out with this kind of statement and yet we end up doing these kinds of operations anyway, on about the same frequency. There are deep structures about the way the US is connected to the international community that lead to this kind of behavior. It is possible that we won’t do this in the future, but it is not the way to bet. If you are going to bet on what is likely to happen, the pattern suggests that we are going to see a specific “conflict climate” (shaped by population growth, urbanization, littoralization and connectedness) within which wars will arise.

Read the rest here.

Chinese Navy

[by Mark Safranski, a.k. a. “zen“]

The editors of the excellent War of the Rocks invited me to post a short rebuttal to the op-ed “How Not to Go to War With China”, by Scott Cheney-Peters, which appears in their “Hasty Ambush” section:

UNDERSTANDING CHINA: THE REAL KEY TO AVOIDING WAR

….A place to begin our efforts in avoiding war with China might be avoiding engagement in some of the same incorrect mirror-imaging assumptions we once made about the Soviet Union, not least of which was MAD.  As a doctrine, Soviet leaders never accepted MAD and the Red Army general staff ignored it in drafting war plans to fight and prevail in any nuclear war. While the Soviets had no choice but to tackle the logic of deterrence as we did, the operative Soviet assumptions were predicated on a different strategic calculus, a different force structure and above all, different policy goals from their American counterparts.  A dangerous gap between American assumptions of Soviet intentions and the reality of these intentions came to light when in 1983 the Reagan administrationdiscovered to their alarm that Soviet leaders had interpreted the NATO exercise Abel Archer 83 as preparations for a real, imminent nuclear first strike on the USSR and ordered Soviet nuclear forces on high alert.

The military-to-military confidence-building initiatives outlined by Cheney-Peters intended to construct “habits of cooperation” are not entirely useless. There is some value in ensuring that high-ranking American military officers have personal and limited operational familiarity with their Chinese counterparts in the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), but as potential game-changers, they need to be taken with a grain of salt. Such a policy misses the essential strategic and political centers of gravity in the Sino-American relationship.  Namely that for the first time in 600 years, China is building a blue water Navy that will foster power projection as far away as the Indian ocean and Australia.  Secondly, this naval expansion, coupled with a new Chinese foreign policy, aggressively presses grandiose territorial demands on nearly all of its neighbors, including India and Japan.  These are fundamental conflicts with American interests that cannot be explained away or papered over by banquet toasts with visiting delegations of Chinese admirals. […]

Read the rest here.

Also read another WotR  China piece “99 Red Balloons: How War with China would Start” by Matthew Hipple

[by Mark Safranski, a.k.a. “zen“]

Today is Veteran’s Day. It is a day when Americans remember all of those who served, in peace or war.

Originally, this day was called Armistice Day in honor of the cease fire that came in ” the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month” and brought the horrific slaughter of  World War I to an end. This was fitting.  The First World War loomed large in the memories of our great grandparents and grandparents the way the Civil War did for earlier generations. It was an ominous touchstone of the nadir of which Mankind was capable until it was thoroughly eclipsed by the subsequent horrors of Nazi barbarism in a Second World War – a conflict that seemed a maturation of the first. In the postwar era, Armistice Day became a national tribute to the sacrifices of all veterans.

This year also marks the fiftieth anniversary of American entry into the Vietnam War.

Historians may quibble with this, as American involvement in Vietnam went back to WWII and OSS agents giving advice to Ho Chi Minh in the jungle war against Imperial Japan and Vichy French puppet colonialists, but 1963 is when “American boys” first went to South Vietnam in real numbers.  And many of them were indeed little more than boys. Fifty-eight thousand, two hundred and eighty six of them did not come home.

Those that did are now grown grey with the passage of time.

The Vietnam War caused deeper divisions in the American psyche than any other war except the one that began at Fort Sumter. The wounds have never really healed and they rest inflamed and sore just beneath the scabrous surface of American politics to this day. America has an unenviable historical track record of not treating its veterans very well and those who served in that unpopular war that ended in defeat received on their return home far more than their share of  disdain and abuse.

Even the attempt to build a memorial – the now famously cathartic Wall – roiled at the time in a controversy of unimaginable bitterness. The site eventually became a place of pilgrimage, alive with memory of the dead and compassion for the living. This was a good thing but in truth as a nation we could have done far, far better for the men who served in Vietnam than we did.

The best tribute to these veterans of Vietnam that we can make as a people would be to see that the veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan do not repeat the sad experience of their fathers.

[by Mark Safranski, a.k.a. “zen“]

Octavian Manea branches out from COIN to the realm of power projection:

The Role of an Air Sea Battle-Centric Posture in Strategic Reassurance: SWJ Interview with Elbridge Colby 

SWJ: In a time when the PLA is intensively investing in anti-access/area-denial (A2/AD) capabilities, how would you characterize the Chinese way of war? What are they preparing for?

EC: My understanding of what the Chinese are trying to accomplish is the ability to effectively counter a third party intervention. If you look at the strategic landscape in the Western Pacific, more or less starting from 1945, the US dominated the aerial and maritime spheres. Obviously, we had less success on the Eurasian landmass, but the whole system was predicated on the ability of the US fleet and airpower to dominate the Pacific.

The particular contingency for which this was most relevant was Taiwan. Now, the US continues to have a policy guided by the Taiwan Act which, at the very least, suggests that we might intervene militarily. This is something that the Chinese are not comfortable with. It [the claim to Taiwan] is a core element of their regime’s legitimacy. This issue became more salient after the Taiwan Strait crisis in 1995/1996. That was a wakeup call for the Chinese, and in its aftermath they decided to build up the ability to try to effectively push back the US military. The trajectory of Chinese military development has therefore been to build forces that would potentially enable them to prevent the US from operating effectively in the areas that we need to be able to dominate if we decide to defend Taiwan in the event of Chinese military attack or attempted coercion. In this context they have spent a lot of time and resources on more accurate ballistic and cruise missiles, aerial forces and naval forces, basically with the overarching idea of creating an A2/AD bubble in order to deny the US the ability to exercise its power in the Western Pacific. That challenge to our power projection ability has been compounded because of the centralization of the US military posture following the Cold War, becoming increasingly focused on Guam and a few other nodes in the Pacific region.

SWJ: What are the implications of China’s military build-up for the United States?

EC:  As we go forward and the Chinese economy likely continues to grow, they will presumably continue to put significant resources into these military capabilities. If we think about the basic military problem, the US is trying to project its power across the greatest expense of water on the globe, very far from our shores, using naval and airpower, all while the Chinese are operating from their mainland. The Chinese basically are trying to frustrate our ability to enter, while we are trying to get there and accomplish our objectives. As the Chinese military become more sophisticated, it will become a great problem for us.

SWJ: Are the Chinese A2/AD capabilities a long-term threat to the credibility of the deterrence capital that the US is providing to the region?

EC: Absolutely. We can see this in the case of Japan, where we see a lot more interest, focus, and essentially need for a stronger military posture. Publicly the Japanese are talking about North Korea, but what they are really worried about is China. The Senkaku Islands are the tip of the iceberg. A few months ago the Chinese state-affiliated press started to talk about the Chinese claims on the Ryukyu Islands, of which Okinawa is a part. It is a classic example of the downside of accommodation or appeasement in that the potential adversary can get hungrier rather than sated due to accommodation. And Taiwan’s closer relationship with mainland China is, in part, a result of the shifting regional military balance. More broadly, in these kinds of strategic competitions, perceptions of capability and resolve are crucial. If everyone thinks we are growing weaker, then they are likely to behave accordingly. 

A lengthy interview – read the rest here.