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O N LD and EW B ATTLESPACES O N LD EW and B ATTLESPACES Society, Military Power, War and Jahara Matisek and Buddhika Jayamaha boulder london Published in the United States of America in 2022 by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. 1800 30th Street, Boulder, Colorado 80301 www.rienner.com and in the United Kingdom by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. Gray’s Inn House, 127 Clerkenwell Road, London EC1 5DB www.eurospanbookstore.com/rienner © 2022 by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Matisek, Jahara, 1983–author. | Jayamaha, Buddhika, 1971–author. Title: Old and new battlespaces : society, military power, and war / Jahara Matisek and Buddhika Jayamaha. Other titles: Society, military power, and war Description: Boulder : Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc., [2022] | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “Explores how today’s civil society, technology, and military organization are dramatically transforming the character and conduct of war”— Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2021028801 (print) | LCCN 2021028802 (ebook) | ISBN 9781626379961 (hardback) | ISBN 9781955055079 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: War. | Military science. | War and society. | Military policy—United States. | Strategy. Classification: LCC U21.2 .M3644 2022 (print) | LCC U21.2 (ebook) | DDC 355.02—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021028801 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021028802 British Cataloguing in Publication Data A Cataloguing in Publication record for this book is available from the British Library. Printed and bound in the United States of America The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1992. 5 4 3 2 1 Contents Preface vii 1 Imagining War 1 2 How Battlespaces Change Through Time 17 3 Warfare in the Nuclear Age 45 4 The Complexity of Emerging Battlespaces 63 5 Compressed, Converged, and Expanded Battlespaces 97 6 Civil Society and the Contemporary Battlespace 117 7 New Battlespaces and Strategic Realities 141 8 The Future of Grand Strategy 159 List of Acronyms 173 Bibliography 175 Index 189 About the Book tk v Preface THE GENESIS OF THIS BOOK LIES WITH OUR PERSONAL observations of warfare over the last two decades, alongside teaching warfare, strategy, and military studies at universities. Many student comments and questions pertain to the wars they have grown up with in the twenty-first century. Their probing provided us with the inspira- tional impetus to see this project through. Students pose incisive and intuitive questions honed to all levels of war and all instruments of national power, such as the following: What is the desired political end state in Afghanistan? Are the political and military objectives there aligned? The United States has been continu- ally engaged in Iraq for over thirty years, so what is the desired strategic end state? What strategic advantages have the United States derived as a nation after two decades of war? Is the digital community we call cyberspace vulnerable to attack? Who is supposed to defend the cyber domain and how? What does automation mean for the future of air- power and the Joint Force broadly? How does the exponential growth of technology change the character of war? How do weaker adversaries outflank and defeat great powers and create strategic realities? What does war mean if everything from terabytes of data to vehicles and smart devices can be weaponized? These questions focus on several themes. Inquisitive students of strategy want to understand the character of wars they may be called upon to fight, how wars change over time, and how to properly conceive of a battlespace. For many military leaders, the traditional conception of their job entails the management of violence to varying degrees, and the vii viii Preface battlespace denotes a leader’s conception of the area of operation to employ combat power effectively. What is the nature of that battlespace, and how can one make sense of it across space, through well-known and emergent domains, and along the various levels of war? Where should one look, how should one look, and for what should one look? The conversations that began in classrooms, then continued via text messages, emails, and video chats with colleagues at home and deployed abroad, transformed into this book during the Covid-19 pandemic. We aim to bridge the scholarship divide among academics, policymakers, and strategists who are interested in emerging security threats and who want to make better sense of a transformed US-led international order. * * * This book is based upon work supported by the Air Force Office of Sci- entific Research under award number FA9550-20-1-0277 and was cleared for public release (PA#: USAFA-DF-2021-130). Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the United States Air Force. We are indebted to the Department of Military and Strategic Studies and the Department of Research at the US Air Force Academy for sup- porting our endeavors during this book project. 1 Imagining War WAR IS THE ORGANIZED USE OF VIOLENCE IN PURSUIT OF an objective. The link between war and politics prominent in contemporary discourse emerged with the advent of standing armies at the end of the early modern period in Europe and particularly after the Napoleonic Wars. The purpose of military strategy is to reconcile ends, ways, and means to shape the behavior of the adversary. Violence and the credible threat of violence are merely means to create a particular effect; destruc- tion is an intermediate effect, never an end in and of itself.1 War is also an elemental social enterprise. As societies change, so too do the ways they organize violence—such as the shift from feudal levies to national conscription to maintenance of standing armies. As societies change, the nature of the objective changes, sometimes quite drastically—such as from territorial conquest to the defense of human rights. Likewise, the character of warfare evolves as societies change. How societies adopt varied forms of military organizations shapes the character of war just as war shapes the character of societies.2 When trying to understand military power and the origins of and victors in a conflict, it is widely accepted that the character and shape of war is influenced by economic and political power and other structural vari- ables.3There also is a general sense that broad trends, like the intensifi- cation and diversification of global economic ties, the development of new technologies, the increasing wealth of many countries, and the political mobilization of their peoples, has affected the relationship between the organized use of violence and the creation of effects that have become contingent and far more complex than in the past. 1 2 Old and New Battlespaces If military history is a guide, the relationships between violence and creating effects will get more complex over time. This reality poses a Janus-faced puzzle for students and practitioners of military and strategic studies. Students of strategy usually look backward to understand changes in warfare over time. Ultimately, strategists have the “task of turning one currency—military (or economic, or diplomatic, and so forth) power—into quite another (desired political consequences).”4 Practitioners who design strategy attempt to apply lessons of the past as they address what they think are salient ongoing changes. Ulti- mately, they execute strategy in an environment of imperfect information with uncertainty as the only certainty. Standing athwart the past and the present, students of strategy are faced with concerns over what broad societal attributes will contribute to the changing character of war over time. But how should both students and practitioners define the character of warfare across time and space? What aspect of war, such as, for example, its nature, character, representation, interpretation, or organization, changes over time? We develop the concept of battlespaces as the prism with which to see changes in war overtime. Napoleon’s Grande Armée marched across Europe in a context that was distinct to the kinds of societies and states that existed at the dawn of the nineteenth century. Napoleon was able to harness a commitment and commonality of purpose that came with a nascent French national identity. The armies that he faced lacked this resource. Union generals in the American Civil War prevailed over their Confederate adversaries in a context undergoing rapid change as industrialization shaped society and state power in the middle of that century. Mechanized infantry and strategic bombing of cities from World War II have become iconic images of conventional warfare.5 The dominant mid-twentieth-century concept of warfare focused on the clash of armies of sovereign states that build and sustain complex military organizations. That kind of warfare, particularly viewed from the present, seemed to pursue clear objectives and offered little ambigu- ity concerning the main protagonists. Other types of warfare, deemed “small wars” in a 1940 US Marine Corps manual, were confined to the geopolitical periphery or were sideshows to bigger wars.6 But as the information age changes societies and economies, organizational princi- ples change and adapt to various efficiencies.7 Taken together, these broad changes reflect different configurations of power. Material resources are important throughout, though in varied ways. Broad political developments, such as the rise of nationalism, the value of global connectivity, and evolving global norms about individ-