Telling tales

Influence is all the rage: persuading key audiences that your ideas are right is seen by many as the key to success in our fight with militant Islamists of various stripes.

Surely it should be easy enough to obtain influence through our ‘strategic communications‘ with the Muslim world. After all, we’ve got a good story to tell – our values deliver prosperity and individual freedoms. What we need to do, clearly, is make sure our messages to Muslims are factual, truthful and consistent (these days its easy to get caught in a lie). Naturally, the messages should reflect our values: we want the audience to know what they’re missing out with all this takfiri repression. And telling the story should be easy – we’ve got the best minds in advertising, marketing, media and design.

What could possibly go wrong?

Somehow, it turns out that this well-meaning model of influence hasn’t been all that effective. Many of the studies on strategic communications put this down to bureaucracy – we need more money, different organizational structures, better minds – the ‘best and brightest’, even. A good survey is this recent RAND report [pdf]. Others suggest that its the result of our foreign policies – the best communications strategies in the world are just lipsticking the pig. Perhaps President Obama’s more sophisticated approach will sweeten the pill of western values. A third group suggest that the problem is our vague, incoherent message – in contrast to the allegedly simple, coherent line put out by the enemy: we don’t have a clear narrative, they do. I’m not persuaded, either that ‘their’ story is simple or coherent, or even that having a simple consistent story is the elixir.

I think there’s more to it. Why won’t they believe us? This Defense Science Board study has a stab at an answer [pdf]:

To be effective, strategic communicators must understand attitudes and cultures, [and] respect the importance of ideas. [...] To be persuasive, they must be credible.

Credibility. How to get that, if telling the truth doesn’t cut it? I’m writing a paper about this at the moment, so won’t spill all the beans. But as a tease – it turns out that theories of cognitive and constructionist psychology can tell us a great deal about how people receive and process incoming information. This offers some good clues as to why factual messages about attractive values have little traction with target audiences and, into the bargain, provides some insights on how to better achieve credibility and influence.

Oddly, this huge body of rigorous psychological literature doesn’t feature all that much in the recent strategic communication and influence work. Theorists of COIN, wars amongst the people, and so on have drawn in part on marketing and advertising, which – to some extent, of course – rest on psychology and sociology. This earlier RAND study is a fine example of that, and makes many good points. And yet the literature is on the whole maddeningly vague, beyond the commonplace thought that these wars are about ideas and persuasion.

So then, from cognitive psychology, we have theories of dissonance, bias, judgmental heuristics, analogical reasoning. And from constructionism, concepts of identity, mythology and memory. Communities are, to some degree, imagined by their members. The thrust of all this is that people are not passive recipients of information, that their identities are to some extent constructed, and therefore unfixed, but that these beliefs – once acquired – are stubborn to shift, even in the face of ostensibly plausible new information.

Frank Kitson once wrote that:

It is in men’s minds that wars of subversion have to be fought and decided.

That sounds right. But Kitson left it there, concluding ruefully that the area was

so hedged around with imponderables that no useful purpose would be served by further speculation in this context. Perhaps some qualified person will take the matter up later on, and research it in a scientific way.

Can we help him – and can you help me? Where are the psychologists who will do for COIN what David Kilcullen has done from an anthropological perspective? Any reading suggestions greatly appreciated, as always.

Here’s one from me: If you’re interested in the state of the art, Matt Armstrong has the best blog around on strategic communications.

Kenneth Payne

Kajaki revisited

You remember the story. It was a triumph of British military cunning, as a giant hydroelectric turbine was smuggled through the desert, past Taliban ambushes, and installed at the Kajaki dam on the Helmand River. The effort was a clear signal to the locals that the British were serious about their welfare, and were there for the long haul. With the new turbine, power generation and irrigation on a much larger scale would be possible.

I was reminded of all this fine sentiment when reading Eric Newby’s very funny book, A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush, recounting his travels in Afghanistan in 1956 – 3 years after the Kajaki dam was completed, by American contractors.

Sticky with melon, we arrived at a town called Girishk on the Helmand River. There, under a mulberry tree, squatted the proprietor of a chaie khana [tea shop], a long-headed, grey-bearded Pathan, chanting a dirge on the passing of a newly founded civilisation, no new thing in this part of the world.

‘There is no light in the bazaar. the Americans brought light when they came to build the great dam, but when they left they took the machine with them, and now there is no more light. [...] Once I worked in a German woollen mill but now I am poor; we are all poor.’

[...] We asked him about the dam, that vast scheme of which so much vague ill had been spoken all along the way.

‘It is all salt,’ he moaned, ‘the land below the American dam. They did not trouble to find out and now the people will eat salt for ever and ever.’

We rose to leave.

‘You will be in Kandahar in two hours’ he went on. ‘The Americans build the road; they have not taken that away.’

This environmental degradation has affected not just local Afghans, but the delicate ecosystem across the border in eastern Iran, where the Helmand drains into Lake Hamun. There’s long been an agreement between the two countries about the level of water that should flow across the border, but it hasn’t always worked in practice – the Taliban, in particular, cut the flow dramatically. There have been social consequences too, with displaced Afghanis moving into the eastern Iranian province, and Iranian farmers moving out as competition for resources drives down the productivity of their land.

Still, I’m sure more thought has been put into things this time round.

Eric Newby in the Hindu Kush, 1956
photographed by his traveling companion Hugh Carless

Are British soldiers mercenaries?

The paper by Hew Strachan I mentioned last time makes another intriguing point:

The British armed forces are composed of volunteers who have enlisted because soldiering is their chosen career: in this sense (rather than in any pejorative sense) they are mercenaries. Britain has no tradition that men serve in the armed forces out of civic obligation, partly because it escaped the Rousseauist legacy of the French Revolution but principally because home defence has not been a prime requirement of strategy.

 I think that on this point, Professor Strachan draws the contrast between the military and civilian society too starkly. Civic obligation might not require that most British men serve, but nonetheless, I am sure that a great many of those who do are motivated by an idea of Britain and of its values, as well as by the desire to pursue their vocation in the military profession.

There is, however, a bigger point here about civil-military relations, and the separateness of the military from wider society – and on this I’m in complete agreement with Strachan. The military is necessarily different from the rest of liberal, postmodern British society, not least because – as I’ve written - its members must have a different view on killing and being killed than do many of us civilians. 
 
More broadly, the armed forces have a moral ethos that is radically different from societal liberalism that emphasises the individual’s worth. As Strachan writes:

The armed forces believe that they cleave to higher moral standards than civil society; that they elevate the collective good over individual needs; and that they do both for excellent reasons. Why, they ask, should they be required to forfeit such qualities? And, if they do, is there not a danger that they will fail in the next war? [...] The underlying tension in civil-military relations resides in the fact that civil society is predicated on an expectation of peace, whereas military society anticipates war.

This is convincing – the values of the British army have been tested in battle. I would though, add two important caveats: first, civil society does not always fit the neat liberal label I’ve given it. I suspect that old fashioned notions of patriotism, sacrifice and the greater good are still held by a great many civilians too. After all, many soldiers serve only a few years before returning to civilian society themselves. And second, soldiers may cede some of their rights as individuals while still holding to the importance of those values for wider society.

The article, well worth a read if you’ve got access, was written in 2003. Since then there has been much fretting within the armed forces about their relationship with wider society – what’s called the military covenant. One unpopular war in Iraq, and a troubled one in Afghanistan have exacerbated these concerns. But as public trust in other institutions crumbles, the military convenant seemingly remains strong.

Liberals like me seem to recognise that protecting our values sometimes requires the employment of people who voluntarily opt out of our ethical code. In that sense, Strachan’s point about mercenaries makes sense, provided the term is understood non-pejoratively, as he suggests. As a society, we have contracted out our defence to a group of people who espouse different values.

Political soldiers?

Should serving military leaders be openly political?  In a provocative paper a few years ago, Hew Strachan argued that they should. Not necessarily in the party political sense, though he thinks that mightn’t be a bad idea too; but in the sense of being willing to openly engage with and critique the defence policies of the day: the ‘politics of professional self-interest [...] not of the individual, but of the profession’.

The armed forces of the United Kingdom have been hoodwinked by the model of civil-military relations propounded by Samuel Huntington in The Soldier and the State: they are professional, therefore they are apolitical.

An apolitical military is unlikely to park its tanks on the Downing Street lawn, but it is also one that is divorced from the attitudes of the wider public. Without open political advocacy, the relationship between the military and the public suffers, as important debates happen behind the scenes and without scrutiny. Strachan argued that

the services, by subscribing to a theoretical norm, have lapsed into anonymity. Public ignorance of their concerns is largely their fault.

In Clausewitzian terms, the passion for warfare originates largely in the civil population. Without the engagement of the people in the wars of the day, the armed forces and their government are in a fix.

Since he wrote that paper in 2003, things have changed somewhat.  Lately there’s been an increasing willingness on the part of senior officers to publicly air their views on strategy, procurement, and a range of other issues.

This weekend, for example, Air Chief Marshal Sir Glenn Torpy, Britain’s senior airman, took to the pages of the Telegraph, to argue that the RAF should take over all fixed wing flying: ‘We have got to kill some sacred cows to make ourselves more efficient,’ he averred. The sacred cow in question is the Navy’s Fleet Air Arm.

A week earlier, it was the turn of head of the Royal Navy, Admiral Sir Jonathon Band, to argue the case for the Navy’s new aircraft carriers. ‘I am not volunteering for the second division,’ he said. ‘While Afghanistan is rightly our priority it is not the only show in town.’

His adversary here is his senior Army colleague, General Sir Richard Dannatt, Chief of the General Staff, who argued in May that the defence capabilities

we will field over the next decade are largely a legacy of decisions taken 20 years ago rather than a true reflection of what we need today. [...] At present I can only take the view that Defence is over-investing in the far future at the expense of relevance for the threats we face today and in the medium term.

And so, a three-way argument about the future of Britain’s armed forces is underway at the top of the services. This debate is increasingly playing out in public, as the service chiefs adapt their bureaucratic skills to the cut and thrust of public argument. Richard Dannatt might have been reading Strachan’s paper as he drafted his speech:

the degree of public understanding and awareness of the nature and extent of the threats we face, now and in the future, and the role of the Armed Forces in tackling those threats, is probably as low as I have known it to be – and that is not the fault of the general public.

The debate between the service chiefs has partly been a response to that lack of public understanding and engagement, coupled with two aggravating factors:

First, there has been an acute lack of political direction from the government of the day. Earlier, I posted about the Korean War dispute between President Truman and General MacArthur. One of the enduring lessons of that episode was Truman’s recognition of the need for sustained and informed civilian input in shaping strategy. In the UK, the sixth Defence Secretary in the last decade has just begun work. With a half-life of about a year, it will be a considerable achievement for him to acquire the necessary experience and influence to shape the military for the longer term.

Second, the stagnant or declining resource base available for defence spending is concentrating minds. If strategy is about choice, tough choices are coming the way of the British military. With a new national security strategy in the works, a Strategic Defence Review likely, and a general election too, we should expect more overt politicking from the armed forces than we have been used to.

Whilst attention is focused on what sort of platforms we should procure, the debate between the services might not seem that important. But the issue is far more profound – it is about the role that Britain should aspire to in world affairs, about the utility of force, and the character of war. The more heated the argument between the Chiefs gets, and the more openly politicized the military becomes, the better for all of us.

Truman, MacArthur and all that…

Things have taken a decidedly military turn over at Andreas Kluth’s always fascinating Hannibal Blog, with a discussion on the lessons of Clausewitz, followed by one on strategy, tactics, and leadership.

Andreas picks out the Korean war spat between General Douglas MacArthur and President Truman on the advisability of  using nuclear weapons.  MacArthur, under pressure on the battlefield, favoured expanding the war into China, using nuclear weapons if necessary. Truman disagreed, and MacArthur, iconic American hero, was unceremoniously sacked. 

As Andreas sees it, the problem is that MacArthur was fighting tactically, focused on the immediate battlefield. Truman, however, saw the big strategic picture and didn’t want to escalate for fear of bringing in the Soviets. Strategy should trump tactics, and so MacArthur had to go.

For me, though, the main lesson is not about tactics versus strategy - I think the spat was about strategy, on which the two men had conflicting perspectives. It’s what the episode tells us about leadership and personality, not strategy and tactics, that captures my attention. 

The dispute opens up interesting territory about tensions between civilian and military leadership in war. But there’s a danger here: excessive reductivism.  

I’ve just been reading Bernard Brodie’s classic book, War and Politics. Brodie’s thesis is that while there’s always the potential for clashing military and civilian perspectives on war, the civilian should always triumph. He was writing in 1973, in the shadow of the Vietnam war.

There’s a chapter in his book on Korea, in which Brodie excoriates MacArthur:

Such men are dangerous. One almost has to be grateful to MacArthur for finally making himself so flagrantly and publicly insubordinate as to provoke dismissal  from his patient and too long abused President.

Truman, though, doesn’t escape completely. Brodie is sure that US forces could have made much deeper inroads into the Communist forces under MacArthur’s replacement Matthew Ridgway. With new commanders in place, US forces were soon on the front foot, blunting Communist offensives with such effectiveness that they were ‘ripe for destruction’. But then came orders from Washington not to press home their advantage. As Brodie writes:

I have hitherto been stressing the all-important idea that politics must control strategy, but this conception does not exclude the need for responsiveness to feedback from the fighting fronts.  In this case the military situation could not have been better.

 The tension between military and political perspectives is always with us. We see it in the Cuban missile crisis; in the conduct of coercive bombing in Vietnam; in the dispute between Rumsfeld and Shinseki over Iraq. We see it in the UK too, in the relationship between Downing Street and General Dannatt, Chief of the General Staff.

But there are big two problems with this picture. First, as Brodie notes, politics should properly have primacy, but that doesn’t excuse politicians from not reflecting adequately on the advice of their military subordinates. They must make themselves sufficiently involved and informed in military affairs to have a sensible perspective on strategic issues.

Second, characterising tension as being primarily between military and civilian mindsets, which we often do, risks oversimplifying the range of factors involved.

Sometimes in war and politics, where you stand depends on where you sit – as Graham Allison argued in his classic book – but sometimes it doesnt.

In Korea, MacArthur and many of his subordinate commanders favoured expanding the conflict. But back in Washington, it wasn’t simply Truman against the military: the Chiefs also saw things the President’s way. Samuel Huntington (yes, that one) tells the story in his great account of US civil-military relations, The Soldier and the State:

The extent to which the generals as a group of field commanders were out of sympathy with the policy of the government probably had few precedents in American history.

And yet, once the Administration had resolved that the Korean war would have limited aims, which in turn would limit the approach to operations,

all the civilian and military leaders of the administration – the President, Acheson, Marshall, Lovett, Bradley, the Joint Chiefs – were in agreement on this fundamental concept.

Not all Generals think alike – for every Franks, there is a Shinseki. Nor do all civilians – Rumsfeld and Gates have dramatically different views on the utility of force.

In the end, bureaucratic and organisational loyalties are just part of an individual’s personality. Truman wasn’t just any President, and MacArthur was much more than just another sabre rattling General. As Truman himself said:

Men make history , and not the other way around.