This is the pre-checked version of the script, so it might change (and be full of errors) before I record it. Definitely ending being considerably more dense than I intended... a lot like the previous War Room episode this is all pretty simple straightforward stuff, it's just not all that easy to articulate in a way people can actually understand. Fingers crossed it's not too disjointed.

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War Room 31: Understanding Policy Ends

Welcome back to the War Room where we are going to continue looking at the more conceptual side of war and warfare. In the last episode we introduced the strategy bridge to help frame the strategic process: states use strategy to try and connect policy ends to tactical means.

In this episode we’re going to focus on the policy end of the process. In some respects, this is a difficult topic.

Policy Ends= Strategic Goals?

Policy ends are the problems that strategy is trying to solve. That means that, in the most simplistic way, policy’s relationship to strategy is top down and one way. The real meat of strategy is the decision-making chains that leverage tactical means in pursuit of policy objectives, not so much the policy objectives themselves.

But that distinction is almost entirely abstract. The policy-strategy-tactics framework is just a theoretical construct to help us understand strategy. If we wanted to be absolutist, we could argue that states only have one policy objective: they want to survive.

Tracing strategic decision-making back to the same ultimate font every single time we want to do some analysis is neither useful nor helpful though. More commonly, when we’re talking about strategy we’re looking at a small part of the overall whole and what we’re describing as ‘policy ends’ to fit our framework are actually higher level strategic decisions.

In the West, for example, when we’re talking about the use of force, we like to draw a line down the civil-military boundary. If objectives come from the civilian sphere then they’re policy ends, if they come from the military sphere they’re strategic goals.

But this is an arbitrary distinction to highlight the tasking element in the framework: policy ends are an organic part of a rolling strategic process.

They don’t come out of nowhere, they’re a link in a chain of “in order tos” and that means that for analytical purposes we can treat them the same way that we treat all the other links in the chain of strategic decision-making.

Through Threads

It follows that we when examine strategy, policy ends are the starting points for threads that we want to follow through the entire process.

El Dorado Canyon

For example, in 1986 the United States conducted a series of airstrikes on targets in Libya in Operation El Dorado Canyon. This was a response to Libyan involvement in the bombing of a West Berlin nightclub in which three people were killed and 229 injured.

The policy end is to deter the Libyans from future terrorist activity. In order to do that, the United States decides to punish the Libyan state. To do that they decide to strike several command and control facilities believed to be responsible for overseas operations.

So we have a very tight focus here: the strategy is to deter Libyan terrorism by blowing up the Libyan means of directing terrorism.

These threads can propagate as they close with the tactical means. The American intention is a punitive raid, airpower is fundamentally transitory so it makes sense to use aircraft to conduct the strikes. For aircraft to successfully strike the C2 facilities, the Libyan air defence network needs to be suppressed. This generates more targets, but the additional strikes are facilitating the main effort in pursuit of the policy end.

If the threads don’t go all the way through, the tactical means are not matching up to the policy aims and you are probably looking at poor strategy.

Integrating Policy and Tactics

That means that it’s just as, if not more, important for policymakers to produce achievable policy aims as it for strategists to find the tactical means that serve them best.

Clearly, this means that dialogue and feedback loops between policymakers, strategists and tacticians constitute good practice. An honest, realistic appreciation of tactical capabilities is just as important for policymakers and strategists as a clear understanding of policy objectives is for strategists and tacticians.

Hand in hand with that, this kind of conversation between ends and means is vital constantly, not just when specific situations call for them. Obviously it’s much easier to produce realistic, achievable policy ends if those policy ends have been anticipated ahead of time and the relevant tactical means determined, or if found wanting procured and developed.

Again, the policy-strategy-tactics framework that we’re working with is a simplified construct to help us understand the strategic process, it’s not a cast-iron flow chart.

The Other Guy Gets a Vote Too

Speaking of exceeding the model, so far we’ve been considering policy ends from an internal perspective, but strategy doesn’t take place in a vacuum. Other states or state-like entities have policy ends of their own and the strategic agency to act on them. So understanding, predicting and accounting for the policy objectives of other states is a big deal.

That is difficult- we’re getting in the world of state behaviour- but to help understand policy ends in general, we can do some basic categorisation courtesy of Thucydides.

Fear, Honour and Interest

In his History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides lays out 3 core reasons that the Athenians and Spartans went to war in 431BC: fear, honour and interest. His reasoning isn’t limited to war, it’s a good base-level guide to pretty much any kind of human behaviour.

Fear

Fear is essentially the concern that inaction is worse than action. States take steps to avoid, prevent or pre-empt negative consequences.

In its simplest form, this manifests as the desire to survive. Inaction in the face of aggression or invasion is a sure way to lose sovereignty and independence.

In 1939, the Finns had watched the Soviet Union invade Poland and bully the Baltic States into accepting the preconditions for annexation before turning to them. Finland had gained its independence from Russia in the collapse of the Tsarist Empire, if they acceded to Soviet demands or failed to resist Soviet aggression then they would lose that independence. The result was the Winter War, where the Finns fought against the Soviet invasion and, although ultimately forced to negotiate, significantly restricted Soviet gains.

Finland determined a negative trajectory and acted to mitigate it. Obviously, national survival is a predictable universal policy end. Most state interactions are not that dramatic.

American involvement in Vietnam, for example, stemmed from a perceived need to stop the spread of communism in South East Asia. American policymakers looked at South East Asia through the lens of great power competition with the communist Soviet Union.

Communism had gained power in China and North Korea, setting the stage for attempted expansion into South Korea, which was countered in the Korean War, and victory in Indochina against the French that produced another communist state in North Vietnam. From there, communism was already making inroads into Laos, Cambodia and South Vietnam, which would in turn become bases for future expansion into Burma, Thailand, Malaya and Indonesia.

This would compromise the United States’ geopolitical advantage in the Eastern Pacific, so successive administrations supported South Vietnamese resistance in a bid to stop the spread. Again, we have a policy end intended to avoid negative effects.

Fear is probably one of the most frequently mismatched drivers between belligerents. In the Winter War, the Soviet Union essentially intended to conquer Finland, or at least establish a compliant puppet state, partly in order to create defensive depth for the city of Leningrad. They were worried about the potential for German aggression and saw Finnish ties to Germany as a threat: it was plausible that Finland could be used as a jumping-off point for an attack on the Soviet Union.

Ending an unrealised future threat to Russia’s second city is a considerably less pressing policy end than Finnish national survival. Hence we get emphatic Finnish resistance leading to the less committed Soviets to adjust their objectives. Policy ends are not absolute, they can change over time and in response to changing situations.

At the same time, Fear can provoke states to move in the opposite direction. Poland and Finland both resisted Soviet aggression, but the Baltic States bowed to pressure from Moscow. Policymakers in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania measured their means of resisting the Red Army and decided that it would be less harmful to accede to Soviet demands than it would be to antagonise their invaders.

Honour

Honour is a little more complex and ‘credibility’ or ‘image’ might be more accurate terms in a modern context. States want to present themselves in specific ways in order to influence future interactions.

Most obviously, no state wants to be seen as weak. Perceptions of relative power figure into the strategic process because they are an easy way of determining the likelihood of success.

One of the reasons that Chechnya seceded from the Russian Federation in the early 1990s is because the Russian Federation was not the USSR. In the late 1980s the Soviet Union had proven unwilling or unable to suppress independence movements throughout its constituent republics, leading to its break up and dissolution in 1991.

This failure to hold itself together shattered perceptions of the USSR’s strength. Chechen secessionists were much more confident trying to gain independence from the broken, struggling Russian Federation than they were the Soviet superpower.

In turn, Russia could not tolerate Chechen independence for exactly the same reasons. They attempted to restore control in 1994, in the first Chechen War. This failed because the Russian Federation was not in a state to effectively prosecute such a war, confirming their image as a less powerful shade of the Soviet Union. So they went on to try and correct their image a second time starting in 1999. They were more successful in the Second Chechen War, but the humiliation of the 1990s and a desire to rebuild a reputation of strength remain strong influences on Russian policymaking.

The Second Chechen War is also a good example of how failures and setbacks can produce strong reputational policy goals. Defeats are embarrassing: they erode state credibility, motivating states to compensate.

Italy was humiliated when it suffered a stinging defeat at Adowa in 1896 attempting to conquer Abyssinia (now Ethiopia). This was hardly the only defeat suffered by European colonial powers in the scramble for Africa, but unlike the British who doubled down after being smashed by the Zulus at Isandlwana, the Italian government collapsed under public outrage. Italy made peace with the Abyssinians, withdrew and became the only European power to fail to conquer an African state.

It should be no surprise that Fascist Italy under Mussolini considered Abyssinia unfinished business and sought to undo the humiliation of Adowa by invading forty years later in 1935.

This highlights another aspect of Thucydides honour or state credibility: it has both foreign and domestic dimensions. Italy’s ruling National Fascist Party was fundamentally nationalist and committed to building a reputation as the heir to ancient Rome. Avenging Adowa not only demonstrated Italian military credibility abroad, but boosted Fascist popularity back home.

Interest

Interest is a much more straightforward concept for understanding policy aims. It’s about securing or maintaining some kind of advantage. These advantages can be very tangible: like territory, natural resources and security.

In 1980, Iraq invaded Iran. Saddam Hussein wanted to seize the province of Khuzestan while Iran was disrupted by the Islamic Revolution. Iraq would benefit economically from securing Khuzestan’s oil fields, including the important refinery at Abadan, but it would also improve its security situation. Iraq’s only access to maritime trade- including the export of oil which underpinned its economy- was via the Shatt al Arab. But from Basrah to the Persian Gulf, the northern bank was part of Iranian Khuzestan. Blocking the Shatt al Arab would be trivial for a coercive Iranian regime: taking Khuzestan would remove that threat.

The advantage that states pursue can be less tangible as well.

The Iraqi invasion of Khuzestan was not well handled and the Iranians resisted successfully before driving the Iraqis back. By 1982 Saddam was prepared to accept a ceasefire, but the Iranian government refused. Amidst the turmoil of the Islamic Revolution, the war was a useful means for hardliners to consolidate their new position. In particular, the IRGC, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, was able to develop from a revolutionary street militia into a kind of parallel state within a state with its own conventional military forces, economic concerns and political power. They gained a domestic political advantage from the war, which ultimately didn’t end until 1988.

Overlap

Obviously, fear, honour and interest are broad overarching categories, but like all theory this trinity exists to help make sense of complexity. Policy ends don’t have to fit neatly into a single box: they usually straddle multiple categories, or are considered with different perspectives by different policymaking actors.

Understanding the emphasis is between fear, honour and interest can help us understand how competing policy goals interact and make it easier to find the through threads that connect them to tactical means.

Conclusion

So, that’s a quick surface look at the policy side of the policy-strategy-tactics framework. The big takeaway is that policy ends are not just the starting point for the strategic process. They’re not just orders from on high, they have their own texture and intricacies that help us assess and analyse the strategic decision-making chains they provoke.

Hopefully at least some of you made it this far. The plan for the next War Room episode is to dive into the tactical means at the other end of the framework, though that might change because I’m making these by the seat of my pants.

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