Boyd, Naveh, and Social Architecture
Along with David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, Amazon sent me Naveh’s In Pursuit of Military Excellence. I’m about 2/3 through it, its most significant (or awesome) theme is that of conceiving operational art (the level of warfare between strategy and tactics) as the organization of a military system to achieve an operational aim. Specifically, military systems should aim not for the integral linear battle of destruction prescribed by Clausewitz. They instead should focus on successive operations culminating in operational shock (udar) that prevents the functioning of the opposing system. Creating this operational pattern (obkhod) involves optimizing one’s own military system (and harmonizing its interrelated parts) to prevent the constitutive parts of the opponents military system from interacting and achieving an organizational goal. In this sense, it inverts the opposing system both mechanically and cognitively (212-213).
Adam first noted that the systemic theme of In Pursuit is shared by the work of John Boyd. Frans Osinga’s recent book explains how Boyd’s A Discourse on Winning and Losing understands warfare as a struggle between competing organic systems to survive. Naveh also knew of Boyd and cites him approvingly as well on p. 279. For Boyd, survival or death depends on configuring one’s internal structure to increase interaction the surrounding environment and preventing the opposing system from doing the same. By interfering with the interaction among the individual parts of the adversarial system, it simply ceases to function as a living organic system. This, in fact, is the theme of The Strategic Game:
“A game in which we must be able to diminish adversary’s ability to communicate or interact with his environment while sustaining or improving ours.” [Slide 33]
Much of this type of theory is constantly criticized for being too abstract and devoid of any practical use. So one idea might be to think about applying to a current problem, namely counterinsurgency. This requires conceiving the competing systems as not just individual military personnel, but civilians as well. Because contemporary warfare is ‘100% political’ and competes for the loyalty of noncombatants, warfare takes place in the context of social systems. Insurgents and counterinsurgents inhabit the same macro- social system with the indigenous population.
Thus, applying Naveh and Boyd to the problem of counterinsurgency requires thinking about how a systems of counterinsurgents can interact with the indigenous population to socially isolate insurgents. Counterinsurgents must strive to induce udar upon the insurgent system causing it to fragment and disintegrate. Doing so requires configuring their own internal components in such a way to interact with and absorb parts of the opposing system, namely the individuals who previously participated in the insurgent system. Thus, counterinsurgents must reflexively interact with and internally respond to the indigenous people that join their social system. In this way, counterinsurgents create social boundaries between social systems that excludes insurgents, thus fragmenting and destroying their social system.
Still, the above paragraph is pretty abstract. One way to clarify its meaning and implications is by specifying the identity of the people as the most important variable in the war, that which determines the political loyalty and support of the people. Social Constructivism takes precisely this theoretical vantage point, thereby necessitating that the operational art of counterinsurgency is the infiltration, fragmentation, and ultimate isolation of the insurgent identity within the population along with the norms, values, and beliefs that make up insurgent culture. Achieving this operational goal requires that counterinsurgents perform discursive acts that falsify insurgent expectations of counterinsurgents: treating insurgents and civilians with respect, recognizing local culture and adopting its own constitutive rules about law enforcement and the use of force. Through empathy and the reflection of informal legal norms, counterinsurgents act as ‘normative entrepreneurs’ (Keck and Sikkink 1998) who interactively construct the constitutive strations that constrain or enable further interaction among the system’s individuals. Reflecting local legal norms alters the boundaries of social systems, determining the direction and functions of their internal parts, and the individuals that comprise it. The use of armed force is only one action among the body of discursive practices that constructs social boundaries, identities, and thus interests in obeying or rebelling against state forces who claim a monopoly on violence.
As mentioned earlier (see Adam’s work also), Naveh’s version of postmodern military theory has strongly influenced Israeli military practices, particularly Kokhavi’s operation in Nablus 2002 where swarming tactics were used to attack Hamas militants. Weizman describes this in the same article that ‘walk through walls’ came up as a method of creating smooth space through striated, consistent with Deleuze and Guattari. Practitioners think of themselves as architects that construct striations and smooth out physical space.
However, this implementation of operational theory is only applied in terms of material space and not ideational, or social space. Counterinsurgency, on the other hand, is a strategy that requires the operationalization of politics and violence that discursively constructs new social boundaries (that which prevent interaction) and creates new smooth space (that which permits interaction). In this way (to recall the previous post), counterinsurgents act as social architects that socialize new boundaries by learning from social interaction with the indigenous people.
Publishing Fail and Discourse in Contemporary Warfare
I have an article I adapted from the 5GW piece originally written two years ago that’s included in the upcoming volume edited by Dan. While the 5GW piece argues that insurgency and counterinsurgency trajectories and outcomes can be understood using Social Constructivism, the new article explains this in much greater depth. I argue that insurgency and counterinsurgency are competitions to socially construct hegemonic authority among an indigenous population. This requires creating new perceptions of identity that legitimate the use of force by one side and delegitimize force used by an adversary. In this way, the adversary is constituted as a threat to the indigenous people, thereby legitimating violent action against that opponent.
Anyway, I submitted this to International Organization, and it was rejected within a week. Which sucks because at the very least I wanted comments. To improve it, I’m thinking I need to go beyond simply describing Constructivism via Wendt (mostly). In fact, I saw something this week that speaks to exactly how identities must be socially constructed in contemporary war (h/t AM, who else?). From Margalit and Walzer:
The crucial means for limiting the scope of warfare is to draw a sharp line between combatants and noncombatants. This is the only morally relevant distinction that all those involved in a war can agree on. We should think of terrorism as a concerted effort to blur this distinction so as to turn civilians into legitimate targets. When fighting against terrorism, we should not imitate it.
We should do the opposite: we should socially construct the identities of combatants and non-combatants as the means of drawing that sharp line. Effective counterinsurgency does exactly this: it requires that soldiers discursively interact with the people (non-combatants) and cooperatively identify those individuals who are socially known to be insurgents (combatants) and perceived to be a threat to the people. In this way, counterinsurgents discursively fix both the identities of the people/non-combatants and insurgents/combatants and create new social boundaries that define the inside and outside of political communities. Because this discursive strategy requires a partner to communicate, any individual can identify him/herself as a non-combatant and cooperate with counterinsurgents to identify combatants.
As social scientists, we want to investigate precisely this phenomenon. Constructivism offers us a theoretical framework by which we can do this. Roxanne Lynn Doty describes how states construct identities via their ‘discursive authority’: “its ability, in the face of ambiguity and uncertainty, to impose fixed and stable meanings about who belongs and who does not belong to the nation, and thereby to distinguish a specific political community – the inside – from all others – outside.” [1] While scholars have tended focus on the political construction of identity, no one (that I have seen) have applied this same focus of research to the topic of insurgency and counterinsurgency. Thus two shifts are needed. The first examines not international politics but domestic (Cynthia Weber argues that this distinction is its own social construct), and the second examines not just politics but politics in the context of war (which approaches war from the other direction suggested by Barnett: “war in the context of everything else”). In making revisions, I should ensure that the article fills this theoretical and scholarly void.
[1] Roxanne Lynn Doty. Sovereignty and the nation: constructing the boundaries of national identity. In State Sovereignty as Social Construct. Edited by Thomas J. Biersteker and Cynthia Weber. See p. 122.
Other Things
My blogging has gotten so bad lately I’ve thought I should give it up. It feels burdensome in a sense, because I know I have interesting things to say, but have become self-conscious to the point of holding back for fear I’ll screw it up. Better to say nothing than sound like an idiot.
Otherwise, it’s been a rough semester and lots of things changed. I lost my car in an accident in February. I have to transition from taking classes to writing a dissertation and doing research. Some dude punched me in the face a couple times for no reason and I got surgery to fix my busted face (Facebook users might have noticed). Unfortunately, this is an environmental hazard living in the Albany student ghettos. I’m moving in June and thought it was ironic that this happened at the very end of five years of living in this neighborhood.
Such is life.
I hope to resume regular blogging soon, the whole blog really deserves a complete makeover. Among other things.
Thanks to Sean Meade for a few book recommendations.
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