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62 of 64 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Interesting, if a bit short on recommendations, May 28, 2006
The first half of this book is a first rate history lesson on how the modern war fighting practices of Western military powers came about, with special emphasis on Clausewitz, Napoleon, the US Civil War and the Spanish rebellion against Napoleon (which originated the term "guerilla"). Also reviewed are some of the 20th centuries guerilla wars and how they were lost or won (not many of those) by regular armies.
This groundwork laid, the book examines how this framework of army-vs-army warfare is obsolete and is replaced by foreign "wars amongst the people" where the enemy is an irregular, rather than a standard army and where public opinion, both at home and in the country of operation, becomes paramount.
a) The need to "forget" Western concepts of overwhelming firepower in an army vs. army struggle, because no one is going to be silly enough to engage Western armies on that level for a while yet. For example, IED deaths in Iraq are partially caused by the military not taking into account the lack of truly peaceful areas in an insurgency war: soft skinned military transports become targets everywhere. While standard military doctrine thinks in terms of fronts and combat zones allowing for front line heavy armor and unprotected vehicles everywhere else.
Again and again the point is made that a competent enemy does not play to your strengths, but rather tries to exploit your weaknesses and that assuming otherwise is a good way to lose.
b) The need for clear political objectives to supplement military force - "if you gotta use force or station an army somewhere, please think of what you want to achieve with it, in political terms". And the need for the political and military efforts to complement each other. Many pages are devoted to this subject. For example, the 1950's guerilla in Malaysia was defeated, both by military action against the rebels and by offering civilians an attractive political alternative to rebel aims. Malaysia was often an inspiration for Vietnam military strategies, but no credible political system was proposed to, and accepted by, the South Vietnamese.
Clearly, this applies to the US military's success at planning Saddam's defeat, only for its government to totally fail to consider what it would do, politically, once it had achieved its military objectives.
c) The limits, in military terms, of shared command over multinational troops. As in the other previous points, the author draws heavily upon his experiences as a NATO commander in Bosnia.
d) The key contribution, for me, is the need to respect the law, decency, and employ restraint in counterinsurgency warfare. Both for ethical reasons and because brutality and needless civilian deaths only fuel insurgencies and alienate public opinion.
Being interested in military history I liked this book, especially the first half. The later parts were however clearly more aimed at engaging political decision makers, rather than the casual reader as it raised more questions than answers. This motivates my 4, rather than 5, stars.
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64 of 68 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Best Book on (Clausewitzian) Strategic Thought in 20 Years, September 9, 2006
Rupert Smith is not only a strategic thinker, but a former strategist and military commander. He has written a trully impressive book on the nature of war in the 21st Century which should be read by military professionals everywhere, and taken to heart and used to influence military operations in the pursuit of political goals, but probably won't. More on that at the end.
Smith's book has to do with war paradigms. I disagree with the use of the term, since following Thomas Kuhn it is questionable whether the term can be applied to the social sciences at all, and would prefer to use the term "ideal types" to describe Smith's concepts. Smith is however aware of the pitfalls but insists that we have essentially entered into a new form of war that although linked with the past (as Smith points out, Clausewitz identified the beginnings of this paradigm in the early 19th Century), is diffent from what we knew as "war" before. One will look in vain for buzzwords such as "4th Generation Warfare" or "Network Centric Warfare", since these dubious concepts only confuse the issue rather than clarify.
This new paradigm he describes as "war amongst the people" is related to "guerrilla warfare" and "revolutionary war" but is different from both due to the distinction of ossillating between "conflict" and "confrontation". Also due to the destructive nature of modern weapons, almost all combat in this paradigm takes place at the tactical level. Smith reserves intelligence and policy operations for the operational level.
A regular military force operating in "war amongst the people" must first of all achieve stability and then impose and maintain the rule of law within the political community they are operating. To ruthlessly utilize maximum military force and thus destroy the structures one is attempting to save, kill the people one is attempting win over, is self-defeating and most likely to increase the support of one's opponent.
Smith compares and constrasts "war amongst the people" with the conventional (and in Smith's mind outmoded) paradigm of "industrial war", which also dates from the early 19th Century. An interesting survey of the tactical innovation of industrial warfare runs from Napoleon through to World War II. Smith is not only a theorist of note, but knows his military history as well. "Industrial war", unfortunately serves as the paradigm in which we conceive of war, the weapons of industrial war - tanks, jet fighters, aircraft carriers - are the icons of war, even though the actual wars we wage are completely different than the wars these weapons systems were designed to fight. We fight "wars amongst the people" with the weapons, doctrine, military organization and thinking associated with the old paradigm of "industrial war", and spend a good bit of time defeating our own political purpose in the process.
So, why is this book liable to have little influence? Given the sad state of strategic thought in the US or even UK today, with most military officers and strategic thinkers unable to see outside the boundaries of "industrial war", not to mention their cultural and value assumptions, and the numerous false paths and confusion as to what is going on, we are at a similar situation to that of Ludwig Beck in 1938. He complained bitterly how his officers had lost all concept of the strategic link between military aim (seeing only in terms of military capability) and political purpose, or even attempting to recognize the limits and utility of military force.
Of all the best selling books on the subject, General Smith's is the lone voice of reason currently in strategic thought.
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28 of 30 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent Summary of Today's Conundrum, March 1, 2007
This review is from: The Utility of Force: The Art of War in the Modern World (Hardcover)
There are 3 things you need to know about this book:
1. There are parts where it's repetitive and he could've used an editor.
2. If you agree with his main premise - that we will no longer (and haven't been for decades) fight nation-state to nation-state (ala WWII) and that it's all going to be battles for what he calls "will of the people" (aka "hearts and minds") - then you can probably skip this book completely unless you want all the detailed why's and how's we got to this point from Napoleon to 2006.
3. The last third of the book is devoted to his approach to start resolving these issues:
- stop building industrial-complex level machines and technology; focus money on information-gathering, intelligence gathering and analysis and building force flexibility
- the military should be used to achieve military goals only; and then the rest of the "hearts and minds" battle turned over to agencies that train for that (in the US, that'd be AID, State dept, Commerce, etc.)
- the only time that the small level non-state enemies we face (insurgents, terrorists, warlords, etc.) are really vulnerable is when they shift from hiding to training and then from training into operations - at those phase points, and thus, information is crucial to determining when so we can strike
- there are no "pat" answers; because every non-state enemy is going to be different, there are no real "if X, then we bring Y+1" types of formulas to figure out what to do
- you need to have the political end-game goal figured out BEFORE you bring in the military (in the case of Iraq today, he argues that we should have figured out what we wanted after the "regime change" to determine how best to use the military and then when to turn it over to someone else because "force" is no longer needed to win hearts & minds).
That said, if you're a fan of Clausewitz and Sun Tzu, this book belongs on your shelf.
J. Avellanet, Co-Founder of Cerulean Associates LLC
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