Introduction
1
‘The common root of all forms of the human ability for destruction is indeed the self-deification of man, the ‘God complex’, as it was called. The position of the dethroned God was not taken by the ‘enlightened man’ but by the pompous man-god’ 2 . – Speech of the Ecumenical Patriarch, Mr. Bartholomew, at the Technological Educational Institute of Kalamata at the inauguration of a conference on the Environment and sustainable development, on 1 February 2010.
Associating religion with the art and science of war can be seen as irrational or even impious. However, the evolution of civilisation follows a parallel path with the evolution of religions in the history of mankind. Religion is a basic factor for the development and creation of the civilisation of each era and any attempt to study the military thought outside the wider cultural framework giving birth to it and shaping it is rather imperfect and misleading 3 .
While, thus, the impact of the individual scientific paradigms, in the meaning given to the term by Thomas Khun, on the development of the notions on the best strategic theory throughout the centuries has been sufficiently studied 4 , the impact of cultural paradigms deriving from the influence of religion has not been widely examined to date.
As professor John Gray argues, the decline of Christianity in the West and the rise of Humanism essentially replaced God in the people’s collective conscience with the belief in man’s capabilities. Thus was created the world-view of man-god, as described by Fyodor Dostoyevsky in his book ‘Demons’. In simple words, man stole God’s competences and capabilities and deified himself. As John Gray characteristically argues, ‘humanism is not a science but religion’ 5 . The same conclusion is drawn by religion scholar, Oxford professor, Karen Armstrong, who argues in her famous book ‘A History of God’ that ‘humanism is itself a religion without God’ 6 .
Very briefly, we could say that human beings, since the Age of Enlightenment, have not seen themselves as yet one more primate with higher intelligence than the rest but as a completely separate being with no relation to their biological relatives. In a way, God’s exile from human affairs has, instead of downgrading the perception of man to the level of an intelligent animal, ‘upgraded’ it to the level of a god. Man saw himself not as a creation of God but rather as God himself or at any rate as a being that can have absolute control of its destiny 7 .
This existential condition was inevitably reflected at the level of military strategy. From the moment man treated himself as a god, he believed that he could achieve perfection. He believed that this can also be applied to the art of war. He tried, that is, to create the perfect strategic theory, the perfect model of war, the perfect warfare.
According to the author’s view, this course reached its peak in the ‘90s with the model of infocentric warfare, which was based on omnipotent centralised C4ISR networks. The aim of infocentric war models, which were developed in the wider framework of the phenomenon called Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA), was to lift the fog of war, to obtain an absolutely clear sense of what is going on in the battlefield and allow the highest levels of command to control the depth and width of their forces in real time and to supervise the warfare and be able to attack targets anywhere using precision guided munitions (PGMs) 8 . In a sense, these models aspired to create commanders – gods, offering them the possibility to be omniscient, omnipresent and omnipotent. The worldview of man-god penetrated the field of the art of war and was transformed into the chimerical dream of commander-god. The result was that these models proved dysfunctional exactly due to their centralisation and the tendency to strengthen the micromanagement of commanders, suppressing the initiative of low ranking leaders and, therefore, their ability to adapt to the fluid reality of the battle. There was the threat that the pace of operations would slow down instead of accelerating, while the ability to adapt to the unsure nature of war operations decreased instead of increasing. The volume of information caused inflexibility and in the end produced a denser fog of war. Furthermore, the inflexible structure, on the top of which there was the commander-god, also created new ‘Achilles’ heels’ that could be exploited by the enemy by developing ‘asymmetric’ abilities. Therefore, the complexity of warfare increased instead of decreasing, resulting in a wider vagueness regarding the effectiveness of the various weapon systems, technologies and tactical and operational perceptions, with greater geopolitical consequences whose investigation cannot be part of the restricted scope of this text.
Western intellectualism and strategic thought
2
This impact of religion on the chimerical attempt to create the perfect combat model and the perfect commander in the battlefield may be more deeply rooted than the transfer of God’s competences to man, which occurred during the decline of religion in the West and the rise of Humanism. The basic causes for this phenomenon may be traced to the intellectual spirit that constituted the core of Western Christianity and the humanistic model that prevailed in the West 9 . Absolute intellectualism can be roughly described as belief in the unlimited capabilities of the human intellect 10 . In the West, the human mind was considered the unique instrument of proof (or not-proof) of the existence of God and the only proper tool to solve theological issues and determine the relationship of man with God 11 . The result was to deify mental functions and abilities and surround them with essentially supernatural capabilities. It was believed that from the moment the human mind had, even potentially, the power to prove the existence (or non-existence) of God and define His nature, it could do everything. It could create perfect models and achieve perfect solutions for everything 12 .
Furthermore, if we consider that everything is a matter of understanding, then, we practically accept that there is a world waiting to be understood. In the context of a dialectical relationship, a perfect mind would not have any meaning if a perfect world did not exist. If mental powers are able to interpret the nature of God, surely it is impossible for them not to be able to interpret the material world. It would be a blasphemy and it would be irrational 13 . Further, if the human mind can fully understand the world, it can of course understand the individual phenomena inside this world 14 . One of these phenomena is war and the way it is conducted. And since you can understand something, you can control it.
This gave rise to the belief in the omnipotence of science as an applied function of the omnipotent human mind that could lead to the comprehension and, then, to the subjugation and control of the world and the phenomena occurring in it. The belief in the scientific approach of war and the expectation of creating perfect warfare models based on scientific principles was born as a result of this rationale.
In other words, the belief in the absolute and unlimited capabilities of the human mind was introduced into the world of science and, then, of military strategy, leading to the pursuit of various chimerical targets, such as the perfect warfare model, the perfect military strategy and the perfect command model in war. The last of these reached its ultimate limit with the vision of the super-commander who would be the core of an omnipotent C4ISR network.
To summarise, we may state that the result of the absolute belief in the ability of the human mind to discourse with God was arrogance and so was the metaphysical-type belief in the capabilities of science and technology, which in war affairs reached its peak with the model of commander-god 15 .
Perhaps it is not accidental that the eminently atheistic military power in the world, the Soviet Union, promoted an extremely centralised command model. When the unofficially deified Stalin was also the highest leader of the armed forces of the country, it was natural and logical to adopt a corresponding command form. The persecution of the Soviet generals in the ‘30s could perhaps be examined in the light of this logic. A man-god, who is also a military commander, cannot tolerate the existence of intermediary stages that have a mind of their own and can give orders and draw principles of strategy. This would be a blasphemy 16 .
On the other hand, perhaps we should examine the emphasis that the Russians and the Soviets placed on the creation of the operational art of warfare, as an interim level between strategy and tactics, to be partly an indirect result of the Orthodox religious culture. As we will see below, the Orthodox paradigm rejects intellectualism and consequently is a factor that limits the chances of generating centralised command models 17 .
The apocalyptic quest for the ‘perfect victory’
3
When the model of intellectual Christianity and the stealing of Gods’ competences by man were introduced in the art and science of war, apart from the belief in the unlimited capabilities of the human mind, these are perhaps partially responsible for other theories on war which attributed metaphysical-type capabilities to man.
For example, ideas such as the ones in French military thought at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century greatly emphasising the will for victory and, in general, the morale factor, very simply believing that if there is will in the army, then this can conquer material forces, may not be fully explained unless they are incorporated in this framework. These ideas comprise one of the factors that led the French army to the ceremonial massacres of the irrational attacks against the machine guns and barbed-wire fences of the Western Front in World War I 18 .
The encroachment of the illusion of man-god to war strategy can perhaps explain the perseverance in the chimera of the ‘decisive battle’ that beset the people of the ‘Age of Reason’. Indeed, military theoreticians at that time up to War World I (in reality, the temptation of the ‘decisive battle’ continues to exist even today) had proclaimed the decisive battle as the Holy Grail of all war acts. We are tempted to think that, even partially, this can result from the belief of man in his omnipotence, which derives from the imaginary theosis of the man himself when he decided to steal the divine powers from the ‘dead’ God of the old religion. This deified man believed that he could achieve the perfect battle, the absolute battle, the ‘decisive battle’: the one that could bring unquestionable, clear and fixed results without objections, exactly as would a divine intervention. This ‘decisive battle’ is essentially the fantasy of man that—with a revealing action—could achieve the fixed and uninfluenced perfection, namely the ‘perfect victory’.
Perhaps the most typical incarnation of the man-god commander is Napoleon. Thus, for Napoleon the quest for the ‘decisive battle’ became his nemesis. 19
Can the decentralised battle models flourish in a war culture dominated by the man-god model?
4
The man-god command model aims in effect at collecting competences at the top of the pyramid, the highest commander, who is treated like a god. Any decentralisation attempt in this framework takes on the character of a crime against the holy, regardless of whether this is understood or not. As a consequence, attempts promoting decentralising command models, such as the continuous American efforts for the promotion of Mission Command methodologies, face many difficulties in their application, exactly because they are opposite to the deeper elements of the culture of the organisation inside which they function 20 .
Even the homeland of Auftragstaktik, the open type of battle, the battle waged at the bottom, in Germany, could not be freed from this trap 21 . On the one hand, there prevailed the open form of command, the emphasis on adaptability and the assumption of initiatives by the lower ranks spread on a monumental scale at the tactical level during World War I. On the other hand, before World War I, an extremely centralised and ‘programmable’ warfare model appeared, leveraging the evolutions of technology at that time. This tendency was expressed by the dominant personality of Schliefen and found its absolute expression with the notorious Schliefen plan, the purpose of which was to achieve absolute and unquestionable victory against France, in a climactic ‘decisive’ battle. Only during the last phases of the war did Germany rediscover the virtues of Auftragstaktik, but it was too late by then to transform their initial impressive tactical successes to victory at the operational level 22 .
In conclusion, the example of man-god at the battlefield leads to the quest of the utopia of the perfect commander, the omnipotent commander; and as each level of command is subordinate to another, the quest of this utopia is practically centralised and leads the lower levels to a passive subordination to the higher ones, suppressing, thus, proposals for a decentralised command, with emphasis on improvisation, assumption of initiatives, flexibility and adaptability. In the past, this trend was checked by a series of factors, with the prevailing one being the pragmatist–individualistic spirit of the West and the weaknesses of the means of the period offering the highest echelons the possibility to control everything below them; today, however, technology gives the hollow promise that it can secure a strong grid of sensors and communication links, combined with a wide range of PGMs that shall offer the highest commander the sense of omnipresence, omniscience and omnipotence.
The worldview of man-god urges the whole military thought of the West to try to create ‘ideal commanders’ at the highest levels and, specifically, at the operational and strategic ones. There is a tendency to wage warfare from the top, where the highest commanders take the right decisions and the lower ranks win – provided, of course, they properly implement the orders of their superiors. However, this leads to centralisation and suppression of the initiative of the lower echelons. This logic in practice restricts the possibility of flexibility and adaptation to the ‘friction’ and the ‘fog of war’, according to the famous terms of Clausewitz which describe the fluid reality of the battle. The effective philosophy of adaptation and flexibility takes it for granted that one cannot predict what will happen in advance and one should all the time adapt; in other words, one must oneself be fluidic. To achieve this, one should probably invest on a command model from the bottom, where the events at a tactical level would be the primary factor of taking decisions, with the highest echelons continuously trying to adapt to the fluid reality on the battlefield instead of trying to impose what should be done at a tactical level. However, for this to be achieved, the highest echelons should be characterised by great ‘humility’, and also the tendency for supremacy should be radically suppressed. The highest echelons should be treated rather as servants of the lowest ones and managers of the results that the lower echelons achieve and not the opposite. Therefore, planners of warfare models should remember that the basic virtue of Christianity is humility and that this is the base for the development of high capabilities of flexibility, adaptation and harmonisation with the chaoplexic 23 and fluid nature of the warfare.
The same can be done by anyone insisting that he is an atheist. In this case, he should relieve his thoughts and the way he deals with life from the ‘infections’ imposed by the absorption of the competences of God by man and would reach the same conclusions which derive from the ascertainment that perfection is not a characteristic of this world. Therefore, to escape from this trap, we need a new cultural paradigm that would give emphasis on adaptation and flexibility. This paradigm, according to the author’s opinion, can be offered by the Orthodox Spiritual Tradition.
The Orthodox Christian paradigm and humility as basic military virtues
5
‘We draw near to God by means of a way of life, not by means of a way of thinking’.
Yannaras, Christos 24
Contrary to Western Protestants, Orthodox Christians do not believe in the omnipotence of the human mind. On the contrary, they think that the human intellect is by nature an imperfect organ with finite abilities which not only cannot give answers to everything but can lead to erroneous and dangerous conclusions if assigned duties for which it is not made. The intellect is not just an imperfect tool to approach the Divine. It is the wrong tool. God, His nature and manifestations, are outside the limits of the human mind 25 . The view has been expressed that the ostensibly peculiar doctrine of the triadic nature of God received its final form as a result of the efforts of the Greek theologians who remained in history as the Cappadocians (Basil, Bishop of Caesarea, Gregory, Bishop of Nyssa and Gregory of Nazianzus), as part of the effort to make it clear that God and His manifestations in the human world is a reality outside the limits of reason and, therefore, the human mind is not the proper tool to be used to approach Him 26 . In the assumed omnipotence of the mind and intellect as tools, Orthodox Christianity puts forward direct knowledge, direct contact from the continuous exercise in esoteric techniques and prayer 27 .
There is no perfect world waiting to be discovered by the human mind 28 . Perfection is the privilege of God. Our world is by nature imperfect and, therefore, there is no perfect model to deal with the various events of this world, such as war. Neither can the human intellect offer the appropriate tools for the best way to achieve victory in war. Moreover, there is no fixed way of how best to conduct war. The Orthodox thought puts humility in the place of absoluteness. Humility leads to flexibility, adaptation, improvisation, continuous change, self-questioning and the effort to harmonise with the events in the battlefield, which has been proven to be a reliable formula for victory in the battlefield since the dawn of human wars to the second decade of the 21st century 29 .
The development of military art and science and cultural paradigms outside the West
6
One might think that matters such as possible impacts deriving from the anthropological model of man-god on military thought, command in battle and, in general, the art of war—even if we were to accept that they exist—are not of particular importance or that, in any case, we cannot do many things about them. If the West, however, continues to be trapped in this paradigm, then an ‘Achilles’ heel’ may emerge in the Western art of war. It is not that, in this way, the attempt for decentralised models of battle is undermined but the opportunity may be given to emerging war cultures, such as the ones of China, Iran and other countries, to escape Western influence and develop their own philosophies about war that could overthrow the advantage enjoyed by the West with the Western way of war 30 . These countries and cultures are less influenced by the Western worldview and, therefore, they can, with greater ease, get rid of the centralised mentality and the subjection of the warfare to an omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent commander. Therefore, they can make a step to combine decentralised, chaoplexic battle models with new technologies of weapon systems, acquiring a potential strategic advantage compared to Western forces. We should remember that it is not primarily advanced weapons that win battles but the way one functions at the time of war, and this way is directly associated with one’s culture. The West was considered to have achieved top war results owing largely not to its advanced technology but to its decentralised operation derived from the individualistic culture and the consequent imposition of war models emphasising the assumption of initiatives, the adaptation to the events on the battlefield and the achievement of a faster pace of operations than the opponents, which were basically more centralised. There is the risk, therefore, for the model of man-god, interconnected with the possibilities provided by the new technologies, to deprive Western armies of such virtues, while, on the contrary, other armies, such as China’s, may have the opportunity to escape from their centralised logic and invest in decentralised models, achieving, thus, a more effective type of war than the West and reversing a course of centuries. The large size of the Chinese army, particularly if combined with new technologies, may impose the use of decentralised, chaoplexic command models as, exactly due to this size, the Chinese army cannot be part of a centralised command model if it wishes to be effective in a modern environment where the pace of the operations may be extremely fast. Furthermore, decentralised, chaos-woven command models seem to derive directly from the Chinese military thought, i.e. the one of the thousand grains of sand that, as it seems, is applied to cyber warfare, but can possibly penetrate into the strategy of conventional Chinese armed forces 31 .
Finally, Iran seems to have also invested on decentralised models of war operation, such as the notorious idea of Mosaic Warfare, adopted by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC). This fact may offer significant advantages to the Iranian armed forces against their Western opponents in the future, in particular if the latter persist on monolithic centralised models. In general, decentralised war models that place emphasis on swarming methodologies are making their appearance in more and more countries outside the West and may play a significant role in the war affairs of the forthcoming decades 32 .
Finally, the appearance (or re-appearance) of more complex war methodologies, such as the one of Hybrid Warfare, makes the effort of fighting all tendencies of centralisation and the subsequent creation of monolithic structure and operational function of the Western armies more imperative 33 .
Konstantinos Grivas is Associate Professor of Geopolitics and Modern Weapon Technologies at the Hellenic Military Academy. He also teaches Geography of Security at the Athens University Department of Turkish and Modern Asian Studies. He lectures at the Hellenic National Defence College for high-ranking Armed Forces officers and at the College of National Security for high-ranking Police and security services officers.