'Survival' and how we think about war

The International Institute for Strategic Studies, of which I've been a member for some 20 years, is this year celebrating its 50th birthday. To mark the occasion they've published a special issue of their quarterly journal Survival, under the title "The Bush Years and Beyond."  It is a generally excellent edition, by a short and informative account by British strategic-studies grandee Michael Howard of the history of the IISS.  Of special note there: that back in 1958, the IISS was founded to provide a specifically British kind of counterpart to pre-existing US think-tanks like the Rand Corporation; and that the British Council of Churches was one of the organizations that-- moved by the ethical concerns some of its leaders had over the whole question of Britain's nuclear arsenal-- participated in founding the IISS

Since 1958, the IIS has changed in many ways.  It has tried hard to become much more international, even if with only mixed success. And it has become far less concerned with the big ethical/philosophical questions around nuclear war and warfare in general, and far more in thrall to the big defense contractors who are well represented in the membership, and far less connected to any religious bodies or individuals. (Regarding Quakers, I know of only one other apart from myself  who is an IISS member. And I confess that I am unaware if any other members of IISS bring  any specifically religious sensibility to their engagement with it, though doubtless there are some who do.)

Be those broader fact as they may be, there are a number ofexcellent articles in this anniversary edition of Survival.  Far and away the most thought-provoking, in my view, is "Strategy and the Limitation of War", by Hew Strachan of All Souls College, Oxford.  Strachan's article is an excellent and much-needed exploration of how specialists, policymakers, and commentators think about different forms of war. He notes that the way wars are described almost inevitably frame the way that we think about them.  He notes, in particular, that the rhetoric that members of the Bush administration have generated about the "Global War on Terror" (GWOT) and about this being a "long war" is at one and the same time:

(1) actually unknowable, since no-one knows the length of a war going in (though I would add that inasmuch as people enter a "long war" mindset, the use of the term from the get-go might itself act as a powerfully self-fulfilling prophecy); and

(2) an intellectually slovenly and in practice very counter-productive way of aggregating under the "long war/GWOT" rubric situations, clashes, and armed confrontations that in reality often have little to do with each other.

Strachan is particularly percipient when he describes how the legacies of the "total war" thinking of the Cold War shaped the way that most western strategic theorists approached the challenges posed by the attacks of September 11, 2001. He writes:

The stock of strategic ideas developed against the background of the Cold War ... continues to have greater purchase than perhaps we recognize. Pre-emption became a principle of strategy within the context of nuclear deterrence.  Although aggressive in its effects, its employment was predicated on the evidence of an immediate and probable attack, which was never forthcoming...  After the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks, the term was given a different conceptual context as a free-standing element in the defence postures of the United States and the United Kingdom.  It implied an early attack against threats that were latent, before they became imminent. A concept developed within one security structure was shoe-horned into another in order to give it a legitimating ledigree.  Moreover, whereas in its earlier incarnation it was designed to prevent war, in its new format it was intended to provoke it.

The mutation of pre-emption was replicated for deterrence as a whole... (pp.39-40)

Strachan writes,