On February 24, 2022, the unexpected happened. Or rather, something happened that almost all the citizens of the Western world had stubbornly considered impossible, as if to exorcise its occurrence. In summary, the second world nuclear power has rediscovered one of the classic ways of doing foreign policy, namely war. In this case it was not a question of a military intervention aimed at remedying some presumed injustice or to restore order in an international framework compromised by the aggressive behavior of the dictator of the moment. No. It was an intervention to make the will of a sovereign country, the Russian Federation, prevail over that of another sovereign country, Ukraine. In short, a pure act of force.
Given this, the outcome might have seemed obvious. A large and well-armed Goliath should have had an easy game of a David already shaken in the past by a heavy defeat that had cost him the Crimea. However, things almost immediately began to take a different turn because surely the Ukrainians were not short of one thing. Of a great will to resist. Of what Carl von Clausewitz calls the "Finely polished blade of the sword". The morale.
The result is there for all to see. After an initial moment of disarray, the Ukrainians began to defend themselves and to retaliate blow by blow. To accept the material destruction imposed on them by the Russians in order not to declare themselves defeated. To give the West time to join forces to support Kiev's efforts in the fight against the Russian Federation.
On the contrary, the Russian soldiers did not show a great desire to fight. Indeed, they lost more and more bite as the Ukrainians, well supplied by the West with weapons suitable for defense, raised their heads and reacted in an ever better coordinated manner.
The conflict was therefore characterized by the high number of losses of Russian men, vehicles and materials and, only in recent weeks, this trend seems to have slowed down, especially after Moscow began to make extensive use of artillery, missiles and rockets. , often indiscriminately. All weapons that strike from afar and avoid putting unmotivated soldiers in direct contact with others who are willing to risk their lives for the salvation of their country.
Ultimately, if the Russians have always had an advantage in the count of weapons and systems, in the field of morale they have been outclassed by the Ukrainians.
Of course morale cannot be a factor of eternal advantage because, with time and losses, it irremediably tends to decrease, but the phenomenon deserves to be studied.
Will and morals are words that have never really caught on in the modern West. If we analyze the most bitter Western defeats since the end of the Second World War, namely Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, we immediately realize how these debacles are above all the result of our lack of moral standing every time we we are faced with determined adversaries, capable of facing unspeakable sacrifices in order to prevail. The West has in fact always focused on the advantage coming from material factors. With the nefarious result of seeing military tactics mainly focused on the physical destruction of the opponent's capabilities. Such destruction does produce results in the tactical and, at times, operational field but success is not so obvious in the strategic field. In fact, the problem is that the West is a slave to its history, or rather, to the origins of our way of waging war.
We have to go back to the time of polis Greek, when phalanxes of hoplites confronted each other in a thrusting contest, with spears and shields, trying to disrupt the enemy block and then start the slaughter. Push against push. With greater resistance, greater thrust. Result ... success coincided with the physical destruction of the opponent, in a world where the tactical, operational and strategic levels were the same thing.
With these assumptions it is easy to understand how, even today, destroying the enemy represents the main objective for a military leader to achieve.
Quoting von Clausewitz again, in the First Book of "Della Guerra" it is in fact stated that the purpose of the conflict is the physical destruction of the opponent's forces, the conquest of enemy territory (so that the opposing military force cannot be regenerated) e, only in the third measure, taming the enemy's will to keep resisting. But perhaps the most serious consequence of this way of thinking about war is the inability to understand that, in other cultures, success in a conflict has nothing or very little to do with the physical destruction of the adversary. There are other, much more effective ways.
Returning to the war in Ukraine, what is emerging is that the will, the morale, the psychological capacity to reconstitute oneself to fight count and count a lot, while all this seems not to be present in Western strategic thinking or, at most, is considered only a secondary phenomenon deriving from the course of the conflict.
The anthropocentric war
Each strategy is the daughter of its time. Our time is a time of connections, of connections between distant entities, of a global village. Internet is king, as well as the way to communicate through social networks. The conflict in Ukraine is followed live by everyone through smartphones that accompany us in every moment of our life. There is no longer the journalist mediator who guides us in forming an opinion and even individual fighters at the front can enter, in first person, live, in this virtual space, giving us so much information that, in the past, we could not even dream of possessing.
People are therefore at the center. Global affairs seem to have become within everyone's reach. These connections further highlight the importance of perceptions, emotions, beliefs and, ultimately, the willingness to be involved in conflict or to accept its results.
This state of affairs produces several interesting effects. The first is that altering the behavior of the protagonists of a conflict in one's own favor and thus achieving lasting strategic results, passes more and more to people. Public opinions are in fact increasingly capable of influencing the choices of decision makers. You can't hide a situation, or an episode, when just wandering around the internet to find out how things actually went.
The second effect is that the people directly involved in the conflict are able to feel and almost touch the support or hostility of other people who follow the events but who also live many kilometers away. This support (or this hostility) increases (or decreases) the will to fight and resist. Basically it is a very human thing. If we feel supported and admired we are inclined to give our best. If we feel despised and rejected, our will to persist in behavior condemned by public opinion falters and makes us reluctant; it is something that speaks to our conscience.
Aware of these dynamics, Sun-tzu said 2.500 years ago that the soldier must be kept in ignorance. But how do you keep the soldier in ignorance if with a click he can know what people think of him in every corner of the world?
If this is the case, perhaps the time has come to acknowledge it and use it to our advantage.
Will and morals in Western military doctrine
Western doctrine, and in particular that of the United States, considers hitting the enemy's will only as a consequence of land combat (US Army ADP 3-0 and US Army FM 3-0). In practice, while supporting the need to limit, if possible, material damage and to comply with the rules of the International Law of Armed Conflicts, this doctrine does not give any indication as to how to conduct operations taking into account morale, be it of the enemy. , friendly forces or civilians. Ultimately there are no guidelines on how to conduct operations to influence will and morale.
In the West, the main aim is to undermine the will of the adversary by destroying the means and materials intended for combat. The achievement of this effect, however, is considered collateral and incidental to regular combat operations, and one does not enter into the merits of how to influence it directly and fails to consider it itself as a real objective to be achieved. For example, it is not taken into account that certain types of operation, far from undermining the enemy's will to fight, tend to strengthen it and that the destruction of morale may require a change of time, place or type of operation itself. Even worrying about the morale of our troops doesn't really get much attention. There are certainly the military chaplains with their comfort and their services, the support for families at home, the opportunities for recreation that are sometimes organized at the front.
In the past, let us remember, there were military brothels brought along as supports in the rear of the armies engaged in the fighting. And there is no manual that tells Western commanders what operations to conduct to raise the morale of their troops or how to conduct them.
In the West, therefore, there is no talk of how to influence friendly morale during actual combat operations or of how to counter any enemy attempts to influence it. And even less is there talk of influencing the will of civilians, be they friend or foe, involved in military operations. This approach, in effect, considers the high morale of the friendly troops in combat to be taken for granted and the enemy morale degraded solely as a result of the material destruction suffered.
Only recently with the doctrine on the so-called MISO (Military Information Support Operations) has begun to consider the possibility of deliberately influencing the morale of the enemy in combat, however, limiting itself to the use of the media only. Too little and only for highly specialized units. In any case, MISOs are used almost exclusively in support of classic military operations that prioritize the physical destruction of enemy capabilities. Ultimately, there are no military operations created solely to hit the morale of the opponents or to improve that of our troops.
The threat
This situation of little interest for the aspects related to morale appears truly singular if we consider that the West has long identified threats ibride and in the subversion two modes of war put in place by various foreign states. China, for example, has closely watched US military actions in the recent past and concluded that intangible factors are increasingly significant for modern warfare.
Reading "War without Limits" (Qiao Liang-Wang Xiangsui ed. La Goriziana) is a good exercise to understand how the Chinese are very clear that, at the moment, facing the West with the weapons of the West does not bring anything good for those who decide to take this path. In the light of these observations, the Chinese have developed a strategic approach that pursues victory through actions that are, first of all, not kinetic but which can become kinetic when needed. They cause the enemy to lose "the will and the ability to resist" and become "paralyzed" as part of a concept of warfare aimed at the destruction of systems. Destruction not so much understood in physical terms as it is the destructuring of the same. After all, there is nothing new in all this since the same concepts were expressed by Sun-tzu when he stated that "The best strategy is the one that makes the opponent's plans fail" that is, that strategy that prevents the adversary's actions and renders them useless at the very moment in which they are conceived. Not surprisingly, the Chinese have also introduced a concept of strategic psychological warfare which proposes to win wars through means independent of combat, preemptively overwhelming an enemy from a psychological point of view.
Historical considerations for the two halves of the war
The substantial absence of considerations concerning morality in the current Western doctrine is, after all, an unfortunate novelty and represents a departure, in part, from tradition. After all, since the time of Homer, whose works are nothing more than the description of how to conduct and return from a war, the physical-psychological duality always appears. The fury of Achilles opposed to the cunning of Ulysses. But, as we get closer in time, the importance of morale and surprise for Sun-tsu. Pericles' speeches to the Athenians for Thucydides. The aforementioned "finely polished blade"By von Clausewitz". L'"Allons enfants de la patrie" of republican France, which became unbeatable on the battlefields because the citizen soldiers knew they were fighting for a homeland where they were no longer subjects but protagonists. The vision of JFC Fuller who in the 20s saw psychological warfare as the war of the future. The clear identification, by Paul MA Linebarger, of the Cold War as a war fought above all from a psychological point of view, where both contenders identified absolute evil in the adversary and, from this axiom, drew strength to conduct the operations in all domains. All these examples show how the moral factor was seriously taken into consideration in the past.
So what happens today? What happens to the values to which these strategists of the past referred? How have our societies changed? What resilience capacities do Western societies retain? Because the question that comes to mind is by no means reassuring. Do our societies still have reference values on which to leverage if they are faced with the possibility of a conflict? Because those who don't know what to fight for simply don't fight.
Where we are?
From this long chat I believe we can draw some useful considerations that can also serve as a lesson learned regarding the Ukrainian conflict.
We have seen that in the West the moral factor is now almost forgotten and that, in the best of cases, it is put reductively at the service of the efforts aimed at the physical destruction of the opposing forces. This approach appears to be in contradiction both with our past and with the conclusions we have reached with respect to the possible threat that, as we know, we believe pursues a hybrid way of waging war.
Ultimately, there is a clear imbalance between moral and physical in favor of the latter. It would therefore be necessary to bring these two ways of waging war back on an equal footing. Therefore make the war anthropocentric. Such rebalancing should see the morale preceding the physical. Acting first on morale, important results can in fact be achieved in the field of physics. In the West we try instead to act on the physical, through the destruction of the potential enemy, to hit, as a consequence, the opponent's morale.
So why this strange choice? As is known, the way of waging war in reality always reflects the organization and values of the reference society. The hoplites of the phalanx fought this way because the citizens of the polis Greeks were equal to each other and even in war this equality was physically exemplified by a combat formation where everyone was equal. The immortality deriving from the gesture of valor was no longer exclusively within the reach of the solitary hero son of an oligarchic society, but was available to the polis itself in which all citizens identified themselves. If this is true, the western oblivion of the moral factor in war represents an extremely alarming signal about the capacity of our societies to deal with a conflict. The moral factor is in fact always intimately linked to the reference values of a company. The will to resist relies in fact on the citizens' sense of belonging to the State, to the homeland, to the community of origin, in the military departments, to the spirit of the body that binds soldiers to each other through loyalty and commitment to mutual support.
And if the moral factor had it disappeared in the West because the reference values have disappeared? In this case, I think, we should seriously worry. In the Ukrainian conflict, the will not to give up is the driving force behind the resistance. This is what allows Ukrainian citizens and soldiers not to despair and face huge sacrifices. The Ukrainian president, he has no chance, is a professional communicator. A comedian is in fact one who knows how to observe the reference society and, through satire and paradox, is able to highlight its contradictions and weaknesses by laughing at it. But to do this you need to know the human soul. His dynamics, his hopes, his dreams and even his troubles, in a word, his values.
Are we therefore ready, in the West, to face a war where the will to resist is the basis of the possibility of success?
Giordano Ciccarelli
Cavalry Brigadier General Giordano Ciccarelli was born in Fano (PU) on May 28, 1961. During his career he has gained many experiences across the board, with an operational, inter-force and international profile, developing command skills and an authentic joint spirit with an active role over the past 20 years in the operations, logistics, training and education sectors.
Photo: Twitter (MoD Ukraine / MoD Russia)
