How to end a war successfully — The Art of War and Peace by David Kilcullen and Greg Mills

Authors Greg Mills and David Kilcullen in Kherson, Ukraine, in 2023. (Photo: Richard Harper)

By David Kilcullen and Greg Mills

27 Aug 2024

In Ukraine, the Middle East and the Horn of Africa, state-led violence is occurring every day. The Art of War and Peace by David Kilcullen and Greg Mills examines why disputes often escalate into full-blown conflict, and why peace efforts routinely fail.

How have the character and technology of war changed in recent times?

Why does battlefield victory often fail to result in sustainable peace?

What is the best way to prevent, fight and resolve future conflict?

In The Art of War and Peace, leading strategists David Kilcullen and Greg Mills explore how wars can be won on the battlefield and how that success can be translated into a stable and enduring peace.

Based on their decades of experience as policy advisers in conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, Colombia and across Africa, and on recent fieldwork in Israel, Ukraine, Ethiopia and Taiwan, Mills and Kilcullen analyse the nature of modern war, considering both large-scale, high-intensity state-on-state conflicts as well as limited-objective, irregular, low-intensity conflicts that often include both inter- and intra-state dimensions.

Read more: Don’t miss the bus – Six big things for defence forces to think about

The Art of War and Peace investigates how technology can be a leveller for small powers against larger aggressors; how one can shape and sustain a viable narrative to ensure public and international support; the balance between self-reliance and alliance commitment; and the role of leadership, intelligence, diplomacy and economic assistance. Read the excerpt below.

***

While the world has been focused on Ukraine and the Middle East, state-led violence continues elsewhere. In the Horn of Africa alone, the cost in human lives from conflict has topped at least one million since 2020. At least 150,000 troops were killed in the two-year war in Tigray starting in 2020, along with perhaps as many as 600,000 civilians. Since then, conflicts elsewhere in the region, such as in the Amhara and Oromia regions of Ethiopia and in Sudan and South Sudan, have added to the grim tally. In Sudan, in addition to the deaths from the fighting between the Rapid Support Forces and the Sudanese Armed Forces, more than 6.5 million people have been internally displaced, and there are more than 2 million external refugees. Fighting between various factions in South Sudan cost an estimated 400,000 lives between 2012 and 2018, in the aftermath of the war of independence from Sudan, in which 1.9 million were killed. We don’t know how many more people have been killed since then in South Sudan, but the number is likely to be in the hundreds of thousands. To these numbers should be added the instability in Somaliland and Somalia among other insurrections, in which more than 70,000 have died this century. If we add the casualties in Oromia (between 200,000 and 300,000) and the Amhara region to the picture, the regional figure since 2020 certainly tops 1 million, perhaps 1.5 million. In these parts, genocide unfolds every day, but curiously it does not cause outrage.

One problem is not a lack of money, but perhaps rather too much. Between 2007 and 2020, for example, the United States spent at least US$2.5 billion on counter-terrorism operations in Somalia, excluding defence and intelligence costs. Official development assistance (ODA) for Somalia has totalled just under $2 billion annually over the past ten years, creating a very high aid-to-GDP ratio of around one-quarter: this is more likely to produce dependency than development. Looking at the results of aid in the comparatively stable and democratic Somaliland (about $20 million a year), one would have to say that too little aid may not be the problem. Indeed, the results of the failure of the international mission in Afghanistan, in which $2.3 trillion was spent by the US alone – a thousand times more than spending on Somalia – also suggest the same answer. More is not necessarily better.

The routine failure to convert war into peace through mediation and negotiation, and the manner in which disputes seem to progress invariably into full-blown conflict, suggest that the problem lies elsewhere. In the world of peace-making, which increasingly resembles the 1930s, when the pre-eminent international organisation (the League of Nations) foundered after the Italian invasion of Abyssinia, this is not surprising. The post-Second World War order is certainly no longer what it once was.

This failure both reflects and is compounded by the inability to positively manage external spoilers. The Cold War offered wiggle room to African dictators from Mengistu in Ethiopia to Mobutu in Zaire. Now, in what is a far cry from the simplicity of the brief, single superpower era of the 1990s, the growing role of Russia, the Emirates, Qatar, Turkey, Iran and China, among others, creates a welter of options for African leaders seeking to sidestep international pressure.

And yet how a war ends determines how the peace is won, what form it takes, and its likelihood of enduring. Various levels of analysis – from grand-strategic and military-strategic to operational and tactical – should link policy with strategy and campaigning with the conduct of battle. These are sometimes called levels of war, and are discussed in detail later in this book, but they apply equally in preserving or making peace, and in the transition from war to peace – an important subset of strategy, known as ‘war termination’, which has sadly been ineffective in Western practice.

Authors Greg Mills and David Kilcullen in Kherson, Ukraine, in 2023. (Photo: Richard Harper)

There is a premium on leadership not only to prepare properly for war but also to make peace. For conflicts to end peacefully, there is usually a need for equal pressure on the belligerent parties, from the outside, to get them to the negotiating table. The parties also need to see that there is more to be gained from ending the fighting than continuing with it, and they need a clear methodology for making peace, a sense of timing and leadership. The last component is critical but elusive, not least in the endless wars of the Middle East. A political plan is imperative unless war is only to set the stage for the next round of fighting, a lesson from Israel’s wars with the Palestinians as much as anywhere. But for this you need two willing partners; in the Middle East just as between Ukraine and Russia, or in the Horn of Africa.

If a peace process is only a device to allow enough time to recover between bouts of conflict, for one party or another to exit from the conflict, or as a means of legal or diplomatic subterfuge, or if one party or another remains more interested in war than peace, then war will likely resume. Once a peace process has been concluded, then other strategic aspects come into play, including economic and legal redress, as well as safeguards to prevent the resumption of conflict.

Making agreements stick has proved another challenge entirely. Paul Collier reminds us that nearly half the countries that have ended a civil war resort to conflict soon afterwards. There were more than 5,000 conflict mediation efforts between 1945 and 2000, in which some type of agreement was reached in 45.5 per cent of inter-state and an almost identical 44.3 per cent of intra-state disputes. Yet just one in four inter-state dispute settlements during this period held longer than eight weeks, and only 17.2 per cent of intra-state disputes. Finding ways to lower this risk is imperative, particularly in Africa given the prevalence of conflict on the continent: of thirty-three conflicts globally in 2022, half were in Africa, with nine in Asia, five in the Middle East, two in Europe and just one in the Americas. In an inversion of Carl von Clausewitz’s observation on the primacy of politics in war, peace can be misused, and be viewed by its participants as war by other means. The need for vigilance over irrational exuberance is clear from those peace processes in which early optimism was replaced by failure, as in southern Africa and parts of Latin America.

The division of labour – and the balance of focus – between insiders and outsiders in ensuring stability is a source of ongoing debate among practitioners, and one that both of us have examined in detail in previous books. The question is what leverage, aside from moral suasion, outsiders can bring to bear. Outside parties – both non-governmental and international – can help both to pressure and to facilitate peace efforts, mobilising communities and creating awareness. They can also help build trust and consensus, provide a neutral arbiter for difficult and sensitive issues, and create alternatives to violence. While attention is often given to high-profile diplomatic efforts to end a conflict, local actors have a critical role to play in establishing the conditions for peace. When it was suggested to Stalin that the Pope might appreciate an end to his oppression of Catholics in Russia, he scoffed, ‘The Pope? How many divisions has he got?’ Stalin’s lack of respect for moral authority may have been extreme, but it is far from unique.

In his work on the Thirty Years’ War, written in 1805, Clausewitz criticised those scholars who treated war only with a sense of horror and superiority as a formless, brutish struggle which some would have preferred to ignore altogether. The centrality of motives – interests and values – has historically found expression in Just War Theory, comprising jus ad bellum (the ‘right [to resort] to war’) and jus in bello (‘right [conduct] in war’). Several criteria exist for a just war: its declaration by a lawful sovereign, a just and righteous cause, possessing rightful intentions in seeking to advance good and curtail evil, a reasonable chance of success, war as a last resort, and goals proportionate to the means being used. Proportionality also applies in the conduct of war, regarding how much force is necessary and morally appropriate to the ends being sought and the injustice suffered. All these principles, which have formed the basis of the work of the United Nations and the rules of the international system since 1945, are at stake in today’s conflicts – notably Ukraine and Gaza. The fact that Western countries, during the war on terror and before, arguably breached these just war criteria themselves, reduces their moral legitimacy in seeking to hold adversaries to account. But this is a criticism of Western hypocrisy, not an argument against others’ right of self-defence.

There are other constants in history. Motive matters. So does fighting will. Mass (whether achieved physically or by massing effects) remains critical to battle, as does logistics capacity. Properly harnessed and supported, technology can be an enabler. How all these aspects mesh with each other is critical in determining deterrence – the business of avoiding conflict – and in determining how wars end and whether peace ensues. DM

The Art of War and Peace by David Kilcullen and Greg Mills is published by Penguin Random House SA (R360). Visit The Reading List for South African book news, daily – including excerpts!

Categories:

Maverick Life

Tags:

DM is much better if you are signed in...

Maverick Life