Warfare and Society

The purpose of this research paper is to provide a better understanding of the challenges that a modern state faces in the current security environment. Given the emerging threat environment with innovative state and non-state actors willing to confront a modern state across a spectrum of activities, it is of vital importance to provide a clear picture for civil servants/employees of the state to best use the tools of good governance. Without a more robust employment of the whole-of-government resources and a holistic approach of the national security the modern state will not be able to counter such threats and seize, retain or exploit the strategic initiative.

The absence of any superordinate authority or world government that would maintain order among states gives rise to a security problem with which all states must cope. Although survival is by no means one of the primary objectives states seek; and can best be achieved through utilizing the tools of good governance, [1: 1] the concern with national security is common to all. Security can be understood both as a defence against internal threats as well as the overall socio-economic well-being of a society and the individuals who compose it. While defence spending may contribute to security by deterring or dissuading would-be adversaries, certain economic benefits can be achieved, as well. Large allocations of a society's resources to defence may be attained at the cost of social or other programs that the state would otherwise be in a position to finance. Beyond these opportunity costs, defence expenditures that are excessive or wasteful of societal resources may even weaken the economy and reduce the economic and social well-being of the citizenry. Allocating more resources to defence may not even enhance security, rather, may induce other states to do likewise, in effect giving impetus to an arms race. Instead of enhancing security, such arms competition may set into motion a train of actions and reactions that undermines security for all parties concerned. Therefore, states are on their own to provide for their defence in a potentially hostile world. [2: 3-6] The purpose of this research paper is to provide a better understanding of the challenges that a modern state faces in the current security environment. Given the emerging threat environment with innovative state and non-state actors willing to confront a modern state across a spectrum of sustained activities it is vital to provide a clear picture for civil servants/employees of the state to best use the tools of good governance. Without a more agile employment of the whole-of-government resources and a holistic approach of the national security the modern state will not be able to counter such threats and seize, retain or exploit the strategic initiative.

Background and the Operating Environment
Throughout the history of human civilization people relied on some sort of political organization in order to police the relationship between the freedom of the individual and collective needs. Since the Treaty of Westphalia delivered the birth of the modern state its legitimacy [3: 35] has been questioned and continues to be by many. Without legitimacy the modern state would have to use its coercive measures in order to maintain law and order in between respective boundaries. However, in a properly functioning state people may pay taxes, follow certain rules or even serve in the armed forces not because of the threat of punishment, but because they view such behaviour as the right thing to do. This world of modern states is built on a rational-legal foundation, which means that the bureaucracy including thousands of individuals is trusted to make daily decisions on a wide range of issues. However, it seems logical that in the future new forms of political organizations may displace states, just as it happened with city-states and empires. Challenges to the modern state may, as well, overwhelm it and will revert to warlordism, for example. Furthermore, technological innovation can make old forms of political centralization weak or even irrelevant. As a result, individuals may build their sovereign communities on a virtual domain rather than in the physical world. [3: 43-45] The operating environment that has emerged since the Cold War has also demonstrated the intellectual and policy futility of the dogmatic understanding of warfare. The time of traditional understanding of military dominated, openly declared, force-on-force confrontation seems to belong to the past. Resurgent state adversaries, rising regional powers and non-state (both global such as NATO and sub-state like insurgent groups) armed organizations are seeking to dominate the political, military and ideological arenas of both peace and war. Some of the most visible form of the short-of-war type warfare practices are the Chinese Unrestricted, the US Political, the Iranian Asymmetric, and the Russian Hybrid Warfare to name a few. They share a common idea that can be best described as Unconventional Warfare. This indirect approach of military actions combined with nonmilitary measures can level off or neutralize the enemy's technological superiority in order to obtain political-economic benefits without traditional armed struggle. In other words, in these kinds of operations the main effort is to combine political, economic and information campaigns in order to influence government policies of adversaries through psychological operations that target the respective human population. [4: 4-7] Therefore, the targeted state may lose its legitimacy.

Strategic Culture
For one who should choose to study the connection between warfare and society, the theory of strategic culture can be one of the most interesting fields. [5: 113-116] Given the difficulties of understanding cultures stems from the fact that culture is difficult to define, and it has been the subject of intense debate to date. However, the ways in which societies identify themselves can be important for political implications. Ethnicity, nationality and citizenship provide collective identities with relative clear boundaries for people to understand the nature of freedom and equality among different actors of human relations. These differences create conflict, competition and also cooperation for the exercising power and authority in society. Therefore, studying these differences can help to understand how societal differences profoundly shape politics within countries. Finally, all these forms of identification set the arena for political struggle over the very freedom and equality. [3: 71]

Political Culture
If a society is a complex collection of people bound by shared institutions, then culture compromises those basic institutions that help to define a society. Furthermore, culture helps people to understand what is and what is not acceptable and provides guidelines and priorities for organizing life; therefore, it can differ significantly in their attitudes toward leisure, privacy and politics. Culture stands somewhere between the group identities of ethnicity, national identity and citizenship on the one hand and individual political attitudes and ideologies on the other. Culture binds groups together, serving as part of the fundamental content of society, at the same time it is a personal set of norms that people may choose to accept or reject to varying degrees. In short, culture is the activity that a group considers proper and normal for its members. Thus, political culture refers specifically to the fundamental norms for political activity in society. According to Inglehart societies can be arrayed by the way they are guided by values. Society's role in politics is clearly complicated, shaped by many factors that affect the ongoing debate over freedom and equality; however, collective identities are more resilient than once thought and they may in fact sharpen in the face of new societal challenges. More broadly, politics is not simply the sum of individual actions but the product of rich collections of institutions that overlap one another, providing meaning to life and informing the ideas, viewpoints and values. [3: 72-75] Recent anthropological research also found more continuity than discontinuity among different forms of state and warfare and these records show that mankind is warlike and have always been such. Wars of today are seen to be more violent not because the human population of the globe is more aggressive than before, but because it became highly effective in anything it does. [6: 176-192

Strategic Culture and National Style
Clausewitz argued that three important elements come into play in any war: the government, which sets the objectives for the war; the armies, which fight it; and the peoples who support it. Clausewitz stressed that leaders should also not forget the real potential of a mobilized mass society. In some ways it challenges the unitary rational actor assumption in security policy studies, based on the conviction that domestic political conditions could shape even the grand strategy that elites (leaders of political parties, economy and the armed forces) articulate in a unique strategic culture related to the security and military affairs. Other important elements of strategic culture include the context associated with perceived security threats and technological development; strong cognitive content associated with attitudes and beliefs; historical legacies; and beliefs about the role of military and concerned institutions in the policymaking process. [8: 93-95] Generations of scholars have produced greater understanding of ties between culture and state behaviour. Strategic cultural studies have provided rich descriptions of particularistic cultures and identities, and researchers have acknowledged important links between external and internal determinants of national security policy. After decades of scholarship on cultural determinants, the theory of strategic culture is on its way to become an accepted independent variable in casual modelling. If so, strategic culture becomes a generator of preferences, a vehicle for the perpetuation of values and preferences. Strategic culture includes the beliefs and assumptions that frame choices about international military behaviour, particularly those concerning decisions to go to war as well as preferences for offensive, or defensive modes of warfare, and the levels of acceptable wartime casualties and the collateral damage. Most scholars agree that elites of a society are instrumental in defining security policy goals and the direction of policy restructuring in case of new challenges. Contemporary scholarship contends that elite behaviour may be more consistent with the assertion that leaders are strategic users of culture who redefine the limits of the possible in key security policy discourses. Therefore, strategic culture is best understood as a negotiated reality among security policy elites. While leaders clearly pay respect to deeply held convictions associated with strategic culture, the story of security policy development may be best understood as the pursuit of legitimation for preferred policy courses that may, or may not, conform to traditional cultural boundaries. [8: 103-110]

Military Culture
Examination of the European military history makes it clear that the warfare of different ages was largely determined by the specific societal, economic, military and cultural differences between belligerents. Recognizing this led to the first steps of the theory of military culture. Today, this theory is an integral part of the Hungarian military science and officer education marked with the name of Jenő Kovács, the late superintendent of the Zrínyi Miklós Military Academy. To test his theory, as an independent concept, does not require the complete overview of several thousand years of European military history. It is enough to look at the events of the period of Napoleonic wars from 1789 to 1815. Kovács, following Clausewitz's detailed scholarly work on victory proposed to divide militaries by their approach (direct-manoeuvre centric or indirect-attrition and guerrilla) to wage war. [9] The dynamic changes of the 1990s resulted that scholars of the Hungarian military science were facing serious challenges. It became clear that the former balance-of-power-based strategic thinking would need serious reconsideration. In order to develop a new National Military Strategy, Kovács proposed a holistic research approach of the subject inviting scholars of various disciplines such as geopolitics, history and representatives of international relations. Kovács primarily supported his initial idea with the works of Anglo-Saxon authors on strategic culture and came to the conclusion that, in addition to decisive use of armed forces, there are ways to successfully conclude an armed conflict such as psychological warfare, ideological warfare and economic embargos. Kovács's untimely death did not allow him to complete the research; therefore, the concept of military culture is incomplete. However, it is providing a sufficient basis for contemporary researchers and military professional to further explore the topic. [10] Annihilation The strategy of annihilation is based on the idea that a single event or a short series of directly related events can produce victory. Thus, this can produce victory by primarily eliminating the enemy's physical capability to defend; therefore, it requires such forms of mobility that make forces able to move to positions of advantage from where they can defeat enemy formations by concentrated fire. Orchestrating manoeuvres of fire and fast-moving echelons of combined arms requires timely and trustable information because of the nature of ground battle. Namely, this kind of battle is chaos on a grand scale. Commanders are to keep the enemy in this chaos, while operating with some sense of order and cohesion on their own sides. This competition is subject to the fortunes of war; therefore, commanders are trying to give the enemy more problems to solve in a given time frame than he and his organization can possibly handle. It requires not just outmanoeuvring the enemy, but also outthinking him. Once one has been run out of options, he is forced to fight the other on the other's term, and then he can be physically defeated or destroyed. [11: 135-136] Kovács also named this approach manoeuvre centric military culture.

Attrition
Attrition or exhaustion is the continuous wearing down of a nation's capability to resist. According to Clausewitz: Inability to carry on the struggle can, in practice, be replaced by two other grounds for making peace: the first is the improbability of victory; the second is its unacceptable cost. [12: 33] Modern practitioners generally use the terms attrition and exhaustion interchangeably; however, they refer to different aspects of the same strategic concept. The earlier tends to be associated with the improbability of victory, while exhaustion refers to a victory of unacceptable cost. A combatant using a physical attrition strategy intends to win by destroying the enemy's military forces over time. The primary intent is for the enemy to realize that it cannot win and will continue to suffer casualties; it surrenders based on lack of hope. Alternatively, the enemy military is so severely depleted over time that it eventually is incapable of defending itself and is destroyed, leaving exactly the same strategic outcome as an annihilation victory.

Exhaustion or Guerrilla Warfare
The common explanation of insurgency strategy is that it pursues exhaustion because resource limitations prevent a more nuanced approach. Exhaustion strategies need not be extremely massive, complex, or synchronized. This strategy mainly differ from other strategies in that its aim is to erode will over time to convince the target audience that further resistance is fruitless and will only result in more casualties. This special kind of moral attrition may target policy-makers, elites, or populations. Ideally, the enemy surrenders before his entire force, economy, or society has been destroyed. Moral attrition campaigns can also be conducted using information operations as the major (even sole) component of the strategy. Propaganda convinces the enemy that resistance is futile, and the future following surrender will be better than can be achieved otherwise. [18: 13-14]

Changes in the Civil-Military Context
The issues became more focused after 9/11, since a new kind of war, the global war on terror (GWOT) has been introduced in which the overriding concern became security against radical non-state actors who threaten the world with using weapons of mass destruction. This new war included a number of small war missions familiar from the past and some new ones as well, but all required the transformation of a military that had been created in the Cold War for battles in Europe against the massed armoured divisions of belligerent forces. In this new environment, the military's firepower became an instrument of last rather than first resort. [14: 26] Scholars have given a variety of names to these missions including asymmetric warfare, counterinsurgency, fourth generation war, but they share a common denominator: success requires the application of extensive and well developed political skill of the armed forces. Clausewitz's dictum certainly has a special application in today's conflict environments essential to success and involves the operational forces and their leaders in extensive political interaction. Today's security environment is an environment of coalitions. Most of the wars fought in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have been waged with allies. The requirement to conduct operations under the umbrella of the United Nations or as a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization or European Union indicates that this reality will not change in the near future. It forces the military to forge a unity of effort with coalition partners rather than the unity of command preferred by all military leaders. However, this is difficult to achieve. Differing military and social cultures, languages, and home constituencies often involve military leaders in difficult interactions with their international counterparts to maintain the strategic, operational, and tactical direction. These efforts are fundamentally political, and local misunderstandings can endanger mission accomplishment as well as the relationship among partner nations. These realities were highlighted during recent counterinsurgency operations, where the U.S. command dictated direct confrontation against local enemy forces, while others, such as the British or Italian forces, preferred a more "indirect" approach, that of negotiating with the opposition, to name one. The requirement for legitimacy in today's security operations involves the military forces in political issues on a number of levels as well, where they must earn the goodwill and the support of local populations and their leaders, as well as the support of political leaders and supporters at home. A single misstep by any member of the coalition forces can receive immediate exposure on 24/7 news programs, with the potential of significant impact on public opinion, when we face today that security operations require long-term perseverance and commitment. [15: 93-94]

New Trends in Strategic Interaction
When applying Lykke's strategic ends (objectives), ways (methods) and means (resources) model, [16: 45] the objective is state survival, while the available resources are the instruments of national power, such as diplomacy, information, military and economy (DIME); therefore, the application of national power in order to close the gap between the current situation and the desired end state is the method. Since there is no single authority over sovereign states nor a world hegemon which is able to properly address current and future security challenges alone a multinational effort needs to be generated. It is clear that a pure military solution without (at least) a diplomatic effort cannot achieve a just peace and stable environment. However, according to Clausewitz there is an indirect approach to the purpose of the war-namely to destroy the enemy's fighting forces-the most important of such methods is to make the duration of the war so long as to bring about a gradual exhaustion of its physical and moral resistance. [12: 31-36] This could be best achieved if one has been cut off from the resources. Taken the globally interconnected world the disruption of one's economy may lead faster to the desired end than actually fighting a war. One option for this can be the imposition of economic sanctions, which invariably creates controversy as it is neither rapid nor precise in effect, and because success is difficult to measure. An adjacent and supporting element of the three instruments of national power described above is the information instrument. In extreme circumstances the diplomatic and economic instruments may require the application of military force in order to enforce their activities. However, the widely accepted way of the Clausewitzian understanding of war is the application of armed forces (means) by a state to destroy the enemy's armed forces (aim) to compel another state to follow the former's will (end). By changing one or more elements in this thesis, new forms of political violence are envisaged and it is possible to move away from the concept of war as used in ordinary language. Actually, Clausewitz goes beyond the empiricist definition by linking the tactics-strategy distinction to his schema of means, aims, and ends of war. Translating the still valid political nature of war to politics is the teaching of the use of war. Following this trail, strategy becomes the teaching of the use of combat, while tactics (engagement) is the teaching of the use of armed forces. Therefore, the political level of the conflict means that a nation struggles for its liberation or very existence. What Clausewitz helps to understand is the political and military difference between war proper (regular or conventional) and small war (irregular or unconventional). The strategic aim in war proper is the abolition of the enemy through the destruction of his armed forces. In small war, this relationship is different, since one of the actors is militarily weaker than the other, he cannot directly fight the enemy armed forces but must focus on operations that have direct political results. The concept of the trinity of government, military, and people (nation/society) became the fundamental analytical tool for the study of war. This trinity can be summed up as a function of the variables of violence-hatred, of luck and the skills of the military,

Components of the Military Instrument of the National Power -Land-power
Technology alone is not likely to prove able to maintain supremacy without counterbalancing supremacies in conventional forces in terms of both concentrated mass and strategic manoeuvrability. The history of the application of land-power theory in terms of principles of war and operational perspectives suggests that Mackinder was, by and large, right. His premise was based not only on world geography, but also on an analysis of cultures and national intents. The military application of land-power is in practice both cyclical and evolutionary. Mass versus manoeuvre, attrition versus annihilation, or indirect versus direct approaches all demonstrate that the application of land-power is a contextual issue. The operational applications are heavily influenced by the technology available to the antagonists, be it better armour or better firepower, or even the advantages of the fortunes of war. However, regardless of the historical context in which it is employed, the strategic importance of land-power seems to remain a stable and enduring concept. This is certainly true in the modern world, when mass armies and industrialized military forces are predominant. Even in irregular form of armed forces the sources of ammunition, weapons, supplies and equipment are from the industrialized part of the world. Today's changing security environment is not a total departure from the past but is an enlargement of it. Conventional challengers remain among states with strong military capabilities. Unconventional challengers will employ means of terror and guerrilla methods to oppose and in some ways negate the immense technological advantages of high tech armed forces. In such chaotic and unpredictable geopo litical terrain, military responsibilities are not likely to be confined to decisive military operations. Therefore, land-power most likely continues to perform traditional occupation duties and stability operations. Naturally, as this is a distinctly population-oriented activity one can well expect that it will take place where the people are. Land forces will play a predominant role in these operations, designating armed forces as the lead executive agent for stabilization and reconstruction. Land-power, then, as an element of this 21 st century geopolitical environment will extend beyond combat situations and encompass much more than land-oriented military forces, which leads to a wider definition of land-power as the ability in peace, crisis, and war to exert prompt and sustained influence on or from land. Land-power so defined, must be employed in concert with other components of military power. Such joint orchestration will be essential at all stages of implementation of the grand strategy, woven into a context of integrated application of all elements of national power: diplomatic, informational, military, and economic. This will require broader interagency cooperation and increasing joint military interdependence. However, land-power and land forces will be central to the process of transformation. Thus, land-power retains a preeminent role in national defence, as it represents the nation's ability to influence events and persons before challenges to national security and international stability degenerate to become more fractious, more volatile, and less manageable. [19: 109-120]

Sea power
Ever since mankind has been able to build ships and got to sail in ancient times, navies have sought to control communications on the sea. Such control has always been general or local, or temporary. In either case the object of such control has been to protect one's own commerce, disrupt the enemy's actions, move his own army, and prevent the movement of the enemy. At various times and places belligerents have built substantial navies to carry out these missions and in the dynamics of their competitions the notion of command of the sea emerged. Command denoted a relative strong relationship between two or more navies in which one can enjoy a significant superiority over the others that provided him the freedom of action in order to carry out the four basic missions of sea power. Innovation and the introduction of the submarine forces and aircraft in the world wars threatened the idea of command of the sea. If the enemy has always the ability to contest control in any area of the sea, whether or not he has a viable battle fleet, there is nothing available to the stronger navy beyond a rather tenuous and local sea control. The onset of the Cold War generated a set of geopolitical parameters that provided unique context. The development of huge arsenals of nuclear weapons created massive disincentives for going to war directly. The power of nuclear weapons meant that a whole fleet arrayed in a traditional formation could be wiped out at a single stroke. In today's globalized world, that is characterized by endemic struggle and conflict, nuclear weapons, the Internet, mass communications, and ubiquitous sensing, the dynamics of interstate, intergroup, and intercorporate relations have produced a world of continuous contention, the characteristics of which are significantly influenced by who can do what in the global commons. Command of the sea is directly associated with overall military and economic superiority that allows a nation to establish a world order on its terms. However, for the purposes of assessing risk in the development of naval strategies and doctrine, it is useful to understand modern command of the sea as a condition of naval superiority that influences other nations' decisions especially as it relates to the maintenance of a global security system that supports the operation of a global economic system. Therefore, nations of the world are becoming economically interdependent, and what the process needs is a comprehensive global security. [20: 22-26]

Airpower
Airpower emerged as an important element of military power virtually as soon as aviation itself existed. Since armies and navies first began to experiment with the use of airplanes as implements of war. In the ensuing years, airpower quickly became integral to the conduct of modern warfare, and sometimes becoming its central element, particularly during the past several decades. Its use and effects are an increasingly important matter of study in international security scholarship; although it is fair to say that land and sea power, with their longer histories and somewhat greater stability of characteristics, remain more familiar to most scholarly observers. Airpower is a vast subject, comprising all uses of aviation in the pursuit of nations' and other political actors' power and security interests including the use of long-range missiles, as well. The evolution of airpower continued at a rapid pace over the following 90 years, driven by innovation in a wide range of relatively young sciences and technologies, by policy choices that themselves created much of the demand for such technologies and also by the often-intense security concerns of the major powers. [21: 1-2] Just as land warfare underwent transformational changes that altered its nature and dynamics with the rise of mass armies and with mechanisation, and sea power was fundamentally altered by the shift from sail to steam and other revolutions, airpower has experienced a more rapid series of state changes that complicate efforts to generalize its nature and its effects on modern warfare and international security. Airpower was born in World War I but came of age in the conflagration of World War II. In the former conflict, airpower played small though important roles, pre-eminently by providing tactical reconnaissance and observation. In the latter, air forces ultimately comprising hundreds of thousands of far more capable aircraft were central to the conduct of the war. Great effort was devoted to strategic bombing campaigns and saw first strategic bombardment by cruise and ballistic missiles. Furthermore, aerial interdiction and close air support also played a central role in the German blitzkrieg. These were punctuated by spectacular though often costly airborne operations, while air transport became a ubiquitous and sometimes decisive component of military logistics. At sea, naval warfare became dominated by airpower, as aircraft carriers supplanted battleships as principal combatants and aircrafts became key tools in antisubmarine warfare; the war was above all a contest to seize and control bases for land-based air power. Pre-war theorists had foreseen many of these developments, at least to a certain degree. But some of their best-known prophecies went unfulfilled. For example, strategic bombing campaigns failed to produce the sort of rapid, decisive results originally envisioned by many. The end of World War II marked the beginning of the nuclear revolution. Airpower was central to this development, being the delivery means for the absolute weapon, and was itself transformed by it. Other technological developments were also altering the still-young art and science of air warfare. Airpower grew ever more capital-intensive and effective, with smaller numbers of aircraft exerting greater influence over larger areas. Over the past 40 years these trends have been dramatically reinforced by the development of air-to-ground precision-guided munitions, stealth aircraft, and new sensors and systems for air battle management, which became the centrepieces of air campaigns not just in war, but in stability operations, as well. [22: 85-114]

Airpower in Low Intensity Conflicts
With most analyses of airpower focusing on its employment in conventional warfare, consideration of the use of airpower in low intensity conflicts has traditionally been a peripheral niche in airpower scholarship and in the broader study of counterinsurgency and unconventional warfare. However, this pattern has lately shifted in response to the prolonged and often frustrating involvement of the Allied forces in conducting such operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. The image of airpower that often springs most readily to mind is its use in the strike role, with a variety of airplanes, helicopters, and UAVs conducting attacks against insurgents, suspected insurgents, or their supporters. Indeed, aerial firepower can be critical to stability operations, particularly since these kinds of operations often involve relatively light ground forces conducting dispersed operations where artillery or other heavy fire support may be unavailable in the event of an emergency. The potential for airpower working together with small or special operations units to become a formidable force on the battlefield was demonstrated recently both before and after the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq. [23] The presence of aircraft can also play an important role in stability operations even when no attacks are actually launched, by deterring insurgents from moving or massing. However, it is often, even typically the case that the airpower's so-called non-kinetic roles of airlift and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance have even a greater impact in such operations. In all of these roles, airpower tends to operate in support of land forces to a greater degree, than in conventional military operations. [21: 13]

Conclusion
The contemporary world, despite the fact that the political nature of the majority of the states are some sort of democracy, is far from peace and stability; therefore, armed conflicts are with us and the future is likely to be similar. Humanity is currently experiencing a period of considerable transition. Historically, such periods of transition have presented the greatest challenges to the security of nations and the stability of international affairs. Transition and the unprecedented rate of change, combined with the emergence of new threats is increasing global uncertainty resulting in a potential shift from the current international system to a polycentric world, a world that is dominated by dozens of actors possessing and exercising various kinds of power rather than just states. The combination of rapid change, uncertainty, and interconnectedness make the world more dynamic and complex because as global systems increasingly become interdependent, it will be difficult to isolate an individual crisis or event and address it separately. One solution on its own will not suffice as it is likely that any action taken to tackle a single problem will trigger cascading effects in other areas. Multiple accelerating trends will interact and bring about a complex array of effects that will cause major changes that can provoke a change in global politics and societies, as well as in the environment. These changes will create a demanding future security environment containing an even broader range of threats and challenges. Therefore, the problem of security can only be seen as a whole and the solution requires a multidisciplinary, as well as a holistic approach.