Op Eds Now More Central in War than Bullets

[NY Sun title: The West Must Learn The Public Relations of War]

Soldiers, sailors, and airmen once determined the outcome of warfare, but no longer. Today, television producers, columnists, preachers, and politicians have the pivotal role in deciding how well the West fights. This shift has deep implications.

In a conventional conflict like World War II, fighting had two premises so basic, they went nearly unnoticed.

The first: Conventional armed forces engage in an all-out fight for victory. The opposing sides deploy serried ranks of soldiers, lines of tanks, fleets of ships, and squadrons of aircraft. Millions of youth go to war as civilians endure privations. Strategy and intelligence matter, but the size of one's population, economy, and arsenal count even more. An observer can assess the progress of war by keeping tabs of such objective factors as steel output, oil stocks, ship construction, and control of land.

Second assumption: Each side's population loyally backs its national leadership. To be sure, traitors and dissidents need to be rooted out, but a wide consensus backs the rulers. This was especially noteworthy in the Soviet Union, where even Stalin's demented mass-murdering did not stop the population from giving its all for "Mother Russia."

Both aspects of this paradigm are now defunct in the West.

First, battling all-out for victory against conventional enemy forces has nearly disappeared, replaced by the more indirect challenge of guerrilla operations, insurgencies, intifadas, and terrorism. This new pattern applied to the French in Algeria, Americans in Vietnam, and Soviets in Afghanistan. It currently holds for Israelis versus Palestinians, coalition forces in Iraq, and in the war on terror.

This change means that what the U.S. military calls "bean counting" – counting soldiers and weapons – is now nearly immaterial, as are diagnoses of the economy or control of territory. Lopsided wars resemble police operations more than combat in earlier eras. As in crime-fighting, the side enjoying a vast superiority in power operates under a dense array of constraints, while the weaker party freely breaks any law and taboo in its ruthless pursuit of power.

Second, the solidarity and consensus of old have unraveled. This process has been underway for just over a century now (starting with the British side of the Boer War in 1899-1902). As I wrote in 2005: "The notion of loyalty has fundamentally changed. Traditionally, a person was assumed faithful to his natal community. A Spaniard or Swede was loyal to his monarch, a Frenchman to his republic, an American to his constitution. That assumption is now obsolete, replaced by a loyalty to one's political community – socialism, liberalism, conservatism, or Islamism, to name some options. Geographical and social ties matter much less than of old."

With loyalties now in play, wars are decided more on the Op Ed pages and less on the battlefield. Good arguments, eloquent rhetoric, subtle spin-doctoring, and strong poll numbers count more than taking a hill or crossing a river. Solidarity, morale, loyalty, and understanding are the new steel, rubber, oil, and ammunition. Opinion leaders are the new flag and general officers. Therefore, as I wrote in August, Western governments "need to see public relations as part of their strategy."

Even in a case like the Iranian regime's acquisition of atomic weaponry, Western public opinion is the key, not its arsenal. If united, Europeans and Americans will likely dissuade Iranians from going ahead with nuclear weapons. If disunited, Iranians will be emboldened to plunge ahead.

What Carl von Clausewitz called war's "center of gravity" has shifted from force of arms to the hearts and minds of citizens. Do Iranians accept the consequences of nuclear weapons? Do Iraqis welcome coalition troops as liberators? Do Palestinians willingly sacrifice their lives in suicide bombings? Do Europeans and Canadians want a credible military force? Do Americans see Islamism presenting a lethal danger?

Non-Western strategists recognize the primacy of politics and focus on it. A string of triumphs – Algeria in 1962, Vietnam in 1975, and Afghanistan in 1989 – all relied on eroding political will. Al-Qaeda's number two, Ayman al-Zawahiri, codified this idea in a letter in July 2005, observing that more than half of the Islamists' battle "is taking place in the battlefield of the media."

The West is fortunate to predominate in the military and economic arenas, but these no longer suffice. Along with its enemies, it needs to give due attention to the public relations of war.

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Oct. 19, 2006 update: John T. Broom adds in important ways to the historical dimension of my analysis in his comment, "The Philippines and Ireland as addtional examples of early press influence."

Apr. 1, 2009 update: In "George Bush and History's Croakers," Claudio Veliz shows that the British tradition of sympathizing with the country's enemy goes back to Napoleon, nearly a century before the Boer War.

July 3, 2009 update: Not to be forgotten in the focus on public opinion is the concomittant legal battle. Amir Mizroch discusses this today in "Israel worries over intense 'legal war'," in the Jerusalem Post.

The defense establishment is concerned at intensifying legal campaigns in foreign courts that aim to deter Israel from using force against Hamas and Hizbullah.

Reeling from four damning reports in one week from human rights organizations about the IDF's conduct in Operation Cast Lead, the sense among senior defense officials is that the "legal front" against Israel is growing at an alarming rate. ... Officials are calling for an increased appreciation throughout the government of the complexities of fighting and winning asymmetric wars within the boundaries of international humanitarian law. ...

"There is a war being waged against us in the legal sphere. Its aim is to delegitimize Israel and to create deterrence against a possible use of force in Gaza and Lebanon again," a senior defense official told The Jerusalem Post. The Post has also learned that, increasingly, legal officers, as well as soldiers from the IDF Spokesman's Office, are taking part in operational planning for possible future conflicts, at the highest levels.

"The last Gaza war is not over yet. It is being fought on another front for now. It is not just in Spain, England and Belgium. Lawyers and jurists in many countries, some of them Arab, some Jewish, are using legal means to attack Israel. There are hundreds of petitions, cases, legal opinions and actions cropping up across the world. The phenomenon is very wide and growing. The other side has a lot of money that comes from countries and people not friendly to Israel. This is another front in the war, and if we don't realize it we'll have a problem," the senior defense source said.

July 6, 2009 update: More on British pro-Napoleonic sentiments, from an article by David Pryce-Jones, "The Dark Lord," about the poet Lord Byron:

George Gordon Byron

Living through the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars that followed it, he declared himself a Jacobin and sighed for a republic. He took advantage of his hereditary seat in the House of Lords to speak for men so frightened of the Industrial Revolution that they were engaged in breaking machinery — an ignorant mob, of course, rather than real rebels. In poems and epigrams, he incessantly ridiculed favorite hate-figures of his, such as the Prince Regent and the foreign minister, Lord Castlereagh. The "freedom" for which he was agitating so strongly remained conveniently abstract, a mere slogan. Bertrand Russell, of all philosophers, pointed out that Byron's concept of freedom was the same as that of a German prince or a Cherokee chief: the pleasure of doing as one pleases and not having to account for it.

In the course of the prolonged struggle between the nations, Napoleon could have destroyed conservative England, and this was Byron's wish. In the days leading up to the decisive battle of Waterloo, Byron was writing of Napoleon, "All seems against him; but I believe and hope he will win." British victory then made Byron "damned sorry." Don Juan has a sarcastic couplet addressed to the Duke of Wellington, victor in that battle: "And I shall be delighted to learn who, / Save you and yours, have gained by Waterloo?" That poem characteristically makes fun of Wellington's nose as the hook on which to hang the whole of Europe. Wellington, the archetypal high Tory, repaid Byron with some finality: "There never existed a more worthless set than Byron and his friends, for example — poets praise fine sentiments and never practice them." Revealingly, Byron ordered a copy of Napoleon's traveling coach, costing £500, an immense sum at the time. Adopting the name Noel for financial reasons, he took to signing himself "NB," the initials he shared with his hero.

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