The New Rules of War: Victory in the Age of Durable Disorder

by Sean McFate

People like to argue semantics when they lack ideas of their own.

War is armed politics, and seeking a technical solution to a political problem is folly. Ultimately, brainpower is superior to firepower, and we should invest in people, not platforms.

“The problem is that victory in the South China Sea is like finding a needle in a haystack when every problem looks like hay.” “The Chinese seem to be doing fine in the haystack,” says the navy officer. “The real problem is the US is playing chess while China is playing go,” says the diplomat, referring to the ancient Chinese game. Like chess, go is easy to learn but hard to master. But go is more complex and requires greater patience, giving new meaning to the phrase “playing the long game.” “I agree,” says the army colonel, fist-bumping the diplomat.

Nonwar war is paradoxical to conventional war thinkers, and seeing them contemplate it is like watching a dog trying to pick up a basketball.

“Grand strategy is the biggest crock of shit.” “Say again?” I ask, nearly dropping my sandwich. “Grand strategy is a myth. It doesn’t exist,” says Dan, a colleague at the RAND Corporation, a Department of Defense–sponsored think tank. “Those are fighting words,” I say, half-seriously. “Bring it on,” he replies, slurping his sweet tea with a smirk.

Mistaking bureaucracy for strategy is another source of grand confusion. Bureaucracy is a zero-sum game, except the sums don’t add up.

Mia Farrow, the millionaire actress, approached Blackwater and a few human rights organizations to end the genocide in Darfur, Sudan.5 The plan was simple. Blackwater would stage an armed intervention in Darfur and establish so-called islands of humanity, refugee camps protected by mercenary firepower. These would be safe havens for refugees fleeing the deadly janjaweed, gunmen who massacre whole villages in Darfur. During this time, the human rights organizations would mount a global name-and-shame media campaign to goad the international community into ending the genocide once and for all with a muscular UN peacekeeping mission. Ultimately, Farrow chose not to go through with the plan, but that’s not the point. The plan was doable, and anyone with money could pull it off.

Often people use the word “peace” when they mean “victory.” Half of winning is knowing what it looks like. Western countries have forgotten, judging by their war record since 1945. Their assumptions about victory are still moored to the conventional war theories developed by Clausewitz and others in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Now it is the twenty-first century, and no one wins that way anymore.