Lost in Translation: Clausewitz, Disinformation, and the Decline of the West’s Will
By Jack Burnham, Queen’s University
The greatest threat to the West will not be the deployment of novel weapons on the battlefield but rather a prescient warning coming to fruition during an era of renewed strategic competition between great powers. Instead of overcoming the West’s military superiority directly, its adversaries, namely Russia, have diligently attempted to undermine Western society through targeted disinformation campaigns designed to amplify public distrust in government and societal polarization. This Contact Report will borrow from Carl von Clausewitz’s understanding of war to argue that these campaigns, made effective by their design and the West’s weaknesses, demonstrate the broader danger of strategic competition by degrading the West’s ability to launch and sustain military campaigns.
The role of will in a belligerent’s capacity to wage war emerges from interpreting Clausewitz’s understanding of the construct of war. For Clausewitz, war is a clash of wills in that the belligerents seek to impose their desires upon one another, stating that the objective is to render one’s opponent “incapable of further resistance”. Clausewitz further refines the importance of will in his discussion of a state’s military power, arguing that it is the product of “two inseparable factors”, those being its means and its will. Writing primarily about the war in Afghanistan, Emile Simpson echoes these comments in noting that war’s outcome is decided through the acceptance of defeat by the enemy’s strategic audiences, a process inherently tied to their will to continue fighting. As such, both Clausewitz and Simpson recognize the importance of an actor’s will in determining the outcome of hostilities, a compelling lesson in an era of great power competition and adversarial information campaigns targeting the West.
The era of great power competition between the West and its adversaries has combined with novel forms of communication to heighten the effectiveness of information campaigns in degrading a belligerent’s will. As documented by Maren Leed, an academic at Georgetown University, these campaigns fall into the “gray zone” between peace and armed conflict and are designed to disrupt Western democracies through the spread of disinformation that corrupts public debate and the public’s trust in their government. Elisabeth Braw, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, notes that propaganda has always been a tool to weaken the will of one’s adversaries. However, technological advances such as the open Internet has allowed for effective Russian interference into the West with Braw citing both the 2016 US presidential contest and fear-mongering messages posted on government websites in Ukraine by suspected Russian hackers in January as Russian soldiers were massing along the border. Further, in an age defined by Edward Luttwak’s concept of post-heroic war, which is marked by the significant unwillingness of post-industrial societies to engage in conflict due to the potential for casualties, this approach avoids the costs that may result from a protracted military campaign while continuing to degrade an adversary’s will to fight through internal disruption.
However, the use of “gray zone” tactics by the West’s adversaries have also become more effective due to the West’s changing relationship to conflict. As Andrew Bacevich, Edward Luttwak, and Maria Ryan argue, war has become highly professionalized and deeply reliant on ever-advancing systems of battlefield technology designed to specialize in an ever-widening array of spectrums and modes of warfare. Luttwak notes that while the Napoleonic Wars that captivated Clausewitz were vast, ideologically driven campaigns, these have become relics of the past. This transformation of the character of war, combined with a deeply divided public cited by Braw, has led to a popular understanding of conflict as a phenomenon removed from everyday life. This belief is insidious as it both offers a convenient cover for the personalized information warfare enabled by social media while discouraging the collective action needed to manage grey zone incursions that ultimately damage the West’s ability to wage war. The West has effectively left itself open to its own form of internal decay, rooted in a corrosive narrative that war no longer requires much effort from the public and has little tangible bearing on the lives of those not in the profession of arms.
The combination of these trends demonstrates the danger to the West’s ability to effectively fight the wars of the future. The degradation of the will to fight, combined with an international system made more unpredictable by strategic competition, may transform a gray-zone incursion into a kill-zone as both actors’ perceptions become dangerously separated from reality. The threat posed by strategic competition and information campaigns is not fictional as Margaret MacMillan and Ja Chong and Todd Hall note in their discussion of the First World War and F.G. Hoffman writes about the seventh revolution of warfare and autonomous systems. The description of polarized societies, information environments poisoned by adversaries, and a world order in transition is just as applicable to August of 1914 as it will be to the wars of the near future. Moreover, each author highlights another unsettling parallel between both historical moments as political leaders expressed complacency regarding their ability to prevail in a potential crisis, even as the introduction of new technology rendered their assumptions irrelevant. It is this satisfaction with the status quo, rooted in the erroneous belief that strategic competition will not fundamentally degrade the West’s military supremacy, that may prove similarly disastrous.
The degradation of the West’s will to fight through information campaigns will continue so long as it remains effective and inexpensive for its adversaries. Gray zone incursions, including targeted propaganda, have always been a tactic even in times of relative peace. Similarly, the inherently open, often fractious democratic process will likely remain a prime target for those that would benefit most from its disappearance, namely autocracies weakened by the power of its example. The challenge remains preventing these campaigns, a core aspect of the renewed era of strategic competition, from damaging the West’s will to engage in the war of the future.
Jack Burnham will be pursuing his graduate degree at the Max Bell School of Public Policy at McGill University this fall. Having recently majored in Political Studies at Queen’s University, Jack is interested in disinformation and great power competition.
