Lecture
Almost all the greatest turning points in the history of individual countries and of humanity as a whole are bound up with wars. In the past, the emergence and destruction of many states and the formation and disintegration of empires were accompanied by armed violence, being either its cause or its consequence. And at present, as throughout the preceding centuries, military force remains an important factor in politics and plays a major, and often decisive, role in it.
The weakening of the threat of large-scale war in the modern world by no means signifies that wars and armed violence are a thing of the past. Moreover, since the Second World War, more wars have blazed across the planet in each successive decade than in the one before. Consequently, military danger has not disappeared altogether, but has merely assumed a different form. This accounts for the constant interest in those problems of social life connected with the creation and employment (or the prevention of the employment) of armed forces and with the formation and functioning of military policy.
One of the fundamental tasks of analysing the life of society is to examine it along the axis of "war and peace". The line that rigidly divides these two opposed conditions of society is armed violence, armed struggle. It is true that a clear separation of war and peace, of strategy and policy, is not absolute in character. First, history and theory are familiar with conditions that may be described as "neither war nor peace". These include: armistice, occupation, military blockade, so-called "undeclared war", and the like. Second, the phenomenon of war exerts a considerable influence on the life of society and its political system even in peacetime, prompting states to attend to their military security, to pursue military development and to maintain an army.
"War," wrote C. Schmitt, "is by no means the aim or even the content of politics, but rather, as a real possibility, it is an ever-present presupposition which uniquely determines human thought and action and thereby gives rise to specifically political behaviour."
This thought and action constitute the essence and content of military policy, which encompasses a relatively autonomous, in its own way "eternal" (so long as wars and armies exist) and exceptionally important field of human activity. Its special place in the life of society is determined by a number of circumstances.
First, it is integrative in character. On the one hand, military policy rests upon and accumulates within itself the economic, political, scientific-technical, informational, spiritual and other capabilities of states and of the actors in military-political relations. On the other hand, virtually any social process may take a confrontational course and, under certain conditions, may spill over into military confrontation and armed struggle. For this reason military policy is marked by extraordinary diversity in its geopolitical scope and driving forces, in the means and forms of struggle employed, and in its social character and political consequences.
Second, it is associated with the most authoritarian, extreme and decisive means of altering the status quo in a given social system, both within a country and on the international stage. Force, wrote P.-J. Proudhon, is "the supreme judge in matters of state, and war is the tribunal of force, in which victory serves to show on whose side the greater force lies and to sanctify the right of the latter". Since the time of Richelieu the world has spoken of weapons as the last argument of kings. But long before Richelieu and long after him, right up to our own day, monarchies and republics, dictatorships and democracies alike have shown a readiness to resort to this argument in order to assert their own priorities in the world.
Third, the creation and maintenance of military force lay a heavy burden upon states and peoples, while its functional employment entails the death and wounding of people, material destruction, financial outlays and other losses borne not only by the victims but also by the initiators of military violence, not only by the vanquished but also by the victors. As the poet said, when the guns speak, the muses fall silent. This image should be understood more broadly than as a relationship between war and art. What is at issue is that under conditions of war or martial law the rights and freedoms of the individual are sharply curtailed, democratic norms are cut back, and a moral hardening of society takes place.
It is for precisely this reason that military policy has been and remains an important aspect of the activity of every state and of any government. Everyone knows this and no one disputes it. Yet what it actually consists of, what place it should and can occupy in the life of society and what role it in fact plays, what the mechanisms of its formulation and implementation are, what the regularities of its formation and functioning are, and other such problems, remain a blank spot for many.
The preparation and conduct of armed struggle, as a distinctive sphere of the life of society and a specific type of human activity, always contains two aspects.
One aspect encompasses the operational-strategic, organisational and establishment-related, and military-technical phenomena and processes which are sometimes described, not altogether correctly, as "military proper" factors. This is the field of military strategy in the exact sense of that term, as "a component part of military art, its highest domain, encompassing the theory and practice of preparing the country and the armed forces for war and of planning and conducting strategic operations and the war as a whole".
But military strategy is not a self-sufficient magnitude. The planning, organisation and direction of military operations, and the course and outcome of a war, depend upon an enormous number of conditions and factors that lie outside the military sphere, yet condition it and, in their turn, are influenced by it. This is why the study of military phenomena and processes cannot be confined to an analysis of armed struggle alone and of the structures specially created for waging it. Understanding them presupposes elucidating the geopolitical, economic, ecological, socio-cultural, informational, psychological and other characteristics of military activity, as well as the influence of military activity itself upon those characteristics.
Few dispute the proposition that the entire organisation of armies and the method of combat they employ, and with them victories and defeats, prove to be dependent upon material, that is to say economic, conditions. In this connection it is worth recalling that Jomini already advanced considerations founded on the moral causes bound up with the operations of an army, and proposed distinguishing between "the policy of war" and "military policy". "The policy of war," he wrote, "is concerned with all the relations of diplomacy to war, whereas military policy denotes only the military considerations of the state or of the commander."
However, the commander's "military considerations alone" are insufficient for understanding, and hence for devising, adequate practical measures for the preparation and conduct of armed struggle. As the President of the Academy of Military Sciences, Army General M. A. Gareev, writes, "by studying only wars it is impossible to answer the question of why they occurred". Without coming to grips with such problems as the nature and character of military force, the causes, essence and forms of military violence, its possibilities and limits, the ways of preparing for and waging or preventing war, the aims, character and consequences of armed struggle, and the economic and socio-political foundations of military development, it is impossible to work out a realistic and effective military policy or to organise the operational and combat training of troops in a manner meeting the demands of the times. In this connection it is worth noting that an official publication of the US Department of Defense, in addressing the purpose of the country's armed forces, emphasises: "Achieving the aims of the United States requires far more than simply issuing the right orders and carrying them out promptly and intelligently."
The other aspect of the preparation and conduct of armed struggle consists precisely in its political essence and content. As is well known, it is policy that determines the military aims of the state and the means of achieving them. It plays an exceptionally important role in defining the tasks of the state's military activity, in creating and maintaining its military might, in working out the principles of military development, in shaping the mobilisation preparation and mobilisation readiness of the country's economy and population, and so forth.
The exceptional importance of this aspect for the accomplishment of all the state's military tasks is indirectly confirmed by the fact that in the "Military Doctrine of the Russian Federation" the first section is specifically devoted to the military-political foundations of the military organisation and military activity of the state. Nor is this a purely Russian practice. Miljan Komatina, the former Secretary-General of the Conference on Disarmament and personal representative of the UN Secretary-General, observed that "in general most aspects of military doctrine belong to the category of political decisions".
Yet policy, too, is not a self-sufficient magnitude for military activity. "Although military doctrine," to cite M. Komatina once more, "is to a considerable degree a matter of policy, it is not a simple product of political decisions already taken and binding upon the military, who must devise the means of carrying them out."
Thus, in wars, in military development and in the functioning of the armed forces there are inseparably fused political decisions and actions, which are directly connected with the creation and use of military force as a factor of policy, and military phenomena and processes, which carry political content within themselves. The relative autonomy of the two aspects of military activity considered above, and the relationship between policy and strategy, not infrequently give rise to complex situations arising from their contradictory interaction, sometimes expressed in the fact that favourable attention to one of them has adverse consequences for the other.
What has been said allows the conclusion that an important aspect of a military commander's professionalism is political culture. And the higher the rank and the wider the range of a military leader's responsibilities, the higher the demands placed upon it. "An outstanding military career," Charles de Gaulle emphasised, "is impossible without service to high politics, just as the great glory of a statesman is impossible without concern for the lustre of the national defence."
Among the various scholarly disciplines that shape the political and military culture of individuals and of society as a whole, a significant place belongs to military political science. Strictly speaking, the theoretical comprehension of the field of human activity under consideration is as old as war itself. Initially it was present implicitly within military practice itself. As the scale of military activity expanded and its tasks grew more complex, it became a special object of rational enquiry.
The need to accumulate, study and transmit military experience required the special formalisation of the political principles, rules and requirements contained within military activity. The corresponding assessments and conclusions are already to be found in the first works of military history and, subsequently, of military theory.
The eminent military theorist and historian G. A. Leer wrote in 1871 of the need to investigate the phenomenon revealed by political conditions in the conduct of military operations – in short, that connection which exists between war and policy.
A quarter of a century later N. A. Korf spoke of the need for a science that "will have a fully independent subject – the study of the significance for war and its conduct of the structure of the state, of state activity and of their evolution, which, although investigated both in sociology and in politics, are examined there from entirely different standpoints".
In 1914 N. L. Klado, in his "Studies in Strategy", spoke of the philosophy of military affairs. In the 1930s N. N. Golovin insisted on the need for a special discipline, the "sociology of war"; at approximately the same time A. A. Kersnovsky was elaborating his "Philosophy of War".
In the past, the body of knowledge about the military-political realities of social life was formed at a time when military violence was a possible, permissible and inevitable factor of world history. It was within this paradigm that the so-called Marxist-Leninist doctrine of war and the army also developed. Today, however, the world has become too fragile for wars and power politics. Accordingly, theories constructed under the dominance of a confrontational political culture have had to give way to the search for, and substantiation of, ways of preventing wars and military conflicts.
The Second World War stimulated the search for answers to the question of the causes of wars and the means of eliminating them. Within the system of the social sciences a number of relatively autonomous fields emerged in which wars, armed conflicts and military violence are studied.
Paxology, or irenology – the study of peace – investigates the factors conducive to eliminating (limiting) the material, political, ideological and other preconditions for the outbreak of wars and armed conflicts, and the paths to establishing a peace that excludes the very possibility of pursuing a policy of the threat or use of force.
Polemology – the study of war – takes the form of a comprehensive interdisciplinary study of wars and other forms of collective aggressiveness which, in the view of its adherents, is immanently inherent in human society, and of the biological, psychological, economic, demographic, technological, sociological and other factors that condition the outbreak and character of armed conflicts.
Violensology – a theory that studies the nature of human aggressiveness in general and its political manifestation in particular. It began to take shape in the West after the Second World War as a reaction to the escalation of violence in the world. Within this theory the biogenetic (ethological), psychological, ecological and social causes and factors of human aggressiveness are investigated, and conceptions of the non-violent development of society are elaborated.
Military political science occupies its own independent niche in this array. It investigates the whole diversity of situations, social movements and social forces, their programmes, orientations and actions, which in one way or another bear upon military problems. In our country the emergence and constitution of military political science as an independent scholarly and academic discipline dates from the beginning of the 1990s.
The formation and dissemination of ideas answering to the new realities was stimulated by the fact that, for well-known reasons, the former ideological tenets came to be rejected, while at the same time a great deal that was new appeared in the tools, ways and methods of assessing events. It is precisely such tools that military political science provides.
Comments