found with Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Other causes are in the form and nature
of each state, its governmental institutions, and those formed by the states.
It is often tempting to think of achieving the overall objective as a serial
process: first, win the fights and defeat the opponent, then deal with underpin-
ning issues that gave rise to the confrontation in the first place. Our institutional
structures help lead us into the temptation; the military, defence, ministries of
defence, and NATO are deemed to win the conflict and the others, diplomats, the
United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the EU, the Organization for
Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), etc. will do the rest afterwards.
This approach is folly; it plays directly to the strategy of the opponent to his
advantage since on their own the military acts appear disproportionate to the
population they are carried out within. The military acts must be firmly based
within the measures to win the confrontation, thus guarding against adopting
methods in conflict that, however successful in themselves, reinforce the oppo-
nent’s position in the confrontation.
The change required of our state-based institutions, including those of the law,
will take a long time to realize and on the evidence of history will probably only be
forced by the war itself, particularly losing or being close to losing awar. The changes
will be strategic and making them will involve more than the matters under
discussion in this chapter. Nevertheless, we would do better in these multinational
ventures if we provided for the absolute essentials for the exercise of the operational
art: a strategy to link to the tactics, a designated authority responsible for the linkage
in its totality, and a theatre in which to exercise this authority.
The example of a commercial venture helps show how we might do this with the
institutional structures we have at present. A group of individuals undertake to
collaborate to achieve a gain or reward; they invest cash and material assets in the
venture. They are ‘partners’, and in their articles of association they agree their
relationships: who is to be the senior partner, the division of rewards, and so on.
Perhaps they need more funds and material resources. They could offer partner-
ships, associate partnerships, or go public and offer shares in the venture. In any
event, the venture has a structure at its head that, while representing the interests of
the partners and investors, allows for strategic decision and direction. The partners
would appoint a chief executive to run the business day to day, perhaps one of their
numbers would be picked or they might employ a suitable person. Depending on
the business and its scope, they may have more than one business area, each with its
own chief executive, or perhaps when the business areas are interdependent form a
committee of the managing directors with one of them as chairman.
If this general concept was applied to the way we conduct our multinational
warlike ventures, then those who had democratic accountability for forces on the
ground would be partners. Partners in a structure formed to achieve a reward rather
than one formed and then deciding on the reward to achieve. A structure formed to
take strategic decisions and to provide a single source of strategic direction to its
executive authority. The executive authority, a man or woman or a small committee,
would be responsible for the operation or campaign as a whole. In return for
adopting this idea and improving the probability of gaining the reward, each partner
242 The Evolution of Operational Art