When Winning Isn’t An Option

See The Simons Foundation Canada's Arctic Security Briefing Papers for information on military policies and practices in the Arctic region by Ernie Regehr O.C., Senior Fellow in Arctic Security and Defence at The Simons Foundation Canada.

When Winning Isn't An Option

The apparent public enthusiasm that now supports, or at least tolerates, the Government’s plan to “quadruple”[i] defence spending over the next decade should not preclude Canadians asking why the threat and resort to military force has become the West’s default response to strategic tensions and instability – even as military combat repeatedly fails in its promise to restore security and stability, and while diplomacy and peacebuilding remain chronically underfunded. To be sure, military forces are relevant and necessary for preventing war and maintaining national security and stability – but that requires military operations that buttress diplomacy and peacebuilding, not that deploy instead of or in preference to them.   

From the front in the American Civil War, a historical fiction combatant writes to a friend:

“They say we are winning this war. They say it, and yet that word does not carry the same meaning to me as it once did. This does not feel like winning, even when the cannons fall silent and I stand up with my head ringing in the midst of shattered trees and shattered bodies and can count more of us alive and more of them dead.”[ii]

More than 150 years later, skepticism as to what “winning” can possibly mean in high intensity conventional wars should only have deepened. Even when the right side prevails, as it did in 1865, the staggering costs of war – not to mention the still active suspicions across the Mason-Dixon line – compel us to confront a key question: how have we come to turn so readily away from diplomacy and peacebuilding and towards military prowess in search of reassurance and safety in the face of daunting conflicts and strategic challenges?

The multiple crises of our time – notably climate change, environmental degradation, food insecurity, record numbers of refugees and internally displaced, potential pandemics, and the Damoclean sword of nuclear catastrophe – all are real and growing threats, the fundamental point about them being that none is amenable to a military solution. Not even military threats are amenable to military solutions (witness, Iran, Gaza, Ukraine, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan, and many more). And yet, no matter how scarce public resources are said to be and how worrisome the escalating public debt may be, the one public program tenaciously shielded from budget cuts in most countries of the West, including Canada, is now the military.

Recent history – including the emergence of China as a formidable military-technological-economic power, the tenacity of Russia on the battlefield despite its obvious decline in other domains, and the American record of failure on battlefields it and its partners have dominated – does not offer much comfort in the face of NATO’s obsessive militarism. 

When war reliably fails

Military planners of course have come to insist that while military forces are ultimately mobilized to fight and win wars, their immediate mission is to prevent them. In that sense war is by definition rightly acknowledged to be a failure – when, once again, societies, governments, the international system, and, notably, military preparedness have failed to save the world from the scourge of war. The great American novelist John Steinbeck put it rather more starkly: “All war is a symptom of man’s failure as a thinking animal.”[iii]

When military planners talk prevention, they tend to talk about something quite different, namely deterrence. The central logic underlying nuclear deterrence is mutual destruction – the certainty that regardless of which side launches the first nuclear attack, the result will be the destruction of both. That in turn motivates both to keep the threat of certain nuclear response fresh and credible – to constantly upgrade their arsenals to demonstrate continuing destructive capacity and to send a message of willingness to attack. To our peril, one innovation in obsessive nuclear “modernization” goes beyond deterrence to develop, “useable” nuclear weapons that they hope, in some circumstances, might not trigger a nuclear response. But, of course, once a nuclear attack is launched, of whatever size or location, all bets are off.

Much the same logic guides conventional deterrence – to demonstrate to adversaries that an attack by them would not be successful (deterrence by denial) and that it would trigger counter attacks of such proportions that adversaries should be dissuaded from attacking in the first place. Thus, in times of tension especially, states and alliances feel (and it is ultimately feeling rather than knowledge) the need to continuously upgrade their conventional threats in order to keep them, in their view, credible – the inevitable result being to escalate tensions that descend into arms racing. 

Left out of the deterrence equation are the consequences of deterrence failing. That’s certainly not the question on which nuclear deterrence advocates are inclined to linger, but there is no doubting the answer – immeasurable death and destruction wrought by a nuclear attack on the states directly involved, and unprecedented collateral damage (including nuclear winter and its consequences) visited on the rest of the planet, even though it had no hand or say in the launch of global nuclear catastrophe.

And we don’t have to speculate about the consequences of conventional deterrence failing – it’s a matter of public record. Daily briefings come in the daily news. Reports from Gaza and Ukraine, from the much less frequent reporting from other violent conflicts, and from the testimony of research institutes that monitor global conflicts[iv] - it is all the documentation we need to tell the story of military objectives not achieved and of dire consequences predictably delivered. It takes a soldier, like Dwight Eisenhower, to offer the unadorned assessment (as he did at the Canadian Club in Ottawa, January 10, 1946): “I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.”[v] And yet war endures, while preparations for it intensify.

From Gaza, the daily, if not hourly, reports validate Eisenhower’s anger. Israel’s crude bombardment of a civilian population has converted Gaza into a killing field that history will long remember, while, by Israel’s own admission, the aim to eliminate all Hamas offensive capability remains elusive. This phase of the Israel/Palestine conflict, launched by the murderous attack by Hamas on Israeli civilians October 7, 2023, has inflicted a grim price on the people of Israel and a much costlier price on the people of Palestine/Gaza. The only clear result is confirmation once again of the tragic futility and fundamental inhumanity of war. 

It's important to remind ourselves of just how often we are taught that obvious lesson. The war on Ukraine tells the same essential story. Russia chose war over diplomacy and three-plus years of vicious fighting later it has become unavoidably clear that there will be no winner. In the Sudan war, a horrendous struggle follows the familiar trajectory of escalation to credible charges of the worst of war crimes,[vi] in this case, 150,000 are dead (some estimates range to 400,000) and 12 million displaced. Diplomatic efforts to end it are lackluster and much of the world is indifferent.[vii]

The recent attacks on Iran represent another decisive turn from diplomacy to war. Besides the Israeli and American attacks being in direct violation of the laws of a rules-based order, it was repeatedly warned that while the attacks could certainly disrupt Iran’s nuclear program, the more profound disruption would be to the diplomacy that had worked in the past and was the promise of the future. When diplomacy does resume it will face the same or tougher choices and compromises that were available before the bombs started dropping. 

In Afghanistan, the United States, NATO, and other supporting states (including Canada), along with Afghans themselves, fought the radically out-gunned Taliban for two decades, only for the latter to prevail. “Winning” isn’t a word that applies to any party, least of all the people of Afghanistan.

As for Iraq, in 2011 the American analyst Andrew Bacevich, then of Boston University, acknowledged the war’s removal of Saddam Hussein as ruler of Iraq, and then tallied the costs, arriving at “a Churchillian verdict on the war [which] might read thusly: Seldom in the course of human history have so many sacrificed so dearly to achieve so little.”[viii]

The list continues. In Libya, NATO’s 2011 intervention demonstrated its undoubted capacity for regime destruction, and its utter incapacity for facilitating regime change or resolving conflict.[ix] Kosovo, like Libya, elicited an emergency response intervention. This time it facilitated positive change for the minority Albanian Kosovars, seen by some legal scholars as consistent with its historic status as a federal unit within the former Yugoslavia,[x] but 25 years later, the conflict with Serbia and Serbians in Kosovo is far from resolved.[xi] 

Even the partial “wins” are rare, the conflicts driving war are not settled, and most often they end with the whimper of mutually hurting stalemates leading eventually to mutually accepted, but mutually unpalatable, compromises. Some never get to even that point and remain frozen conflicts – but at least with the fighting halted. The foundation of these stalemates is of course the extraordinary suffering, the death and destruction, and personal and societal trauma that remains. As for the social/political conflicts that spawned the wars – unresolved.

The primary model for what war can positively achieve is, of course, World War II. We now portray it as having wiped the slate clean and having set the stage for new beginnings. It was also the deadliest, the most horrific war in all of known human history. While unique in multiple ways, perhaps its most rare feature was the unqualified surrender of one side, with the victors committed to rebuilding, not only the vanquished but also the regional and global orders. 

One unusually “successful” contemporary war was the international coalition’s 1991 expulsion of Iraq from Kuwait. It had the explicit approval of the UN Security Council, and it reversed Iraq’s gross violation of the UN Charter. But the coalition’s military operations still delivered more than their share of dire consequences. Mass attacks by American forces on retreating Iraqi troops came to be known as a “turkey shoot.”[xii] The US president’s post expulsion comments were wrongly interpreted by oppressed Shia Muslims of Iraq as a signal that, if they chose the moment to rebel against the despotic rule of Saddam Hussein, they would have American support.[xiii] Some reports estimated that when the Shias revolted, and support was not forthcoming, upwards of 100,000 were killed by Hussein’s forces.

When the guns finally fall silent, the first daunting task is to address the mess that war has produced – and that threatens to re-ignite war. That means things like emergency provisions of humanitarian relief, attention to the human displacement crisis, rebuilding the most basic infrastructure to support essential community safety and services, efforts to gain control of weapons that circulate in war zones, finding alternative employment for fighting age young men, and exploring the establishment of accountable governance. On top of that comes the need to address the collective mistrust and trauma in war’s wake. All of this must be accomplished despite catastrophically depleted resources. 

Diplomacy and war prevention

“If you don’t fund the State Department fully, then I need to buy more ammunition.” General James Mattis

In Donald Trump’s first presidential term, 120 retired military Generals wrote to him protesting his plan for a major increase in military spending, ostensibly for an intensified war on terror. The funding was to come from non-military spending cuts, including to diplomacy and foreign aid. The generals quoted Gen. Mattis, and one of the signatories, a retired United States Marine Corps four-star general, told the CBC that “we cannot fight our way out of this. It is an issue which can be decided by decisive diplomacy and enlightened development.”[xiv]

Nevertheless, the West, increasingly concerned about China, seems to view it primarily as a military challenge that we may have to fight our way out of. And China did nothing to allay that perception when it staged an extraordinary array of assembled hardware at its commemoration of the 80^th anniversary of the end of World War II.[xv] Foreign Policy concluded that China has “undergone arguably the most rapid technological transformation of any military force since World War II.” And it further suggests that if the United States were to persist its ambition to remain the dominant military actor in East Asia, far from its home area, China would respond with its own ambitious agenda, within its own neighbourhood. The inevitable “arms race would play to Beijing’s strengths, not to Washington’s.”[xvi] With Russia the prominent if not dominant presence in the Arctic, it should be clear that a military-centric strategy to deal with peer adversaries is not going to be an effective path towards a more stable, balanced world order. 

It’s undeniable that the world has become a more fragile place with the rules-based order in retreat. But the collective West’s current response is to promote military preparedness as the realistic option and too often to characterize diplomatic engagement that doesn’t produce early results as weak and misplaced, not to mention politically and morally suspect.[xvii] The flat refusal to engage substantively with Russia on strategic security (President Trump’s red carpet photo ops do not qualify as serious diplomacy^[xviii]) should be recognized as self-defeating. Diplomacy is not a luxury turned to when tensions have eased, it is essential for the pursuit of better relations, including with our adversaries. 

In the Cold War, both sides had the good sense not to refuse to substantively engage with adversaries. A mutual dependency on deterrence was recognized and led to things like hotlines, some basic information sharing, exploring confidence building measures, accepting basic verification intrusions, and protracted arms control negotiations that yielded some effective agreements. 

Arms control and disarmament, like diplomacy itself, are not something to be enjoyed after security is assured. They are not a peace dividend, but also an essential component of building peace and security.

Canada’s Arctic Foreign Policy includes this succinct and compelling description of the essential role of diplomacy in advancing national and international security:

“Effective diplomacy is critical for shaping the international environment to defend and advance Canadian national interests; it is a first line of defence for Canada’s national security. Canada’s fundamental defence and security goal is to prevent and defuse potential crises before they can develop into conflict”^[xix] (emphasis added).

Diplomacy, by the Government’s own testimony, is a key resource in war prevention, which makes halting current plans for further budget cutting at Global Affairs Canada^[xx] a first order requirement for a credible Canadian security strategy. “We must resist the temptation to limit Canada’s diplomacy and development efforts to paying for defence: after all, defence is only an instrument of foreign policy.” That’s the wise counsel offered in the Globe and Mail by Academic Michael Manulak of Carleton University’s Norman Paterson School of International Affairs, former Foreign Minister Lloyd Axworthy, and former cabinet minister and Canadian Ambassador to the United Nations Allan Rock.^[xxi] 

When Industry Minister Mélanie Joly was Foreign Minister in the previous Liberal Government she called for increasing funding for diplomacy. “Canada needs more diplomats,” she argued before the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, “if it wants to have influence in the Indo-Pacific and other key regions of the world”[xxii] –and she could well have added that influence in other parts of the world builds influence in Washington as well. The call goes unheeded,[xxiii] but at some point the Government will have to recognize that, like military preparedness, diplomatic preparedness requires sustained resources, skills, and a commitment that persists through inevitable set-backs and dead-ends. 

Human security, good governance, and war prevention

The first thing that has to be said about the responsibility to prevent war is that it is not only European and North American wars that must be prevented. It is a global obligation and must thus be a global enterprise.

For much of the world, security and war prevention must be substantially built on meeting the day-to-day needs of the people, on building and sustaining broad trust in political and legal institutions. In the Arctic, for example, Canada has the obligation to foster and maintain political processes that engage with indigenous governing institutions in ways that earn their trust. That means demonstrating to indigenous communities that they can confidently rely on national political institutions and processes to respect constitutional and treaty obligations, to afford them a genuine hearing and guarantee their meaningful participation in decisions that affect their lives. 

The loss of trust in such political and economic systems creates opportunities for adversaries to exploit the discontent that arises when needs are chronically unmet and when institutions that should be serving the population chronically fail citizens. Foreign interests that claim to understand that discontent and that offer political empathy leading to financial and other material support, will gradually plant seeds of a pervasive climate of grievance and, in extreme cases, can lead to more direct, including military, interference. 

That makes good governance a key war prevention tool. And the good news is that the international community has a wealth of understanding and programming committed to war prevention through such means – like peacebuilding to proactively address social and economic and other chronic grievances, support to fragile institutions of governance, control the arms that flood into a region when war was present, rebuild trust. Canada has been a respected participant in those international efforts, but it is a respect and effectiveness that at the international level has been wearing thin. Canadian funding for economic development and peacebuilding programming aimed at meeting basic human needs and contributing to stable political/economic systems, has been stagnant at about half the rate of contributions that the international community recommends through the UN.[xxiv]

When the international community collectively fails to address the challenges of arms control and peacebuilding and the rest of the war prevention agenda, more war is the most immediate risk. A study by the Peace Research Institute Oslo puts it this way:

“The seeds of war are often sown during war. Violence associated with armed conflict adds more grievances to those that led to conflict in the first place…. Recurring conflict is symptomatic of unaddressed grievances, and lasting peace will not be achieved until these issues are addressed.”[xxv]

Western politicians are, in some ways, attuned to this reality, repeatedly warning that unless properly settled, the current war in Ukraine will only be the prelude to further attacks. The problem is that many still cling to the fond hope that the only acceptable end to the war must be the unmitigated defeat of Russia on the battlefield – but very few contemporary wars are won that decisively, nor do they resolve the political conflicts that spawned them. Conditions conducive to peace are not forged in war, they must be built – that’s why its called peacebuilding.

What wars leave behind are not conditions conducive to peace but the threat of renewed fighting. The fragile window of opportunity left by war’s end calls for peacebuilding and peacekeeping. But the previous Government’s promise to revive Canadian participation in peacekeeping did not materialize, and the current Government has been largely silent on it. Former Foreign Minister Lloyd Axworthy has, however, pointed out that Prime Minister Carney’s openness to post-war Canadian troop participation in a Ukraine peace stabilization force suggests such a revival may yet be in the offing.[xxvi] 

Peacekeeping works,[xxvii] and given Canada’s previously celebrated contributions to UN peacekeeping, it amounts to a dereliction of duty for Canada now to be absent from this evolving, but proven, global war prevention strategy. 

From deterrence to war prevention

“The only way human beings can win a war is to prevent it.” George C. Marshall, WWII US Army Chief of Staff, former Secretary of State.[xxviii]

The current wave of enthusiasm for massive increases in military spending across the West, and mirrored in the East (of course, it can also be said that it pervades the East and is mirrored in the West) is still predicated on fantasies of winning wars and intimidating adversaries (deterrence). But, to emphasize the point, deterrence and war prevention are not the same thing – the former depends on credible threats, the latter on de-escalating tensions. 

The more optimistic de-escalation formula doesn’t presume that adversaries like Russia and China desires the same. But Canadian values lead toward the understanding that a prevention strategy aimed at confidence building and de-escalation offers a more likely path toward mutual acceptance, if not active cooperation, than does a deterrence-based threat escalation strategy.[xxix]

Given the inevitable and tragic failures of contemporary warfare, and given the innate logic of conflict de-escalation, Canada’s former Defence Minister, Bill Blair, had the commendable sense to tell the House of Commons defence committee that the primary role of the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) is to prevent wars, not fight them.

“I think what you'll see reflected in this document [the 2024 Defence update to the 2017 Defence policy] is a strong commitment to deterrence, to making peace and to keeping peace. This is not a document about fighting wars. It's a document about preventing wars and responding in such a way, with our allies, to make sure that we can represent sufficient deterrence to potential adversaries and what can sometimes be very aggressive and hostile activities on their part.[xxx] 

He still described the mission of the CAF as deterrence (another version of the stock idea that to prevent war you have to prepare for war), but the emphasis on preventing war as the purpose of armed forces, rather than fighting and winning wars, has been a dominant security theme ever since the advent of the nuclear age. The American nuclear strategist Bernard Brodie wrote in 1946:

“Thus far, the key objective of military strategy has been to win wars. From now on, the key objective of military strategy must be to avert wars. There can be no other objective.”[xxxi]

His framework was also deterrence, of course, but states with nuclear arsenals have certainly insisted that the purpose of nuclear weapons is to prevent nuclear war/use. They have repeatedly said that “a nuclear war can never be won and must never be fought”[xxxii] – unfortunately, while still perfecting their capacity for global destruction. 

Mikhail Gorbachev took the point much further, and that led to the 1990 announcement by the chief of the Soviet general staff of a set of guidelines for a new military doctrine:

• War would no longer be considered a means of achieving political objectives.

• The Soviet Union would never initiate military actions against any other state.

• The Soviet Union would never be the first to use nuclear weapons. 

• The Soviet Union had no territorial claims against any other state, nor did it consider any other state to be its enemy.^[xxxiii]

The point is not to argue whether the Soviet Union, in its dying days, honoured those guidelines, the successor Russian State obviously has not, but it is legitimate to ask whether those are the kinds of principles that are credible and doable and that could become part of a reliable route to avoiding the resort to all-out war.

Acknowledging the distinction between deterrence and prevention, and making the de-escalatory strategy of war prevention the real military mission, could advance exploration and planning for the multiple ways in which military forces should be contributing to conditions that help avoid war, rather than focusing only on the build-up of military capacity and threat in the fond hope that adversaries, instead of automatically matching those threats, will be sufficiently intimidated to back down.

The extraordinarily destructive consequences of high-intensity conventional wars, and given the fact that such wars are virtually never “won” and don’t resolve the conflicts that led to war, Canada and its NATO allies should be driven to admit and adapt to the now widely observable reality of the futility of war. It is time for an accepted truth about nuclear war to be applied to conventional war: “High-intensity conventional wars cannot be won and must never be fought.” That would be a credible, realistic framework to guide and shape military forces and missions.  

Ernie Regehr, O.C. is Senior Fellow in Arctic Security and Defence at The Simons Foundation Canada; Research Fellow at the The Kindred Credit Union Centre for Peace Advancement, Conrad Grebel University College, University of Waterloo; and co-founder and former Executive Director of Project Ploughshares.