Bryan Terrazas
On Thursday, February 24th 2022, one of the United States’ near-peer adversaries crossed the Ukrainian border with a significant portion of its substantial military power. At the outset Ukrainian forces suffered from material combat power disparities with their Russian invaders, but the Ukrainian people themselves seemed to enjoy high morale overall.[2] Despite Russian technical and numerical military superiority, Russian forces did not quickly overwhelm the Ukrainian defenders and achieve a decisive victory.[3] Nearly two months into the conflict, not only have the high-spirited Ukrainian people proven unwilling to accept defeat as a consequence of material destruction, they are rallying international support for their cause.[4] Conversely, Pentagon Press Secretary John F. Kirby remarked that low Russian morale may in fact affect the outcome.[5] As the gap between Ukrainian and Russian morale continues to yawn, the ultimate outcome of the conflict is still very much in question. Although the Russia-Ukraine conflict may not ultimately be decided solely by the gap between Russian and Ukrainian morale, it has so far been an intangible yet critical aspect that will have effects on its enduring outcome.
The body of a Russian serviceman outside Kharkiv on February 26, 2022. (AFP/Getty)
Will and morale now represent critical aspects of warfare that the U.S. military has neglected in favor of material factors. The deleterious consequences of that neglect have prodded leaders across the U.S. joint force to acknowledge that an emphasis on the physical destruction of enemy capabilities as the primary goal for military operations translates to operational and tactical success and not necessarily enduring strategic successes.[6] Even before the Russia-Ukraine conflict, U.S. wars in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan provide ample justification for these concerns. The outcomes of these conflicts challenge the current U.S. military assumption that more physical destruction can achieve enduring success, and the implication that non-Western perspectives to warfare do not accommodate this type of war’s outcome long-term. In response, there is newly placed importance on the potential for affecting the most fundamental motivations for adversaries—the will and morale to develop, reconstitute, and fight.[7] This emphasis on intangible human factors such as will and morale embodies a glaring current omission in Western thinking on the conduct and outcome of war, and represents the human or psychological element that has historically been considered the other half of warfare.
THE IMPORTANCE OF PEOPLE
The strategic environment is now defined by human-oriented considerations as much as it is defined by increasing complexity and interconnection. The world is progressively more online and connected, and this migration on to social media is increasing at a much faster rate than the population itself.[8] Much of the world is now watching the Russia-Ukraine war play out in real time on their smartphones, bypassing traditional media corporations and providing a direct linkage to those intimately involved in the fighting.[9] Although much of this change is attributable to advances in technology-enabled information capabilities, it also highlights the importance of the human-centric aspect of global affairs empowered by the ability to connect instantaneously across the globe. These connections further highlight the importance of perceptions, emotions, beliefs, and ultimately the willingness to become involved in conflict or to accept its outcomes.
The joint staff has recognized the importance of people and that military power must be re-imagined to accommodate these changes in order “to alter behavior of relevant actors to support the achievement of enduring strategic outcomes.”[10] This statement does not mean simply an acknowledgment of information or non-lethal operations. Given the increased importance of human connections, it is an expansion of the relevant actors beyond the immediate participants that accommodates those who may be geographically distant and otherwise only indirectly involved. It serves as an emphasis on influencing the will of the people involved as the ultimate objective in competition and conflict over simply the physical destruction of enemy means to resist. However, this acknowledgement has not yet translated into practical application.
U.S. ARMY TREATMENT OF WILL AND MORALE
The U.S. military has not fully exploited this long-acknowledged assertion operationally, especially in the U.S. Army. Even as the seminal U.S. Army Doctrine Publication (ADP) 3-0 recognizes that a military operation is a human endeavor, it characterizes breaking the enemy will only as a result of ground combat.[11] Beyond advising to limit harm and adhering to international laws of war, the doctrine is devoid of how to conduct operations in a manner that accounts for enemy, friendly, or civilian will. The somewhat more tactically focused Field Manual (FM) 3-0 again only acknowledges will as the focus of the “Dominate” phase, which itself is characterized as “overmatching enemy capabilities at the right time and place.”[12] There is no guidance on how to conduct operations to affect will and morale, such as timing an offense to exploit morale considerations.
U.S. military doctrine principally seeks the destruction of an adversary’s will through the destruction of that adversary’s material means to resist and fight. Moreover, the destruction of an adversary’s will is often viewed as a derivative of morale during combat operations. For example, enemy morale is discussed briefly as particularly low during an enemy withdrawal, but the U.S. Army’s principle guidance on offense and defense FM 3-90-1 treats morale as an incidental effect of regular combat operations without any real consideration of how to influence it directly or as the actual objective.[13] This effectively ignores that some operations may instead boost enemy willingness to resist rather than diminish it, and that the destruction of the morale may require a change in the time, place, or type of operation itself. Friendly morale similarly receives only passing attention as the commander’s responsibility, and its primary tools are through religious services, human resources, and sustainment.[14] Like the treatment of enemy morale, there is no guidance on how to conduct combat operations to maintain or even enhance friendly morale.
The U.S. military’s default approach to enduring success in war thus neither speaks to how to influence friendly morale during actual combat operations nor how to counter any enemy attempts at influencing it. It is further still from any considerations on affecting the will of enemy non-combatants and civilians that provide support for the conflict. This approach, in effect, treats high friendly morale in combat as nearly a foregone conclusion and degraded enemy morale only as a consequence of continued material destruction. Only contemporary Military Information Support Operations doctrine focuses on deliberately affecting enemy morale in combat and only narrowly by using information means. Principles and methods of information operations are accepted but largely within support of traditionally planned military operations that prioritize physical destruction of enemy capabilities.[15]
THE THREAT
This dearth of meaningful institutional commitment to the influence of will and morale ironically contrasts with U.S. warnings of foreign state hybrid threats and subversion activities designed to undermine the will and morale of the U.S. and its allies.[16] China, for example, has closely observed U.S. military actions in the previous decades and has concluded that intangible factors are increasingly significant for modern warfare.[17] China’s emphasis on intangibles is especially evident in the division of a Chinese technology-based information domain and an equally important cognitive domain.[18] The Chinese seek victory by forcing the enemy to lose “the will and ability to resist” and “paralysis” through a combination of kinetic and non-kinetic means, as a part of its systems destruction warfare concept. Realizing the vulnerability within these domains to destroy the enemy’s morale and will to fight, the systems destruction warfare concept emphasizes the capabilities of psychological warfare to exploit opportunities.[19] The Chinese have also introduced a concept of Strategic Psychological Warfare that proposes to win wars through means independent from fighting by preemptively overpowering an enemy psychologically.[20]
HISTORICAL CONSIDERATIONS FOR THE TWO HALVES OF WARFARE
The substantial absence of human considerations in U.S. doctrine is, all things considered, relatively new and represents a departure from the view in numerous traditions. An enduring theme throughout writings on the theory of warfare is the duality of the physical with the psychological. Ancient works such as Homer’s The Odyssey highlighted intelligence and cunning, or métis, while Sun Tzu wrote of the importance of morale for controlling maneuvers, the effectiveness of surprise, and even that the ultimate goal was winning without a fight.[21] Napoleon, a master of the decisive battle, emphasized the importance of the psychological aspect of war with his dictum that “in war morale forces are to physical as three to one.”[22] Revolutionary France’s ability to harness the collective will of the nation through levée en masse, reduced desertion, and rendered its fighting spirit reliant on psychological factors for its advantage rather than new technical or material means.[23] Not surprisingly, students of the Napoleonic Wars, such as Carl von Clausewitz, exalted the psychological over the physical for securing an enduring outcome.[24]
There have been previous attempts at operationalizing the concept of a psychologically-driven way of war. Psychological warfare as a theory provides one of the earliest that attempted to capture the intangible factors in warfare. However, the value of these factors was quickly lost as the term psychological warfare became plagued with misconceptions and derided as an imprecise description of the concepts it was meant to describe.[25] Rather than a mere support mechanism to traditional military operations, J.F.C. Fuller originally envisioned psychological warfare in the early half of the 20th century as a future way to wage wars beyond the physical domain.[26] Paul M.A. Linebarger later refined Fuller’s idea at the onset of the Cold War. Linebarger characterized it instead as “warfare psychologically waged,” wherein psychological objectives provided the driving force for operations in all domains, not isolated to the information domain, and as a way to wage a war that was not focused primarily on destroying the physical means of the enemy.[27] This concept represented the other half of war long-discussed, and most recently forgotten in the West.
CONCLUSION
Even a brief survey of the theories of war show that the U.S. has largely forgotten the other half of warfare—the psychological complement to the physical—even as its significance in conflict increases. Against several centuries of claims to the contrary, U.S. doctrine has errantly privileged the physical over rational and emotional factors. This is not to suggest that the physical is not important or plays no role in modern or future warfare. Rather, the proper practice of strategy is to start with the human or psychological components, like will and morale, as avenues to affect the physical. This represents a near-inverse of the current paradigm wherein the physical is used to get to the psychological, and one that may benefit enemies that may be all-to-willing to draw upon the psychological to wage a prolonged conflict.
The U.S. is unprepared for a future of human-centric warfare. Its military doctrine acknowledges morale and other psychological factors but does not provide guidance on how to shape it. This represents a disconnect between war as a material affair and war as a human affair. Such a misconception of warfare leaves the U.S. and its allies vulnerable to adversaries and enemies seeking to exploit this lacuna. The U.S. therefore critically constrains itself despite its material strengths if it fails to embrace a psychologically grounded view of war.
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