The Adventures of Chester: Combination Warfare

One of the hallmarks of maneuver warfare as it has been conceived in the Marine Corps is the use of combined arms. "Combined arms" refers to the use of various weapons systems in concert, such that each reinforces the weaknesses of the other. The doctrinal definition is this:

Combined arms is the full integration of arms in such a way that to counteract one, the enemy must become more vulnerable to another. We pose the enemy not just with a problem, but with a dilemma -- a no-win situation. [from Marine Corps Doctrinal Publication 1, Warfighting]

There's no reason to think that this doctrine couldn't be articulated at the national level as well. Rather than confining it to the realm of military strategy and the use of force, why not include all the elements of national power -- diplomatic, economic, informational, military, etc -- and force them to work in concert toward a common goal? This may be an ideal, but it is one at which the US does not perform so well. The primary reason is the way our foreign policy bureaucracy operates: there is little in the way of the kind of unity of command necessary for an individual decision-maker to muster all elements to work in concert.

But not so in Iran, warns Robert Kaplan:

Combination warfare, a term coined by Air Force colonels James Callard and Peter Faber, acknowledges that in an age of intensive military, media, financial and other activities, battle must be joined in a coordinated fashion on several fronts to create sustained and shifting pressure on the adversary.

Iran's power structure, armed with an admirable Persian gift for subtlety and manipulation, has restricted its own domestic organs of dissent so that it is well positioned to lay siege to media and political elites elsewhere. Its president both shocks and fascinates Western journalists; sophisticated mullahs at Davos, Switzerland, have made deals with international businessmen; Iranian intelligence agents encourage Islamic power demonstrations that undermine Europe's resolve; and Iran's diplomats follow a strategy of delay and partial concessions that evaporate.

The goal is to buy time while Iran's scientists work 24/7 to develop a nuclear capability to alter the balance of power in the Middle East.

An earlier Adventures post excerpted an op-ed by Henry Kissinger in which he discusses the way to conceive of diplomacy and expanded upon that, describing a view of the use of power similar to "combination warfare":

Diplomacy never operates in a vacuum. It persuades not by the eloquence of its practitioners but by assembling a balance of incentives and risks. Clausewitz's famous dictum that war is a continuation of diplomacy by other means defines both the challenge and the limits of diplomacy. War can impose submission; diplomacy needs to evoke consensus. Military success enables the victor in war to prescribe, at least for an interim period. Diplomatic success occurs when the principal parties are substantially satisfied; it creates -- or should strive to create -- common purposes, at least regarding the subject matter of the negotiation; otherwise no agreement lasts very long. The risk of war lies in exceeding objective limits; the bane of diplomacy is to substitute process for purpose. Diplomacy should not be confused with glibness. It is not an oratorical but a conceptual exercise. When it postures for domestic audiences, radical challenges are encouraged rather than overcome.

The popular methods of portraying diplomacy include its being on the opposite end of a one-dimensional axis that includes military action on its far end, and of characterizing diplomatic initiatives as merely talk and not action. Such a view is unconstructive. Diplomacy is dealmaking, pure and simple. The tragedy perhaps is that so much of our recent dealmaking has seemed much more like concession-making alone.

Readers may also be interested to know that the Chinese have developed a similar view of the use of power, which they call "unrestricted warfare". From Wikipedia:

Unrestricted Warfare is the English title of a book on military strategy written in 1999 by two Colonels in the People's Liberation Army, Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui. Its primary concern is how a nation such as China can defeat a technologically superior opponent (such as the United States) through a variety of means. Rather than focusing on direct military confrontation, this book instead examines a variety of other means. Such means include using International Law (see Lawfare) and a variety of economic means to place one's opponent in a bad position and circumvent the need for direct military action.

Commentary

Combination warfare, as a title for the collection of powers that constitute the means of the state to fashion its ends, is deceiving, because the use of the term "warfare" could easily be misconstrued to mean a battle of some kind. The same is true of unrestricted warfare. An old-fashioned term, that few use any more, works much better: statecraft. It's better not only because it implies the use of all elements of the state to achieve a goal, but also because "craft" hints that there is much more art than science in the process.

But Kaplan's larger point, that the US should be engaging in brinksmanship with Iran to dissuade its nuclear aims, still stands, as does his estimate of why the US is not succeeding:

Only to Western elites is power strictly either economic or military. In reality, power is the combination of both these elements, depleted or magnified by the extent of political will required to deploy them — which historically has been the function of a deep-seated faith of one kind or another. Put simply, the Iranian regime has more nerve than we do. Nerve translates into power.

Exactly. Regardless of what conception of the use of power we labor under, the ultimate factor in determining success is willpower. Another section of Warfighting puts this pretty eloquently (for a government document):

The essence of war is a violent struggle between two hostile, independent, and irreconcilable wills, each trying to impose itself on the other.

Will Iran succeed in imposing its will upon us? That's a bit more pointed than the manner in which such things are usually described, but probably more descriptive of the actual nature of the game -- and more evocative of the consequences of failure.

Posted by Chester on September 30, 2006 5:47 AM to The Adventures of Chester