Military Operational Planning and Strategic Moves

Assuming that any decision-maker will maximize the expected value of some utility function, we will find different methods to decide which action among all possible alternatives could be the most appropriate according to our interests. If we use, for example, a multi-criteria decision-making approach we would conduct an analysis arranging all relevant factors in a hierarchical structure. With a cost-benefit analysis our focus will be directed to assess the strengths and weaknesses of all possible options to determine the decision that gives us the highest possible net payoff. There are other situations where the outcome will not only depend on one’s own decision but also on that of other actors, and vice versa. These would be the so-called interdependent decisions. In such cases we might be interested in gathering information other than the one needed for a cost-benefit or a multi-criteria analysis, like information about the intentions of other decision-makers who are involved. Game theory represents a part of decision theory, where two or more decision-makers are involved in the result. To carry out these analyses we assume decision-makers to be intelligent and rational. The meaning of being intelligent in the context of game theory refers to the assumption that each player will not only know his possible payoffs and strategies but also his enemy’s. Therefore, he will be able to make any inference about the game that any other external observer sharing the same information would be able to make, too. Game theory aims to analyze situations of conflict and cooperation by means of mathematical models. The resulting models should provide guidance for either player when having to choose a strategy in order to achieve a good or possibly the best outcome.

The words strategy and tactic share an etymological and historical origin. While the word strategy is etymologically formed by the Greek stratos (army) and agein (to guide), meaning the art of leading military operations, the word tactic comes from the Greek taktike (tekhne), meaning the art of arrangement. It was the Byzantine emperor Leo VI who around 900 first used the word strategía to express how to move armed forces, and who released the military treatise “Tactica” collecting different issues in the conduct of war, from cavalry and infantry formations to naval operations. In the Western world, though, it took until 1771 when Paul Gédéon Joly de Maïzeroy translated the works of Leo VI into French that the term stratégie was first coined, stressing the difference between the specific art of how a commander has to successfully move his subordinates and other aspects of a military campaigns such as tactics, logistics or building fortifications (see, e.g., Heuser 2010, p. 3).

Over the past decade, the term “asymmetric” has begun to convey two meanings within the military field. First, it has been used to refer to a special, i.e. “asymmetric”, kind of threat that countries are facing, and second, it describes the military conflicts resulting from these threats. It thereby refers to the nature of the conflict, and even though the sources of asymmetry in a conflict are varied, usually it is the asymmetry of force that is responsible for all others. On the other hand, though, it must not be used in a too narrow sense: as in real life any two opposing forces most likely command unequal defense budgets and/or are composed of different kinds of units, military conflicts could of course be described as being “asymmetric”, except that then examples for “symmetric” conflicts would at best be extremely rare indeed.

In game theory, a player enjoys a first-mover advantage if he achieves a higher payoff by turning the game into a sequential one with him being the first mover, provided of course that the game can be changed in the first place. Leaving the proviso aside, once we are talking about tactics such a statement might sound obvious rather than revealing, though. Jensen (2015) argues that, if in a battle what can be seen can be hit, military actors should be primed for the offense, i.e. trying to make the first move by striking first. It holds true in particular in naval engagements and aerial dogfights, and obviously it is the lore told by countless Wild West movies: he who draws first wins.

War understood as two armies fighting against each other has become an obsolete concept. During the last few decades we have been observing conflicts of a different nature, not only because the actors involved are no longer legitimized by states, but also because of the unconventional strategies utilized in particular on the side of the non-state actor. Since 1975, the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP) has been recording data from global armed conflicts confirming the increasing trend of non-state conflicts.

“Mission Accomplished” said the banner on the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln from which in May 2003 the then US President, George Bush, declared the conclusion of the military operations against Iraq. Nothing could have been further from the truth, which was highlighted when, in the fall of 2006, the security deterioration in Iraq peaked.

The Afghanistan war exhibits two special features. First, it is exemplified not only as the most recent example of “Irregular Warfare”, or IW, but as the prime example for the kind of armed conflict the West has to expect in the twenty-first century. Whichever definition of IW one looks at, its paramount characteristic is a (strong) asymmetry of the opponents’ objective functions. In order to achieve overall, i.e. politically sustainable, victory, it no longer suffices to defeat the enemy army but other aspects such as culture, religion or the problem of dealing with less perfect Third World-style “democracies” in general have to be taken into account.

Military doctrine assumes information and information technology to be a key factor in decisions at all levels of war. It suggests that one should expect military operations to go hand in hand with second mover advantages. The analyses presented in this thesis suggest, though, that the general assumption that every strategy anticipating the enemy’s intentions would necessarily result in an advantage is not justified. What is more, we even find examples in actual conflicts, where there is an incentive to do the opposite, namely reveal one’s strategies to the enemy. Scenarios from Operation Enduring Freedom, e.g., show that, contrary to intuition, COIN forces’ operations would have been able to do better by revealing their CAS capabilities in advance of every operation to take place, and not going ahead with that particular operation in the first place, unless they possess sufficient capabilities.