At War with Social Theory: Liberal and Post-Liberal

Paradigms of Action in US Military Doctrine

Introduction
I.

In recent years, the field of security studies has been marked by a strong resurgence of

interest in the study of conflict within states. This interest has followed from Western
involvement with many forms of intrastate war variously known as asymmetric warfare,
complex peacekeeping, stability operations, and counterinsurgency. The decline of interstate war
and persistence of these conflicts has led by scholars and practitioners to argue that a paradigm
shift has taken place which departs from the modern Western Way of War. Whether known as
non-trinitarian war (Van Creveld 1991), wars of the third kind (Holsti 1996), fourth generation
war (Hammes 2005), or chaoplexic warfare (Bousquest 2010), these approaches assume that
states can no longer apply the Clausewitzian formula whereby war is merely the rational
extension of policy. In the new paradigm, military action is directed toward the security not of
states but of civilians (Kaldor 1998, Smith 2006), and is consistent with human security and
peacebuilding approaches adopted by the United Nations which seek to support new institutional
structures that prevent a recurrence of conflict. Although states have been generally slower to
adopt this new paradigm of warfare, one might assume that the recent adoption of
counterinsurgency and stability operations doctrines and associated military theory by the United
States would indicate such a shift. According to Sewall, Field Manual 3-24: Counterinsurgency
is a radical field manual that focuses more on political than military action and seeks a
holistic form of human security (Sewall 2007, xxi-xxix). In this way, new counterinsurgency
doctrine is a paradigm shattering cultural transformation for the US military.
However, large gaps exist between the assumptions of counterinsurgency theory and
contemporary alternatives to traditional security studies. Scholars of many overlapping fields of

study that define the new paradigm - including peacebuilding, cosmopolitanism, human security,
and critical security studies - argue that the warfighting context of counterinsurgency operations
is ill-suited to protecting civilian life (Kaldor 2010, Gilmore 2011). Post-structural and critical
theorists have gone even further to argue that new doctrine associated with counterinsurgency is
a new method of imposing liberal governance on unruly parts of the globe and gaining
biopolitical control over areas that arent integrated into global capitalism (Kienscherf 2011,
Anderson 2011). These critiques suggest that counterinsurgency is more like 19th Century
imperialism, which many historians have noted serves the overall inspiration for 20th
counterinsurgency theories that inspire todays thinking on war (Marshall 2010, Rid 2010, Porch
2011). Overall, these critiques suggest that more continuity than change in how the United States
approaches counterinsurgency and that the shift to a new paradigm of warfare is incomplete.
But how incomplete is it? In this paper, I investigate the degree to which US military
approaches to contemporary conflict remains rooted in the political and cultural foundation of
Enlightenment liberalism. Specifically, I examine US military doctrine and military theory
written in the post-9/11 era to identify their sociological assumptions and specify where doctrinal
texts have retained or departed from the classic security paradigm. This work builds on recent
studies on the conceptual place of war in Western social thought and the sociology of warfare
(Joas and Knobl 2013; Malesevic 2011, 2010). In doing so, I evaluate US military doctrine and
military against two theories of social action - an instrumental strategic approach consistent with
Enlightenment liberalism and a critical communicative approach that emerges out of
philosophical critiques of liberal reason and embraced by the human security paradigm as well as
critical security studies. By identifying the overlapping and divergent assumptions of US
counterinsurgency theory with critical and human security studies, we can better reform US

approaches to contemporary warfare toward the operational defense of human security and the
constitution locally legitimate institutions.1
The paper is organized in three sections. First, I show how classic military theory and
contemporary approaches to peacebuilding rely on instrumental and communicative theories of
action to enable the fulfillment of either traditional state security or the broader emancipatory
objectives of human security. Second, I demonstrate the contradictory adoption of both theories
of action in US doctrine and military theory for operational design, stability operations, and
counterinsurgency. Third, I suggest how US doctrine can be reformed to fully embrace the
paradigm shift away from states and toward human populations by adopting new metatheoretical
assumptions about the ontology and epistemology.
Theories of Action in Two Paradigms of War
Scholars and security professionals have argued, in different ways, that the dynamics of
war and conflict have shifted fundamentally - from interstate war fought between conventional
military forces to intrastate and irregular conflicts fought by violent non-state actors. While
critiques of these arguments have noted that violence against civilians and the use of partisan
warfare has been a consistent feature of conflict in the pre-modern and modern eras, they do
acknowledge that the world-political context of conflict has changed. The internationalization of
the European states system coupled with rapid expansion of globalization following the Cold
War has created new conflict environment that dramatically departs from the context of the
modern states system, which itself serves as the theoretical foundation of Western military theory
and action. Below, I explore how these two world-political contexts have constituted paradigms

1 Kaldor (1998) calls precisely for such research: [insert quote here]

of war that suggest alternative instrumental and communicative theories of action in pursuit of
respective security goals.
Warfare by Enlightened States in the Modern Era
Classical military theory derives from the work of thinkers and practitioners confronted
with the problem of war in modern Europe. The practice of war was intimately linked to threats
faced by political units of the period, which became consolidated sovereign states by the
Napoleonic era. But, war didnt just simply the state and vice versa, to paraphrase Tilly (1985,
1992). Both war and state were constituted by and were constitutive of civil society and laissezfaire economics. Thus, Western Way of War relies on a specific set of theoretical relationships
between state formation, civil society, and a capitalist economy. The form in which these four
concepts became realized in modern Europe was determined by the liberal ideological project of
the Enlightenment, which structured their relationships and defined how sovereigns would
guarantee their security and ensure their survival amidst the threats of the period.
Conventional warfare can be understood with reference to the foundational military
theory elaborated by Carl von Clausewitz, who famously argued that war is the extension of
politics by other means (Clausewitz

Why interstate war declines

Large-scale industrial warfare between recognized sovereign states have rare events
owing to the emergence of nuclear weapons as well as the vast military superiority of the
United States (Smith 2006, XXXX)

the rise of warfare within states has coincided with (and has been constituted by) the
spread of sovereign state institutions across the globe, including former colonial
possessions ruled by Europe and inhabited by peoples which had not developed coherent
national identities.

Mutually exclusive relationship between war and society characterized the European state
system breaks down in contemporary era as the boundaries of societies are redrawn by
globalization and diverge from state boundaries.

This shift involves challenges to the pre-existing relationship between war and society
that served as the foundation of modern state institutions which emerged from
Enlightenment institutions and were recognized across the globe during the postcolonial
period.

VII. Goals of each type of military action in relation to new referents of security diverge as well whereas one seeks to implement state policy as a means of protecting ones sovereignty, and the
new model seeks to protect civilian life.

VIII. This paradigm shift poses a epistemic challenge to conventional military forces because it
departs from existing theories of action and the professional knowledge. The Enlightenment
assumptions of classical military action embodied by the foundational work of Carl von

Clausewitz are no longer applicable, and warfare is less and less likely to successfully serve as
an instrument of state policy. The center of gravity is no longer the opponent which denies the
realization of the sovereigns will as the representative of the people but becomes the people.
War amongst the people is about competing claims to sovereign authority as well as social
exclusions which define the boundaries of the political community.

IX. The persistence of of civil wars in which the people are the center of gravity suggests an
alternative theory of action more consistent with critiques of the Enlightenment. These emerge
that emerge out of critical theory, particularly the communicative action of Jurgen Habermas.