Max G. Manwaring, PhD, is a retired professor of military strategy at the Strategic Studies Institute of the U.S. Army War College (USAWC), where he has held the General Douglas MacArthur Chair of Research. His recent publication Confronting the Evolving Global Security Landscape: Lessons from the Past and Present shares empirical-research-based theories informed by case studies that describe the complexity of modern-day threats to the security of nations and the global system as a whole rather than according to dated theoretical frameworks.
How to Understand the Current Moment
The present-day global security situation is characterized by an unconventional spectrum of conflict that no one from the traditional Westphalian school of thought would recognize or be comfortable with. In addition to conventional attrition war conducted by easily recognized military forces of another nation-state, we see something considerably more complex and ambiguous. Regardless of any given politically correct term for war or conflict, all state and nonstate actors involved in any kind of conflict are engaged in one common political act – that, war. The intent is to control and/or radically change and government and to institutionalize the acceptance of the aggressor’s objectives and values. It is important to remember that these “new” actors and “new” types of battlefields are being ignored or, alternatively, they are considered too complicated and ambiguous to deal with. Yet they seriously threaten the security, stability, development, and well-being of all parts of the global community.
Change and Development within the Inter/National Security Concept
Stability is a concept that has sometimes been confused with security. Often these terms are used synonymously and are defined as the protection of territory and people. Threats against stability/security include direct military threats as well as offensive/defensive aggression supported by propaganda, information, moral warfare, and a combination of other types of conflict that might include, but are not limited to, psychological war, financial war, trade war, cyber war, diplomatic war, narco-criminal-war, and guerrilla war. There are no ways or means that cannot be combined with others.
These terms, however, are not the same. Security is better thought of as the foundational element that enables national and international socioeconomic-political development and includes the task of generating “responsible governance”.
In 1996, the secretary general of the United Nations, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, described the most important dialectic at work in the post-Cold War world as globalization and fragmentation. As a consequence of his research in the field he introduced two new types of threats. These included:
(1) A new set of players that includes insurgents, transnational criminal organizations, private armies, militias, and gangs that are taking on roles that were once reserved for nation-states.
(2) indirect and implicit threats to stability and human well-being such as unmet political, economic, and social expectations.
This broadened concept of security ultimately depends on eradication of the causes, as well as the perpetrators, of instability.
A New Sociology of Security
These new global developments and the emergence of new players and practices in the global security arena dictate a new sociology of security and redefinition of the major characteristics of contemporary socioeconomic-political conflict. A few of these defining characteristics include the followings:
- The center of gravity is no longer an easily identifiable military force. It is now leadership and public opinion – and the fight takes place among the people, not on a conventional battlefield.
- The broadened concept of security (responsible sovereignty) ultimately depends on the eradication of causes, as well as perpetrators, of instability.
- The primary objective of security is no longer the control of sovereign territory and the people in it. The strategic objective is to capture the imagination of the people and the will of their leaders – thereby winning a public opinion trial of relative moral strength.
- The principal tools of contemporary conflict are now the proactive and coercive use of words, images, symbols, perceptions, ideas, and dreams.
- War is now total in terms of scope, method, objective, and time.
- There are the following three rules: (1) only the foolish fight fair; (2) there are no rules; and (3) the only viable morality within the anarchy of the world disorder is national self-interest.
The Peace-Security Paradigm
The fulfilment of a holistic, population-centric, legitimate governance and stability-security equation for national and global security consists of three principal elements. They are derived from the independent variable that define security (i.e., S). These three primary elements are as follows: (1) the coercive capacity to provide a culturally acceptable level of personal and collective stability (i.e., M), (2) the ability to generate socioeconomic development (i.e., E), and (3) the political competence and rectitude to develop a type of governance to which a people can relate and support (i.e., PC). It is heuristically valuable to portray the formula among these elements in a mathematical formula: S = (M+ E) X (PC)
This peace-security equation was developed from the SWORD model (a.k.a. the Manwaring Paradigm) and warrants high confidence that the findings are universal and explain much of the reality of the contemporary conservative environment.
Five Components of a Legitimate Government
- Free, fair, and frequent selection of political leavers
- The level of participation in or acceptance of the political process
- The level of perceived government corruption
- The level of perceived individual or collective well-being
- The level of regime acceptance by the major social institutions
These key indicators of moral legitimacy are not exhaustive, but they statistically explain a high percentage of the legitimacy phenomenon and provide the basic architecture for the actions necessary to assist governments in their struggle to survive, develop, and prosper. The degree to which a political actor efficiently manages a balanced mix of these five variables enables stability, development, political competence, security, acceptance, and sustainable peace, or the reverse.
The Quintuple Threat to Security
There are five threats that when combined pose a grave danger to the security of a nation’s sovereignty. These are domains that external threats and, potentially, their internal partners will seek to damage. These include:
- Undermining the ability of the government to perform its legitimizing functions.
- Significantly changing a government’s foreign, defense or other policies.
- Isolating religion or racial communities from the rest of the host nation’s society and replacing traditional state authority with alternative governance (e.g. ideological, plutocratic, criminal or religious).
- Transforming socially isolated human terrain into “virtual states” within the host state, without a centralized bureaucracy or easily identified military or police forces.
- Conducting low-cost actions calculated to maximize damage, minimize response, and display carefully staged media events that lead to the erosion of the legitimacy and stability of a targeted state’s political-economic-social system.
Each of the above elements, when combined and sustained over time leads to the inability of a nation to maintain peace and security.
Linear-Analytic Case Study Elements
Research applying these methods will frequently find that the study of only a few sharply contrasting instances can produce a wealth of new insights as it produces an enhanced understanding of the architecture of successful and unsuccessful strategies – or best/worst practices – in dealing with complex contemporary hybrid conflicts.
With this information, the strategic and analytical commonalities and recommendations can be determined that are relevant to each case examined, as well as the larger general security phenomenon.
The standard approach to such case studies is to include the following three elements: Issue and Context, Fundings and Outcome, Conclusions and Implications.
The case studies which Manwaring then covers include the following:
- Lessons from Italy (1968 – 1983) and Western Sahara (1975 – Present)
- Lessons from Somalia (1992 – 1993) and Bosnia (1992 – 1998)
- Lessons from Argentina (1960 – Present) and Mexico (1999 – Present)
- Lessons from Vietnam (1959 – 1975) and Algeria (1954 – 1962)
- Lessons from Malaya (1948 – 1960) and El Salvador (1979 – 1992)
- Lessons from Venezuela (1998 – Present and Uruguay (1962 – 2005)
- The Proxy War against the Soviet 40th Army in Afghanistan
Conclusion
From the aforementioned cases a large number of insights on the nature of global security are able to be developed. Perhaps most importantly – in understanding the new nontraditional and greatly enlarged security arena, one must be organizationally and cognitively prepared to deal with proxies as well as other unconventional players operating across the entire spectrum of conflict.
Strong empirical evidence illustrates that the essence of any given contemporary threat situation must be to co-opt, persuade, control, and/or compel an adversary’s public opinion and political leadership to accept one’s will. That defines war. The origins of this form of ‘protracted struggle’ originates largely within the canon of Marxist thought.
Lenin articulated the contemporary political vision within which many nonstate and state actors operate. He taught that anyone wishing to force radical political-economic-social change and compel an opponent to accede to his or her will must organize, equip, train, and employ a body of small political agitator groups. His intent was straightforward. If these unconventional and clandestine individuals of statecraft succeed in helping to tear apart the fabric on which a targeted enemy rests, the instability and violence they create can serve as the “midwife of a new social order.”
This has a number of implications that are important both for an enlightened electorate and political operatives should consider when deliberating and legislating about the contemporary global security arena. Most importantly, this includes understanding that the root causes of insecurity are rooted in economic and social issues and that the way in which to assess risks to security is to look at the individuals and groups engaged in activities defined as threats to the peace-security paradigm.