BECOMING HYBRID: TOWARDS A CRITICAL THEORY OF AGENCY IN WAR A thesis submitted ...

153 Pages·2015·1.39 MB·English

BECOMING HYBRID:
TOWARDS A CRITICAL THEORY OF AGENCY IN WAR

A thesis submitted to the Committee on Graduate Studies in Partial
Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in the
Faculty of Arts and Science

TRENT UNIVERSITY
Peterborough, Ontario, Canada
© Copyright by Joshua David Noiseux 2015
Theory, Culture, and Politics M.A. Graduate Program
September 2015
ABSTRACT

Becoming Hybrid:
Towards a Critical Theory of Agency in War

Joshua David Noiseux

Institutional military strategists are developing theories of asymmetric and
unconventional warfare that complicate the notion of strategic agency, the idea that
military action emanates from a coherent agential source or subjectivity. This thesis
attempts to push the conceptual trajectories of the theories of Hybrid War, Unrestricted
War and Onto-power towards an even more radical complication of the notion of strategy
- towards an ecological understanding of war as an unwinnable, self-perpetuating
process. Recent geopolitical events are meticulously examined, as are institutional
doctrinal and theoretical frameworks that stop just short of imploding the conventional
agential notion of strategy. Insights from the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari,
as well as Brian Massumi, particularly the concepts of multiplicity, assemblage, and
ontopower, are employed in the thesis, which is itself a “heterogeneous assemblage” of
elements ranging from Israeli war theory and Chinese military doctrine to etymology and
post-structuralist philosophy.

KEYWORDS

Hybrid warfare, unrestricted warfare, pre-emption, strategy, agency, Deleuze,
subjectivity.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Many thanks are owed to Dr. Elaine Stavro, my supervisor. Dr. Stavro’s gracious
participation in and constructive criticism of this project kept it on track in more ways
than one. It is a testament to the patience of Dr. David Holdsworth, TCP MA Program
Director and Committee Member, that this document has come into being at all. Dr.
Holdsworth’s support and encouragement, along with his expert procedural help, were
invaluable throughout the entire process. I am indebted also to Dr. Paul T. Mitchell of
the Canadian Forces College/Royal Military College of Canada (CFC/RMC) who took
more than a polite amount of time out of his schedule to correspond with me about post-
structuralist currents and systemic design in the contemporary military academy. Dr.
Barbara Falk of the CFC/RMC contributed importantly in the later stages of the project,
giving extensive feedback and taking her role as external examiner exceptionally
seriously. I am profoundly grateful for the attentive and sympathetic scrutiny with which
Dr. Falk read and critiqued the thesis.

Finally I am deeply thankful, and honoured, for the support and love of my wife Janita. I
couldn’t do any of this without her.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

TITLE PAGE……………………………………………………………………………........ i
ABSTRACT…………………………………………………………………...…………..…. ii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS……………………………………………………………….…. iii
TABLE OF CONTENTS……………………………………………..……………………… iv

ELEMENT:

0. INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………………………..
a. The Central Questions..………...………..………………………………………. 1
b. A Note on Methodology ………..…………..…………………………………… 6
c. Literatures and Outline of Thesis ………………….……………………….….… 8

1. HYBRID WAR THEORY…………………………………….………………………….
a. Introduction to Hybrid Warfare……………………………….…………………. 12
b. The Convergence of Means………………………………...……………………. 16
c. The Proliferation of Actors………………………………………………………. 30
d. The Fusion of Modes…………………………………………………………….. 39
e. Institutional Responses………………………………...………………………… 46
f. Tool, Threat, or State?............................................................................................ 53

2. THE BRIDGE…………………………………………………………………………….
a. 4th Generation Warfare Theory………………………………………..…………. 60
b. Unrestricted Warfare………………………………………………….………….. 68
c. The Invincible Philosophy of Preemption (Ontological Warfare)…………..…… 70

3. THE CRISIS OF STRATEGIC AGENCY………………………………………………. 83
a. Agent/Agency/Assemblage………………………………………………………. 86
b. Subject/Subjectivity/Subjectification…………………………………………….. 102
c. Strategist/Strategy………………………………………………………………... 107

4. ISRAEL, DELEUZE, AND THE MUTUAL PRODUCTION OF ANTAGONISM…… 116
a. Flirting with Deleuze…………………………………………………………….. 117
b. The Mutual Production of Antagonism………………………………………….. 127

5. FINAL QUESTIONS…………………………………………………………………….. 134

BIBLIOGRAPHY……………………………………………………………………............. 139

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1

INTRODUCTION

In the late 20th and early 21st centuries the war machine issued out from the States
which were hitherto its exclusive minders and proceeded to disseminate itself, circulating
through ever wider radii.

The central questions
Recent conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, and Syria richly illustrate the
strategic failures of the state: winning the battles but losing the wars. Massive
apparatuses of conventional war on land, air, and sea have been employed to destroy
enemy-regime structures with shocking swiftness but also with debilitating lack of
staying-power. The Second Iraq War, for example, began in earnest only after Bush’s
pre-emptive 2003 “Mission Accomplished” speech. NATO forces in the process of
withdrawing from Afghanistan and disengaging in Libya have bequeathed little more
than the low-hanging fruit of failed states, along with the proliferation of weapons and
enmities destined to be exploited by patient and opportunistic Talibans, Ansar-al-Sharias,
al-Qaedas, al-Nusras and Islamic States. If one were to assume, following a conventional
conception of geopolitical strategy, that the United States’ strategic objectives in the
Middle-East and South-Asia are to secure control over energy resources, support friendly
regimes, exert and maintain hegemony, and promote regional stability, then it has failed
spectacularly on almost all counts. Accordingly, American operational imperatives and
strategies must be placed under severe scrutiny.
2

Since the end of the Cold War the US has enjoyed global military hegemony. As state
vs. state wars have (perhaps temporarily) occurred with decreasing frequency, most
conflicts are now relatively small scale, intrastate or trans/meta state and asymmetrical.1
Non-state actors are the primary threats engaged by conventional state militaries and
violent conflict and military activity has shifted to unconventional “battlespaces” which
have progressively expanded to include, or fuse with, civilian peacetime life.2 Both
driving and benefitting from this process, large defense conglomerates have acquired
inordinate influence within the American government, which spends more than at least
the next seven countries combined on defense.3 There is even evidence that military
competence and strategic imperatives are being compromised by pecuniary entanglement
of the military with defense industry corporations.4 In light of this, and the fact that
recent American military interventions have had the opposite of their ostensibly intended
effects (exacerbating regional tensions, inflaming sectarian conflicts and generating
protracted counter-insurgency wars and bombing campaigns) one could be forgiven for
thinking that American strategic policy is oriented towards the production rather than the
defeat of its enemies.

Within the US military establishment, as well as that of Israel, there are a number of
theorists and commentators who are questioning the strategic direction of the US. These

1 See, for example: “The Decline In Global Violence: Evidence, Explanation, and Contestation,” The Human
Security Report 2013. (Vancouver: Human Security Press, 2013) 95-104.
2 This argument is elaborated below in the section dealing with the work of Brian Massumi.
3 Perlo-Freeman, Sam, Aude Fleurant, Pieter D. Wezeman and Siemon T. Wezeman. “Trends in World
Military Expenditures, 2014.” SIPRI Fact Sheet. (Stockholm: SIPRI, April 2015)2-3.
4 The fraught development and roll-out of the Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II, is illustrative of
institutional resistance to critically re-evaluating spending and operational priorities in the face of
widespread criticism. For one example of many articles on the subject see: Fredenburg, Mike, “The F-35:
Throwing Good Money After Bad,” National Review, July 22, 2015. Accessed at:
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/421473/f-35-defense-waste-danger
3

writers include the advocates of the theories 4th Generation War, Unrestricted Warfare,
Hybrid Warfare, and Diffuse Warfare.5 All of these theories offer critiques of the
technophilic military doctrines in vogue since the Revolution in Military Affairs and the
advent of “Netwar”, which now seem to be ineffective against actually existing
contemporary threats. In the early 2000s a Marine officer illustrated the situation thusly:
“What are our satellites supposed to do in this kind of war, watch a twelve year old boy
pick up a stone?”6 While today that boy might instead be strapped with an explosive vest
in Syria, Libya, or Nigeria, the Marine’s concern demonstrates the limitations of
technology in waging asymmetrical war in more immaterial, social, cultural, and
epistemological battlegrounds.

Military theorists and strategists from a variety of backgrounds and approaches are
working feverishly to try to develop a realistic and effective counter-insurgency and
geopolitical policy. Nevertheless, there is as yet no consensus among strategists about
the role and the methodology that the US and its military should adopt. This is in part
because recent developments in the Middle East and Africa seem to demonstrate an
almost causal relationship between preemptive, interventionist, and technology oriented
“solutions” and the geopolitical problems that seem to follow in their wake. 7

5 William S. Lind; Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui; Frank Hoffman; and Yedidia Groll-Yaari and Haim Assa,
respectively.
6 Lind, William S. et al. FMFM-1A: Fourth Generation Warfare (Draft), (August 2009)38. The word “Draft”
is part of the title – as a literary device and to pre-empt institutional liabilities, the text is presented as a
doctrinal document from the fictional “Austro-Hungarian Imperial Marine Corps”.
7 As evidenced by air campaigns in Libya, Iraq and Syria, Yemen and elsewhere that have either been
ineffective at destroying their intended targets (the Houthi’s in Yemen, ISIS in Iraq and Syria, other
Islamists in Libya) or disastrously efficient at bringing such targets into existence in the first place (ie: the
2011 NATO intervention against Libya which saw the overthrow of Muammar Qadaffi and the beginning
of the still ongoing civil war.)
4

Philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s offer a number of concepts, such as that
of the multiplicity, the assemblage, and the War Machine, that converge with recent
geopolitical events and emergent understandings amongst military strategists trying to
understand the workings of asymmetric warfare, especially the theorists of Hybrid
Warfare. The counter-Clausewitzean assertion that war is not an extension of politics,
and that politics is in fact a production of a generalized relation of war, is echoed by calls
from elements the American and Israeli military establishments to understand war as a
fully social and cultural enterprise requiring full-spectrum, or total, commitment and
deployment of resources.8 The purview of war is now seen to be unrestricted, even by
the constraints of its juxtaposition with the concept of peace, which has been subsumed
within it.

Simultaneously, recent developments in contemporary warfare (including the diffusion of
violence through the proliferation of “actors”, the convergence of the means of war
across the spectrum from conventional firepower to terrorist insurgency, and the fusion of
the modes of war and peace in one generalized plane of potential conflict) have forced
strategists to inch towards a post-positivist, and post-structuralist framework for
understanding the problem of strategic agency: who, what, and how does power express
itself in the context of political and military antagonism? Authors of military position
papers and doctrinal manuals have been quoting Deleuze and Guattari and other post-
structuralists in their attempt to better understand the complexities of agency in

8 The inversion of the Clausewitzean dictum that war is the extension of politics by other means was
perhaps first put forward by Michel Foucault in “Society Must Be Defended,” Lectures at the College de
France 1975-76, (New York: Picador, 2003)15. The idea was developed further by Deleuze and Guattari in
A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).
See pages 421-422.
5

contemporary war.9 Their theories, including Hybrid Warfare theory, are beginning to
concede that military strategic actors might not be the stable and coherent agents they
were once thought to be; that they might be better characterized as relational, and
ecological.

In this context, wherein war is an ecology that encompasses strategy, rather than a tool
used by it, the central research questions of this thesis arise:

In light of the contingently relational position of agency in war, how can there be such a
thing as a coherent and actionable military strategy?

For whom and for what objectives can strategists operate, if they become aware of the
trans-agential and self-perpetuating expression of a war-machine that has been unleashed
from the state who hitherto controlled it?

Can the insights of post-structuralist theorists like Deleuze and Guattari be
operationalized through some future, advanced version of Hybrid War theory, or are
military strategists and “actors” doomed to surfing waves of inter-relating tendencies and
trajectories that no person or state can ever purport to truly direct?

9 See for example: Zweibleson, Ben et al., Frame Reflection: A Critical Review of US Military Approaches to
Complex Situations. OODA.com (September 2013); Groll-Yaari, Yeddidia and Haim Assa, Diffuse Warfare:
The Concept of Virtual Mass. (Tel Aviv: Yediot Aharonot Press, 2005); or Naveh, Shimon, “Between the
Striated and the Smooth,” Insecurity. (Issue 22, Summer 2006).
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A note on methodology
Rather than taking the conventional “problem -> literature -> methodology -> analysis”
approach, this thesis unfolds in a heavily modified manuscript-style. That is to say, it is
an aggregate or assemblage of a number of more or less heterogeneous elements, linked
together through the overall themes of agency and hybridity in military strategy.

The elements, which might otherwise be referred to as a chapters, could conceivably
stand alone as mid-length essays, though they were not written this way. The elements
are arranged (assembled) in a particular order and should be read as such, but they are not
intended to be perceived according to a strict sequential or evolutionary chronology.
Concepts from within each element may extend beyond or traverse the cumulative
assemblage of the thesis, becoming enriched or otherwise altered through subsequent or
parallel development in other elements. In this sense, the thesis structure tries as much as
is possible to conform to the processual and rhizomatic metaphor, rather than one of
arborescence.10

The thesis and its elements should not perceived as a final statement of accumulated
knowledge, but rather as a collection of distinctly mutable and ongoing movements of

10 Deleuze and Guattari develop a conceptual opposition between the rhizomatic (nodal proliferation),
which maps “a process of networked, relational and transversal thought, and a way of being without
‘tracing’ the construction of the map as a fixed identity,” and the arborescent (linear branching), which
describes “ordered lineages of bodies and ideas that trace their originary and individual bases.” Colman,
Felicity J., “Rhizome,” The Deleuze Dictionary, 231. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari
attempt to evade philosophically conventional arborescent thinking, which emphasizes evolutionary
filiation of concepts, forces, and bodies in order to regulate and structure them. They perform the book
as a kind of network of rhizomatically interrelated philosophical positions that are not supposed to be
fixed in any particular order or flow of thought.