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Campaign Design for Winning the War…and the Peace

It had started so well. The most battle-worthy, best-trained, best-equipped, and best-led army in the world had made a stunning advance in enemy country. It had defeated the enemy army and captured its national capital. By all rules of classical warfare, this should have been the end of it. But the enemy continued to resist. Soon, scattered elements were hitting back hard and the long lines of communication were threatened. Hostile neighboring countries began to see the opportunities.... The echoes of Napoleon's campaign of 1812 in Russia still resonate today: they are at the core of our understanding of war, and the relationship between policy, strategy, and operational art. (1) Statesmen and generals have sought to explain this relationship ever since Socrates urged one of his students to go learn the art of war from a famous visiting general, only to hear him report, upon his return, that he had learned "tactics and nothing else." (2) Recent history has merely reminded us of the paradox of the campaign of 1812 in Russia. Indeed, the numerous critiques, opinions, and analyses of the campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq center around one critical question, best posed by Frederick Kagan: "Why has the United States been so successful in recent wars and encountered so much difficulty in securing its political aims after the shooting stopped?" (3) The answer, for some, is political, (4) while others believe it lies with the US "method of warfare," (5) or with "a persistent bifurcation in American strategic thinking." (6) Yet US and NATO military doctrine are crystal clear that "wars are successful only when political goals are achieved and these goals endure." (7) If doctrine is sound at this level, the problem, if any, then surely lies elsewhere and suspicion must fall on the ways in which the ends are met. Is there a fault line between strategy and operational art, and, if so, is it made worse by inadequate campaign design? The thesis of this article is that there is, and that the current Western interpretation of campaign design must thus reunite with its strategic roots of ends and means in its quest to seek ways of winning both the war and the peace in the post-9/11 era. The Current Interpretation of Campaign Design The genesis and object of campaign design are intrinsically strategic. Indeed, campaign design seeks to devise ways in which strategic ends are met through the employment of strategically generated means. It entails the formulation of a commander's vision and the application of the operational art in the conduct of the campaign. (8) To assist in what is essentially a creative process aimed a solving complex military problems, commanders and campaign planners use a number of "elements" (9) such as the center of gravity, decisive points, lines of operation, etc. Unfortunately, these elements "hamstring planner's and commander's abilities to design and construct effective, coherent campaigns for operations across the spectrum of conflict in today's security environment." (10) The first weakness of these elements is that they reinforce a pervasive dichotomy between ends and ways. Indeed, while US joint doctrine states that "campaign planners should never lose sight of the fact that strategic objectives must dominate the campaign planning process at every juncture," (11) they are admonished two paragraphs later that "above all, the [operational] concept must make it explicitly clear that the focus is on the destruction or neutralization of the adversary's [centers of gravity]." (12) Since the latter are more often than not defined at the operational level as the enemy's armed forces (or a key element thereof), (13) the result is an undue focus on seeking battle rather than the attainment of policy itself. In Western civilization, this quest for battle is ingrained in cultural tradition and values. It was codified in the writings of Clausewitz, who declared that "destruction of the enemy forces is the overriding principle of war, and, so far as positive action is concerned, the principal way to achieve our object. …