On Limited War
Carl von Clausewitz
Limited wars have been fought for millennia, although the term might date back only as far as Carl von Clausewitz (1780-1831). Clausewitz used it to contrast with “total war,” which he described as an all-out effort to destroy the enemy, or at least destroy the enemy’s ability to fight. It was in the nature of total wars, according to Clausewitz, for the two adversaries to go to extremes. He wrote:
War is an act of force, and there is no logical limit to the application of that force. Each side, therefore, compels its opponent to follow suite; a reciprocal action is started which must lead, in theory, to extremes.
Sometimes, however, the political ends sought by at least one of the adversaries does not justify extreme measures. In fact, Clausewitz tells us, there may only be a limited objective, for which a limited application of force is appropriate. The trick is measuring out the force, which must still be greater than the force applied by one’s adversary. Yet policy—in this case the policy of limited the effort—must place limits on precisely how much. The political objective, after all, was less to destroy the enemy’s ability to fight than to alter at least marginally the status quo so that the winner could renegotiate the resulting peace to better serve its interests.
After the Second World War, which was the ultimate expression of a total war, the victorious western powers—above all the United States—believed that nuclear weapons all but made total war impossible. In fact, military strategy in the nuclear age changed from thinking about how to win wars to thinking about how to prevent them. The purpose of militaries was to prevent their use. War represented failure, and all war, moreover, represented an intrinsic evil if for no other reason than that it potentially could escalate to a total war, i.e. nuclear war.
Western military strategists came to understand that nuclear deterrence did not, however, prevent limited wars, and in fact it made limited wars more likely. Revisionist countries unsatisfied with the status quo could conduct all manner of acts of aggression secure in the knowledge that their target would not resort to nuclear weapons, because the stakes did not justify so extreme an escalation. The answer to that threat, according to Western strategists, was to be able to respond with limited, and presumably conventional, non-nuclear means. In other words, to be prepared to counter limited acts of aggression with limited force, i.e. limited wars.
Wars therefore could no longer be won, at least not militarily. There would be no military victory. The objective of diplomacy and even of warfare was to preserve the status quo or foster the return of the status quo ante. Generally, speaking, this perspective has guided U.S. foreign policy and informed all U.S. wars since 1945, with the arguable exception of the 2003 war against Iraq.
There are two problems with this. The first is that, as Beaufre argued, nuclear weapons may have brought the end of total war, but it also brought the end of total peace, or, to put it another way, of war and peace as two completely distinct states. One is at war. Or one is at peace. According to Beaufre, the world had entered a permanent state of “peace-war,” characterized by small and indirect acts of aggression calculated to stay below the threshold of nuclear war. This means that seemingly minor or limited conflicts may well be part of some much more nefarious strategy, suggesting that they need to be dealt with more vigorously that one might think. The second has to do with the problem of calculating the amount of force required to apply to a limited war conducted for the sake of limited objectives.
As Clausewitz explained, when calculating how much force to bring to a war of any sort, one must estimate the amount of force one’s adversary will apply, and therefore work to ensure that one applies more. In a total war, one does that by throwing everything one has at the enemy. In a limited war, the idea is to attempt something more measured: One seeks perhaps to “one-up” the enemy, with the extra force calculated to be just enough to do the job.
The challenge at least for the United States has been in consistently getting this calculous wrong. What is of marginal importance for the U.S.—a war in south-east Asia, for example, or Afghanistan—is of huge importance for our adversaries. For them, it is a total war. A life or death struggle. This does not mean that the adversary would throw a greater force at us: That is impossible for all but a superpower. They instead would avail themselves of indirect strategies, most often the “lassitude maneuver,” to use Beaufre’s term, which consists of tiring the U.S. out, usually combined with some form of “external maneuver” on the international scene intended to limit America’s liberty of action. This could be propaganda, or lawfare, or generally finding ways to oblige the U.S. to hold back its punches and further limit its war effort.
Naturally I’ve been thinking of these things in the context of the Gaza war, and now the Lebanon war. From the American perspective, war is failure, and therefore the goal of the use of force should be the restoration of peace, usually understood to be something resembling the status quo ante. Israel, naturally, does not share this appreciation of either conflict and has no interest in restoring what came before. Nor does Israel’s adversary, for whom these conflicts are total wars.
Israel’s apparent disinterest in fighting a limited war appears incomprehensible; critics ascribe this to Netanyahu’s desire for political self-preservation, or perhaps some intrinsic barbarity within the Israeli or Jewish soul. They ignore what Israel’s adversaries are doing. The most charitable explanation for that is mirror imaging, and the presumption that Israel looks like a Western country and therefore is behaving in un-Western-like ways, whereas Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran, because they don’t look Western, are somehow less disappointing. This may well be a case of the soft-bigotry of lower expectations. It also confuses the relative military weakness of Israel’s adversaries with weakness full stop, and it ignores the fact that they are applying powerfully effective indirect strategies that can, over time, destroy Israel. This makes Israel’s application of massive force to what Americans and many others believe to be a limited conflict appear “disproportionate” and even illegal or unethical. Whatever the explanation, it seems clear that the preferred lens through which Americans at least view warfare encourages misunderstanding, which then leads to incrimination. I would argue that it is odd for the U.S. to give lessons in limited war given that we consistently have lost such wars, and we have done so against enemies that, at the end of the day, never put America’s vital interests at risk.