Abstract
Force, which is coercion or compulsion, especially with the use or threat of violence, requires concentration. Concentration, in turn, depends upon three components: cooperation, conveyance, and comprehension. Since ancient times, rulers who master this three-part relationship have victory abroad and rest from enemies at home. This framework matters today because digitally and globally networked capabilities are rapidly transforming the third of those variables—comprehension—causing a revolution in what governments can know about adversaries in real-time and at-scale.
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- 1.
The tyrant, explained Aristotle , sought to guard “against anything that customarily gives rise to two things, high thoughts and trust.” A tyrant therefore sought “to make all as ignorant of one another as possible,” while he sent out his spies “wherever there was some meeting or gathering (for men speak less freely when they fear such persons).” Tyrants especially dreaded men who trusted one another, thus a tyrant would “slander them to one another, and set friends at odds with friends”; cf. Aristotle, Politics, in the Carnes Lord trans. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1984); V, 11, 1313bl. In Sun Tzu’s Art of War we read:
All warfare is based on deception. Therefore, when capable, feign incapacity; when active, inactivity. When near, make it appear that you are far away; when far away, that you are near. Offer the enemy a bait to lure him; feign disorder and strike him. When he concentrates, prepare against him; where he is strong, avoid him. Anger his general and confuse him. Pretend inferiority and encourage his arrogance. Keep him under a strain and wear him down. When he is united, divide him.
See Sun Tzu, The Art of War, Samuel B. Griffith trans. (London: Oxford, 1963), Chapter 1, “Estimates”; emphasis added.
- 2.
Douglass C. North, John Joseph Wallis, and Barry R. Weingast, Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. xii, xvii, 14, 18–20, and 53.
- 3.
Ibid., pp. xii, 14, 18–20, and 53.
- 4.
Ibid, p. xv.
- 5.
Hobbes in 1651 famously described human life in the “state of nature” thus:
In such condition, there is no place for industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving, and removing, such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
See Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (New York: Touchstone, 1993), chapter 13; emphasis added.
- 6.
Both definitions come from the Oxford Living Dictionary, accessed March 24, 2018, https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/force
- 7.
Harold Lasswell and Abraham Kaplan, Power and Society (New York: Routledge, 2017), xxviii.
- 8.
There are significant literatures on coercion and compellence in internal security and international affairs. We take a broader view to understand “how force works” irrespective of the purpose to which the ruler puts it. Readers interested in coercion, compellence, and deterrence can consult Kelly Greenhill and Peter Krause’s anthology Coercion: The Power to Hurt in International Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018). We noted the first sentence in this anthology’s Acknowledgments: “This book grew from a shared realization that the foundational scholarship on coercion that we regularly read, taught, and utilized was no longer adequate to explain much of the behavior we observed in the world around us”; see p. vii.
- 9.
Oxford Living Dictionary, s.v. “Power,” accessed March 24, 2018, at https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/power
- 10.
Thomas Schelling discusses a similar distinction between what he calls the power to hurt and brute force; see Arms and Influence, (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), p. 3.
- 11.
This is a consideration similar to how Nadia Schadlow discusses the consolidation of combat gains into political power. See her War and the Art of Governance, (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2017), p. 3.
- 12.
In Arms and Influence, Schelling describes a diplomacy of violence in which states use force and threats of force against one another. Our work takes this into account but focuses on the idea of force as a tool in negotiation rather than on the process and logic of negotiation.
- 13.
No one knows the author’s real name; we only know he wrote around 200 BC, appropriating the name of a counselor to the first emperor to rule a swath of India stretching the length of the Indus and Ganges rivers. Kautilya’s tome, the Arthasastra (or “Science of Government”) influenced Indian society and governance for well over two thousand years, even though its manuscript was lost around 1200 and only rediscovered in 1904. See Philip H.J. Davies, “The Original Surveillance State: Kautilya’s Arthasastra and Government by Espionage in Classical India,” in Philip H.J. Davies and Kristian C. Gustafson, eds. Intelligence Elsewhere: Spies and Espionage Outside the Anglosphere (Washington: Georgetown University Press, 2013), pp. 50–52.
- 14.
Kautilya, The Arthasastra, trans. L.N. Rangarajan (New Delhi: Penguin, 1992), 9.1.16—see p. 628 in this edition.
- 15.
Carl von Clausewitz, On War, trans. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976), Book III, chapter 11, p. 204 in this edition. See also Book I, ch. 2, p. 95, and Book III, ch. 14, p. 213. Emphasis in original.
- 16.
Quoted in Ian T. Brown, A New Conception of War: John Boyd, the US Marines, and Maneuver Warfare (Quantico, VA: Marine Corps University Press, 2018), p. 104; accessed January 23, 2019, at https://www.usmcu.edu/Portals/218/ANewConceptionOfWar.pdf?ver=2018-11-08-094859-167. Clausewitz would seem to agree, explaining that the defender has lost the battle when “the attacking force has lost little if any of its cohesion and effectiveness…while the defender has become more or less disorganized.” See On War, Book IV, ch. 7, p. 241.
- 17.
There is a way in which the doctrine or “technology” of military cooperation can also influence the military success of a nation. In this book we focus more broadly on the concept of cooperation within and without the military. For those who want more detail on how doctrine might influence success; see Stephen Biddle, Military Power (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004).
- 18.
See, for instance, Simin Hall and William McQuay, “Review of Trust Research,” Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting (2007).
- 19.
Charles S. Carver and Michael E. Scheier in discussing information, cybernetics, and control, note that “information” is intuitive yet fuzzy, and attempt to define it as a concept that “revolves around questions of entropy”; Attention and Self-Regulation: A Control-Theory Approach to Human Behavior (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1981), p. 12. For more on information, entropy, and trust, see Hall and McQuay, “Review of Trust Research,” pp. 22–24; and Jenna Bednar, Yan Chen, Tracy Xiao Liu, and Scott Page, “Behavioral spillovers and cognitive load in multiple games: An experimental study,” Games and Economic Behavior 74 (2012), pp. 12–13.
- 20.
Clausewitz, On War, Book I, ch. 2, p. 95; see also Book I, ch. 3, p. 108.
- 21.
Note the difference between comprehension and related words. Understanding is a near synonym; it is the ability to comprehend, which makes it more than an accumulation of facts. Yet understanding also implies a degree of empathy that would often seem alien to warfare and internal security. In this context, comprehension better suggests the ability to foreknow one’s adversaries’ intentions or plans, rather than simply their location, name, or equipment (the definition of comprehension comes from Merriam Webster online; accessed March 8, 2019, at https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/comprehension).
- 22.
Martin Van Creveld, Technology and War: From 2000 B.C. to the Present (New York: Free Press, 1991 [1989]), p. 316.
- 23.
For the notion of “doorstep” open-access states, see North et al., Violence and Social Orders, pp. 192 and 205.
- 24.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust: Human Nature and the Reconstitution of Social Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), pp. 3–4.
- 25.
Lawrence Freedman, The Future of War: A History (New York: PublicAffairs, 2017), pp. xxi, 237.
- 26.
Peter W. Singer and Emerson T. Booking, LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2018), p. 22.
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Warner, M., Childress, J. (2020). Introduction: Tools for Sovereignty—Power and Force. In: The Use of Force for State Power. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45410-4_1
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