Elena Wicker
Strategy is often described as both an art and a science. Complete oeuvres on the art of war litter military reading lists, and a professional education would be inadequate without a military science component. Yet, as Bernard Brodie stated in his lecture to the Naval War College in 1958, but for a few exceptions “both art and science have generally been lacking in what is presumed to be strategic studies.”[1] A great deal of attention has been paid to the scientific aspects of strategy, and processes abound to steer strategists through stepwise methodologies to calculate capabilities and answer strategic problems. Given that strategy is as much art as it is science, how is the art of strategy trained? Furthermore, what can critique of art reveal about strategy?
Sculpture, like strategy, is a three-dimensional art form that relies on spatial relations and perspective to alter and reflect its environment. As opposed to a painting that can only be viewed from a single plane, sculpture can be seen and experienced from infinite points of view. Sculpture moves the intellect and the senses; strategic sculpture moves armies. Just as Michelangelo Buonarroti worked in marble and fresco, the strategist shapes orders, concepts, memos, white papers, budgets, and strategies. Michelangelo’s tools were hammer, chisel, and paintbrush, and the tools of the strategist are language and logic. This article draws lessons from four classical sculptural techniques—casting, carving, modeling, and assemblage—to illustrate questions and challenges for the modern artist of strategy. These styles are not mutually exclusive. Over the course of a lifetime an artist is likely to draw on multiple styles, media, and subjects, just as the strategist will encounter a variety of questions, assumptions, and challenges over the course of their career.
First, historical contexts and assumptions have created a set of molds from which both strategists and their work is cast. Second, Michelangelo’s belief that statues exist in the marble and the artist’s task is to release these angels through carving relates to positivism: the idea that generalizable rules about the world and war exist and can be identified. Third, the American modeling of strategy has segmented the battlefield into domains, distributing strategic development for each domain to different corners of the workshop. This is done with the assumption that when those pieces are returned to the shared armature, each segment will fit together seamlessly. Fourth, and finally, is assemblage or the art of complex systems. The adhesives that attempt to glue disparate service contributions together are called by many names—jointness, multi-domain, integration, synergy—yet the cracks and seams between services remain points of weakness, and if one component fails, the entire structure may crumble.
Yet, art is so much more than connecting chisel to marble or paintbrush to paper. Brodie submitted to his Naval War College audience that strategy is undervalued in the U.S. military because of a false belief that strategy is easy.[2] Art has been similarly evaluated. As one critic of Pablo Picasso’s work commented, “I have seen the work of insane persons confined in asylums who lean toward art, and I will say that the drawings of these insane artists are far superior to the alleged works of art I saw at the exhibition.”[3] Reducing strategy to an axiom of fog and friction or to ends, ways, and means is not art per se, just as slapping paint on paper was not the genius of Picasso. Strategy, like art, is an interplay of actors, produced through the interactive trinity of artist, medium, and audience. Just as sculptural masterpieces are exhibited in galleries to shape the senses of a public audience, strategy is displayed in an international gallery where it shapes a global audience’s sense of security or lack thereof.
CASTING: THE MOLDS OF HISTORY AND THE COMMAND TRACK
A contemporary mold for a cast bronze sculpture (Tizzano Sculpture)
When casting a sculpture, liquified medium is poured into a mold and allowed to solidify. The final sculpture is revealed once the mold is cut away or removed. There are two critical molds in modern strategy: that of the strategist, and of strategy itself.
The first type of mold creates a service member. A soldier, airman, sailor, or marine is liquid potential, first cast in the mold of the tactician through their service’s basic training. This mold emphasizes the implementation and mastery of existing doctrine and accepted practices of warfare. A newly cast soldier attempts to master their craft and excel in tactical positions until they reach a level of experience that qualifies them for functional areas. If selected, the soldier enters Functional Area 59, the Army’s strategist program. Just as Michelangelo shone as a sculptor, painter, and prolific poet, so the newborn FA59 strategist must now perform as an academic, researcher, planner, and artist of strategy. Having first been cast as a tactician, becoming a strategist requires that the soldier be re-forged.
To become a strategist, the soldier passes through a series of crucibles intended to heat and hammer the soldier out of the shape of their first tactician cast into a new strategic form. Strategists are asked to envision the future battlefield, forecast unforeseeable threats, question and modify existing doctrine, and embrace change and experimentation. Despite heavy investment in the development of these soldiers, historically strategists almost never see the critical command positions for which they were intentionally forged.[4] Retired General Robert Scales argues the Army promotion system “grinds these officers off at field grade.”[5] According to a 2020 study by the RAND Corporation, general officers are frequently selected from the ranks of combat branches due to proven success in small unit tactical leadership, or, how well they fit the cast of the tactician.[6] This was not always the case. By today’s standards, Dwight D. Eisenhower’s undistinguished career and extended time as a staff officer prior to 1941 should have undermined any possibility of his appointment to general officer, much less Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe.[7] Today, despite the strategic responsibilities of command, the shape of command is the mold of the tactician.
This is not to say that the strategist is superior to the tactician. Militaries require both, and likely fewer strategists than tacticians. Rather, it is necessary to recognize that the attributes intentionally inculcated in strategists to develop creative analytical thinkers may be the exact reasons why they are deemed poorly suited for command. There are few true Michelangelos of strategy: Sun Tzu, Clausewitz, Jomini, Mahan, Corbett, Mitchell, and Douhet among others.
Michelangelo was recognized as a genius of his day, yet few strategists receive that same regard, instead tending to exemplify the difference between tactical and strategic genius. Alfred Thayer Mahan was a Navy misfit whose dislike of steam-powered vessels led him to avoid sea duty whenever possible.[8] When Mahan was placed in command, he had an unfortunate predisposition that would likely have ended his military career in present times—he presided over the collision of nearly every ship under his command with anchored vessels, dry dock caissons, even other ships on open seas. He was not the only Michelangelo who ran contrary to the molds of his position. Giulio Douhet was imprisoned for a year after being court-martialed for his criticisms of Italian leadership.[9] Billy Mitchell’s aggressive pursuit of new strategic approaches led to a demotion, conviction in a court-martial for insubordination, and finally resignation. If past masters of strategy were not perfectly cast from the mold of their time and place, how should the military protect misfit virtuosos within their ranks today? Are there any procedures in place for identifying and protecting the next Mahan or Douhet?
The second type of mold is that into which the language of modern strategy is cast. As the medium of strategy is language, the molds in which strategic art is cast are formed from assumptions and beliefs. The molds of modern strategy are created in the syllabi of strategic education courses: the War Colleges, and to continue the example of the Army, the Basic Strategic Arts Program and the School of Advanced Military Studies. Modern strategy has been cast in the historical images of the plains of Gettysburg, the trenches of the Western Front, the beaches of Normandy, the Persian Gulf, and the streets of Saigon. Alongside the staff of the War Colleges, Thucydides and Napoleon serve as instructors. Despite thousands of conflicts throughout human history, these seven select historical contexts define the education of a generation of strategic thinkers. Do these molds, shaped by terrain, sovereignty, and conventional capabilities still hold true for wars in space and cyberspace, or for irregular war?
Theories and strategies are a snapshot of a time and place, each cast in a mold created from the historical, political, and social context of its temporal moment. Just as single-use molds are destroyed in the process of releasing the final piece of art, the context of any single theory or strategy will never be entirely recreated at a future time. Furthermore, strategies are created with the intent to shape environments and change the context in which they were created. As a result, strategy is a sculpture intentionally designed to break the mold in which it was created.
Other types of molds can be reused, but these will degrade with time and repeated use. Artists cannot ignore the continuous degradation of their sculptural molds; they are continuously examined, evaluated, and if necessary, remade. Mold creation is a constant dynamic interplay between the artist, their tools, the medium, and the final sculpture. Recycling strategic concepts, formats, and approaches can provide a false sense of artistry and risks importing outdated historical assumptions. As the world evolves, a static mold of strategy that attempts to recapture historical genius will become less and less applicable. Strategists cannot disregard the natural deterioration of lessons and assumptions drawn from historical contexts, lest the United States find itself attempting to fight a Napoleonic land war over the ephemeral terrain of cyberspace.
CARVING: POSITIVISM AS SUBTRACTIVE SCULPTURE
Michelangelo's unfinished carving "The Atlas," circa 1530-1534 (Galleria dell ‘Accademia)
In subtractive sculpture, the artist begins with a large piece of the medium and painstakingly removes pieces of the medium to eventually reveal the work of art. To Michelangelo, sculpture was the art of taking away.[10] Pope Benedict XVI described Michelangelo’s view of the artist’s task as removing that which covered an image already set in the stone. He described Michelangelo as seeing art as “a bringing to light, a setting free, not as a doing.”[11] The idea that every block of marble contains a statue is the essence of positivism. Positivism suggests there are generalizable laws that can be identified with the right question, approach, and rigor.[12] Essentially, this world is full of statues and, with the right approaches, they can be discovered.
The U.S. military approaches warfare in a similar manner to Michelangelo. To date, the U.S. military has named dozens of unique types of war. Adjectival war includes conventional, irregular, hybrid, cold, trench, proxy, asymmetric, cyber, and otherwise. Naming war, or types and subsets of war, bounds a set of instances and suggests there is something unique about each category of conflict. According to positivist thinking, each category should have a set of generalizable rules, and, through application of the scientific method, those rules can be identified. [13] Identification of the rules allows for the optimization of strategies. Each adjectival war is a statue.
Colin Gray pushed back against this linguistic segmentation of warfare with a simple statement: “War is war.”[14] When considering the nature of war, other strategists saw a pantheon of statues, while Gray saw a single angel in the marble. War is war. As for the character of war, war is “more than a true chameleon,” and in more modern terms, the joint environment is “fluid.”[15,16] If, in fact, war is a perpetually changing chameleon, efforts to identify general laws will nearly always be fruitless. Analysts may say that words matter, but frequently this focus is on the meaning of one term versus another rather than the naming process itself. Whenever a new type of adjectival war is introduced, there is an implicit suggestion that this new type is categorically unique from the preexisting forms of war. In Michelangelo’s notes for the carving of David, he describes carving as simple, “you just go down to the skin and stop.” Where does the United States’ carving of war stop?
The interaction of artist and medium not only sculpts the medium, the interplay develops and shapes the artist as well. In the process of carving, the artist will come across unexpected occlusions and veins in the marble, shifting their approach to highlight different features. The interaction of strategist, strategy, and context are mutually constitutive. Strategists are shaped by their apprenticeships to other strategists, the strategies upon which they were trained, their prior experiences, and repeated interaction with their medium. American strategists are both the sculptor and the sculpted. This means the strategist must recognize their lack of objectivity. The strategist exists in the same context as their art—molded by the same assumptions, context, and pressures as the strategy they are attempting to craft. Essentially, as an artist, a military strategist is not viewing the marble from an external stance, they are themselves embedded in the same block of marble as the statue they seek to reveal.
Strategic artwork is not only created for those embedded in the American marble matrix, but also for an external audience who are sculpted from a different set of values, experiences, cultures, assumptions, and biases. If the American strategist is a sculptor, allies and adversaries may be metalworkers, glassblowers, or printmakers. In recognition of the embedded strategist, scientific approaches to strategy should embrace an “attitude of doubt.”[17] This approach vocalizes and emphasizes the choices made while crafting strategy. No assumption is so obvious as to escape questioning, even supposedly simple questions of war and peace. As General Joseph F. Dunford stated, “We think of being at peace or at war… our adversaries don’t think that way.”[18] A reflexive attitude embraces ongoing self-questioning, unearths and examines deeply institutionalized assumptions, and ultimately illustrates the matrix of American marble.
MODELING: ARMATURES OF HISTORY AND THE SEGMENTATION OF WAR
Maquette of a horse (Pinterest)
As opposed to subtractive processes, modelling is an additive technique. Pliable materials are added to a framework and molded to build the final piece of art. A common first step for a sculpture of this type is the creation of a maquette or a scale model.[19] The maquette informs the creation of the armature. Armatures provide a stable framework upon which the sculpture is constructed. The maquettes and armatures of modern strategy are the skeletons of past strategy: the instruments of national power; ends, ways, and means; strict formatting requirements; and oblique wording recycled from one strategy to the next.
What are the segments added to the armature to craft strategy? I offer the domains of war. Each service is responsible for conquering or contesting a domain of the battlefield. The ground battle has remained with the U.S. Army, the segment containing air targets has been apportioned to the U.S. Air Force, space is newly granted to the U.S. Space Force, and any sea-based warfare or coastline assault is kneaded into shape by the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps. Within these segments, even greater partitioning occurs as specialty units claim their areas of expertise. Yet, domains are not fundamental to warfare. In fact, the term itself is not defined anywhere in doctrine. In almost off-hand notation, domains are described as an area of activity within the operating environment.[20] While shared knowledge and activity are a more recent definition of the term, etymologically, the word domain is derived from a Latin root for ownership and households.[21] Domains are that which belongs to a lord or authority.[22] Domains encompass that which belongs to the services.
A close study of segments can inform a greater understanding of the whole. Michelangelo studied human anatomy through the dissection of cadavers, building his deep knowledge of anatomy that would later be expressed in marble and bas-relief.[23] Just as Michelangelo studied musculature, strategists study the specifics of the historical cases that comprise a strategic education. In this same vein, strategists of each service specialize in the domains over which they have been given dominion. But as Clausewitz warns, “In war more than in any other subject we must begin by looking at the nature of the whole; for here more than elsewhere the part and the whole must always be thought of together.”[24] Strategy and sculpture are complex systems. If any single piece of the final sculpture is inadequate, the entirety of the complex system will fail. “Even when the likelihood of failure in each component is slight, the probability of an overall failure can be high if many components are involved.”[25] If any section of the strategy fails, the entirety of the campaign is at risk.
Ideally, each service would sculpt their segment of the strategy and, when complete, return that piece to the center of the workshop where it would be seamlessly joined with the portions created by the other services. In reality, regardless of intentions, this segmentation and distribution of segments of the battlefield invariably creates boundaries. These boundaries between domains are less walls between services than they are chasms—capabilities that exist at the edges tend to fall into the void. The plight of the A-10 Warthog and other service-bridging capabilities illustrate these crevasses. Domain strategies developed in isolated corners of the workshop may become delinked from their counterparts—an air campaign delinked from the fight on the ground. When returned to the armature, the parts reassembled no longer resemble the ideal whole. Rather than Michelangelo’s David, the final result is Frankenstein’s monster.
ASSEMBLAGE: THE KINTSUGI OF JOINTNESS
Pablo Picasso's “Guitar,”1912 paper assemblage (Museum of Modern Art)
The last technique of sculpture is assemblage, a technique made famous by Pablo Picasso during the cubist movement. Assemblage is like collage—numerous pieces are combined to create the final work of art. Assemblage is perhaps the closest analogy to modern strategy of all classical sculptural techniques. As the battlespace has expanded, portions of campaigns have been delineated and distributed to the services. Each service was deemed best suited to optimize strategy in their area of expertise. As a result of the partitioning and distribution to those deemed expert, strategies have proliferated in number but contracted in scope. Rather than an intricate complex system, the map of all of these existing strategies has come to resemble bricolage or patchwork.
Efforts to assemble the pieces of warfighting are called by many names—jointness, combined, all-domain, multi-domain, cross-domain, et cetera. All are efforts to bridge severed connections. Rather than question the organizational and strategic decisions that severed the connective tissue between the segments of war, the services have latched onto technical solutions such as Joint All-Domain Command and Control. These are often ideas for how to bridge gaps rather than close the distance between fragments. These terms proliferate jargon and play into the buzzword bingo that plagues the U.S. military. Strategy does not knit back together stronger at the fracture. Rather, every point of segmentation creates a fault line and a potential weakness. Strategy and sculpture share this tendency—they are most likely to fracture at the points where they have been joined.
Combining the branches of the military is not a feasible recommendation and is not one that this article is making. The vested interests, diverse service cultures, and organizational habits would make reunification of forces extraordinarily difficult, as past Canadian efforts at unification clearly demonstrated.[26] When the Goldwater-Nichols Act was signed, joint assignments were hotbeds of friction and surveillance. Congress noted that military officers are “pressured or monitored for loyalty by their services while serving on joint assignments” and “joint thinkers were likely to be punished, while service promoters were likely to be rewarded.”[27] Decades later, jointness is still challenged. It may not be possible to unify the sprawling bureaucracies and responsibilities of the various armed services, but it may be possible to reunify the United States’ picture of war.
Tea bowl repaired using the Kintsugi method (Wikimedia)
American jointness is the stitching on Frankenstein’s monster—ugly but effective. Jointness would be better served if it were treated as kintsugi. The Japanese art of golden joinery is a technique for repairing broken pottery in which gold, silver, or platinum are mixed into the lacquer used to reconnect the broken fragments. Jointness is not broken in the sense that it is defective. Culture, habit, and isolation have severed the connective tissue between the services, fracturing the overall sculpture of American strategy. Rather than hiding breakage, kintsugi embraces the repair, draws the eye to the beauty of imperfection, and treats the fractures as opportunities for growth and improvement.[28]
A kintsugi approach to jointness would mix gold dust into the epoxy used to fill the gaps between services by incentivizing joint positions, assignments, and programs. Goldwater-Nichols made the first attempt to mix gold dust into the cracks between the services by making joint assignments a requirement for promotion to general officer. But what further precious metals could be mixed into the joint assignment system? Requirements for earlier career joint assignments, increased inter-service officer exchanges and rotations, and extending the depth of joint commands could begin to incentivize inter-service cooperation. But the military should also consider how to protect against further fragmentation. Rather than breaking cyber officers out into yet another service, perhaps the military should maintain the distribution of cyber expertise throughout the joint force. Even more radically, it could rotate cyber specialists across services periodically so that individuals develop deep knowledge of various systems, build relationships and cultural competency in several services, and most importantly, gain the trust of multiple services. A distributed, multi-service cyber corps may be a concrete opportunity for digital golden joinery. Such a solution would place people first and create a culture of jointness rather than further divide the military in search of technical solutions. When incentives and attention are shifted to the chasms between service fragments, rather than mainly service specialization, the programs and people who work in those spaces may close the distance between the services.
THE STRATEGIC GALLERIA DELL ’ACCADEMIA
Today, David stands in contrapposto in the Galleria dell ‘Accademia in Florence, Italy. Contrapposto is a sculptural position in which the subject places their weight on the leading leg, and twists the upper body slightly off of a central axis. The figure appears relaxed, yet the pose implies movement and dynamism. Psychological research has shown this slight twist is one of the most pleasing presentations of the human form.[29] Strategy is this same deceptive balance. There is the appearance of relaxation and confidence, yet an implied dynamism and capability for movement. While conducting peaceful freedom of navigation exercises in the South China Sea with a determined confidence, the U.S. Navy maintains the ability to rapidly shift to a dynamic warfighting posture. As Michelangelo balanced David in contrapposto, so the strategist crafts in counterbalance and counterforce. The strategist is perpetually seeking the equipoise of power, the demands of the present and the requirements of the future, and the tendencies of reason, passion, and chance.
Strategy is cast in the molds of history, carved from the environment, assembled in the workshop, and finally displayed to an international audience. This last feature of art must not be overlooked. Unclassified strategy, like art, is intended to be displayed and seen. Both sculpture and strategy signal aesthetic decisions, priorities, and choices. A further feature of art is its interpretability. Art is not only a physical object; it is an experience. The global community shares an international gallery, displaying strategic masterpieces to signal priorities and focal points. Just as art draws different emotions from its viewers, strategy seeks to convey different messages to ally and adversary.
Upon David’s completion, Piero Soderini, a representative of the guild that commissioned David, is believed to have critiqued David’s nose—saying that it was too thick and required revision. On the high scaffolding, Michelangelo tapped gently and tossed marble dust in a performance of alteration that left the original nose untouched. When asked about the new nose, the sponsor commented that it was much improved and truly brought the statue to life.[30] While perhaps apocryphal, the lesson from this story is two-fold. The simple lesson is that the sponsor made an ignorant request and Michelangelo fooled him to protect an irreplaceable work of art.
The more subtle lesson is how the relationship between strategist, medium, and viewer creates a trinity of mutual constitution: each of the three is created through interaction, visibility, and exchange with the other components. The artist applies the technical skills and processes developed in training, putting chisel to marble or pen to paper, but each piece of art is constrained by the sponsor’s vision, the medium, and the tools and molds made available. The medium is shaped by the artist’s hand, but the marble’s occlusions, fault lines, and veins can reject the artist’s plans upon contact, rebounding to shape the artist’s approach in turn. The viewer experiences and interprets both sculpture and sculptor, their responses and interjections modifying the final product or inspiring the sprinkling of marble dust.
Strategy, like art, requires a unique talent and disposition, an eye for both minute detail and overall composition, time, training, and the uninhibited opportunity to create. There is no lack of talent, artistry, or creativity in the guild of American strategists. When given a block of marble and the latitude to truly innovate, the results can be astounding works of art. American strategy attempts to present a contrapposto, the relaxed confidence of a superpower with the slight twist of dynamic responsiveness to external actors or new challenges. The interplay of sculptural style, artistic license, qualities of the medium, and external comment are perpetual. As Carl von Clausewitz stated, “In war the result is never final.”[31] Artists from poets to filmmakers share this view, often repeating the adage that “art is never finished, only abandoned.”[32]
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