Fowler D - MSc Dissertation

David John Fowler
Dissertation submitted to the School of Social Science, University of Aberdeen, as partial
fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of M.Sc. Strategic Studies.
Politics and war:
Irreconcilable differences between the soldier and the statesman - the
consequences for successful strategy-making.

Abstract
All too often in strategic theory the nature of conflict is reduced to mythical Clausewitzian
banalities where war becomes a ‘true political instrument, a continuation of political
intercourse.’ Yet the full meaning of such a statement is frequently misapprehended. Beyond a
simple recognition that war exists to fulfil political objectives, the act of conflict must, as
Clausewitz implies, be continually perfused by political considerations, and the strategy that
directs the conduct of war should be similarly shaped by political imperatives. As such,
although a military activity, the conduct of war will be governed as much by domestic and
international political expedients as it is by military considerations. Occasionally this element of
realpolitik necessitates a politically motivated shift in strategy that may be inconsistent with
purely military objectives but is beneficial for the wellbeing of the state as a whole. It is this
dissertation’s key assertion that a failure to realise this ubiquitous and overarching political
supremacy in strategy, by either military or political actors in the strategy-making process, leads
to a breakdown in relations between political and military establishments. In turn this results in
a flawed strategy that fails to reconcile the broad spectrum of political and military
considerations.

Contents
Introduction: i
Chapter 1: War and Strategy as Political Concepts. 1
Chapter 2: Theories of Victory. 10
Chapter 3: Civil-Military Relations. 21
Conclusions: Strategy, victory and civilian ascendency. 32
Bibliography 36
Abstract - 199 words.
Dissertation, including all footnotes and bibliography – 14,983 words
47 pages including frontispiece.

Declaration.
This dissertation has been composed by the author, and has not been accepted in any previous
application for a degree; all work has been done by the author, and all of the quotations and
sources of information have been acknowledged.
Signed ................................................ Dated.................................

Introduction – What is strategy all about? i
Introduction
‘De qoui s’agit-il?’ (‘what is it all about?’)
Field Marshall Ferdinand Foch1
It is almost axiomatic to suggest that war is strictly a political phenomenon.
Seemingly, the vast majority of strategic thinkers and practitioners today assume this to be
fact and, in support of this assumption, almost all are apt to quote the somewhat clichéd
aphorism of Carl von Clausewitz where war is reduced to simply ‘the continuation of political
intercourse’.2
This appreciation of war’s political dimension is certainly commendable, for it
gives war its legitimate purpose, without which it becomes an immoral manifestation of
violence for violence’s sake. As such, strategy becomes that vital functional link that directs
war in a calculated way so that political objectives can be met; without strategy, war cannot
be a legitimate instrument of policy. Strategy achieves this through a hierarchical framework
stretching from the civilian statesman to the soldier on the battlefield. At the apex of this
hierarchy is grand-strategy, which seeks to employ all instruments of state power (military,
diplomatic and economic means) in the pursuit of overarching political objectives. Nested
below grand-strategy are the individual strategies of those instruments of power, the activities
of which grand-strategy would seek to coordinate synergistically so that none takes place in
isolation. At the next tier down the hierarchy, military strategy looks to achieve military
objectives through the tactics and operations of the physical act of war itself. Importantly,
each level of strategy should look to utilise the effects garnered at lower levels to contribute to
the higher purpose of policy and politics – the actions of the most junior soldier on the
battlefield should contribute to this overall political purpose.3
Richard Betts sees this as a somewhat fragile ‘chain of relationships’ where ‘strategy
fails when some link in the planned chain of cause of cause and effect from low-level tactics
to high-level political outcomes is broken.’4
The consequences of such a strategic failure
become manifest when war is fought for its own sake, unguided by political objectives and
calculations, or when unrealistic political objectives are set with no regard to the strategic
1
Quoted in Bernard Brodie, War and Politics, London: Casell & Co., 1974, p.1.
2
Carl von Clausewitz, On War, (trans. Michael Howard & Peter Paret), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008,
p.28.
3
For an examination of the theory of strategy see, Colin S. Gray, The Strategy Bridge, Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2010.
4
Richard K. Betts, ‘Is Strategy an Illusion?’ International Security’ vol.25, no.2, p.6-7.

Introduction – What is strategy all about? ii
realities of the situation or the resources available. What then, are the reasons for breakages
in this strategic chain of relationships? This is the question that this dissertation sets out to
answer, and concludes by suggesting that strategic failure stems from either:
1. A failure by policy makers to understand that strategy is not simply setting the
political objectives but the matching of means and allocating the appropriate
resources.
2. A failure by the military to understand that strategy should be ubiquitously
guided by political considerations, rather than the requirements of military victory
alone.
Either of these two scenarios can occur when there is a failure in the relationship between the
policy-maker and military commander such that a balanced strategy that reconciles their
often-conflicting viewpoints becomes impossible. When this occurs, the prevailing
dominance of either the military establishment or the civilian political leadership produces an
unbalanced strategy that is either devoid of political reason or based on unrealistic military-
strategic assumptions where allocated resources are insufficient to achieve policy goals.
CHAPTER OUTLINE
Underpinning this dissertation’s conclusion is the assumption that war is indeed a
political activity. Chapter one seeks to set this assumption in concrete by moving beyond
banal quotations of Clausewitz and narrow interpretations of his dicta, and by demonstrating
war’s ubiquitous political character throughout antiquity to the present day. It continues with
an illustration of the consequences of misapplying the basic concepts of strategy where war
becomes devoid of political purpose or policy overstretches military resources. Chapter two
examines the notion of victory, setting out the importance of perspective from differing
positions within the strategic hierarchy, concluding that differing notions of victory held by
the military and political establishment creates a divergence of opinion over how and for what
war should be fought. In turn, chapter three shows that this divergence can be remarkably
deleterious on civil-military relations, resulting in a failure to reconcile political objectives
with strategic realities, eventually leading to strategic failure.

Introduction – What is strategy all about? iii
The consistent realist narrative throughout this dissertation is the notion that war and
strategy should always be perfused and guided by political considerations regarding the
relative balance of state power. As such, when politicians fail to assert political authority
over the military establishment and political considerations become subordinate to military
expedients, then the perils of militarism can ensue. As such, in the development of strategy a
harmonious dialogue between military commanders and policy-makers can only be a healthy
thing, but ultimately, only the civilian leader can represent the needs of the state and the
society they represent.

War and Strategy as Political Concepts 1
Chapter 1
War and Strategy as Political Concepts
WAR AND STRATEGY
THE ‘CULTURAL TURN’?
By stating clearly in the opening gambit of his 1994 book, A History of Warfare, that ‘War
is not the continuation of policy by other means’, historian John Keegan clearly sets out his
unequivocal opposition to Clausewitzian theories that conflate politics and war.1
Instead,
Keegan argues that war should be understood as being motivated by cultural rather than political
factors. His argument, in essence, stems from the fact that warfare predates the existence of the
Westphalian state system that governed Clausewitz’s understanding of politics and war. To
Keegan, war must therefore be based more on symbolic tribal ritual than on rational political
purpose.2
Keegan’s logic supposes that the harm and destruction war causes, even to the victors,
could never be ‘an extension of politics, when the ultimate object of rational politics is to further
the well being of political entities...’3
Instead, an underlying and irrational belligerency in human
nature is responsible for conflict; using the war in the Balkans during the 1990s to illustrate, he
suggests that war is ‘apolitical’ since it is fed by ‘passions and rancour that do not yield to
rational measures of persuasion and control.’4
Martin van Creveld is similarly sceptical of war’s political nature. However, van
Creveld’s doubts stem less from an anthropological perspective but instead from a belief in the
demise of the primacy of the Westphalian nation-state in the late 20th
century.5
Written in 1991,
van Creveld’s The Transformation of War, is prescient where it makes bold predictions
regarding the rise of violent transnational groups that would be motivated by cultural, religious
or ethnic reasons rather than by politics associated with the state. Moreover, his suggestion that
western military capabilities are over-reliant on technology and would find themselves poorly
configured to deal with ill-defined, non-state adversaries has obvious parallels with the
difficulties the US and its allies have encountered in fighting groups like al-Qaeda. This
perceived challenge to the previously dominant western ‘way of war’ (Clausewitzian in character
1
John Keegan, A History of Warfare, London: Pimlico, 1994, p.3.
2
Ibid.
3
Ibid, p.381.
4
Ibid, p.58.
5
See Martin van Creveld, The Transformation of War, New York: The Free Press, 1991. See chapter 7 (p.192) for
van Creveld’s challenge of nation-state political primacy in war.

and focussed on decisive battle waged by the state for reasons of politics), by an eastern or
oriental paradigm of warfare (waged for religio-cultural motivations and characterised by
strategies of patient attrition and irregular warfare) has forced a renewed interest in the West on
the cultural character of warfare in an attempt to ‘better understand the enemy’.6
From this so called ‘cultural turn’ have come those who might try and vindicate the earlier
theories of Keegan and van Creveld by arguing that the actions of Osama bin Laden and al-
Qaeda stem from religious affront and are wholly without rational political purpose.7
Similarly,
there are those who suggest the violence of the Iraqi insurgency following the 2003 conflict was
more akin to tribal warfare motivated more by bonds of kinship and honour than by politically
directed strategy.8
Phillip Mielinger encapsulates the sentiment of this ‘cultural turn’ claiming:
‘The warriors of al-Qaida, Hezbollah, Hamas [and the] Taliban ... do not view war
as an instrument of policy. Other cultural, biological and religious factors motivate
them. [...] They are not Clausewitzians. We need to understand what motivates
them.’9
As such, the fundamental political motivation of war and strategy, espoused by Clausewitz, may
be in question – is war primarily a cultural phenomena? There is certainly no denying that
culture plays a part in defining the shifting character of war and strategy; indeed, later we shall
see how the culture of a dominant military class in Prussian society influenced how warfare
should be conducted in the wars of German unification. To suggest, however, that the enduring
nature of war is motivated by purely cultural factors, or is apolitical since war occurs outside the
Westphalian state system, is perhaps a little naive and demonstrates a failure to understand the
broader nature of politics.
The one-dimensional interpretation of Clausewitz’s dicta that van Creveld, Keegan and
Meilinger are guilty of adopting misconstrues the translation of Clausewitz’s ‘political
intercourse’ (Politik in the original) as pertaining only to the bureaucratic policy decisions of the
state system of the day. Christopher Brassford of the US Army War College sees Clausewitz’s
use of politik in rather broader terms, suggesting that it is used interchangeably to encompass
6
See Patrick Porter’s excellent critique of the ‘cultural turn’ in the study of warfare in Military Orientalism,
London: Hurst & Co., 2009.
7
Lee Harris, ‘Al Qaeda’s Fantasy Ideology: War Without Clausewitz’, Policy Review, no. 114 (August/Sept. 2002),
p.19-36.
8
See Montgomery McFate, ‘The Military Utility of Understanding Adversary Culture’, Joint Force Quarterly, no.
38, (July 2005), p.42-48.
9
Phillip Meilinger, ‘Clausewitz’s Bad Advice’, Armed Forces Journal International, August 2008, p.10

both policy and politics.10
Reminding us that Clausewitz himself suggested that ‘war is not
merely an act of policy, but a true political instrument’, 11
Brassford emphasises not just the
instrumental role of war in state policy but also its role in the fundamental and ubiquitous
struggle over the distribution of power, suggesting that politics ‘is simply the process... by which
power is distributed within a given society.’12
This is all to say that, throughout strategic history,
warring groups may be organised along non-Westphalian, sectarian or ethnic lines and
influenced in the manner of their war-making by their specific cultures, but all use organised
violence to gain or retain some degree of power, and therefore all use war for politically
orientated motives.
It may be that, on the surface, each warring group has culturally influenced objectives, but
almost all have their root motivation in the extension or retention of power in whatever societal
system they inhabit. Colin Gray asserts this point when he suggest that non-state groups may
have ‘prime motives’ of ‘profit, personal salvation, or fun and glory, [but all] function with, if
not principally for, political consequences.’13
As such, the political dimension of non-state use
of violence may be hidden – intentionally or otherwise – behind a veneer of cultural motivation.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the doctrines of al-Qaeda’s chief ideologue and now
leader, Ayman Al-Zawahiri, whose social-religious objectives appear contingent on an
underlying requirement for power and identity as a religious state:
‘[I]f the successful operations against Islam’s enemies and the severe damage
inflicted on them do not serve the ultimate goal of establishing the Muslim nation in
the heart of the Islamic world, they will be nothing more than disturbing acts,
regardless of their magnitude, that could be absorbed and endured...[emphasis
added]’14
Keegan, van Creveld, Meilinger, and those who have subscribed uncritically to the
‘cultural turn’, have therefore failed to make a distinction between policy and politics. In
essence, they see war as ‘apolitical’ because it occurs in the absence of rational state policy, but
by doing so they deny war’s true political dimension in the fundamental distribution of power;
10
Christopher Brassford, ‘John Keegan and the Grand Tradition of Trashing Clausewitz: a Polemic’, War In
History, Vol.1 no.3, 1994, p.326.
11
Clausewitz, p.28.
12
Brassford, p.326.
13
Gray, 2010, p.31.
14
From Ayman Al-Zawahiri, Knights Under the Prophet’s Banner, Quoted in Mahnken, 2010 p.70

they fail to recognise that war can exist as a political activity without the existence of the rational
state and its policies.
GRAND-STRATEGY FOR SECURITY IN WAR AND PEACE
NUCLEAR DETERRENCE AND THE PELOPONNESIAN WAR
War, then, should be considered as a political phenomenon at any level of analysis, and
any strategy to use the military instrument should be guided ultimately by political
considerations. Not only is this true in the use of military instrument but in the threat of its use.
That is to say that, although Clausewitz considered the act of war itself a continuation of policy,
to some theorists this represents too narrow a conception of the political utility of military force.
The advent of the Cold War, nuclear weapons and salience of deterrence theory reinforced the
need for strategy in circumstances of confrontation and not just during times of war. Bernard
Brodie in his landmark work The Absolute Weapon reflected on the Cold War’s somewhat
paradoxical need for strategy and military power to sustain peace, suggesting that ‘Thus far the
chief purpose of our military establishment has been to win wars. From now on its chief purpose
must be to avert them.’15
Given, then, strategy’s now ubiquitous role in both war and peace,
Barry Posen suggests grand-strategy might better be considered ‘a state’s theory about how best
it can “cause” security for itself’ rather than just a theory of victory in conflict.16
The identification of strategy, war and the threat of war as tools serving national security
policy and survival of the sovereign state brings strategy into the milieu of international
relations. This, of course, is a deeply political domain where competition for relative power in
the anarchic ‘international system’ is realised by grand-strategies to address evolving threat
perceptions and the shifting balance of power.17
This is a concept of strategy that Thucydides
was familiar with whilst writing about the Peloponnesian War in the 5th
century B.C. Indeed
Thucydides’ historical perspective is deeply persuasive of the fact that strategy and war are
purely political in purpose where that purpose is national security.
Much of Thucydides’ contribution to our fundamental understanding of war and
strategy’s role in politics and national security comes from his examination of the underlying
15
Bernard Brodie, ‘The Absolute Weapon’ in Strategic Studies: A Reader, Mahnken et al (ed), p.205.
16
Barry Posen, The Sources of Military Doctrine, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984, p.13.
17
The term ‘international system’ is reluctantly used in this context since it implies the existence of a formal
organizing system between states that does not exist. However, it is a term employed by international relations
theorists to suggest that the interaction between states has a certain structure that follows predictable systemic
principles. See Joseph S. Nye, & David A. Welch, Understanding Global Conflict and Cooperation, Longman:
2011, p.42.

systemic causes of war in the Peloponnese. Briefly, according to Thucydides, within the bipolar
Hellenic system of the time, Athens was in the ascendency in territorial, economic and military
terms relative to the extant hegemon, Sparta, which found itself in relative decline. Spartan fears
for their security in the face of this imminent power transition prompted them to take preventive
action against Athens before the balance of power tipped against them.18
A Spartan strategy of
war was thus, in Thucydides’ mind, a perfectly rational political act. Moreover, because of the
fortifications surrounding Athenian cities, the Spartan leadership recognised that decisive battle
would likely take place at sea where the Athenians held a 3:1 advantage.19
With this in mind, the
preparations for war proposed by the Spartan king Archidamus revealed a grasp of longer-term
grand-strategy and political manoeuvring that Henry Kissinger might have been proud of: 20
‘We should not yet take up arms, but should first send envoys to complain, giving
no unambiguous indication either of war or of acquiescence, and in the meantime
we should make our own preparations. We should look to acquire further allies...
who can supplement our financial resources.
‘It may well be that that they [the Athenians] will be more inclined to hold back
when they can see our preparations and a diplomatic policy giving the same
signals...’21
This small excerpt alone demonstrates a concert of alliance building, deterrence through overt
military preparation and coercive diplomacy with the objective of checking Athenian growth
without resorting to military action – grand-strategy indeed. Moreover, Archidamus clearly
appreciated that if military action became necessary, the Spartan navy at the time did not have
the means to achieve decisive victory; only a diplomatic approach to garner allied military and
economic support in order to build a large fleet of warships would allow Sparta the means to
fulfil their political objectives.
From Thucyides, it is clear that the use of war as a tool in Spartan grand-strategy was
based on a rational calculus. The same, however, was true of the Athenians. Intent on
maintaining the status quo (that is the extant ascendancy of Athens relative to Sparta), the
18
Thucydides, ‘Book I, 23’, The Peloponnesian War, trans. Martin Hammond, Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2009, p.13
19
P.J. Rhodes, ‘Introduction’, in The Peloponnesian War, trans. Martin Hammond, Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2009, p.xv.
20
Thucydides, ‘Book I, 80-86’, p.40-42.
21
Both quoted in Thucydides, ‘Book I, 82’, p.40-41.

Athenian leadership under Pericles developed a strategy that recognised that decisive victory
over the Spartans was not necessary. Instead, the Athenians merely sought to prevent their own
defeat at the hands of Sparta – a subtle difference. As such, Periclean grand-strategy sought to
avoid a decisive land battle with the stronger Spartan army but instead chose to protect its vital
interests in the city, giving up land in Attica to the Spartans if required but looking to eventually
exhaust them by naval blockade and confrontation at sea where the Athenians held the tactical
advantage. This, the Athenians hoped, would persuade the Spartan’s that the cost of victory
would be too great and they would surrender their unlimited ambitions of total victory. In
Pericles’ words:
‘We should abandon our land and our homes, and safeguard the sea and the city.
We must not, through anger at losing land and homes, join battle with the greatly
superior forces of the Peloponnesians.’22
As politically rational as Archidamus’ approach was, Pericles’ strategy has the additional quality
of being so apparently contrary to the prevailing hoplite cultural ethos of ‘the glory of war’
depicted by Homer in his Iliad. Allowing the Spartans to ravage the Athenian lands and homes
of Attica by retreating to the fortifications of Athens, and avoiding pitched battles against the
stronger Spartan force may all be acceptably ‘post heroic’23
in modern strategic parlance, but in
the context of the 5th
century B.C., where the epitome of honourable battle was open
confrontation between hoplite phalanxes, it might have seemed somewhat cowardly.24
By
bucking the cultural norm where glory and honour were motivation enough to confront the
enemy in decisive battle, Periclean strategy demonstrates that when war and rational decisions of
national security are combined, then cultural influences become subordinate to those of state
national interest – once again the burden of proof suggests that war utilised by strategy is a
political and not cultural action and has been throughout strategic history.
22
Thucydides, ‘Book I, 143’, p.71.
23
See Edward N. Luttwak, ‘Towards Post-Heroic Warfare’, Foreign Affairs, vol.74, no.3. p.109-122.
24
Athanassios G. Platias, , Constantinos Koliopoulos, Thucydides on Strategy, London: Hurst & Co., 2010, p.47.

STRATEGY – THE PERILS OF CONCEPTUAL FAILURE
(1. Overambitious Policy)
Strategy, at any level of analysis, is about the orchestration of means to meet political
ends. Strategy may be considered broken either when it fails to coordinate the available means
in a coherent and appropriate manner commensurate with meeting those objectives, or when
those objectives are out of reach of the available means. Surprisingly, considering the reasoned
political calculus for strategy in Athens and Sparta described earlier, both city-states were
eventually guilty of failures of strategy that were born of a failure to grasp this crucial functional
concept. The patience and guile of the Spartan king Archidamus was left for nought as the
Spartan assembly instead followed the entreaties of the belligerent and misguided Sthenelaidas
who advocated immediate war.25
Without time to build the alliances and fleet of warships that
Archidamus’ strategy espoused, Sparta did not have the means to stand-up to the successful
campaign of naval attrition waged by Athens. Eventually, Sparta had little choice but to accept
armistice and the prospect of Athenian hegemony. However, hubris and a failure to match
means to ends eventually got the better of Athens too as the Athenian assembly, following
armistice with Sparta, chose to abandon Pericles’ strategy of limited aims and opted instead for a
campaign of territorial aggrandizement. The subsequent far-flung Athenian expedition to
conquer Sicily led to an overextension of their military forces leaving Athens itself vulnerable to
renewed Spartan attacks. Indeed, the Spartan state was able to reverse the terms of armistice,
conquer Athens and impose its regional hegemony once more.26
Of course, the perils of overoptimistic political ambition and a failure to allocate the
resources required of any policy are particularly germane when one considers the criticism
levelled at the UK government for under-resourcing the overambitious military operation in
Afghanistan’s Helmand region in 2006. In a recent indictment of the UK’s policy to mount the
Helmand operation, one parliamentary report asserted that it was ‘unacceptable that hard pressed
Forces in such a difficult operation as Helmand should have been denied the necessary support
to carry out the Mission from the outset’27
, whilst charges of overextension of the British
military by current operations in Libya also give the lessons learned in the 5th
Century B.C.
contemporary relevance.28
25
Ibid, p.62-63.
26
Ibid.
27
House of Commons Defence Select Committee, Operations In Afghanistan - 4th
Report, 6 July 2011, para. 41.
28
BBC, ‘RAF Stretched by Libya says Second in Command’, BBC News, 21 June 2011.

STRATEGY – THE PERILS OF CONCEPTUAL FAILURE
(2. Military action devoid of political guidance)
Overambitious policy represents one side of strategic failure; military action absent of
any policy or strategy represents the other. Military action unguided by strategy may lead to
tactical or operational success but is unlikely to contribute to the overarching political objectives
of the war thus rendering any tactical success meaningless. This is a familiar criticism of the
German Armies in the two world wars. Colin Gray suggests that the German inability to turn
tactical excellence into strategic success stems from the legacy of Prussian General, Helmuth
von Moltke the elder.29
Moltke was a disciple of Clausewitz and it would be a disservice to deny
his military genius. His emphasis on taking the offensive and the need for efficient and rapid
mobilisation led to quick and decisive military victories against a disorganized French force in
the Franco-Prussian war. As such, his strategic legacy evolved into the tactical successes of
Blitzkrieg in the 20th
century. His flaw, however, was his insistence that ‘strategy works best for
policy, but in its actions is fully independent of policy’.30
As such, Moltke believed that the
decision to go to war was indeed political, in that it was an act of policy, but once war had been
embarked upon, its conduct should remain free of political interference until a rapid and decisive
victory had been achieved. The problem with Moltke’s approach arose when the initial tactical
successes of Blitzkrieg, for example those achieved by the Wehrmacht against the Soviet Union
in 1941, confronted the protracted and defensive character of 20th
century total war. Here,
military action could not bring war to a rapid and decisive conclusion, and the independence of
strategy from politics, and indeed of tactics from strategy, rendered the military campaign
somewhat unreactive and disconnected from shifting political expedients.
But this is not only a criticism of the Imperial German Army and then the Wehrmacht led
by Moltke’s protégés. Of the US conduct of the war in Iraq in 2003, Colin Gray wrote ‘there is a
black hole where American strategy ought to reside’ suggesting that American tactical victories
were not coordinated to address the underlying political conditions required for peace and
stability in the country.31
The same may be true of the recent US led NATO campaign in
Afghanistan. Here, recent criticisms suggest that the prevailing strategy has focussed
excessively on the military defeat of the Taliban rather than a lasting negotiated political
settlement. Former UK Ambassador to the country, Sherard Cowper-Coles, suggests that ‘a
29
Gray, 2010, p.31-2.
30
Helmuth Graf von Moltke, Moltke on the Art of War, ed. Daniel J. Hughes, trans D. Hughes, H. Bell, New York:
Ballantine Books, 1993, p.45.
31
Colin S. Gray, Another Bloody Century,, London: Orion, 2005, p.111.

military focused approach risks making Afghanistan safe not for better governance, but for the
warlords and narco-mafias’, implying that the military effort to provide security for a stable
Afghan state free of al-Qaida might eventually prove worthless and that only a politically guided
strategy can work in the long-term.32
This is an issue we shall return to in chapter three when
examining civil-military relations.
CHAPTER CONCLUSIONS
To conclude this chapter and to anticipate later arguments, it should now be clear that at
all levels of analysis war is truly a political instrument that strategy employs to gain or retain
some element of power. War is, however, more than an isolated act of state policy and should
continue to be guided by political expedients throughout any conflict. So too should any policy
underpinning a strategy be based upon the military and strategic realities of any conflict
otherwise overextension of the available military resources can ultimately result in failure.
Chapter two develops this theme suggesting that strategy exists as an equilibrium of differing
political and military perspectives and considerations. The military, focussed on events on the
battlefield, may see victory principally as the defeat of the enemy, whilst the statesman might
have a broader political purview influenced by diplomatic considerations and the general well
being of the state. Moreover, and perhaps most importantly, any polity must also consider the
feelings of the society it exists to represent and whose consent the state may need as a mandate
to rule. These differing perspectives form the three elements within Clausewitz’s ‘paradoxical
trinity’ – chapter two’s aim is to show that when strategy fails to acknowledge and reconcile the
dynamic relationship and opposing perspectives within this trinity then that strategy may be
critically flawed.
32
Sherard Cowper-Coles, Cables from Kabul, London: HarperCollins, p.288-9.

Theories of Victory 10
Chapter 2
Theories of Victory
War and strategy are political activities, but as chapter one concluded, they are
influenced not only by rational political calculation, but also by the military realities of any
conflict as well as by the feelings of the society for which any war is theoretically being
fought. Only by successfully balancing these perspectives and by achieving a modicum of
support from all angles within this relationship will the state be able to develop a strategy for
war that has any chance of success and ultimately achieves political objectives. The problem,
as this chapter sets-out, is that all too often these differing opinions of how and why the war
should be fought appear irreconcilable. The result of such conflicting theories of victory is
ineffective strategy making and friction that leads to damaged relationships either between the
state and society, or between the civilian leadership and military commanders, either outcome
having important negative consequences for the state and its use of the military instrument.
VICTORY - THE IMPORTANCE OF PERSPECTIVE
In response to receiving congratulations for his victory over the Romans at Heraclea in
280 B.C., King Pyrrhus of Epirus is said to have uttered ‘If we are victorious in one more
battle with the Romans, we shall be utterly ruined’ such were the costs of victory to his city-
state in terms of men and materiel.1
Over two millennia later, on 1st
May 2003, President
George W. Bush stood on the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln and stated
that ‘major combat operations in Iraq have ended’, and that ‘the United States and our allies
have prevailed’.2
Considering that the insurgency in the aftermath of that ‘victory’ cost
another 4,269 American servicemen their lives and left in tatters the international credibility
of American strategy to use preventive-action, one might ask whether victory in Iraq was no
less pyrrhic.3
As political scientist, William Martel puts it: ‘the ferocity of the insurgency and
the cost in lives undermined the nature of that victory’.4
Martel’s pessimism regarding the validity of the declaration of American victory
stems from his belief that ‘the term “victory” is employed reflexively as a synonym for
1
Plutarch, ‘Life of Pyrrhus, (21.9)’.
2
Quoted in William Martel, Victory In War, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007, p.1.
3
Casualty figures up to 1 August 2011, US Department Of Defence.
4
Martel, p.2.

outcomes that align with one’s preferences’.5
As such, Martel, like a number of other
theorists, believes that the term ‘victory’ is largely a subjective judgement dependent on an
arbitrary perspective not necessarily defined by the reasoned and clearly articulated political
objectives that chapter one suggests should be the underpinning of all strategy and war. In
the case of President Bush’s declaration of victory, his language implied that success was
measured largely in terms of military effectiveness and the battlefield defeat of Iraqi forces:
‘the battle of Iraq is one victory in a war on terror.’6
The implication in this example is that
the strategy contingent on this vision of victory failed to address longer-term political
objectives of a secure Iraqi state in the aftermath of the collapse of Saddam Hussein’s regime,
a theory that is supported when one considers the reactive nature of post-conflict
reconstruction that occurred apparently as an afterthought.7
That is to say, President Bush’s
declaration of victory was more than just an element of rhetoric for domestic consumption; it
bellied a lack of conceptual clarity where the statesman focussed his vision of victory purely
in military terms, which in turn led to an inadequate strategy that Hew Strachan suggests ‘was
devoid of strategic insight or of political context’ and had ‘no structure for the post-conflict
phase of occupation.’8
Martel attempts to provide an organising framework with which to analyse the
concept of victory and explain such failures. Within this framework, victory – that is when
the outcome of events aligns with ones subjective preferences – exists on three levels: the
tactical, political-military and grand-strategic level.9
Depending on the level an individual is
judging the outcome of events from dictates on whether they see those events corresponding
to victory. Critically, victory on one level does not constitute victory at the next.
Tactical victory perhaps represents the classical vision of victory. The Roman
historian and scholar, Titius Livius (Livy), perceived victory as encompassing a range of
successes but all involved defeat of the enemy force militarily, either by decisive victory on
the battlefield (when he talks of ‘a famous victory...with cavalry’), to deterring the enemy
from engaging in battle in the first place (‘as good as victory – the admission, namely that
[Hannibal] was running away and refusing battle’).10
This emphasis on the tactical nature of
5
Ibid.
6
Quoted in Martel, p.1
7
See Hew Strachan, ‘Making Strategy: Civil-military Relations after Iraq’, Survival, vol.4, no.3 Autumn 2006,
p.59.
8
Ibid.
9
Martel, p.94-103.
10
Quoted in Martel, p.20.

victory also appears in Clausewitz’s writings. His chapter on ‘the Culminating Point of
Victory’ in On War focuses almost exclusively on the practical importance of bringing
military strength to bear on an enemy, where ‘victory normally results from the superiority of
one side.’11
This, as we saw in chapter one, was the concept of victory that Moltke the elder
adopted, believing that success stemmed from the annihilation of the enemy through
overwhelming force.
Yet Clausewitz’s appreciation of war serving political objectives ensured that,
indirectly, he understood victory to be more than mere annihilation of the enemy. Indeed, by
writing that ‘it is not possible in every war for the victor to overthrow his enemy completely’
Clausewitz asserts that winning the war is not always a matter of decisive military defeat of
the enemy.12
Instead, simply waging war, or as we saw in chapter one, merely threatening it,
could be force enough to coerce the will of an enemy into accepting overall political
conditions without having to destroy them. This use of the military instrument for political
ends would yield military-political victory. In his theoretical framework this is Martel’s
second level of victory, which he suggests is ‘the desire of policymakers to translate military
intervention into improvements in the political environment.’ Victory at this level recognises
the coercive effect of force or the threat of use of force to achieve political ends - it does not
always mean military defeat of the enemy. The Athenians recognised this during the
Peloponnesian War where their strategy of attrition aimed not at defeating the Spartans, but
by doing enough to coerce them into accepting the status quo by making the cost of war too
great for the Spartan state to bear. A more recent example was the coercion of President
Milosevic of Serbia to desist persecution of Kosovar Albanians in 1999 without outright
defeat of the Serbian armed forces.
Above the military-political level in Martel’s theory of victory sits the grand-strategic
level of victory, which he describes as the ‘outcomes of wars in which the state defeats the
economic, political, and military sources of power of another state.’13
The inference here is
that grand-strategic victory stems from grand-strategy where victory is obtained by mobilising
all instruments of state power and seeks total defeat of the enemy state and a comprehensive
change in the political relationship between the victor and vanquished. This would be victory
encapsulated by the objective of total war. But victory at this level must be qualified by the
11
Clausewitz, p.209.
12
Ibid.
13
Martel, p.98.

extreme costs of total war. Strategic theorist Basil Liddell Hart clearly anticipated the
moderating effect that total war had on the concept of victory, echoing the words of King
Pyrrhus, where ‘Victory is not an end in itself. It is worse than useless if the end of the war
finds you so exhausted that you are defeated in peace’.14
Apropos war’s political dimension,
Liddell Hart supposed that ‘it is the statesmen’s responsibility... to look beyond the military
victory, and to ensure that the steps taken for this purpose do not overstrain the fabric of the
nation or damage its future’.15
This is all to say that in practical terms, to the military commander, decisive battlefield
victory through combat may be all-important,16
but to the politician this might be a sterile
victory if it cannot be translated into political gain or if the costs of that military victory are so
great as to damage the state and threaten its well being. Conversely, the tactical commander
may suffer huge losses and be defeated on the battlefield, but if the political objectives of the
action are sufficiently limited – perhaps only to show sufficient strength to prevent the
collapse of the ruling regime – then victory at the strategic level is still possible. For instance,
the survival of Iraqi Ba’athist regime following military defeat in the first Gulf War would
certainly have been seen as a strategic victory to Saddam Hussein, whilst the continued
regional threat from an unstable Iraqi regime with a precedent for developing weapons of
mass destruction may be considered a strategic failure for the US led coalition. Of the third
perspective of victory that will shape strategy – society’s perspective - this is far harder to
characterise, for it may shift as war goes on. Perhaps in the early phases of war, when the
motives to fight and the presence of a threat are clear, then populist visions of tactical victory
and defeat of the enemy prevail, but as war endures and costs rise, society’s perspective may
change to one more akin to political-military victory where more limited objectives and
military withdrawal with honour are preferred. We shall encounter the fickle nature of public
support a little later. For the moment, however, it should be quite clear that amongst the
paradoxical trinity, the members of which all have a stake in shaping strategy, victory could
mean quite different things. As the following examples illustrate, strategic failure occurs
when these perspective become irreconcilable and fractures in the relationships amongst the
members of the trinity develop as a result.
14
Basil H. Liddell Hart, Thoughts on War, London: Spellmount, p.47.
15
Quoted in Martel, p.63.
16
The psychological explanation of why this might be so is beyond the scope of this dissertation. For an account
of why the military mind might see victory purely as a battlefield event see Norman Dixon’s classic, On the
Psychology of Military Incompetence.

PUBLIC PERCEPTIONS AT VARIANCE WITH THE STATE
TET OFFENSIVE - 1968
The North Vietnamese Tet offensive of 1968 was a surprise attack against South
Vietnamese and American military units with the North’s aim of taking back some initiative
for their floundering military campaign. The offensive yielded some initial military success
with American forces besieged at Khe San and Hue. Eventually, however, the North’s
offensive momentum stagnated and American forces were able to counter-attack and deliver a
crushing tactical defeat. Yet despite decisive military victory, the outcome of the Tet
offensive was seen as a strategic failure in the American war effort. In the month before Tet,
the US commander in Vietnam, General Westmoreland, had publicly reassured the American
public that the United States was winning the war, that ‘there is light at the end of the
tunnel’.17
The surprise resurgence of the North during Tet, and the subsequent increase in
American casualties, critically destroyed credibility in General Westmoreland’s claims and in
the government’s Vietnam policy as a whole. Meanwhile, despite his forces being eventually
annihilated at the tactical level, Ho Chi Minh seized the moment and turned defeat into a
strategic victory. Through propaganda portraying the North Vietnamese as courageous
freedom fighters set upon brutally at the hands of a belligerent United States, Ho successfully
sought to shift American public opinion against the war.18
The outcome of the Tet offensive is illustrative of a more general failure by the
American government to reconcile the divergent visions of victory held by the American
people and that of the US administration. Martel suggests that the American public has
developed a stereotyped and somewhat one-dimensional vision of decisive and honourable
victory that was born of the experiences of the two World Wars and American Civil War. He
characterises this vision of victory as a set of six criteria against which the American psyche
judges victory. These criteria are:19
1. Defeat the enemy military forces and its economic infrastructure.
2. Control the enemy state.
3. Post-war political and governmental reform of the defeated state.
17
Quoted in Thomas X. Hammes, The Sling and the Stone, St. Paul: Zenith Press, 2004, p.72.
18
Ibid, p.66.
19
Martel, p.137-147.

4. Rebuild the economy and the infrastructure of the defeated state.
5. Realign the defeated state’s foreign policy.
6. Build a new strategic relationship with the defeated state.
These criteria have their roots in conceptions of total and unconditional surrender
against a state-based adversary followed by a period of post-war reconstruction and
realignment along the lines of Marshall Plan aid and the integration of West Germany into
NATO following the Second World War. Yet the strategic context at the height of the Cold
War rendered this vision of victory as obsolete. The threat of nuclear confrontation made the
conception of benefit and advantage through total victory a non sequitur to war; instead
deterrence and war avoidance were the preferred strategic options rather than mutually
assured destruction. As such any attempt to ‘win’ through military defeat of the enemy state
became irrational and served no political gain, indeed it risked unimaginable costs for the
‘victor’. It was this context that Martel argues stymied American efforts in Vietnam,
suggesting that, ‘The United States could not marshal the political will to use the instruments
of power at its disposal to achieve victory because it was stalemated by the risks of nuclear
war with North Vietnam’s sponsors, the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China’.20
In many ways, Cohen corroborates this interpretation, suggesting that President
Johnson and Secretary of State Robert McNamara limited American strategy to one of
restrained escalation and political signalling (as McNamara had done during the Cuban
missile crisis) fearing that the overtly offensive strategy that the military chiefs requested
would incur Chinese or Soviet involvement.21
As such, any attempt to gain the kind of
success the American public would perceive as victory, according to the criteria of
unconditional surrender, were too dangerous to contemplate. That the American government
failed to communicate and reconcile this strategic reality against the expectations of the
American public, who held artificially high expectations of what victory would look like,
meant that when eventually the strategic realities did become apparent, public support
plummeted. That public expectations were perpetuated through official pledges to protect
South Vietnamese independence by first Kennedy and then Johnson administrations, as well
as the unfounded optimism of General Westmoreland, meant that when realities did become
apparent, the public’s trust in its policy makers was irrevocably damaged and strategy was
20
Ibid, p.128
21
Cohen, p.176.

hamstrung as a consequence.22
For example, the opposition to the war that besieged President
Johnson after the Tet offensive meant that, for political reasons, he could not begin to
entertain the subsequent request for more troops from his military Chiefs of Staff, despite the
perceived military necessity.23
Moreover, President Johnson felt that the situation in Vietnam
left his position as President untenable; he elected not to stand as the Democrat nominee at
the subsequent election, which was won in any case by the Republican, Richard Nixon.
Certainly, the importance of the public’s theory of victory and the failure of the government
to shape public perceptions were critical in the failure of what was already a flawed strategy
in Vietnam,
Bartholomees points to the importance of public perception when it comes to
developing objectives and strategies for victory today. He even goes so far as to suggesting
that, in America at least, it is more important than the opinions of the political and military
elites not to mention that of allied governments.24
One need only look at he evolution of
American strategy in Afghanistan to understand Bartholomees’ point. A Pew Research
Centre poll in May 2011 suggested that the majority of American’s (56 per cent) believed that
US troops should be withdrawn from Afghanistan as soon as possible,25
leading some to
suggest that this war weariness, born from the enduring human and financial cost that post-
conflict reconstruction has exacted on US forces, has prompted President Obama to begin a
schedule of troop withdrawals that is more rapid than his military chiefs would have
otherwise advised.26
Those who advocate that Obama does indeed adopt a strategy of
‘declare victory and get out’ underline the importance of bowing to public perception in
developing strategy.27
Once again, Bartholomees is succinct and accurate when he says ‘at
the strategic level, victory and defeat can be as much issues of public perception and even
partisan politics as they are of battlefield achievement.’28
22
Martel, p.126.
23
H.R. McMaster, Dereliction of Duty, New York: HarperCollins, 1997, p.333.
24
J. Boone Bartholomees,’A Theory of Victory’, Paramaters, Summer 2008, p.31.
25
Pew Research Center, 3 May 2011.
26
‘Afghanistan drawdown risky, US Joint Chief Says’, BBC News, 23 June 2011.
27
Toby Harnden, ‘Analysis: Barack Obama's slow motion strategy of 'declare victory and get out' of
Afghanistan’, The Telegraph, 22 June 2011. The origins of the ‘declare victory and get out’ suggestion come
from a misquoting of Senator George Aiken in 1966 who proposed that US forces be extricated from Vietnam
having fallen short of the strategic goal of maintaining South Vietnamese independence but having successfully
communicated resolve against Communism. See Richard Eder, ‘Aiken Suggests U.S. Say It Has Won the
War.’ New York Times. 20 October, 1966, p. 1, 16.
28
Bartholomees, p.32.

So too, the British experience of strategy making in Afghanistan is illustrative of the
fragility of the dynamic relationship between society, the state and the military. Successive
governments throughout the decade since British military forces became involved have
struggled to shape public perception and retain support for the mission. Tony Blair, stressing
the importance of victory in Afghanistan to British security, said in 2006 ‘this extraordinary
desert [of Afghanistan] is where the future of world security in the early twenty-first century
is going to be played out’, yet the distance of the conflict from British shores and limited
credible evidence conflating military success against the Taliban with improved homeland
security has made maintaining public support a difficult task.29
Mike Gapes, the chairman of
the Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee in 2009, acknowledged as much, telling the
Times newspaper that ‘People see men and women being killed for something, but they are
not sure why they are being killed.’30
The Select Committee concluded that continued public
support for the Afghan mission was at risk of dwindling further in the absence of any clear
explanation of purpose by the government. Indeed, recent polling by the Ministry of Defence
suggests that in March 2010 only 52 per cent of the UK population supported the mission and
41 per cent directly opposed it.31
To date, considering that the security benefits of the
Afghanistan campaign may be intangible to the public, and with 377 British personnel dead32
as well as total costs to the exchequer of some £14 billion,33
it is unsurprising that public
support for the mission is fragile and hence why Prime Minister David Cameron is keen to
offer voters signs of a successful end-game and a non-negotiable withdrawal of troops that
would see British combat operations in Afghanistan end in 2015 – Edmund Burke’s assertion
where ‘no war can be long carried on against the will of the people’ is apposite when
considering the relevance of society’s perspective in influencing strategy.34
This, as much as we would wish strategy to focus on guaranteeing military success
and national security interests, appears to be an unavoidable aspect of democratic realpolitik,
that is to say it is the statesman’s responsibility to see the broader picture and dictate strategy
in the state’s best interests at home and abroad even when this strategy appears at odds with
29
Quoted in Jeremy Black, Defence: Policy Issues for a New Government, London: The Social Affairs Unit,
p.99.
30
Deborah Haynes, ‘Tell us why we're in Afghanistan, MPs say’, The Times, 3 August 2009.
31
Report, para. 14, 6 July 2011.
32
Ministry of Defence, Operations in Afghanistan: British Fatalities, 18 July 2011.
33
Costs to 31 March 2011, see Operations in Afghanistan – 4th
Report, Para 107.
34
Edmund Burke, The Works of The Right Honorable Edmund Burke, Vol. V, Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press, p.283.

the concept of military victory. To those involved in fighting wars, this may appear craven, to
political scientists like Peter Feaver, it is simply a matter of democratic theory where only the
civilian leadership, as the representative of society as whole, is in a place to act on behalf of
the broader interests and wishes of the society it represents; as Feaver suggests: ‘even if the
military is best able to identify the threat and appropriate response to that threat ... only the
civilian can set the level of acceptable risk for society.’35
Moreover, we might also remind
ourselves that, even in Clausewitz’s ‘paradoxical trinity’ we see recognition that the state
conducting a strategy that failed to address concerns of the people ‘would conflict with reality
to such an extent that... it would be useless.’36
It appears an unavoidable truth that public
opinion, fickle though it may be, shapes strategy.
MILITARY VICTORY VERSUS THE NEED FOR POLITICAL COERCION
THE CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS - 1962
The reflection of political primacy over military concerns in strategy making stems
not only from the politician’s need to consider the wishes of society, but of a broader political
understanding that the military option is not always the most appropriate guarantor of a state’s
security. Consider the US reaction to the deployment of Soviet nuclear weapons to Cuba in
1962.37
Fundamentally, the civilian approach, characterised by Defence Secretary Robert
McNamara, feared the unintended consequences of escalation and therefore favoured a
strategy of political signalling rather than of outright force.38
The resulting blockade of
Soviet shipping, combined with unequivocal signs of military preparation and diplomatic
signals of intent to raise the stakes was the epitome of Thomas Schelling’s ‘brinksmanship’ in
that it left the Soviets fearful that they may have started an uncontrollable escalatory chain
that would ultimately see them come off worst;39
the Soviets would have to withdraw their
missiles or risk local military confrontation and eventually even nuclear exchange and their
35
Peter D. Feaver, Armed Servants, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005, p.6.
36
Clausewitz, p.31.
37
For a history of the background to and events during the crisis, see Michael Dobbs, One Minute to Midnight,
London: Random house, 2008. See also McMaster, p.24-41.
38
Kennedy understood that any strategy must balance caution with the need to show resolve, both to the Soviets
and to the US electorate in view of impending Presidential mid-term elections and with memories of the Bay of
Pigs debacle still in recent memory.
39
Thomas Schelling, Arms and Influence, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008, p.99.

own annihilation at the hands of superior American nuclear capabilities.40
For the American
military leadership, however, this strategy of political signalling rather than outright force
failed to address the underlying problem of having a Soviet proxy only ninety miles from the
US mainland. The military chiefs were vociferous in the need for an approach that not only
saw the removal of the Soviet missiles but also fulfilled the objectives of Operation
Mongoose – the on-going covert mission to remove Castro from power. A military
conclusion through airstrike and invasion would satisfy both objectives. Kennedy, however,
saw the chiefs’ insistence on the use of decisive force as politically naïve and dangerous, and
began excluding their input from his deliberations.41
For the political leadership, averting nuclear escalation and the removal of the Soviet
missiles from Cuba was a ‘victory’. For the military, however, the lack of decisive force to
remove all Soviet forces and Castro from Cuba, combined with the tacit agreement by the
Kennedy administration to remove American Jupiter nuclear missiles from Europe in
exchange for the withdrawal of the Soviet missiles, represented little more than appeasement.
Chief of the Air Force, General Curtis LeMay even went so far as to say that it represented
‘the greatest defeat in our history’.42
It is apparent that between the civilian and the military
leadership there was no common appreciation of the objective of the use of military force,
where the military failed to understand that the need to exercise discretion and avoid
escalation were more important than the need to use decisive force. These irreconcilable
visions of what victory meant poisoned the relationship between the civilian and military
establishment. The Kennedy administration began side-lining the military officers who had
proven themselves obstacles to reasoned deliberation during the crisis, and as US Army
General, H.R. McMaster suggests, ‘foreshadowed what would become a major obstacle to
strategy for the Vietnam War.’43
CHAPTER CONCLUSIONS
This chapter has shown that victory is an assessment that is guided not by objective
criteria but by how the consequences of battle are subjectively perceived relative to an
individual’s perspective. Tactical success may be a victory to the military commander, but
40
Graham Allison and Peter Zelikow, The Essence of Decision, 2nd
Edition, New York: Longman, 1999
41
McMaster, p.28.
42
Quoted in McMaster, p.29.
43
McMaster, p29.

unless that victory has positive political benefits, then to the broader concerns of the
statesman it may mean defeat. Victory may be positive through defeat of the enemy, or it
may be negative where defeat by the enemy is simply avoided; again it is the political and not
military consequences of each scenario that might be considered the ultimate arbiter of
whether victory has been attained, for war is ultimately a political activity. As such,
Clausewitz’s paradoxical trinity has proved instructive where the state battles to balance
visions of victory of the people whom the state represents, and of the military who fight for
the state. This balancing act is perhaps the crux of successful strategy making, and we have
seen that in examples where friction exists between the civilian leadership and the military
commander, strategy making is hindered. Chapter three examines the nature of this
relationship, suggesting that two-way dialogue underpinned by strong civilian leadership is a
prerequisite of successful strategy making and must be the final word on policy.

Civil-Military Relations 21
Chapter 3
Civil–Military Relations
Politics, as discussed in chapter one, is an activity focussed on the manipulation and
distribution of power. Political philosophers since Plato have understood politics as a human
activity that intrinsically involves a zero-sum conflict where one man’s gain in power is
almost certainly another man’s loss.1
Politics must therefore involve an element of coercion
where the will of one actor is forced upon another against their wishes. Military power, as we
have seen, is one such instrument of coercion. But there is an inherent weakness in this
theory. Once the coercive power of the military has been created, its strength becomes a
threat to the state that it is meant to serve, either through a direct challenge to the state’s
authority by military coup or by autonomously waging war irrespective of the state’s wider
interests and expressed will, thereby destroying the state’s monopoly on the use of force as
well as draining its resources.2
The state is therefore faced with a dilemma: the need to develop a military strong
enough to do its will, whilst generating a relationship where the military does not wield its
power against the state that created it. This dilemma may be less acute in absolute
monarchies like that under Frederick the Great, or in totalitarian states under a military
dictator like Hitler, where the military leader also heads the state, negating any conflict of
interests between the two. For democracies, however, those who govern represent the will of
the civilian population and therefore power is placed in the hands of civilian political agents
as an extension of the electorate as a whole. Political scientist, Peter Fever, sums up this
basic tenet of democratic theory by reminding us that ‘the governed must govern.’3
This complicates the matter as we saw in chapter two, for in war the state may have to
reconcile differing perceptions of victory between society and the military whilst nurturing its
relationships with both to maintain political support and military obedience; if either society
or the military were to turn against the civilian leadership then at best it would mean a change
of government by the ballot box, at worst by military coup. Chapter two showed how the
democratic state’s relationship with the electorate is a matter of public perception – ensuring
that military action is seen to have positive benefits for the state, most likely in terms of
1
Feaver, p.4.
2
Ibid, p.4-5.
3
Feaver, p.5.

securing its national interests at home or abroad. This chapter deals with the fragile
relationship between the civilian leadership and the military, asking how the state can
continue to command obedience when the military’s perception of victory may be at odds
with that of their political leadership. More importantly, this chapter looks at the
consequences for successful strategy-making when the civil-military relationship breaks
down.
HUNTINGTON’S MODEL OF CIVIL-MILITARY RELATIONS -
OBJECTIVE CONTROL
In terms of institutional theory, Samuel Huntington’s model of civil-military relations
appears to remain the dominant explanatory paradigm, with some theorists referring to it as
the ‘normal’ theory of civil-military relations.4
Outlined first in his 1957 book The Soldier
and the State, Huntington’s model asserts that the key to successful civil-military relations is
‘objective control’ of the military by the state. This involved ‘the recognition [by the state] of
autonomous military professionalism’, i.e. allowing the military to do their job and conduct
military operations as they see fit for overall political objectives but without civilian
interference. 5
In theory, this would lead to voluntary subordination by the military, allowing
for a large and capable military instrument but rendering it ‘politically sterile and neutral.’6
The antithesis of objective control Huntington called subjective control. This
involved the civilianization of the military’s leadership, or as Eliot Cohen suggests,
‘controlling it from within with transplanted civilian elites.’7
The problem with subjective
control, either by a civilian elite within the military or alternatively by politicised military
leadership, is that it failed to create a distinct boundary between state and military. The
military instrument could therefore become a theoretical threat to the democratic state, armed
with the political awareness and military clout to challenge the authority of the civilian
leadership that created it in the first place. The only solution would be to either emasculate
the power of the military instrument, the consequences of which would be detrimental to the
security of the state, or by depoliticising the military and allowing it autonomy to operate in
the military domain, i.e. by undertaking objective control. As such, in the context of an
4
See Cohen, p.4-8
5
Samuel Huntington, The Soldier and the State, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985, p.83.
6
Ibid, p.84.
7
Cohen, p.227.

existential threat from the Soviet Union during the Cold War, Huntington posited that only
the freedom associated with objective control would allow for the development of a strong
American military that was capable of defeating the threat whilst preventing the military
leadership from questioning overall civilian control.8
VIETNAM
THE PERILS OF CIVILIAN INTERFERENCE?
In many ways, the American experience in the war in Vietnam might have helped
vindicate Huntington’s preference for objective control. As we saw in chapter two, the legacy
of President Kennedy’s experience during the Cuban missile crisis had left President Johnson
mistrustful of his military chiefs, favouring instead the counsel of Robert McNamara and his
coterie of civilian ‘Whiz Kids’.9
Johnson and his team were therefore left with a civil-
military relationship that did not respect military professionalism and held insufficient trust to
allow the military any autonomy. The result of this mistrust was the counter-productive
civilian involvement in the detail of military matters during the Vietnam War. As examples,
Eliot Cohen points to the drawn out air-campaign that lacked decisive effect because Johnson
felt it necessary to personally approve most of the targets submitted by the Joint Chiefs of
Staff, whilst the exclusion from bombing (for political motives) of urban areas in the north
stymied the coercive effectiveness of American air power.10
As such, the perceived wisdom
that grew from the American flaws in strategy in Vietnam was that an arrogant and hubristic
civilian leadership, lacking trust in their military advisors, had become overinvolved in the
running of the war, excessively politicising American involvement and failing to let the
military do their job, the result of which was strategic failure.11
This wisdom suggests that,
had the US military been afforded autonomy under objective control then a more effective
military strategy might have produced strategic success. As we shall see later, this is a
questionable assumption, but dominance of this perspective at the time galvanised the
8
Feaver, p.16-53.
9
See McMaster, p.19. The term ‘Whiz Kids’ was a popular and occasionally pejorative term for McNamara’s
team of young civilian advisers that came to government from think tanks like the RAND Corporation. They
placed a great deal of emphasis on systems and quantitative analysis and were suspicious of seasoned military
judgment when it came to strategy-making.
10
Cohen, p.176.
11
Ibid, p.175. This perceived wisdom is encapsulated in McMasters’ Dereliction of Duty.

American military and political establishments to revise the nature of their relationship,
leading to a reassertion of respect for military autonomy that the Huntington model espoused.
THE 1991 GULF WAR TO AFGHANISTAN TODAY
THE PERILS OF MILITARY AUTONOMY
Perhaps the clearest articulation of the nature of the revised relationship came from the
former US Secretary of Defence, Casper Weinberger. The Weinberger doctrine as it became
known, advocated military commitments only when there were unambiguous threats to
national security and only when there were clearly defined political and military objectives
and overwhelming military force to ensure success.12
Colin Powel carried this doctrine into
practice during his the first Gulf War in 1991 during which he served as the Chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff. Powell’s apparently successful insistence on clear objectives and the
authority to use overwhelming military force to achieve those objectives putatively put the
painful memories of civilian interference in Vietnam to rest. President George Bush Senior
reflecting, ‘by God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome for once and for all.’13
Yet the
newfound relationship between Bush and Powell perhaps signalled an unhealthy swing
towards excessive military power.
Powell’s power had its origins in the Goldwater-Nichols Department of Defence
Reorganization Act of 1986. This gave the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff enhanced
bureaucratic influence to force military concerns onto the political agenda.14
Combined with
a determination of the civilian leadership not to ignore military advise as they had in Vietnam,
Powell’s influence during the Gulf War became significant. President Bush Senior reflecting
on his relationship with Powell shows his almost unquestioning acceptance of Powell’s
military counsel, haunted as he obviously was by his memories of Vietnam:
‘[General Powell...] ever the professional... sought to ensure that there were
sufficient troops for what ever option I wanted, and then the freedom of action to
12
Black, p.8, Cohen, p.187.
13
Quoted in Cohen, p.199.
14
The Goldwater Nicholls Act sought to limit the power of the individual Service Chiefs following the
impediments that inter-service rivalries had caused to coherent strategy making in the Vietnam War as well as in
the failed Beirut intervention of 1982 and the invasion of Grenada in 1983. At the same time, the Act gave
unprecedented power to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff as the sole military adviser to the President as
well as a place on the National Security Council. See Strachan, 2006, p.64.

do the job once the political decision had been made. I was determined that our
military would have both. I did not want to repeat the problems of Vietnam...
where the political leadership meddled with military operations.’15
The apparent trust and autonomy that Powell, and by extension the military
organisation as a whole, had developed during the Gulf War may have reflected a productive
and successful return to ‘normal’ civil-military relations, but for some political scientists the
level of decision-making authority it lent to the military was a step too far. Eliot Cohen
points to numerous examples during the Gulf War when abdication of politically oriented
decisions by the civilian leadership to Powell and the military leadership cost dearly. Perhaps
most crucially was the deeply flawed recommendation by Powell to call a halt to the war
before the appropriate strategic conditions for victory had been achieved, i.e. before Saddam
Hussein’s military capabilities had been sufficiently degraded to critically weaken his regime.
Powell’s ill-considered recommendation and President Bush’s unquestioning acceptance led
to the premature termination of the conflict where, having first failed to secure the exits from
Kuwait, units of the Iraqi Republican Guard were allowed to escape and prop up Saddam
Hussein’s regime for years after the war.16
Powell’s influence had apparently trumped
political reason rendering one of the implicit strategic objectives of the campaign beyond
reach. Moreover, Powell’s recommendation was based on his appreciation of the political
situation rather than on military judgement. Assessing – incorrectly as it happened - that the
political ramifications of continuing the offensive against retreating Iraqi forces would
damage the coalition’s international legitimacy, Powell had transcended the boundary
between military and political responsibility, threatening the integrity of civilian control as
well as the efficacy of the prevailing strategy. 17
Elements of this apparent subservience of political decision making to an assertive
military institution are also evident in the current British experience in Afghanistan. The
former British ambassador to the country, Sherard Cowper-Coles, recently argued that the
dominance of military decision-making in the development of strategy had supplanted the
primacy of political reasoning, allowing military solutions to prevail rather than potentially
more suitable political approaches.18
Suggesting that the prevailing convention where it has
15
George H. W. Bush, & Brent Scowcroft, A World Transformed, New York: Random House, 1998, p.354.
16
Cohen, p.195.
17
Ibid.
18
See Sherard Cowper-Coles, 2011.

become ‘awkward and unpatriotic’ to question the military’s authority, Cowper-Coles argues
that a relationship has developed where politicians and civil servants had become ‘much more
deferential’ to military decision-making.19
In turn, this had led to an inchoate strategy that
focussed on military operations and a surge of troop numbers into the Helmand region
‘regardless of whether there was in place a credible political strategy to harvest the success
the military might achieve.’20
There are also those who believe that this pernicious military assertiveness reaches
beyond a domineering influence in developing strategy, but now publicly challenges the
primacy of government policy. Citing Colin Powell’s very public criticisms of government
policy on everything from intervention in Bosnia to homosexuals in the American military,
historian, Russell Weigley asserts that Powell’s opinions were ‘much more political than
professional’21
and left the military’s acceptance of civilian supremacy precarious.22
Another
military historian, Richard H. Kohn, suggests that the problem of an ‘out-of-control’ US
military was compounded by the election of President Clinton whom he described as ‘weak
and vacillating’. For Kohn, the growing assertiveness of the Joint Chiefs of Staff combined
with a weak President and ineffectual Secretary of Defence (Les Aspin) effectively allowed
the military to dictate policy to the civilian administration.23
Again, the same might be
evident amongst senior officers in the British military. In 2006 General Sir Richard Dannatt,
then head of the British Army, spoke publicly in the media of his concerns regarding the
overstretch of UK forces and questioned the continued relevance of UK forces in Iraq.24
More recently, commenting on the UK government’s clearly stated policy to end combat
operations in Afghanistan by 2015, the current Chief of the British Army, General Sir Peter
Wall, suggested that the 2015 deadline might be subject to revision.25
This and other public
criticisms of government policy by the military forced an apparently exasperated Prime
Minister David Cameron to ask of his military chiefs, ‘you do the fighting - I’ll do the
talking.’26
19
Ibid, p.280.
20
Ibid, p.292.
21
Russell Weigley, ‘The American Military and the Principle of Civilian Control from McClellan to Powell’,
Journal of Military History, vol.57, no.5, 1993, p.29.
22
Black, p.64.
23
Richard H. Kohn, ‘Out of Control’, National Interest, vol.35, Spring 1994, p.3-31.
24
Sarah Sands, ‘Sir Richard Dannatt: A very honest General’, The Daily Mail, 12 October 2006.
25
James Kirkup, ‘Head of the British Army questions deadline for Afghan troop withdrawal’, The Telegraph, 22
June 2011.
26
Andy Bloxham, ‘David Cameron tells defence chiefs to stop criticising Libya mission’, The Telegraph, 21
June 2011.

Where, then, does this leave Huntington’s objective control of civil-military relations?
It appears that the backlash from the perceived interference by civilians in military affairs that
contributed to failure in Vietnam has led to an overenthusiastic effort by the civilian
leadership to reverse the trend by reasserting respect for military professionalism and
allowing the military excessive autonomy. The military, left with their own enduring legacy
of mistrust of civilian meddling in military matters, have used their newfound influence
amongst the civilian leadership to bring military concerns into the political sphere. Once
more it seems, political influence over the military at any level beyond simply articulating the
policy decision to wage war and then setting the conditions for victory is considered
meddlesome in strategy-making, when in fact, political influence should be strategy’s
ubiquitous guiding light. Hew Strachan suggests that the example of General Powel and
others since might be considered a return to the flawed concept of strategy enunciated by
Moltke the elder, i.e. that the military be allowed absolute autonomy to conduct operations
free from political interference once the politicians had made the decision to wage war.27
Moltke’s advocacy of military freedom from political interference is certainly echoed in
Huntington’s emphasis of military autonomy and in the Weinberger/Powell doctrine, yet, as
we have already seen, those following the guidance of Moltke and Huntington have tended to
produce similarly flawed strategies resulting in pounding tactical successes that could not
always be translated into political objectives.
Fundamentally, as chapter one introduced, the failure of autonomy stems from
Clausewitzian friction; chance, unforeseen circumstances and the enemy all conspire to
intervene in plans, and events unfold that have bearing on the intended political outcomes.
Affording the military excessive autonomy can therefore lead to a military strategy based only
on initial political assumptions and objectives articulated at the beginning of conflict, but that
would be unreactive to the changing political situation that only the statesman with his broad
international and domestic perspective and his role representing society is in a legitimate
place to judge. The political dimension should therefore always have bearing on military
strategy, and indeed on the conduct of tactics where they have strategic effect, throughout any
conflict. Policy makers should understand their responsibility as such, understanding that this
implies the need to set political objectives commensurate with available means or else change
policy or increase resources. Similarly, military commanders should advise but ultimately
listen to the policy makers and then mould strategy and tactics to fulfil the needs of policy. In
27
Strachan, 2006, p.64.

many ways, this is the contractual relationship that Peter Fever suggests is the key to a
successful civil-military relationship. Fever’s model is derived from political science and
microeconomic theory and frames the civil-military relationship in the somewhat esoteric
language of a principle-agent dilemma. In Fever’s words:
‘The civilian principle establishes a military agent to provide the security
function for the state, but then must take pains to ensure that the military agent
continues to do the civilians’ bidding.’28
Although grossly oversimplified (and therefore failing to do Fever’s theory the justice it
deserves), the principle-agent thesis asserts that the military agree to subordinate themselves
to civilian leadership and execute policy using military force when so ordered, and are
allowed to do so with a degree of autonomy, but that this autonomy is granted with the
understanding that there has been no abdication of civilian political responsibility and control.
As such, the civilian leadership continue to exert oversight over the military’s conduct and
will punish any deviation from set policy or, alternatively, reward obedience. Moreover, this
should be a dynamic and iterative process where the military must always appreciate that they
are expected to follow policy and it is in their best interest to do so otherwise they will risk
losing the autonomy they have been granted. Fundamental to the success of this interaction is
the continued oversight by the civilian leadership; Fever suggests that it was the absence of
such monitoring and the resultant failure to punish growing military insubordination that were
crucial failures that damaged American civil-military relationships in the last two decades.29
THE NEED FOR AN ‘UNEQUAL DILAOGUE’
Eliot Cohen’s account of the successful wartime leadership of Abraham Lincoln,
Winston Churchill, Georges Clemenceau and David Ben-Gurion in many ways corroborates
Fever’s thesis of civil-military relations. Cohen illustrates in great detail how none of these
leaders abdicated strategic decision-making responsibility to the military, but neither did they
become overbearing by dictating tactics and becoming too involved in the military minutiae.
As Cohen puts it:
28
Feaver, p.95.
29
Ibid, p.180-233.

‘They might coax or bully interrogate or probe but rarely do we see them
issuing orders or acting like a generalissimo.’30
Instead, their skill was in understanding the military situation through detailed oversight,
bringing the military to task, and where necessary, exercising their leadership by punishing
the generals who failed to follow policy. Equally, theirs was a role of give and take,
respecting and properly considering the advice of the generals, and where necessary acting on
it, but always asserting their leadership and final authority in their position of Supreme
Command. Cohen calls this the ‘unequal dialogue’ and insists that such an interaction must
continue throughout a conflict where the unfolding events must always be considered in a
political light.31
Fever agrees, suggesting that such a relationship will become normalised and
that the standard of military advice ‘will improve with vigorous give-and-take led by activist
civilian principals.’32
CHAPTER CONCLUSIONS
THE ABSENCE OF DIALOGUE AND STRATGIC FAILURE
Can we conclude that the absence of just such an unequal dialogue is the root of
strategic failure? Eliot Cohen believes so, suggesting that American strategic failure in
Vietnam stemmed less from overbearing civilian interference in military affairs than from the
lack of intrusive dialogue between the civilian establishment and military chiefs. This
repudiation of perceived wisdom recognises that the restrictions placed on military operations
for political considerations was quite within the nature of things, where political expedients
necessarily overrode operational requirements. In this case the containment of the war within
Vietnam and avoidance of Chinese and Soviet involvement were of greater importance than
the unrestricted bombing of the North. As such, allowing the military greater autonomy
would not have alleviated the problem of military interference; indeed the chiefs’ willingness
to engage in an out-dated strategy of aerial bombardment against the industrial centres in the
north could have inflamed matters rather than yield decisive victory.33
30
Cohen, p.208.
31
Cohen, p.208-224.
32
Feaver, p.300.
33
Cohen, p.179.

It was not therefore the over involvement of the politicians in military affairs that was
the cause of failure in Vietnam, it was the unquestioned assumptions that underpinned the
prevailing strategy of political signalling and gradual escalation that was at fault. With no
realistic alternative provided by the disenfranchised chiefs, who preferred to accept the flawed
strategy formulated by the statesmen and then surreptitiously undermine it by degrees, the
civilian leadership fell back on a what they knew had worked during the Cuban missile crisis
but failed to ask whether this was appropriate or not in the context of fighting an insurgency
in Vietnam - unfortunately for them, it was not. As Robert McNamara later reflected
painfully, strategic defeat stemmed from a failure to conduct ‘a knock-down, drag-out debate
over the loose assumptions, unasked questions and thin analyses underlying our military
strategy in Vietnam.’34
Similarly, in the first Gulf War, the lack of appropriate dialogue and political
oversight meant that the military made decisions regarding strategy and conditions for victory
that were at odds with the political objectives for the campaign. Stronger civilian leadership
that questioned the military’s assumptions without hindering their tactical and operational
conduct might have brought a more decisive conclusion to instability in the region caused by
the survival of Saddam Hussein’s regime.
Moreover, of the UK’s strategy in Afghanistan, a recent parliamentary report was
explicit in its criticism of military and ministerial establishments where the lack of dialogue
between the two led to flawed strategy:
‘force levels deployed throughout 2006, 2007 and 2008 were never going to
achieve what was being demanded of the Armed Forces by the UK. [....] UK
Forces were deployed in Helmand for three years, as a result of a failure of
military and political coordination, without the necessary personnel and
equipment to succeed in their Mission.’35
Finally, in the examples from antiquity detailed in earlier chapters, we see a failure by
the state to balance military power with political reason resulting in failure. The Spartan
statesmen in the 5th
Century B.C. failed to check the unreserved militarisation of strategy
espoused by Sthenelaidas that lead to defeat at the hands of the Athenians. Later, the
34
Robert S. McNamarra, In Retrospect: the Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam, New York: vintage, 1995, p.203.
35
Report, para. 67.

Athenians also failed to balance political caution with the hubristic need to exert military
power by launching their ill-fated campaign in Sicily.
All these examples suggest that war should indeed serve political ends; the politician
must exercise oversight and assert civilian control to guard against excessive military
autonomy. However, policy must also reconcile military realities and the perception of the
public. The civilian leadership must therefore engage in a constructive and dynamic dialogue
with all strategic stakeholders in the paradoxical trinity. When it does not achieve this, civil-
military relationships fail or the relationship between the state and society sours; either way
strategy falls by the wayside and the costs of war in terms of blood and treasure often end-up
tragically counting for very little.

Conclusion 32
Conclusions
Strategy, victory and civilian ascendancy
The narrative theme that this dissertation has consistently held, explicitly in chapter
one and then implicitly thereafter, is that strategy is fundamentally a political phenomenon.
That is to say, that strategy not only serves political purposes but also that its character is
ubiquitously shaped by political considerations. As such, the way in which grand-strategy
yields the instruments of national power must be governed by political factors. This is a
general assertion that can be applied in specific circumstances, with this dissertation focussing
on the perfusion of political considerations in the formulation of military strategy and the use
of the military instrument in war. The same would be true had we examined grand-strategy’s
use of diplomatic or economic coercion.
The pervasive influence of political considerations on strategy and the conduct of war
may be considered a natural consequence of the primacy of civilian control of the state in a
democracy, where the governing polity must balance the feelings of the electorate, the
unfolding events on the battlefield and the wider political interests of the state to guarantee its
wellbeing. This can and does create a conflict of interests where society, the military and the
polity foster divergent perspectives on what those ‘wider interests’ are and what victory in
war really means.
These divergent perspectives are perhaps becoming more pronounced, certainly in the
case of the state and the electorate, where a propensity for states to engage in wars of choice
rather than existential wars of national survival makes sustaining public consent for military
action ever more difficult. As such, for western liberal democracies, winning the ‘strategic
narrative’ and shaping public perception to generate consent for any war has become as
important in strategy as the military campaign itself. Indeed, a recent report by the UK
Government on the campaign in Afghanistan embellishes on the strategic importance of
public perception, suggesting that ‘Communications with the UK population are crucial, not
only to secure their consent to operations in Afghanistan but also to avoid radicalising young
people.’1
With this in mind, Hew Strachan points to the challenge of wars fought increasingly
in the media gaze where wholesale coverage of scandals like the mistreatment of Iraqi
prisoners in Abu Ghraib and Camp Breadbasket can have a disproportionality deleterious
1
Report, para. 14.

Conclusion 33
effect on domestic public perceptions relative to the overall conduct of the war, whilst also
doing untold strategic damage by radicalisation of the local population.2
Certainly, the example of Abu Ghraib serves to illustrate that war cannot take place in
the kind of political vacuum that Moltke the elder so desired. It must be reactive to both
military and political events where the strategy that guides the conduct of war is formed by an
appropriate balance of political and military considerations. Without this balance, strategy
can become overly politicised, where the political objectives and considerations do not take
into account the military realities of the situation, perhaps failing to assign the appropriate
means to achieve stated objectives; alternatively, war becomes a military activity conducted
without consideration of political objectives or guidance. In the latter case, the perils of
military autonomy ensue and war no longer serves its defining political purpose.
As asserted in the introduction, the only way to avoid strategic failures of this kind is
to adopt an appropriate dialogue between policy makers and military commanders. Of
course, civilian control should always be exercised over military strategy – a democratic
society demands as much – but successful strategy making can only be born from a civil-
military relationship underpinned by mutual respect of one another’s political or military
concerns. As, such civil-military dialogue should, therefore, welcome ‘loyal dissent’ where
the military feels able to articulate its concerns privately and not through public criticism of
government policy. Clearly this undermines the trust required of the civil-military
relationship, but also, whilst the civilian polity remains in a position of supreme command, it
becomes counterproductive for the military chief involved as they become increasingly
ostracised from the heart of defence policy-making in government. Indeed, recent proposals
for the restructuring of the UK’s Ministry of Defence recommends the removal of the
individual service chiefs from the top-level Defence Board3
in a way reminiscent of President
Kennedy’s removal of his intransigent military chiefs from the decision-making committee
during the Cuban missile crisis, and also of the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols act that removed the
individual service chiefs from the US National Security Council on account of their
counterproductive inter-service rivalries.4
History, however, carries a note of caution here,
for an inadvertent swing from an assertive military establishment to the emasculation of
military advisors in favour of civilian council has proved as harmful as excessive military
autonomy. Evidenced by the US experience in Vietnam, the danger is less of excessive
2
Strachan, 2006, p.74.
3
Lord Levene of Portsoke, Defence Reform, London: Ministry of Defence, 2011, p.20-21.
4
McMaster, p.1-23

Conclusion 34
civilian involvement in the policy and strategy-making process than of one of disenfranchised
military advisers and a civilian leadership content with their own flawed reasoning.
Of course, a harmonious dialogue, where military concerns can help shape strategy to
ensure that resources are appropriate to meet desired aims, should alleviate the military’s need
to publicly air criticism of government policy, but it needs more than this. Civilian authority
should be asserted on the growing propensity for senior military officers to see it appropriate
to challenge government policy in general. General Wall’s doubts over the UK Government’s
scheduled withdrawal from Afghanistan for instance were less a heartfelt plea from an under-
resourced military commander but instead were indicative of a growing tendency for military
officers to enter the political sphere and question government policy - history shows that
intervention like this can be dangerous for successful civil-military relations.
This dissertation has attempted to illustrate that those policies like the US and UK.
Governments’ decision to begin withdrawal from Afghanistan are politically motivated, but
rightfully so. In this example, the financial costs to an already stretched exchequer, not to
mention overstretched military capabilities and dwindling domestic support must enter the
political equation for a government to balance against continuing a war where total defeat of
the may simply be no longer worth the effort. From a perspective of military strategy, this
realpolitik may be a bitter pill to swallow but certainly it forms a grand-strategy that would be
recognised by Thucydides, Clausewitz, Liddell Hart and other strategic thinkers who
understood war’s necessary subservience to political expedients. As a fitting conclusion, the
words of former US commander in Afghanistan, David Patreus, provide a succinct but
entirely accurate description of how the relationship between soldier and statesman should
work for the benefit of all-important grand-strategy:
‘The President [of the United States] has a broader purview and has broader
considerations that are brought to bear, with the President alone in the position of
evaluating all of those different considerations... [Once the President] has made
his decision, it is the responsibility, needless to say, of those in uniform to salute
smartly and do everything humanly possible to execute it’.5
5
Comment made by General Patraeus at US Senate Select Intelligence Committee hearing on 23 June 2011
confirming the nomination of Patraeus as the head of the Central Intelligence Agency. The comment was made
answering questions pertaining to Patraeus’ position on the President’s decision to begin withdrawing troops

Conclusion 35
from Afghanistan faster than US military commanders (including Patreaus) had advised. See http://www.c-
spanvideo.org/program/IADirectorNom (minute 39.20)

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36
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