Rhizomic Maneuver

Notes from a lecture by Shimon Naveh, presented sometime previous to 2013

*Note: Naveh speaks and writes very much in the style of the French postmodernists he often alludes to — these academics tend to write, as it has been described, not to convey clear ideas or information but to display qualities expected in elite well-educated people, with many unexplained allusions, and gaps for the educated to fill in by themselves. Likewise, to really grasp what Naveh is talking about one has to be fairly familiar with postmodernism and in particular the writings of Deleuze and Guattari, references to whom are littered throughout this discussion. As Naveh himself has stated, “…my writing is not intended for ordinary mortals.” In fairness, Naveh’s ideas are admittedly not a complete theory, so perhaps that certainly contributes to why the discussion gets increasingly esoteric as it progresses through each of its three sections.

Video of presentation is embedded at the end. I have inserted links to map out some references or offer possible interpretations for some ideas — these are my additions, not Naveh’s.

Naveh’s premise: We are in a transition phase from an industrial paradigm of maneuver to something yet unclear, but emerging in front of us.

The presentation is broken up into three parts:
- Part I: a critical exposition of the traditional paradigm.
- Part II: discussion of the generators of change.
- Part III: discussion of ideas that portray the new emerging paradigm of maneuver.

I. The Prevailing Paradigm

Military institutions for past 200 years have ignored the nature of warfare, namely that,

“The defining characteristic of warfare is precisely the inevitable distance that separates the reality of it from its model. In short, to think about warfare is to think about the extent to which it is bound to betray the ideal concept of it.”
-Francois Jullien

This ignorance is tragic because the prevailing paradigm, conceptualized around first 3rd of 19th century and idealized since, hasn’t worked one time yet still military institutions adhere to it and are unready to give it up.

This paradigm, conceptualized by Clausewitz, argues that war is initiated by politicians who are unsatisfied with reality. These politicians understand reality and can define clearly and articulately their ideas. They assign a goal, a mission, an endstate to the military. The military, whose tradition is that of engineers, plan and execute the operation. The concept of maneuver very much relates to this phase of execution which follows the planning session. When the execution — which is structured as beginning with invasion of rival territory, then the destruction of the military, then the capture of the capital, and the introduction of conditions of advantage to the initiators of the war — ends, the military hands the situation over to the politicians who are supposed to exploit the fruits of victory.

This model has never worked. The closest example is 1870, but even there upon the invasion of France after the initial fiascoes in Alsace-Lorraine and the fall of Sedan, as the German Army marched toward Paris, a war machine emerged. Despite having never worked, militaries still pursue this model.

Periods of Industrial Maneuver — are characterized by a specific strategy of maneuver:

1. Strategy of a Single Point — Napoleon and Moltke.
2. Strategy of Colliding Massed Fronts — Schlieffen and Gamelin.
3. Strategic Manipulation of Mechanization — Guderian, Rommel, Patton, and Ariel Sharon.
4. Strategic Domination by Air-Mechanization — Tukhachevsky (theoretical creator), Schwarzkopf & Franks (practitioners).

Main Characteristics of the Industrial Maneuver Paradigm:

1. Discourse Banalization — nothing new in 200 years of discourse (rationalization of problems/emergences done through exploration of similarities; in regulation it was pursued through repetition).
2. Strategic Idealism — the idea that by looking back at one’s experience one can define an ideal model, translate this into a form, and then idealize and pursue this form in almost every case; emphasis on strategies of action/force/power; military institutions used the same concepts for defining goals; dominating general pattern is victory is achieved through destruction an decision.
3. Newtonian Ecology — speed is idealized, mass is main instrument that feeds the maneuver business; speed and mass are main contributors to efficacy; all about symmetry — nation-state vs nation-state; one orients himself by looking at concepts of borders, real-estate, and presence; time is measured in tactical units; maneuver space is defined in terms of boxes.
4. Geometric Simplification — militaries use geometry in simplistic terms; fascinated by potential of manipulating geometry, as the whole idea of maneuver is about order and control and Euclidean geometry provides the basis for doing this resulting in line vs line, column vs line, and the idealization of Flügelschlacht (grand wing maneuver) or Kesselschlacht (‘cauldron battle’ — encirclement) or the fascination with Umfassung (envelopment) and getting to rivals flank (makes sense on tactical level, but unrealistic at theater level).
5. Operational Binary — dichotomy between war and peace; the unending debate between absolute and real world; the tension between determinism which stems from a hegemonic approach to the use of the military apparatus and the inability to deal with the random aspects of warfare (reibung — friction).
6. Autocratic Command — command is hierarchical, tree-like; all about decision-making, the commander’s estimate, the commander’s intent, etc.
7. Technocratic Direction — manifested in the planning process which has been idealized by the establishment of huge staffs and huge schools that are teaching staffs, etc.
8. Engineer Organization — the business of engineers, only engineers can understand war, only engineers can plan war, only engineers can execute war in a very controlled manner.

The Dissonant Planning Process of Execution Project — the failures, impediments and contradictions embodied in the way militaries plan the business of maneuver:

1. Cultural Inhibition — perceiving the rival as mirror image of the political self.
2. Strategic Fabrication — deterministically sets the rival in a defensive posture (see WWI plans by both sides which assumed rival would be on the defensive and no competitors could get out of this trap, and simply injected more and more energy into the system).
3. Operational Forging — assuming the form and logic of the rival’s defensive, another way of inhibition (assuming rival plans and thinks as you do).
4. Geometric Manipulation — transgressing offensive vector into rival’s territory.
5. Spatial Machination — assuming if one seizes rival’s territory that one will create the conditions to develop the maneuver — seizure of territory is not always about political reasons. See invasion of Belgium in WWII, which was political fiasco, but was necessary to allow for the maneuver.
6. Tactical Self-Fascination — destruction of the rival’s army in an integral battle of annihilation.
7. Strategic Reprisal (self-rewarding) — one is always aiming at the seizure of the rival’s state apparatus source of power legitimacy / capital.

Stages of Maneuver over past 200 years:

Forms of maneuver change but the logic remains the same — imposing one’s logic on the competitor, dichotomization of learning breaking the continuum between theory and practice; the fascination of geometry and the idealization of action.

1. Top Left — simple formula that precedes era of Napoleon.
2. Top Middle — distributed maneuver (Napoleon & Moltke).
3. Top Right — simultaneous movement of massed fronts in a collision pattern (Schlieffen).
4. Bottom Left — German concept of Kesselschlacht.
5. Bottom Middle — Russian concept of Deep Operations (Tukhachevski).
6. Bottom Right —AirLand Battle; attempt to go beyond War in Iraq.

II . What Has Changed

Emergent Political Cosmology

• Paradigm of nation-state is under attack, not only from external agents (Bin Laden and others) but is criticized from the inside.
• Competition between nation-states is becoming less relevant.
• World becoming global zone of insecurity so there is a growing need for forces-in-being.
• Cultural difference and not similarity is becoming an engine for political interaction.
• We see more and more hybridization of state institutes and subversive entities, not only on the negative side but on the positive as well.
• Growing tension between sedentary structures and nomad entities.

Emergent Strategic Ecology

• Aggravation of competition between technological sophistication and a fundamentalist approach to warfare.
• a decline in hegemonic strategic paradigms and a growing need for tailor-made strategic suits. There’s no one idea that can suit all cases, all states, all entities. It is almost an imperative that each entity must develop its own paradigm.
• Disparity between existing military organization and emerging challenges. Institutional armies are not deliberately but in many aspects becoming less relevant regarding their basic mandate — that of protecting the citizens and community of the state.
• Discourse between politicians and soldiers becoming more complex.
• War is globalized and warfare is becoming infinite.
• Proliferation of mass-destruction capability.
• Relativization of strategic definitions — it’s not about destruction and decision anymore, one has to be careful in defining the logic of the problem that he is about to approach.
• The urbanization of warfare.

Emergent Ontology of Warfare

• Most military institutions have become incapable of producing a written theory that will be relevant to the use of practitioners. Most institutions suffer from a total lack of theory. This explains lack of criticism when militaries approach contextual emerging problems. Doctrinal patterns in common use are totally irrelevant. Military bureaucracies cannot keep up with the tempo of change that is being experienced by armies, soldiers, etc.
• We are not talking about the idea of empty battlefields, arenas where duels can be fought between two armies, like deserts or jungles. The battlespace or operational space is becoming heterogeneous and we see hybridization of civilian and military elements, subversive and institutional elements, etc.
• The ambiguity of political direction.
• Indefinite spaces.
• Rivals that state militaries are fighting are disguising their form from the militaries. Most military institutions haven't been identifying the cognitive problem here — how you rationalize a rival that you cannot see — and identifying modes of thought and learning that will enable them to overcome it.

Emergent Operational Epistemology

• How to synthesize tactical time, operational duration and strategic time — how to develop concepts of time that can serve efficiently in various levels of abstraction and action and in different contexts.
• the dialectics of logic and form — namely how to deal with morpho-genetic operations, or operations whose form and logic are emerging as the operation takes place.
• understanding the concept of difference — the value of a different way of thinking or planning or approaching operations (operational design) — as a set of tools or an approach that enables one to deal with martial ecologies.
• The relevance of theory.
• How to spatialize logic.
• How to educate soldiers who are heretics.

III. The Emergent Paradigm

Theoretical exposition that explains maneuver differently in five ways:

1. Maneuver as a sphere of logic — through which one synthesizes complex emergences within a self-regulating ecology.
2. Maneuver as a space of praxis — in which operational architect is deconstructing an initial framework or model that he has built up with a construct in being, an understanding that he is developing in the course of the operation.
3. Maneuver as a medium of learning operationalization.
4. Maneuver as a medium of spatializing strategic logic.
5. Maneuver as a self-creating, an auto-poetic system that perpetuates strategic potential.

Strategic Rationale of New Type of Maneuver:

1. It is not about action, it is about transformation.
2. It is not about decision, it is about pursing potential, instigating and exploiting potential.
3. The basis is not deterministic ends, or the engineer-like discourse of ‘means and ends’, but is a logic that evolves through the course of the operation, a very skeptical and heretical approach.
4. It is not about destruction (vernichtung) it is about de-structuring.
5. It is not about conquest but space aversion.
6. It is not about imposing plans on reality but about integrating into the ecology.
7. It regards hybrid realities and not banality; breaks away from banal differentiation between war and peace; we will live in a perpetual gray ecology, in which peace and war are synthesized or integrated.
8. The basis is that reality flows all the time (Heraclitus approach); we are struggling to orient ourselves within this flowing and changing reality so the traditional definitions of start and termination are a bit irrelevant.

The Learning System (the Operational Episemology)

• Knowing through reflective operation and not through deliberate planning. Knowledge is incomplete yet everything in the operation is certain — this is deconstructing the Clausewitzian idea of reibung (friction), which was in a way a safety valve that enabled him to break away from the contradiction that he was unable to solve or deal with. Everything is certain because you decide what you will do and not do, refraining from action is still a kind of action.
• Systemic differentiation between the operation and tactical maneuver. This is something most western cultures have been suffering from the idealization of tactics because they have all been addicts of action. At the end of the day when someone wants to do something in the physical world they have to act, but this is not the type of maneuver being discussed. This action doesn’t necessarily involve killing but can imply different modes of injecting energy: economical, human, etc. This differentiation is crucial to the introduction of a new epistemology because the the tragedy of most military institutions is that the generals, who are not always dumb and stupid though in many cases they are, have spent the best years of their intellectual abilities serving in the environment of tactics and yet nobody has paid attention to their education for their functioning in a different level, confronting different cognitive, political and cultural challenges, etc.
• Frame of contextual knowledge are only references for contextualized learning. Maneuver generates tension that propels deconstruction — this ties back to Jullien’s idea. The whole idea is how to educate a heretic — a guy who develops an idea, a concept and then while acting he betrays the concept because reality changes by the mere operationalization of his means, of his action [If there is a move obvious description of Boyd’s ideas, I haven’t seen it].
• Operational maneuver is a systemic learning experiment.
• Tactical doing provides tools of inquiry for maneuver architects. For a tactician, someone supposed to do something in the physical environment, the action is everything. For the architect of the operation action is a tool for asking question, for observation, for research, for inquiry. The problem is that most generals are addicts of action in the tactical or physical sense and they are not aware of the difference in function once they move into a different position.
• Maneuver is auto-poetic system not an imposed universal model.
• Design planning direction is a learning continuum.
• Morpho-genetic maneuver.
• Logic evolved with formal folding.
• The purpose of maneuver is the disclosure of the constellation’s logic. The whole idea is not to achieve a deterministic endstate, but to understand the logic of the problem, by using forces and other means as tools of inquiry.
• Design as a methodology for rationalizing complexity.

Command

• Principle challenge of operational command is to explain the logic . Command in this type of maneuver is a discursive networking.
• Command system exposes the logic of strategy in time in three dimensions: time of action, time of operational learning, and time of potential exploitation, and all three of these are synthesized simultaneously.
• Command architecture embodies the logic of the operational learning system. The command structure is a self-regulating system. There is no hierarchy. Command positions are related to learning functions and they are circumstantial.
• Command is an auto-poetic system that keeps evolving through maneuver operationalization.
• Operational commanders as practicing architects. There is basic common ground in the cognitive sense in the way architects approach problems of complexity and the way militaries do.

Spatial System

• Tactical maneuver is generic existing forms of action; operational maneuver is a singular pattern, which is basically a contextual mental construct.
• Form is a reference for rationalization.
• The idea is to force the rival or other agents operating within the environment to reveal their form while keeping others from discovering one’s own. This is very different from Western tradition of warfare which has a ritual dimension in it — it is about presence, it has some spectacle to it that the general very much likes to direct and handle, it has some ceremonial elements. This idea is different, grayish, unseen.
• Operation through disappearance.
• Dialectics between the smooth and the striated.
• Definition of space through movement perpetuation — no borders, no fronts, no rears. The idea of exterior vs interior lines is all Jominian trash.
• Campaign as a protracted learning experience evolving through shifts between operating working frames.
• No beginning, no end.

Organization

• Martial organization without presence. The organization evolves or transforms through the operation.
• Common hybridization — the military is becoming more civilian and civilian societies are becoming more militarized. Will see the transformation of military into a more civilian kind of entity.
• The special forces will be conventionalized and the conventional force will be specialized.
• The form and logic of soldiering is going to change. We are breaking away from idea of mass conscription. Military will become much more professional organization in which people will need to serve most of their lives.
• An army without soldiers — a different kind of element will provide the individual component of the system. It will be an organ without a body and soldiers without uniforms.