April 6, 2016 ·
Since assuming power in 1999, Russian President Vladimir Putin has used rising income from gas and oil exports not only to rebuild the Russian military from its post-Soviet nadir, but also to spur the evolution of new tactics and capabilities blending cyberwar, support to proxy forces, special operations and conventional operations. Like Washington, Moscow recognized that the primary security threat in the opening decades of the 21st century was not major conventional war but a complex web of state weakness, political extremism, terrorism, insurgency and transnational crime. Russia’s military interventions in Georgia, Ukraine, Syria and elsewhere demonstrate that Putin has honed Russia’s arsenal of weapons and is willing to use them.
The roots of this story go back even further, though, to the end of World War II. Despite the massive destruction and death the Soviet Union suffered in the war, Josef Stalin saw opportunity in its aftermath. The old global order that had kept the Soviet Union and before it Imperial Russia in check had been destroyed. This, Stalin and his henchmen believed, provided an opening to advance Soviet power in ways never seen before.
Stalin’s first inclination was to use the Soviet Union’s massive conventional military power to intimidate and control weaker nations. But there was a problem with this plan: the United States. While the United States had demobilized after the war, it still had massive air and sea power and, most importantly, nuclear weapons. So Stalin developed an alternative: use the Soviet Union’s connections with communist or socialist organizations around the world to exploit local grievances fueled by colonialism, inequity, corruption, repression and ethnic or racial tension, in order to empower revolutionary movements. Rather than a big and very costly Soviet offensive through Europe, the West would die the death of a thousand small cuts as it lost its friends in the Third World and access to vital resources. Thus what became known as “limited war” took on increased strategic significance, playing a major role in the post-war global security system, breaking up old empires, creating new nations, and providing a tableau for proxy conflict between the Eastern and Western blocs.
Now Putin seems determined to begin act two of this proxy conflict. But the United States and Russia approach limited war very differently. This truly is a tale of two strategies. While its conclusion is yet to be written, the struggle is likely to affect large parts of the world in the next few years.
The Russian Approach to Limited War
Like individual humans, a nation’s history and strategic culture shapes the way it thinks about new security challenges. That is clear in Russian and American approaches to limited war. For both, the past offers both a key to the present and a guidebook to the future.
Russia and the United States both began as relatively small states surrounded by dangerous enemies and then expanded over time, eventually filling their continents. This expansion brought the two nations into contact and conflict with different cultures. Their experience with limited war was forged in what today would be called pacification wars or cross-cultural counterinsurgency. Russia’s involvement in such conflicts was much longer and more difficult than America’s; its enemies were more powerful and numerous. Russia has undertaken pacification campaigns or counterinsurgency for most of its 1,000-year history. Limited war runs deep in its collective memory and strategic culture.
Russian President Vladimir Putin at the opening of the Army-2015 international military show,
Moscow, June 16, 2015 (AP photo by Ivan Sekretarev).
Over the past two centuries, Russia used limited war to minimize threats on its periphery and as proxy conflict with other great powers. It learned many lessons from this. One is that finding and propping up a compliant local ally is easier and cheaper than direct control. Take Russia’s deadly and vexing problem with separatism in the Caucasus. After two costly wars in Chechnya, Moscow reverted to its time-tested methods, empowering strongman Akhmad Kadyrov and, after he was assassinated, his son Ramzan Kadyrov. This was characteristic of the Russian approach: Brutal, vicious dictators are acceptable allies or proxies so long as they control their realm and do not threaten Russia. Heavy-handed repression is a feature, not a bug.
Another thing Russia learned was that brutality often works. Enemies involved in low-intensity warfare with Russia know that it will escalate. Of course, the mailed fist does not always work. The Soviet campaign in Afghanistan from 1979 to 1989 probably killed 75,000 Afghan fighters and a million civilians. But the Afghans persisted, and the Soviets lost. Closer to home, though, Russia often escalates until resistance is shattered. The two wars in Chechnya may have killed 100,000 or more civilians. Earlier, under Stalin, Moscow deported half a million Chechens to Siberia and Central Asia. Chechen resistance fighters still use terrorism against Russia but have little hope of winning independence.
A third thing Russia has learned about limited war is that it never fully ends. If one opponent is crushed, there will be others. While Americans consider peace the normal human condition and thus search for a permanent solution to a conflict, Russians, with their long history as an imperial power, accept George Santayana’s lament that only the dead have seen the end of war. For Russians, peace is simply the time spent preparing for the next conflict.
Farther afield, Imperial Russia used limited warfare as leverage against other great powers such as Turkey and Great Britain, supporting rebels, independence movements, separatists and a cast of tribal militias. The Soviet Union turned this relatively minor aspect of Imperial Russian strategy into a linchpin of its own strategy, supporting anti-Western nations and movements throughout Asia, Africa and the Americas.
As it supported its proxies, the Soviet Union exhibited an ice-cold, unemotional realism. It would back almost any anti-Western leader or movement, no matter how bloody or evil. And it was willing to abandon its proxies when the relationship no longer advanced Moscow’s interests. This conditionality of support gave the Russians and Soviets leverage over their allies that the United States often lacked with its partners.
Today, Putin’s strategy reflects the historical lessons learned by Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union. He uses limited war to keep potential opponents on Russia’s periphery weak and to demonstrate that Russia remains a power to be reckoned with. While Russia is too weak to dictate the outcome of limited wars, particularly those far from its territory, it can be a spoiler, preventing the United States and its Western allies from achieving the outcome they desire.
Putin’s September 2015 intervention in Syria is a perfect example. At the time, Russia’s long-time client Bashar al-Assad was on the ropes. Russian intervention probably saved him and allowed him to retake some ground he had lost to rebel forces. But just as Assad went on the offensive, Russia announced its withdrawal. While it remains to be seen whether this will actually happen, the intervention kept Moscow’s client in power while making Assad know that he depended on Russian support. The intervention also signaled to the West that no resolution to the Syrian civil war was possible without Russia’s approval. After decades of post-Soviet decay, Russia was back.
The intervention also demonstrated that the rebuilding of the Russian military was moving along. Nations close to Russia certainly got this message. And Putin used the intervention to score political points back home, portraying it as a great victory that accomplished what he had intended. At the same time, the Russian leader made clear that he would send his forces back to Syria if need be. This was a powerful message that the United States could not replicate after its disengagement from Iraq and Afghanistan. Once Americans leave a limited war, they never return.
The American Approach to Limited War
The United States did not spend nearly as long policing an empire as Russia, so limited war was not etched as deeply in America’s collective memory and strategic culture. When the United States did fight insurgents during the settling of the Western frontier, as well as in the Philippines and in the Caribbean basin, the experience did not dramatically shape national strategy. Each conflict was seen as a one-off or an aberration. As a result, the United States never developed a large colonial service or overseas intelligence agencies like the European imperial states did.
When the United States later was forced into limited war-first in Vietnam, later in El Salvador and then in Iraq and Afghanistan-policymakers and military leaders developed concepts, doctrine and organizations on the fly. Despite this ad hoc procedure, the U.S. government, military and intelligence agencies eventually got very good at counterinsurgency, counterterrorism and other components of limited war. But the time it took to do this posed a problem: In each case, the United States became effective at limited war just as the public and its elected leaders were losing patience with involvement in the conflict. This happened in Vietnam and again in Iraq and Afghanistan. And in each of those instances, Americans assumed that they could forget what they learned from the conflicts, since the United States would never get involved in limited war again.
Because of this, the general inclination of America’s political leaders-with the major exception being the response to the 9/11 attacks-is to limit involvement in pacification or counterinsurgency to indirect methods such as providing security assistance, training and advice to partner nations; small-footprint operations involving a small number of the military’s special operations forces or members of the intelligence community; or standoff strikes using manned aircraft and, more recently, drones. This makes sense in terms of lessening the chances of being drawn into a costly quagmire and losing public and congressional support, but limits the ability of the United States to engineer the sort of permanent, decisive outcome it wants.
While Russia is too weak to dictate the outcome of limited wars, it can be a spoiler, preventing the United States and its Western allies from achieving the outcome they desire.
The problems don’t stop there. The American political system, with its powerful role for Congress and the importance of public support for a policy, pushes the president to overestimate the threat from an insurgency or terrorist movement so as to mobilize opinion, and to overpromise results. Americans expect decisive outcomes even when their willingness to commit resources is limited. Washington may send lots of money and launch many airstrikes, but resists the large-scale, long-term troop presence that is often needed to pave the way for a decisive outcome in a deeply troubled state. Even when the United States does go all in, as in Iraq and later Afghanistan, it is unwilling to stay for the many decades it takes to really fix a badly broken political and economic system. This gap between expectations and commitment is made even worse by the need of senior policymakers and military leaders to show quick results before their time in office or command ends.
The United States also faces legal and ethical constraints that Russia does not. When American troops or, more often, a partner government or its security forces become abusive or corrupt, it undercuts public and congressional support for continued involvement. Yet insurgencies, which almost always incorporate terrorism, are called “dirty” conflicts for a reason. When insurgents are unconstrained by law and ethical considerations, government and security forces often feel they must answer in kind.
One of the biggest obstacles to the American way of limited war is finding the right partners. America needs allies committed to good governance, rule by law, democracy and human rights. Unfortunately, regimes with those values are not the ones likely to face a serious insurgency. Instead, the partners that most need help to defeat extremism usually operate in a system where political power is used to benefit one particular social group at the expense of others, and where corruption, cronyism, repression and abuse are the norm.
The new commander of NATO and U.S. forces in Afghanistan during a change of command ceremony,
Kabul, March 2, 2016 (AP photo by Rahmat Gul).
For the United States to succeed, it has to encourage its partners to abandon these methods even though they personally benefit the powerful and their clients. This seldom works. The norm is for partners to make some concessions, undertake modest reforms, and say the right things to please Washington when the security situation is dire. But once American assistance helps get the insurgency under control, they usually revert to old practices and stifle reform. Thus the root causes of the conflict are never fully addressed, and the United States does not get the decisive outcome and permanent resolution it was after. The American way of limited war is much like pushing a boulder most of the way up a mountain only to let it roll back down, then repeating this with another boulder on a different mountain.
Finally, the way that Americans normally view history and the global security system limits U.S. effectiveness at limited war. As Gen. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, noted in a recent talk at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, Americans see the United States as either at peace or, in rare instances, at war. When the nation is at war, military actions and solutions take precedence. The objective is to defeat the adversary on the battlefield. Then peace returns, and the armed forces are used support diplomacy.
America’s opponents have learned to exploit this conceptual rigidity. Organizations like al-Qaida and the so-called Islamic State do so by employing strategies that focus on human terrain, rather than geographic terrain. Throughout history, a state, tribe or any other sort of political entity was rooted in a piece of territory. In a conflict with an enemy, whoever ended up controlling this territory won. Transnational movements like al-Qaida and the Islamic State exist in specific geographic locations, but their existence is not contingent on controlling it. They can, if need be, move elsewhere and continue operations. So the United States is still approaching its conflict with al-Qaida and the Islamic State from the historical geographic perspective, while America’s enemies have, in a very real sense, transcended geography to operate in human terrain.
Americans expect decisive outcomes even when their willingness to commit resources is limited.
Other nations, like Russia, China and Iran, have also learned to exploit America’s conceptual rigidity through the use of what security experts call “gray zone” aggression. As Hal Brand of Duke University wrote, this refers to “an activity that is coercive and aggressive in nature, but that is deliberately designed to remain below the threshold of conventional military conflict and open interstate war.” In Ukraine, for instance, “Russia has used its own advanced military forces in combination with irregular forces, propaganda, and coercion of the civilian population.”
Since the United States thrives on political and moral clarity and is the master of quick operations where its advanced military capabilities-whether airpower, seapower, cyberpower, conventional landpower or special operations forces-secure victory, America’s opponents rely on methods that are neither purely military, purely political nor purely economic, and which can be applied for as long as necessary. They understand that the United States is very good at some things, so they focus their efforts elsewhere.
The Future of Limited War
History does not determine the way a nation responds to changing events and new challenges, but it certainly affects it. The Russian and American approaches to limited war in all of its forms-whether pacification, counterinsurgency, counterterrorism, gray-zone conflict or others-demonstrate that the past, as expressed in the national collective memory, remains important, shaping the framework in which strategic decisions are made.
For both Russia and the United States, limited war has been a way to influence events at an acceptable cost when important but not vital national interests are threatened. Both prefer to conduct it indirectly if possible by finding and empowering partners or proxies. Both would rather send advisers and assistance than troops on the ground, hoping that partners or proxies can take care of things themselves. Both have also shown a willingness to take on a more direct role under some circumstances. While the militaries of both nations are optimized for conventional war, both have extensive limited war capabilities, including special operations forces. Both rely heavily on their special operations forces in limited war as trainers and advisers, to direct airstrikes, and for direct-action missions. Both have organizations that combine traditional intelligence functions-the gathering and analysis of information to support national decision makers-with specialized operational capabilities.
Russia and the United States will remain involved in limited wars. The United States may continue the approach preferred by President Barack Obama of limiting its involvement to indirect, small-footprint and standoff actions, but is unlikely to disengage so long as enemies as heinous as the Islamic State threaten fragile states. Russia’s interventions in nations that were once part of the Soviet Union and in Syria show that it, too, considers limited war important, and that it has both the will and the ability to undertake it.
Beyond these parallels, history has also led Russia and the United States to think differently about limited war. Given its resource limitations, Russia must be more selective than the United States and is less able to prop up a partner with economic and security assistance. Unlike the United States, which can usually count on help from France, Great Britain, Australia, Canada and other formal allies and partners, Russia has no great-power allies to share the burdens of limited war. Yet Putin in particular, and Russian rulers more generally, is much less constrained by the need to mobilize the support of other Russian leaders or the Russian public than the president of the United States. For Putin, other Russian leaders and the public are an audience rather than partners in making strategy. Russia also remains willing to take on partners, clients and allies and use methods that Washington would reject. Reflecting its history, Russia remains less ambitious when it wades into limited war, recognizing that permanent resolution of conflicts is seldom possible and that limited war is an unfortunate but persistent part of the human experience.
The American attitude toward limited war is likely to remain riven by contradictions and tensions. The United States would prefer to avoid involvement in such conflicts altogether but this is not possible, particularly in an era when adversaries have devolved to insurgency, terrorism, gray-zone aggression and nongeographical strategies. No matter who is elected president in 2016, he or she is likely to seek indirect, small-footprint and standoff methods of shaping the outcome of limited wars, but may not always be able to. It remains to be seen whether an American president could resist a call for help from a partner government facing an extremist threat.
U.S. involvement in limited war will continue to face serious problems arising from the nature of the American political system, as well as ethical and legal constraints. It is also hamstrung by a strategic culture that pushes the United States toward expecting big, permanent results from modest infusions of resources and sees war and peace as rigidly distinct conditions, with peace the norm and war the aberration.
So the United States will continue to hone its tools for limited war with special emphasis on what Americans do best: integrating new technology and producing extraordinarily skilled warriors. It will not, however, overcome the conceptual and organizational constraints that hinder its effectiveness at limited war. For Americans, insurgents, terrorists and the denizens of the gray zone will remain pervasive and vexing.
Russia, with its more limited ambitions and willingness to simply play the spoiler against nearby opponents and the West, will encounter fewer frustrations and continue its long tradition of treating limited war as an unfortunate but inevitable aspect of the human condition.
Steven Metz is the author of “Iraq and the Evolution of American Strategy.” His weekly WPR column, Strategic Horizons, appears every Friday. You can follow him on Twitter @steven_metz.
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