Strategy and the Limitation of War

Strategic theory has failed to provide the tools with which to examine the conflicts now being waged. Major war is the preferred vehicle for the development of strategy, as the issues are absolute, the role of contingency diminished and the play of policy less overt. But a phenomenon increasingly remote from the actual experience of war does not provide a sufficient template for the current debate on strategy. The result is a discussion in flux, without unifying themes or coherence. The labels we currently attach to lesser wars, such as low-intensity operations, irregular war or counter-insurgency warfare, define themselves by their means, not their ends. Governments talk about major war but provide the means only for small war. Having set out with political goals that were unrealisable, they have not adjusted those goals but focused on military solutions which lack a political end. So the application of military capabilities becomes, by default, an end in itself.