"Fortissimus Inter Pares": The Utility of Landpower in Grand Strategy

Abstract

Landpower is financially costly, politically contentious, exacts a high human price, and impossible to assess until after the fact. It is of apparently questionable value for preserving security in unstable states or maintaining the benefits of kinetic operations. It has been a truism for sixty years never to conduct a major land war in Asia. As Secretary of Defense Robert Gates suggested to an audience at West Point, one also might now add the Middle East and even Africa to that admonition. (1) The list of potential theaters of operations seems to be growing thin, increasingly restricted to regions where major war appears unlikely to occur in the near future, where landpower is apparently unnecessary. Has landpower lost its utility? Will landpower be circumscribed to increasingly smaller roles, lighter footprints, and more limited missions? The expenses and dangers of employing landpower are genuine. Nonetheless, landpower is unique in its capability to deliver strategic effect through the taking and exercise of control. No other grand strategic instrument, military or nonmilitary, can achieve a similar effect. Yet neither the strength nor the dangers inherent in using landpower should be considered in isolation; they are inextricably intertwined and form the basis for employing landpower in the future. Grand Strategy Grand strategy concerns the control of manifold forms of power in competitive relationships. Such multifariousness is a necessary aspect of the relationship between grand strategy and the control of power. Professor Colin Gray suggests [i]f the concept of grand strategy is to have intellectual integrity it has to admit a necessary connection to military force as a, not the only, defining characteristic. (2) In the competition for control, recourse to force must remain an available option despite the existence of and the need for other relationships and other tools (diplomacy, sanctions, propaganda, etc.). Edward Luttwak argues [t]he boundaries of grand strategy are wide, but they do not encompass all the relationships of all participants in the totality of international politics; instead they depend upon the potential to use force as a meaningful instrument. (3) The possible reciprocal application of force within the framework of a political competition defines grand strategy and distinguishes it from statecraft, although in practice the line separating the two is, and can only be, indistinct. The aim of grand strategy is to control the mutually adversarial and interwoven pattern of power manipulation--of events around and during conflict--in time and space. Control of space is meaningless if it is not temporally durable, just as control of events is meaningless if those events are isolated from the theater of a competitive relationship. Control is nevertheless finite both spatially and temporally, for the means to control are ultimately limited--in magnitude, in capability, by geography, etc. Control is not entirely zero-sum, but is instead a trichotomous concept: one may deny control to others, one may take it for oneself, and one may subsequently exercise it. Denial of control to the enemy is implicit in acquisition and exercise of control, but the latter two are not necessary features of the former. One may deny control to another without being able to acquire and exercise it oneself. Tools of Grand Strategy The unique capacity of landpower to take control and subsequently exercise it may be juxtaposed with how all the other tools of grand strategy influence the competition for control. These tools, both military and nonmilitary, deny control of particular exercises of power to the opponent, to varying extents and dependent upon the context. Economic sanctions and blockades constrain the ability of the target to manipulate its economic power at will, thus restricting its internal power creation mechanisms. Propaganda and psychological operations contest the opponent's narrative and impair his capacity for controlling the opinions of his population and influencing the attitudes of the international audience. …