The Myth of "No Military Solutions"
One of the odder bits of dogma one frequently encounters in policy circles is the idea that conflicts have “no military solution.” For example, on 12 November 2024, US Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield asserted before the UN Security Council the following regarding Sudan’s civil war:
There is, quite simply, no military solution to this crisis. None. All countries should cease providing military support to the belligerents. And every one of us must continue to press the parties to return to the negotiating table with the aim of ending this conflict.
Taken at face value, the statement is not remarkable. But this is far from being the only time a senior U.S. diplomat or any other senior diplomat has made this assertion about seemingly intractable conflicts. A simple google search with the terms “State Department” and “no military solution” turns up such nuggets as the U.S. Special Representative to Afghanistan Zalmay Khalilzad insisting on 3 August 2021 that there was “no military solution” to the Afghanistan War. He was echoing a State Department spokesman’s statement in 2011 that there was “no military solution” to the Afghanistan War. On 12 September 2022, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken opined that there was “no military solution” to the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Similarly, on 9 November 2022, another State Department spokesperson said that there was “no military solution” to the war in Libya. On 7 December 2014, a Washington Post columnist took the Obama Administration to task for insisting there was “no military solution” to no less than three conflicts (Iraq, Syria, and Ukraine). On 1 June 2006, Richard A. Boucher, Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asia, affirmed that there “is no military solution” to the conflict in Sri Lanka between the Sri Lankan government and Tamil rebels.
Honestly, I could go on and on, especially if one broadens the scope to foreign governments and international bodies like the United Nations. Thus UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres asserted at a press conference on 21 June 2024 that there was “no military solution” to the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah in southern Lebanon.
This is all complete bull shit.
There almost always is a military solution to most conflicts: It consists of one side winning. Take Sri Lanka, for example: It took a while—the war began in 1983, but in 2009, Sri Lankan government soldiers crushed the last remaining pockets of the Tamil Tigers (while ignoring calls by the international community not to do so, for fear of possible civilian deaths). Sri Lanka’s government won. The war ended. No more Tamil Tigers. And of course, we all know how the war in Afghanistan turned out: Despite the State Department’s confidence that the war had “no military solution,” the Taliban apparently disagreed. They won through military means.
Tamil Tiger founder and leader Velupillai Prabhakaran. The Sri Lankan army killed him and his family during a last stand by surviving Tigers. It turns out that killing him was part of a successful military solution.
Often, what US government officials really mean when they say “there is no military solution” is that the United States (or other international actors) do not care enough about the conflict to take measures that might end the war, perhaps by helping one side win. Yes, the U.S. helped the Afghan government that it created, but in truth, it conducted a limited war that reflected the fact that U.S. had no vital interests at stake. In some cases—and perhaps the current conflict in Sudan falls in this category—the disinterest is matched by ambivalence about which side should win. Both sides of Sudan’s civil war are bad. The debate usually is about which side is worse. (Most agree, by the way, that the Rapid Support Forces, the rebels, are worse than the government, but it’s not black and white.)
There is something else going on here that I think is important to consider. I think it has to do with how nuclear weapons reframed how many people think about conflict.
Let’s back up. Our old friend Carl von Clausewitz made very clear that the purpose of war is victory, which one is to achieve by destroying the enemy’s ability to fight. That enables one to impose one’s will, even if that means moving off the battlefield to the negotiating table. There, victory empowers the victor to negotiate from strength and impose its terms. Usually, for Clausewitz, victory comes through a decisive military victory. Clausewitz, as discussed here, allowed for the possibility of limited wars with limited objectives, but in that case as well, the idea is to “win,” which he defined as bringing the war to a conclusion that advances’ one’s interests at the expense of that of the adversary. In the 20th century, Marshal Ferdinand Foch, the French commander who perhaps more than anyone can claim to have been the man to win the First World War, echoed Clausewitz’s remarks in his seminal 1903 classic The Principles of War, . This emphasis on winning through decisive battle basically held up until nuclear weapons.
Nuclear weapons had a profound effect on military strategy, for they rendered virtually impossible any major war between nuclear-armed powers. Thus, the United States and the Soviet Union could not fight each other directly, and never seek anything like the kind of decisive victory Clausewitz of Foch considered the primary objective of war. At most, the two Superpowers could conduct acts of aggression in areas of marginal importance to either side, acts that both understood to be below the threshold of unleashing a major war that could escalate to a total war, and then to nuclear war. In this context, victory no longer meant what it had in the past. “Winning” really meant avoiding war, and managing conflicts such that they did not lead to all-out war. The point of military strategy now was winning what French theorist Guy Brossollet referred to as the “non-battle.” From this point of view, the outbreak of war was tantamount to failure.
During the Cold War, the Communist side did what it could to promote its interests at the West’s expense through marginal acts of aggression. Thus, it used proxies to fight in Indochina, Vietnam, or Afghanistan. The West more or less went on the defensive, striving to limit conflict and, ultimately, preserve the status quo. Western strategy became “status quo”-focused. If a conflict did break out, the priority was putting a lid on the crisis—freezing it, perhaps—and ideally restoring the status quo ante.
There is good sense to this, but my argument is that we’ve gone too far. First of all, not every conflict, especially not since the Cold War, carries the risk of an escalation that might lead to nuclear war. During the 1956 Suez Crisis or the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, the Soviets basically threatened nuclear war; first Eisenhower and then Nixon responded by hitting the breaks on those two conflicts. In the case of the Yom Kippur War, that meant stopping the war before Israel might have achieved the sort of decisive victory that Clausewitz or Foch would have savored. But so it goes: The U.S. put its interests first, and the U.S. understood its interests to lie in ending conflict before it reached a natural conclusion. The priority was managing the crisis, not enabling a victory by one side or the other.
Since the Cold War, however, none of the conflicts that have arisen, with the possible exception of Ukraine, has carried any real risk of triggering World War III. No Great Powers cared enough about Sri Lanka to intervene, not even India, which in early phases of the war helped the Tamil Tiger rebels. But even if India had intervened, no other major power had any interest in opposing it. So Sri Lanka crushed its enemy, and nothing happened. Israel could thrash Iran (or Hamas, or Hezbollah), which might lead to a nasty regional war or perhaps devastate the global economy if the Iranians shut down the Straits of Hormuz, but not a major war involving Great Powers. Armenia or Azerbaijan could win a decisive victory, which might be a tragedy for the people of one of those two countries, but it would not lead to the kind of major total wars involving Great Powers that nuclear weapons have made all but impossible. Likewise, one of the two parties to Sudan’s civil war could crush the other, with zero risk of a major war. That might even be an optimal solution if it brought the war to an end, and thus all the displacement, ethnic cleansing, etc. Honestly, the most humane thing to do for outside parties would be to ensure a decisive victory by either side. That won’t happen.
The only real possible exception is Ukraine, for Russia has determined that subjugating Ukraine is in its vital national interest. Still, the risk of an escalation that lead to World War III, or even a major war with NATO limited to Europe that might involve nuclear weapons is small, thanks in large measure to, well, nuclear weapons. In the meantime, it should be clear to all that letting Russia get away with its aggression out of fear of what is unlikely to happen would itself be contrary to the West’s interests, possibly even vital ones, at least for Europeans.
Basically, risk aversion and an emphasis on crisis management born of the Cold War have become an almost hegemonic paradigm with which Western countries, the United States chief among them, understand conflict, even when the risk of escalation is nothing like it was during the Cold War.
Perhaps it might be time to update the paradigm?