S7E4: The Dangers of Strategic Fashion: Dr Chiara Libiseller

Hello and welcome once again to season 7 of Talking Strategy. My name is Paul O'Neill from the Royal United Services Institute in London. In this season, my friend Professor Bezris Husser and I will be talking to experts about some of the most important strategic issues affecting global security today. The history and implications of great power competition, deterrence in a multipolar world and the future of the international order. We are delighted that this podcast is once again made possible thanks to our long-term partnership with Corn Furry. As a leading global consulting firm specialising in strategy and in unlocking performance across defence and commercial sectors, their passion for enhancing organisational and individual potential makes them ideal partners. Now the views expressed in this interview are the speakers alone and do not represent those of Corn Furry, RUSI or indeed any other institution. Mark Twain famously said that history doesn't repeat itself but it often rhymes and in our last two episodes we've discussed how despite the novelty of the strategic situation today it may represent a return to something we've seen before even if it comes with a new twist. We're told regularly the world is more dangerous than ever and that we are in a pre-war moment where hybrid or grey zone or sub-threshold or economic or political warfare, take your pick, is a uniquely challenging time. But even if the terms are new do they represent something unprecedented or is it new or merely old wine in new bottles? Joining us to discuss fashions in military thinking is Dr Chiara Libicella from the Department of War Studies, King's College, London. Her research focuses on western knowledge production about war and strategy and its effects on practice. Her doctoral research at King's analysed the rise and fall of fashionable concepts in strategic studies with a particular focus on the life cycle of concepts such as revolution in military affairs, counter-insurgency and hybrid warfare. A book based on her thesis is by Oxford University Press. Chiara is also the deputy editor of the Journal of Strategic Studies and is part of the advisory committee of women in international security in the United Kingdom. Chiara, welcome and thank you very much for joining us. Thanks for having me. Why is the framing of the current situation so important? Why is it so important to us? Yes, thanks for that question. Framing generally shapes our perception. It shapes how we make sense of events and therefore also how we react to them. And therefore words actually have consequences for practice and strategic practice. And this claim that we live in the most dangerous times, the as far back as I can remember, right? It doesn't matter which period you look at in recent contemporary history, you always see these claims about the current times being somewhat special and somewhat exceptional. And I think basically this is a rhetorical tool to justify certain approaches, to justify introducing new concepts or advocating for new policies. And that's the way I read them. I wouldn't take them literally. But then what it does is it also narrows our perspective, right? If you say this is the age of, I don't know, great power politics, geopolitics, hybrid warfare, grace on conflicts, whatever you pick, you limit our perspective on this specific framing. And everything that happens, we then interpret in the specific framing. Whether it fits or not, it just becomes subsumed into this specific framing. And that then by consequence also marginalizes other perspectives and other frames that matter for making sense of events, but also for shaping our practices. And that's why I'm always very cautious when I hear sentences like the world today looks like this or that, or even if we're more specific, even warfare or wars today look like this and that. There's never just one way that things go and there's never just one perspective that we should apply to events. But we also need to try to make sense of the world around us. And that inevitably draws us to some kind of shortcuts or analogies. How do we avoid the downside elements whilst also accepting the fact that sometimes framing can be quite powerful and helpful? It can sometimes be very tricky to steer this conflict or contradiction. We do need shortcuts, but I think it's also important just at the same time to be aware of the implications. And those shortcuts or specific framings, they often serve a very specific purpose. So we just have to be aware of that purpose. So for example, if I go and say that we are living in an age of great power competition, then I likely will go on to say that because of that, we need certain policy responses. In terms of legitimizing certain policy approaches in terms of mobile resources, it serves a political purpose. That's the way those concepts work. But then if I, for example, as an academic, want to study the world or study great power politics, I need to be much more specific about the terms I'm using and the events I'm actually referring to. And that's the next issue with those terms, right? They are so vague. Everything these days is great power and hybrid warfare and so on. So those terms become so vague that they do serve as a tool of political mobilization, but they cannot serve as a tool of academic analysis. You can be quite wicked and say it is a tool of self-promotion within either civil service apparatuses or the military or the academic world. I've seen so many wonderful patterns where somebody said something which was novel, coined an expression that somehow caught on. What is it that you think makes people latch onto a particular neologism or a new expression? There are all kinds of reasons why people come up with new concepts, right? And one of them is that we just overvalue newness. I think coming up with a new concept is rewarded both in academia and in the practitioner's world. It's often seen as a real achievement if you manage to create a new concept and attach your name to it. So that's sort of innovation for the sake of innovation. And that's this innovation bias. And that's one reason. And then the other is you're also saying, well, I'm the one who is understanding what's happening, whereas you all got it wrong. So there's claim to power and authority to expertise in this argument. It's also important to distinguish between conceptual innovation and fashions and what causes them. Not every new concept turns into a fashion, right? So the cause of fashion is linked to a cognitive crisis, the perceived inability to make sense of an event with the existing conceptual apparatus. And this also links well to what you discussed with Florence Gow on surprise, right? So if I can take the example of hybrid warfare, this concept was actually coined around 2007. But it only became really prominent, i.e. fashionable, after Russia annexed Crimea in 2014. So we can talk about Russia's action as a strategic surprise for Europe. And because it was unexpected and it challenged existing assumptions, it couldn't just be fitted into existing concepts and paradigms. A new term had to be found to explain how the situation could have come about. And that term was hybrid warfare. And the way the EU and NATO and a couple of experts framed this situation was to say that it was only because Russia's smart and effective use of hybrid warfare that this move was possible. So Russia carried out this annexation so well using a new combination of tools, they could not really have been foreseen or prevented. And that way, hybrid warfare was used to narrate NATO's unpreparedness, possibly lack of reaction. And so the term reacts to this cognitive crisis, and it serves a political function. Only if you understand that, I think, you can really understand why the term hybrid warfare became so popular, because it spoke to collective emotions and collective cognitive crisis. Hybrid warfare, no matter what definition you use, is something new, historically speaking. But that's really not what it's about. It's just important to be aware about that there's, again, I highlighted this before, there's these different purposes of why people use concepts. And those fashions, they really serve a political purpose. And then the concept takes on a life on its own. In the context of hybrid warfare, it became this grand narrative of Russian foreign policy and everything that Russia did was interpreted in the hybrid warfare frame? Basically, it is an iteration of of the old pattern of, oh my goodness, the enemy has won, but they haven't played according to the rules. So they're actually barbarians. Because the whole idea of barbarian civilized was always those who play according to the rules and those who don't. So it's actually an exculpation. We couldn't have been expected to prepare for this because it was not playing by the rules. I love that. Yeah. And I think that's a key point and we have to be honest about it. So I absolutely get why it was attractive for NATO to go down that route and to use that and also to use it as sort of a mobilization tool, right? It is useful in that sense that you can say like, okay, something happened that we weren't prepared for and we didn't really think about it and we now need to think about it. And that's a fair point, but that's essentially as far as it goes. Once you are looking to the concept for its analytical clarity or for an analytical purpose, it gets problematic. Because it just doesn't serve an analytical purpose anymore. It has become so broad and vague that you cannot really use it effectively for research or for understanding work and strategy. So simultaneously, it's both exclusionary and it's also vague. You highlighted the fact that if you focus on that, then you don't focus on other things. So how do we try to avoid the downfalls of both, I suppose, while still making sensible policies? Paul, when you said these are vague concepts, but they're also exclusionary in a socio-bureaucratic way, because people who haven't latched onto this concept are just so, so out of date. And we, the clever people, have latched onto this new jargony concept. And of course, that means we're way ahead of the curve. And all of a sudden, we're the new gatekeepers to the understanding of reality. That's precisely why that's also exclusionary in a social way. I think from a policy perspective, you have to be aware of the different uses and functions of those concepts. I understand the purpose of using them to mobilize, but I hope that internally, there's also an awareness that those things need to be looked at in more detail and with more nuance. So for example, if we want to understand hybrid warfare, we need to look at the individual tools and elements. That make up hybrid warfare, right? Because that's the way in which you can truly understand them. That's also the way in which you can react to them. Because actually, if the narrative is that Russia has come up with this new, powerful way of warfare that we don't know how to react to, and that is so surprising to us, it sounds very overwhelming. And it can serve to parallel you. And so it actually makes more sense to add more nuance and to look at different tools. And whether Russia is using them directly, indirectly through other actors, how much control Russia actually has over those actors, and so on. This nuance will be missed if we just group all of it together into hybrid warfare. And when you look at those tools separately, this then also strengthens your own. And that's why hybrid warfare is so important, because you're able to prioritize, you're able to understand what you actually need to react to, what maybe actually doesn't matter that much. And it's actually also easier to react to individual tools and their effects than reacting to the entirety of hybrid warfare. How does that play out in this sense of great power competition that we're now seeing? The danger is that we, as we focus on great power competition, we forget the idea that some of the competition is not going to be as good as it used to be. And so we're not going to be as good as we used to be. And we're not going to be as good as we used to be. Competition is going to be not great power or not in the same place that the great powers are geographically located. Great power competition can be seen as another fashion and just another rhetorical tool to sort of point out that we have to think about things differently. But that can also be challenged critically, because again, the question is, is it useful to have this one lens that's quite narrow, actually, and think about all the events that are happening on the globe? Through this one lens. And you can also see this when people are talking about the return of great power politics, right, or the return of geopolitics. I mean, firstly, that is not historically correct. Neither of those things were ever gone. It is just for us in Europe, that these sort of issues and types of competition have become more pressing. And it's only now that we are facing them because we're not going to be able to do that. We're not going to be able to do that. Russia and China are in the mix now, whereas geopolitics, of course, has always been there. It just happened to be that the United States were the most powerful actor. From a European perspective, of course, there's a bit of a double standard as well that judges American actions different from Russian actions and China's actions. And there can be a very good reason for that, but it also shapes the concepts that we're using and introduces a bias in how we discuss those things. So there is this Western perspective or European perspective in those concepts, rather than considering it from a truly more global perspective. Because if you go to the global South, I think they will tell you a very different perspective on global power competition and geopolitics and so on. That's the first. And then second, the Western perspective is problematic in the sense that we are not looking at the world from the perspective of. Our adversaries or competitors. We are looking at this through our lenses rather than trying to understand how Russia actually sees the world, how China sees the world, and trying to understand things from their perspective. Chiarek, are there principles of war that are long-term and eternal despite changing technology? If there are eternal principles, then one of them would certainly be that any good strategy has to be tailored to the adversaries. And so this is something that many of those fashionable concepts don't do. One example I look at is the revolution in military affairs. And the assumption in the United States was that this approach, this very techno-optimistic approach, would work against any state actor independently of who they are, independent of the specific context of the conflict. So it's a very strategic outlook on war. And we can see the same with counterinsurgency, for example. So the military doctrine related to counterinsurgency proclaimed that there are historical principles that could be transferred from one counterinsurgency context to the other. Again, that just de-emphasizes the importance of context, of politics, of the interaction of actors in war, right? So possibly there are eternal principles, but the way in which those concepts are shaping the debate are in a completely different direction. And I think, or I wonder if actually a key driving factor of conceptual innovation and fashions in war and strategy is a lack of understanding of strategy. If I may come back to the hybrid warfare example, if you look at EU discourses, maybe NATO discourses, one thing you will come across is, that they say that hybrid warfare builds on Russia's strength and exploits our weaknesses. And this is quite obvious, right? This is the definition of a good strategy. So the fact that they highlight this and seem sort of surprised about this fact makes me wonder to what extent they are aware of basic strategic thinking. Same goes, for example, with the term of gray zone. It draws our attention to the fact that the distinction between war and peace is sort of blurry, which might be a fair point in the sense that, you know, there are states beyond war and peace, and there's different levels of intensity within those categories. But to just then put all of those elements, interference, sabotage, great power competition, propaganda, and so on into this box doesn't give you any strategic agency. Actually, it highlights the fact that there are different levels of our own confusion, but doesn't tell us anything about the logic of those tools. So it also doesn't further our understanding of those issues. Chiara, could you also talk about another case study you had in your book, namely that with counterinsurgency? Tell us something about that. So I mentioned that fashions are reactions to a cognitive crisis, but not any concept can become a fashion. Not any concept can fulfill this role of dealing with a cognitive crisis. So if we're looking at the example of counterinsurgency, just to make this a bit clearer, that concept was sort of rediscovered when the United States and its coalition partners encountered popular violence in Iraq and Afghanistan. That was the cognitive crisis, right? So to simplify a much more complex story, they went in there with a conventional war mindset, and that eventually didn't prove successful. And so counterinsurgency doctrine was developed as a new approach, approach that helped explain firstly why things had gone wrong and secondly also how they could be fixed. So counterinsurgency doctrine offered through so-called historical principles a way out of this quagmire. It promised success in Iraq and Afghanistan and it is this inherent promise that made it so attractive to people. So especially to practitioners but because practitioners were talking so much about it it was eventually also picked up in academia and again this promise is what makes fashions so problematic from a strategic perspective because the concept doesn't just become a lens to look at things but it comes like the lens the solution to this problem. Cognitive crisis and the conflict and that again relates to the power of fashions. This helps the fashionable concept to become even more powerful because the dominant concept is the one that's most readily available. It subsumes and marginalizes other perspectives as we've discussed. So everything that then happened in Iraq and Afghanistan was understood through this counterinsurgency framework. The two were often even discussed. And the consequence of that was that policymakers thought that what worked in Iraq would also work in Afghanistan and we've seen it fail, right? And that's because specific lenses and fashionable concepts ignore contextual factors. The narrow view really sets us up for the next surprise and that's why we're moving from fashion to fashion be it from the revolution in military affairs to counterinsurgency to hybrid warfare. Or from the global liberal order to great power competition and geopolitics. Paul was very right when he was talking about the vagueness of these terms because counterinsurgency was particularly a term that all sorts of different things could be fitted into. Some people could approach it statistically and say because statistically it has worked like this and this and these occasions, eclipsing culture entirely, eclipsing context entirely, it's going to work in the same way in the next one. Or they could say it's all about culture. It's all about culture. Or they could say it's all about hearts and minds. Or they could say, no, no, it's all about kinetic approaches. They could actually fit all sorts of things into it, couldn't they? Yeah, absolutely. Because those fashions are so vague, everything can be attached to them and therefore they become even vaguer. And therefore, as I mentioned previously, they become analytically useless. In your book, you talk then about the different factions within the fashionable concept area and that's really very interesting. What we see in the academic debate then is that there's different waves of engagement. So with the concepts I looked at, they were all firstly institutionalized by the US or by NATO in defense doctrine, defense thinking, and then picked up by academia. And then there's a lot of conceptual exploration. What does it mean? What can we learn from previous cases that might apply to the current case? And that's also interesting in the sense of what kind of questions do people ask? Because bringing in a new concept also means that you have to reinvent the entire wheel of knowledge on the war. So people writing on counterinsurgency talk about all kinds of aspects like counterinsurgency and intelligence, counterinsurgency and logistics. Assuming that logistics, intelligence, and intelligence are not the same thing, they're not the same thing. They're not the same thing. And so on all work fundamentally different in counterinsurgency as opposed to other wars. And to some extent, that is true. But the way these debates played out, it really suggested that everything we've known about war up to this point has become irrelevant. That's also, I think, very problematic in terms of accumulating knowledge, right, as an academic field. So it's not just that we are coming up with new terms repeatedly. It's also that these new terms then reorder our existing knowledge and decide what continues to be relevant and what can be dropped. But then we also get different waves of academic engagement. As a reaction, we get, of course, the, I call them historical revisionists in the sense that they went back to the historical cases and looked at what actually happened there. And that was actually quite useful because promoters of counterinsurgency provided quite simplistic characterizations of previous conflicts. And that encouraged historians to go back to those cases. And that was not just in relation to counterinsurgency, an important point, but I think in general, it helped to really dispel some myths that have been around anyway. We've spoken quite negatively about fashions. If you're a policy person seeking to mobilize a population, you're not going to be able to do that. You're not going to be able to do that. If you're a policy person seeking to mobilize a population, particularly in a democratic country, then are there positive values of these military fashions, these things that seize the headlines to allow communication, even if it is only perhaps a superficial comprehension of what's involved? Because it does act as a cohering effort. Many Western defense strategies at the moment are talking about whole of society approaches. And you need something around which you can coalesce. So do these fashions provide anything positive in the that you can engage communities, you can do the mobilizing outside the polity itself? Yeah, absolutely. So I think that is actually the key purpose that those concepts can serve to communicate to the population, what your political ambition is, or what your political aims are, or why you are investing in the things that you're investing, and so on. So it's a useful communication tool. It can simplify quite complex, situations. So in that sense, these terms are useful in mobilizing resources and justifying policies. Whether you think that's a good or neutral or negative aspect, I'll leave that up to you to decide. What I think is important is that while those terms might be used externally, it is important internally to be aware that more nuance has to be added. To really understand what's going on. And I suppose that's the, remember, the map is not the territory. Yes, yes, absolutely. And it's also about taking others' perspectives into account, right? Not just addressing the world from your point of view, based on your experience, but really trying to understand other actors and where they're coming from. There've been such a number of different, very fashionable terms. In the 1950s, we had the new look. And I think that's a really important term. And it was something that was almost deliberately designed to confuse everybody what it was about. You know, it was everybody just said a new look rather than saying we're now going to emphasize nuclear weapons much more than ever before. It did not say nuclear massive retaliation or flexible response, which was actually used over time deliberately so as to confuse people about what the contents were. In the early 2000s, it was transformation. Transformation was everything. We now have the Allied Command transformation, of course. And I remember in one meeting in the early 2000s, when we knew that it was a great new fashion for NATO. And we all looked at each other and said, does anybody in this room have the slightest idea of what they mean? We said, no. But we continued to use the word because in order to be one of the boys, you had to use it. Yeah. So beware of those fashions and beware of what they carry, I think. Absolutely. And I think that's also important for the policy implications because those vague terms can have the benefit of just bringing everyone to the table, mobilizing, maybe pointing to some aspects that we want to focus on. We can make a similar point about multi-domain operations these days. So it's a useful term in the sense that it communicates to allies. We got to invest in this. We got to invest in specific capabilities. We got to work on jointness, essentially, and on combining domains. But then if you look at how different member states understand multi-domain operations, you quickly realize that they have quite different understandings of it. And there it can become problematic when it comes to the implementation process, right? So vague terms have this benefit of bringing a group of people together under a heading. But when it comes to the specific implementation, it might bring up quite different problems. And presumably as well, a danger there, particularly with terms like integration and transformation, that because they get charged with so much meaning, through the fashion, that they get elevated from being ways of achieving something to being the ends in themselves. Yes. Thank you for raising that. That's such an important point. And that's a key characteristic of fashions because they become so powerful. They become an aim in and of themselves. We have seen this with counterinsurgency. I mean, this concept essentially became a strategy for the United States and it shouldn't have. Same with the revolution in military affairs. The United States were struggling to really find a framework to that could guide their defense efforts. So they clung on to this idea of the revolution in military affairs to guide their defense policies, strategies, and their capabilities. And then just, as you say, this idea of having certain capabilities or this idea of transforming becomes an end in itself. So Chiara, how do we guard against fads or fashions that obscure rather than illuminate, but whilst also leaving space for those that genuinely contribute to that ability to mobilize, cohere, and communicate that you've described? I think in general, working with those fashionable terms isn't the way to go. You can find benefits, but overall, there's just too many downsides. So I wouldn't per se recommend focusing on those terms. What I would suggest is instead thinking about ways that help you understand the complexity of things and then help you diversify the lenses that you apply. And in some way, again, this links to what you discussed with Florence about how you can best think about the future and about how you need to constantly challenge your own assumptions. And if we talk about strategy specifically, for example, Colin Gray once came up with those, I think, 17 dimensions of strategy, right? And what we see with concepts of war and warfare is that they are usually focused on one specific element. So the revolution in military affairs was focused on technology. Counterinsurgency came in as sort of antidote to this focus on technology, but over time, it's become more and more important. It's over-focused on the population, for example, and on strategic communication. Hybrid warfare focuses on non-military means. It used to focus on something else, but the way we now understand it is it's about non-military means. And then we have terms like information warfare, economic warfare, Le Grayson, and so on. They all focus on a very specific aspect of war. More often than not, it's somehow related to technology. And if you think about it, if you think about Colin Gray's 17 dimensions, you quickly realize that each of those terms covers one of those dimensions, maybe two. So looking at those 17 dimensions, I think always reminds you that war and the strategy are very complex. And there are so many things, so many variables, so many factors at play. And also it's about interaction, right? So it's really also about chaos and friction and so on. And there's so much that you cannot control. And that's also one thing that those concepts do, by the way. They suggest that we can't control war. So counterinsurgency, for example, says, if you only follow those historical principles, you'll be victorious. Or the revolution in military affairs said, if only you acquire those certain technologies and integrate them into your doctrine and so on, you will be victorious. So it's always those monocausal explanations that suggest that we can't control war. And then again, just being aware of the different dimensions and be it Colin Gray's 17 dimensions or something similar to that, it doesn't really matter. Just being aware of the complexity of war, I think helps you guard against those simplistic understandings. Chiara, thank you very much for the way you've situated these fashions as a reaction to cognitive crisis. But the illusory nature, of what we're reaching out for as a consequence and how that narrow view sets us up for future surprise. And the counter to that you've suggested is about making sure we engage others' perspectives, situate ourselves around context and look broadly at the different dimensions of strategy and not look for silver bullets that might be the answer to everything. So for all of that, thank you very much for a really stimulating conversation. Well, thank you for having me. It was my pleasure. Thank you for joining us for this RUCI podcast brought to you in partnership with Corn Furry. If you would like to catch up on any of our earlier episodes, please visit your usual streaming platform or try our webpage at ruci.org. And to hear about future episodes, you can always follow RUCI on social media. One persistent fashion is that we are in a pre-war era and that our future can thus be described in relation to something that has happened before. Our next two episodes will question the degree to which we are in a rerun of history and the extent to which the 2020s are the same or different to the periods before last century's world wars. Joining us next time to discuss whether we are really in the 1910s moment will be the renowned academic of the First World War, Professor Margaret Macmillan. Please join us then. Thank you. Thank you.