The Clock Is Always Ticking

MICK RYAN

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Perceptions of time directly shape the ways in which states generate military power. This has important consequences for the West’s ability to balance military power and liberal principles, notably pacing itself in the conduct of war.

Sten Rynning, Oliver Schmitt and Amelie Theussen, War Time (2021).

Time is an important factor in the current Israeli operation in Gaza.

There will come a point when diplomatic pressure from America and Europe may force a pause – or even cessation - in Israeli military operations in Gaza. In the 2021 Israel-Gaza crisis, after nine days of war, President Biden apparently informed the Israeli Prime Minister that: “Hey, man, we are out of runway here.” After Netanyahu insisted on continuing the war, Biden then informed him, “It’s over.” A ceasefire followed two days later.

Israel may have ‘more runway’ in this situation because of the horrendous attacks it suffered on 7 October, but that runway is not infinite. It will need to achieve its military objectives and set the foundations for longer term political goals before the strategic clock runs out. Time is a critical tactical and political resource for the Israelis.

As the growing ‘fatigue’ among Western citizenry with the war in Ukraine, and the increasing demands for a truce in Gaza demonstrate, in war and competition, the clock is always ticking. Beyond the Israeli operation in Gaza, the ability to exploit time is one of the most important considerations in the planning and execution of military and other national security activities.

After the Cold War ended, Western nations wanted to ensure that conflicts were more limited in duration. This need for shorter wars was driven by the level of interests involved as well as the need to sustain political and public support for military actions in an era where the ‘big bad’ - the USSR - had seemingly been vanquished. The desire for short wars, however, was confounded by the long-term commitments required in Iraq and Afghanistan in the wake of 9/11. However, despite their duration, these were low intensity missions and did not necessitate the imposition of new taxes or the wholesale mobilization of populations and industry in the nations that committed forces.

While western democracies were involved in these long duration but low intensity conflicts, emerging competitors such as China and Russia became richer developed new modes of competing with the West. These new approaches broadened the conception of national security and embraced all elements of national power in strategic competition. Their new strategies were designed to play out over longer periods of time than Western nations and governments might otherwise prefer. They developed forms of competition that exploited western predilections for short war, through political warfare, lawfare and unrestricted warfare.

Western nations had begun the slow process of strategic adaptation required to address these Russian and Chinese strategies in the wake of Iraq and Afghanistan when the war in Ukraine forced a reappraisal of modern war. It saw the return of high intensity and large-scale war, as well as long duration conflicts. This was a strategic surprise for Western politicians whose approach to strategic risk management over the previous decades had assumed away the need for the capacity for large scale mobilization of people and industrial capacity.

Countries like China and Russia were now exploiting time – especially Western impatience - in the development of their strategic concepts for competing against the United States and other democracies.

Exploiting Time – More Than Just Speed

Time is a strategic commodity in this competition and is also a vital resource at every level of military endeavour.

In Fighting by Minutes, Robert Leonhard’s superb examination of time and warfare, he proposes that four elements of time – duration, frequency, sequence, and opportunity – demarcate the limits of political and military power. Each of these elements has consequences in the preparation for, and conduct of, military activities. While all four are important, the two more crucial elements in this strategic examination of time and its relationship with future conflict and competition are duration and frequency.

Leonhard examines duration through the lens of events that have a start and a finish, even though these may not always be well defined. As Clausewitz wrote, “even the final decision of a whole war is not always to be regarded as absolute. The conquered state often sees in it only a passing evil.” There are a range of variables which might influence the duration of a conflict, including the size of respective forces, the importance of the goals sought, geography and the level of training and technological sophistication of the involved combatants.

Exploiting western fears of extended duration wars is now one of the core elements of authoritarian competition with the west.

Confronting such methods will demand Western nations adopt longer term approaches to national security policy and strategy. This is essential if we are to defeat theories of victory conceived by actors such as Vladimir Putin, whose strategy for Ukraine is now based on ‘waiting out’ Ukrainian supporters. We must reconceive what democracies will accept in terms of risk over time in competition and conflict. In facing adversaries who might prefer longer duration confrontations, democratic societies will need to develop greater levels of strategic patience, risk tolerance and national resilience.

Fortunately, this is not the first time that democracies have faced the challenge of long duration conflicts. The Second World War was a six-year conflict (although my American friends think it was only a four-year conflict). There are also lessons from the Cold War which will be useful, as well as the twenty-year commitment to Afghanistan. Democracies have demonstrated the will for long duration conflicts and confrontations against threats in the modern era. But it will take time, resources and political will to redefine how longer periods of time might be exploited to achieve strategic outcomes by various elements of national power in Western nations.

The second important element in the strategic use of time is frequency. Frequency is the pace at which different actions take place. Throughout military history, revolutionary change has generally occurred when one nation has changed the pace at which it can innovate and adapt, or when combatants are able to change the frequency at which they operate and thus interfere with its adversary’s frequency (and ability to respond). Examples of exploiting a different frequency include Sherman’s march on Atlanta, the German Army’s invasion of France in 1940, the American conduct of the later stages of the Cold War and the 1991 US Army’s offensive operations in Kuwait to eject the Iraqi Army.

Our conception of time and military activity, now and in the immediate future, must incorporate a better appreciation of frequency. An understanding of frequency must include how quickly events might occur, or how many activities can occur concurrently or sequentially than we might be traditionally used to. Frequency can be used to gain the initiative, to reduce an adversary’s reaction options and impose paralysing shock. A good example of frequency is the later part of 2022 in the Ukraine War. Had western support arrived with greater speed in mid 2022, Ukraine may have possessed the wherewithal for one final offensive after Kherson (an increase in operational frequency), which may have disrupted the construction of the Surovikin Line. It is now another great counter-factual of history.

The application of AI in all forms of information collection, analysis, dissemination, and decision-making is another influence on how frequency in war might increase. The US has a vision of what it calls Mosaic Warfare, which seeks to more seamlessly stitch together the various kinetic and non-kinetic elements of military operations, and better leverage information with a manned and unmanned system of capabilities. These will be capable of generating rapid speed and simultaneous operations that break down an adversary’s facility for timely and effective decision-making. As one analysis of this method concludes, “mosaic warfare places a premium on seeing battle as a complex system, using low-cost unmanned swarming formations alongside other electronic and cyber effects to overwhelm adversaries. The central idea is to be cheap, fast, lethal, flexible, and scalable.”

Similarly, Chinese documents and journal articles describe the informationisation and intelligentisation of warfare in the 21st century. The various ideas of Chinese scholars and military officers is associated with leveraging information to better connect various forces and generate a tempo across multiple military endeavours to paralyse an adversary and ‘break down their system’. Often referred to as System Destruction Warfare, this as the ability to paralyse the functions of an enemy’s operational system, forcing an adversary to lose the will and ability to resist once their operational system cannot function. Paralysis can be generated through kinetic and non-kinetic attacks, as either type of attack may be able to destroy or degrade key aspects of the enemy’s operational system.

But Systems Destruction Warfare has much broader applications. It can integrate all elements of Chinese national power against Western systems to cause their disintegration over time.

Back to the Concept of Speed

While many of these approaches are not new, the Chinese seek to apply intelligentisation to also speed up the tempo of all military and national security activities.

Intelligentisation has become a central element of Chinese operations as they seek to exploit advanced technologies such as robotics, artificial intelligence, biotechnologies, information warfare, cyber and space capabilities proliferate. The use of these technologies will drive development of new warfighting concepts to cope with the speed of operations, and the use of a combination of crewed and autonomous systems in the physical, cyber and cognitive domains. The Chinese PLA for example has explored concepts such as autonomous dormant assault warfare, swarm attrition warfare, and autonomous cognitive control warfare.

But a Western version of this intelligentisation has also emerged in the last few years. The integration of civil and military sensors and analytical capacity, which has been accelerated by the war in Ukraine, has also seen an increase in potential operational and tactical velocity.

The knowledge developed through the meshed civil-military intelligence system (explored in this article) is shared across digitised command and control systems to the lowest levels to inform military decisions. This democratisation of relevant information has permitted an intensified interaction between domains and allowed for a faster tempo of operations. In battle, this informed and democratised command and control system helps leaders direct rapid manoeuvre and focus diverse fires on the adversaries’ critical vulnerabilities.

An important outcome of increased speed (real and potential) of military activities is that it compresses the strategic-operational-tactical hierarchical framework. The consequence of this compression is that the potential rapidity of military activities also denies strategic military leaders, and national political leaders, the time to thoughtfully consider their options. The speed of certain weapon systems, particularly those that threaten strategic assets or whose payload is uncertain, will force the more rapid involvement of operational and strategic commanders in decision making. It will drive better linkages between all sensors both in and outside the battlespace, as well as a demand for better decision support tools based on big data and artificial intelligence.

This also has significant consequences for decision making by political leaders. They may not always have the luxury of time or quality information to make decisions. As technologies evolve rapidly, weapon systems and equipment may become obsolescent faster than ever. At the same time, the rapid pace of tactical operations on the ground can see strategic decisions made irrelevant or result in a level of paralysis on political decision makers.

During the war in Ukraine, the pace of decision making has been slower than required. As Royal United Service Institute analyst, Jack Watling, has written of slow political decision making about the war: “While the provision of Western support to Ukraine has seen some notable successes, the slow pace of decision-making has made it more difficult to capitalize on Russian weaknesses.”

With fears of ‘escalation’ that could cross Russian redlines, the debate over providing main battle tanks took months to resolve, and this delay ensured that the Ukrainians lacked these decisive armoured vehicles when the Russians were at their most vulnerable at the end of 2022. The decision to finally allow F-16 fighter aircraft for Ukraine in 2023 was likewise too slow to help the Ukrainians achieve some measure of control of the air for their 2023 offensives.

Another time-related complication has been pace of delivery. Once a decision has been made to provide assistance, it is often slow in arriving. While quantity of support is vital, getting that assistance to the right people at the right place and time is crucial for the future execution of western nations that are supporting in supporting Ukraine, as well as in deterring Chinese aggression in the Pacific. As President Zelensky noted during his 2023 Munich Security Conference address, “We need speed. Speed of our agreements. Speed of delivery to strengthen our sling. Speed of decisions to limit Russian potential. There is no alternative to speed. Because it is the speed that life depends on. Delay has always been and still is a mistake.”

Western nations are still largely trapped in the slow political decision-making paradigm of the 1990s, 2000s and 2010s. This needs to change. While some of this challenge can be mitigated through new organisational design or operational concepts, eventually decisions must be made. And the long-term, multidecade focus of many Western defence procurement agencies that currently exists must change to be more agile and more time conscious.

Late British academic Colin Gray once wrote that “every military plan at every level of war is ruled by the clock. Geographical distance, and terrain, translate inexorably into time that must elapse if they are to be crossed. On the virtual battlefield of cyberspace, electronic warfare is apt to mock geography and therefore time.” The pace of planning, decision making, action and adaptation is increasing due to hypersonic weapons, faster media cycles impacting political decisions, and the potential for AI to speed up decision-making at many levels.

Tempo Matters Too

Notwithstanding the foregoing discussion, speed in strategic and military affairs is a relative construct. It is important only if it means operating at greater speed – or frequency – than an adversary and that this generates an advantage where and when it is needed. Additionally, high speed operations are not possible or even required for every endeavour. Achieving greater speed comes with trade-offs – faster platforms are more expensive and may also trade off performance in other areas such as sensor performance.

This returns us to the wise exploitation of time being more vital than speed. Acting at the right time will always be more important than acting at speed. While some have imagined future conflict consisting of Hyperwar, this will neither be achievable nor desirable in many circumstances. No military institution can operate at its theoretical maximum speed and capacity for long durations of time. Rest, resupply, the need to constant strategic realignment with allies, synchronisation with other units and national assets, balancing kinetic and non-kinetic actions and the pace of political decision-making all have an impact on the tempo of military operations. As the operations in Ukraine have demonstrated, there has been a continuum of pulses and pauses in Russian and Ukrainian military operations since February 2022.

Slowing down operational frequency over a longer duration may be preferred in some scenarios. This may necessitate a transition from warfare which is focused on maneuver to more positional approaches. This was a topic recently examined by Ukrainian General Zaluzhnyy and is worthy of more study. Positional warfare, as part of a mix of attrition, maneuver and positional war, will at times be preferred as a way to rebuild and regenerate forces that have been engaged in offensive operations – or to rethink operations and develop new military concepts to overcome tactical, operational and strategic adaptations by one’s adversary.

This is explained in a 1990 RUSI Journal article, that explores the concept of Positional Warfare and the likely forms of war available to European armies in the wake of the Cold War:

Positional war seeks to maintain cohesion by exploiting ground and fortifications to increase fighting power, whilst limiting the opportunities open to the enemy. It strives to use time to permit the mobilisation of resources and increase attrition of the enemy. Positional war is not intrinsically weaker than the other forms as some exponents of manoeuvre may suggest…positional war may be the only practical option in certain conditions and circumstances.

Being able to govern strategic and operational tempo may be more important than acting quickly when confronting long-term strategic threats such as China. Our strategies may include the consideration of speed, but speed is designed to be employed precisely when and where it is needed to generate advantage. And, if we intend to confront the long-term threat posed by the loose alignment of Russia, Iran, China and North Korea, governing our tempo over the long-term should ensure that democracies have the endurance and resilience over the decades that are likely to be required to prevail.

Tempo also incorporates the appropriate sequencing of operations as well as non-military strategic endeavours, and the capacity to transition between different activities in different geographical locations at the right pace. Finally, consideration of tempo at all levels must include the ability to learn and adapt at a speed relatively faster than an adversary.

Retired US Army officer and military theorist, Robert Scales, has written that “the one factor that will control the shape and character of a prospective conflict is time.” The global security environment sees time having an impact as new technologies appear at a brisk pace, new weapon systems and AI will allow much more rapid tactical activities, and the impact of the alignment of several predatory authoritarians spreads. This creates an environment where our wise use of time, from the tactical to the political levels, is vital.

Beijing's military parade on the 70th anniversary of the People's Republic of China (Source: Nikkei Asia)

China: Using Time Wisely

China used the time after 9/11 wisely. Exploiting western distraction with the threat posed by violent extremists, the Chinese Communist Party not only built a massive economy and conducted a large-scale program of economic espionage, it undertook a global influence campaign to solicit influence among western political elites and convince the west more broadly that China posed no threat. Concurrently it undertook the largest military peacetime build up in history.

This was a ‘strategic happy time’ for the Chinese communist party. And once the attention of western strategists returned to China a few years ago, it was a very different challenge to that it posed before 9/11.

The exploitation of time, based on the war in Ukraine, is an area where the Chinese Communist Party will also have learned lessons. While the degree of Western support for the war will have initially surprised the Russian and Chinese presidents, this aid often took time to be decided on by governments and to arrive in Ukraine. Therefore, President Xi and the Chinese Central Military Commission will be refining their contingency plans for Taiwan, and ways to distract the United States and Europe, to delay their intervention for as long as possible.

Time becomes an even more important consideration when the geography of the Western pacific is examined. Ukraine is close to western Europe and aid can be delivered relatively quickly. On the other hand, Taiwan is distant from the nearest country that might be able to support it. The PLA will be sure to exploit this.

Time and 21st Century Competition and Conflict

The conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza, as well as the strategic competition with China in the western Pacific, offer good case studies in the clever exploitation of time.

A key idea for contemporary Western governments and military institutions is their ability to conceptualise and implement the ability to fight fast and slow. As Pascal Vennesson writes in War Time, “Western warfighting has been characterized by a variety of uneven and challenging efforts to adapt to a slower pace of operations and wars of much longer duration than were initially expected and wished for. In short, Western war planners may prefer to fight fast and win short wars but they end up having to fight fast and slow, which proves harder and more unsettling than expected.”

This demands a different approach to utilising time by governments and military institutions. Governments and military institutions must ensure that their people and institutions at every level are able to deal with the environment intellectually and physically through better use of time for improved decision-making. Further, politicians, military and civilian personnel must be able to exploit this use of time to improve their capacity to understand and accept risk, and to adapt through re-organization, re-equipping, re-thinking and re-skilling.

But this will require a fundamental shift in the ability of contemporary politicians to communicate the immediacy of the threat of predatory authoritarians, and the capacity of the citizenry to believe them and force governments to address it as a priority.

As I wrote in War Transformed, democracies in the 21st century need to develop a new appreciation of time.