PME Issues
st
Dr Michael Evans

US Hart-Rudman
Commission: ‘New World
Coming’
Many of the fundamental assumptions that steered us through the chilly waters of the Cold War require rethinking. The very facts of military reality are changing, and that bears serious and concentrated reflection
New World Coming: American Security in the 21 st Century (Phase 1
Report, 1999)
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From ‘Long Peace’ to ‘Long
War’
[In the 21 st century] there is a novel setting of diffusion and diversification of weapons of mass destruction, percolating global turbulence, and widespread fear of terrorism
Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Choice:
Global Domination or Global
Leadership (2004)
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Challenging the Profession of Arms: ‘Old’ and ‘New’ in
Globalised Security
– Globalised strategic transition in new millennium transcends nation and region
– PME and training challenges affect all militaries
– Arrival of ‘two world’ strategic universe means that countries must prepare for
‘old’
(state-centric) and
‘new’
(multi-centric) challenges
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Two-Part
Presentation
– Part One examines main features of evolving globalised security environment
–
Part Two concentrates on implications of globalised security for PME and training
–
Part Two focus on three particular areas: strategic art ; military jurisdiction ; and integrated skillsets
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‘Two Worlds of
World Politics’
– A bifurcated conflict environment
– ‘Two worlds of world politics’ (state-centric and multi-centric and their interaction)
– Complexity created by imposition of multi-centric
(non-state) on to state-centric (state-on-state)
– Rapid compression and interconnectedness of change between the ‘two worlds’
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A Non-Western View: ‘An
Intertwined World’
The international security issue has become increasingly diversified, traditional security factors and non-traditional ones have become intertwined
Jiefangjun Bao (Chinese PLA),
February 2002
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Globalisation’s Four
Strategic Changes
– From territoriality towards connectedness
– Blurring of state-society, foreigndomestic policy distinctions
– Rise of calculus of strategic riskanalysis
– Blurring of ‘near and far’: merging modes of conflict and rise of full-spectrum strategy
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1. From Territoriality to
Connectedness: ‘The New Geography of National Security’
– Globalisation creates supra-territorial space
– Rise of non-state (multi-centric) actors cuts old link between sovereignty and national security
– Societal vulnerability because of permeable open societies
– Lawrence Freedman’s ‘demilitarisation of interstate relations’ and parallel trend towards non-state warfare
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– Cold War an age of predictable threat
– Globalised security era an age of unpredictable risk
– Threat focuses on tangibles : intentions and capabilities of conventional adversaries
– Risk focuses on intangibles : probabilities and consequences stemming from unconventional adversaries
– Iraq 2003 a product of risk-analysis
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R
There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know
Donald Rumsfeld, US Defense Secretary, February 2002
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– Risk-strategy concerned with rogue and failed states
– In conventional threat analysis Afghanistan less a threat than Haiti
– But Afghanistan a high-risk failed state
– Risk-analysis focuses on consequences not capabilities – from rogues to refugees to viruses to nuclear devices
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Risks in ‘A World Without
Precedent’
This world is without precedent.
It is as different from the Cold
War as it is from the Middle Ages.
Tomorrow’s wars will not result from the ambitions of States but from their weaknesses
Philippe Delmas, The Rosy Future of
War (1995)
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3. Blurring of the ‘Far and the Near’: National
Security Policy
• Globalised security creates blurred distinctions between state and society and between foreign and domestic policies
• Rise of cohesive national security policies to meet spectrum of threat and risk
• Need for a mixture of expeditionary forces and homeland security to reconcile the ‘far and the near’
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4. Need for Full-Spectrum
Strategy
• Globalised security blurs conventional and unconventional modes of conflict
• Need for full-spectrum strategy
• 2005 US
National Defense Strategy : traditional, irregular, catastrophic and disruptive categories of threat may intersect
• Deadly cocktails possible (eg irregular
Islamist jihad plus catastrophic WMD)
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The Main Challenge:
Different Times, Different
Enemies
The enemies of yesterday were static, predictable, homogeneous, rigid, hierarchical, and resistant to change. The enemies of today are dynamic, unpredictable, diverse, fluid, networked, and constantly evolving
Brian Michael Jenkins, ‘Redefining the Enemy’, RAND
Review (Spring 2004)
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Cold War Legacy: An
Operational Approach to War
• Cold War era marginalised military influence in strategy-formulation
• Professional embrace of operational level of war and operational art
• Accelerated by precision revolution after 1970s
• Operational approach dominant in conduct of Iraq and Afghanistan wars
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The operational art appeals to armies: it functions in a politics-free zone and it puts primacy on professional skills
Hew Strachan, ‘Making Strategy: Civil-Military Relations after Iraq’, Survival (Autumn, 2006)
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The Paradox of the
Operational Level of War
– Operational level often encourages cult of battlefield artisanship
– Prefers ‘aesthetic symmetry’ of similar enemy and focuses
– Operational craftsmanship over strategic coherence
– ‘Lost victories’ of Iraq (1991 and 2003) and of Afghanistan (2002)
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Coherence and Design: The
Need to Create Strategic
Artists
– Military must improve knowledge of the strategic level of war
– Need for commanders to concentrate on mastering strategic art in 21 st century
– Strategic art: ‘mastery of the principles of coherence, integration and unity of effort in relating military power to political purpose’
– Pressing need in PME for creating better strategic artists who concentrate upon control over victory in the pattern of conflict
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PME’s Objective in the New
Millennium
To produce a strategically-astute and operationally-expert officer who can function in both the counsels of state and on the joint, multinational and interagency battlespace of the
21 st century
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Three Key PME
Requirements
– Rediscover strategy and improve conceptual understanding of relationship between policy, strategy and operations
– Refine a realistic concept of military jurisdiction to enhance above
– Create better integration of educational and training skill-sets to maximise professional mastery of war
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1. Rediscovering Strategy:
Parameters of Policy,
Strategy and Operations
Among practitioners, politicians often conflate strategy with policy objectives (focusing on what the desired outcome should be, simply assuming that force will move the adversary towards it) while soldiers often conflate strategy with operations (focusing on how to destroy targets or defeat enemies tactically, assuming that positive military effects mean positive policy effects
Richard K. Betts, ‘The Trouble with Strategy: Bridging
Policy and Operations’, JFQ Winter 2001-02
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‘The Lost Meaning of
Strategy’
- Serves as a bridge between political objectives and military operations
- But often neglected leading to failure to connect ends
(objectives), ways (methods) and means (resources)
- Example of Iraq in 2003: failure of systemic strategic design
- Strategy must integrate policy and operations not separate them
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Civil-Military Integration to Meet ‘Conflict and
Confrontation’
• Cold War conflation of civilian policy with and military operations with strategy must change
• Need for greater civil-military integration in age of
‘two worlds of world politics’
• Rise of Rupert Smith’s ‘conflicts and confrontations’ over classical warfare
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• Classic exposition in Samuel P.
Huntington’s
The Soldier and the
State (1957)
• Study reflects Westphalian warfare: strategy begins when diplomacy ends
• Armies mobilised across territorial frontiers
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• Model no longer reflects interactive threatrisk conflicts of 21 st century
• Military force not autonomous but used in complex multinational and interagency frameworks
• Major intellectual challenge for military professionals to bring greater coherence to strategy in order to improve link between politics and operations
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• Need for robust civil-military engagement
• Clemenceau was right: ‘war is too serious to be left to generals’
• But corollary is without military involvement to shape strategy war will not be prosecuted effectively
• In 21 st century need for improved uniformed knowledge of strategy
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• Guide should be intellectual pragmatism
• Remember Dr Johnson’s advice: ‘always temper the splendours of ornamental erudition with practical application’
• Need to create blend of strategic leadertheorist-practitioner and avoid Clausewitz’s
‘pretensions of false genius and fruitless scholarliness
’
• Teaching should serve as primer for mental preparation of commander’s mind
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2. Refining Military
Jurisdiction
• Better strategic art linked to tailoring PME and training to realistic parameters of professional jurisdiction
• Modern spectrum of conflict has expanded boundaries of professional jurisdiction
• Huntington’s concept of the autonomous ‘manager of violence’ and MacArthur’s ‘no artifice under the name of politics’ difficult to uphold
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Jurisdiction during Kosovo
The old separations in time between the military and the political and between echelons of military command were no longer the same . . . What we discovered increasingly [during Kosovo] was that the political and strategic levels impinged on the operational and tactical levels . . . Sometimes even insignificant tactical events packed a huge political wallop. This is a key characteristic of modern war
General Wesley K. Clark, Waging Modern
War: Bosnia, Kosovo and the Future of
Combat (2001)
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‘An Alchemical Blend of
Multiple Archetypes’
– Military jurisdiction confronted not just by politics but by multiple civilian agencies
– Includes journalists, aid workers, security contractors
– Military professional at once anthropologist, police officer and diplomat and warfighter
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Jurisdictional Boundaries and
Warrior Knowledge of Strategy
– Jurisdictional expansion must be tempered by the uniqueness of the profession of arms
– Unique skills of warrior must not be diluted
– One jurisdictional area that does require expansion
– improved knowledge of strategy
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Future Operational-Strategic
Preparation in JPME
– Cold War PME formula of twenty year ‘stairway process’ of PME
– Globalised security conditions may expose officers to operational-strategic responsibility much earlier
– Need to consider ‘glide path’ model of PME
– Need to construct continuum of PME knowledge by move from phased to continuous learning model
– As much philosophy as program
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3. Integrated Skill-Sets and
Future Education, Training
• The ideal: ‘one trains for certainty; one educates for uncertainty’
• But education and training are difficult to separate
• Technical training an essential foundation of military expertise
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Training and Education as
Siamese Twins
• Intertwining of training and education apparent even at strategic level of war
• Training and education are to military profession what surgery and anatomy are to the medical profession
• Symbiosis between the practical and the abstract
• Educated strategic artist must first be a trained operational expert 38

Theory and Practice in
Military Problem-Solving
• Close linkage between education and training reflected in many contemporary military problems
• Levels of war debate on networked battlespace
• Future of the operational art
• Reconciling indirect high-level command with direct low-level control 39

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Ages of War
Every age has its own kind of war, its own limiting conditions, and its own peculiar preconceptions, its own theory of war
Carl von Clausewitz, On War
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Future Military
Effectiveness and PME
– Cold War PME legacy of operational artistry and civil-military separatism in increasingly policyoperations inadequate
– PME must give greater attention to conceptual integration of policy, strategy and operations
– Overarching aim: to merge the narrow 20 th century operational artist into a broader 21 st century strategic artist
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