want him to have them. But he will not have them at the point of your bayonet or in
the form and way that suit your cultural and social norms rather than his.
Reconciling the achievement of the confrontational objective with that of the
conflict is not easy because each is achieved with different means. Ultimately,
conflicts, battles, and fights are won by firepower, either applied directly to kill
and destroy the opponent, or in such demonstrably evident potential that its
imminent prospect leads to retreat or surrender. The currency of conflict is
firepower. It is the business of the military to apply firepower. In a confrontation
where one is seeking to change or form an opponent’s intentions, the currency is
information. All agencies, including the military, can transmit information by
word and deed. For example, if we want to deter an attack, the opponent must be
made to understand that we will fight to defend ourselves, that he will lose or at
least lose more than he will gain by defeating us, that there are advantages to him
in not attacking us, that we can find and hit that which he wishes to defend
(which is not the same target as that which is attacking us), and that we will
escalate if at first we do not succeed. We want the opponent to understand that
this is our position and so form his intention not to attack us before the
confrontation becomes a conflict. His understanding is shaped by information;
the information may be transmitted by demonstrations of military forces, the
acquisition of weapons, diplomacy, alliances, and so on.
In the confrontation just described, the relationship between information and
firepower potential is simple and direct. But in cases where conflicts are already
part of an overall confrontation, matters are more complex. The mind or minds
of those in the confrontation are not necessarily those in the particular conflicts
or fights. For example, in 1998–9, NATO was in confrontation with President
Milosevic of Serbia over Kosovo, initially to deter murder and ill-treatment of the
Kosovars, and subsequently to coerce him with the use of air power into with-
drawing his forces and administration from Kosovo. The confrontation was with
Milosevic and his henchmen, not the people of Serbia or their armed forces. The
conflict was with the Serbian Air Defence Forces and these were suppressed
quickly. But it proved difficult to find the objectives and targets that when hit
created the condition and thereby the flow of information that directly threatened
Milosevic’s position sufficiently to persuade him to withdraw from Kosovo. The
Serbian forces deployed and concealed presented few targets; infrastructure
targets hit in Kosovo were ineffective, because the Serbians did not care for
the Kosovars, and those hit in Serbia gained popular support for Milosevic,
because they were seen as an attack not on him but on them. It was not until
the Russians were persuaded to bring diplomatic pressure to bear on Milosevic
that he conceded and NATO won the confrontation. To guarantee the victory, the
Russians had to enter the theatre of operations. They became the other means,
and they were persuaded to be so and acted in the condition created by NATO’s
bombing.
In war amongst the people, reconciling the two objectives to one’s advantage
takes place within the theatre of operations and as a result the criteria for defining
the theatre are different to those of the past. In the past, the theatre was defined in
238 The Evolution of Operational Art