The Theory and Practice of Associative Power: CORDS in the Villages of Vietnam 1967-1972

By Stephen B. Young

To succeed in achieving its national security objectives the United States needs to use Associative Power in place of both Hard Power and Soft Power. Associative Power is the use of joint ventures and alliances to optimize the forms of power brought to bear in conflicts responding with precision to a spectrum of enemy threats, situational challenges, and political opportunities. Associative Power was wisely and successfully used by the United States in the Vietnam War through the CORDS program of counter insurgency and village development to defeat the Viet Cong insurgency and permit the withdrawal of American combat forces. Associative power was not used by the United States—nor was the best counter insurgency practices of CORDS—in the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts. As a result of this omission, interim outcomes in Iraq and Afghanistan did not acceptably accomplish American objectives.

• Language: English
• Publisher: RowmanLittlefield
• Release date: Jun 19, 2017
• ISBN: 9780761869009

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The Theory and Practice

of Associative Power

CORDS in the Villages of Vietnam 1967–1972

Stephen B. Young

Hamilton Books

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This book is dedicated to all who served the cause of freedom

in South Vietnam and especially to those Americans and Vietnamese

who gave that cause the last full measure of their devotion.

In particular, it is dedicated to my mentors:

Kenneth Todd Young, William E. Colby, Ellsworth Bunker,

Nguyen Ngoc Huy and Duong Hieu Nghia.

Foreword

Associative Power and American National Security

As I write this foreword, we are fifteen years into the longest conflict in American history. How long this will go on is uncertain. In the weeks before I write this three Americans were killed in operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the American military struck targets in six different countries in the Middle East. So, it would seem decreasing U.S. military involvement in the region, and in combat, is unlikely in the near term.

The so-called Arab Spring has left the greater Middle East in chaos, as we witness the broad-based failure of regional governance and the explosion of multiple civil wars. The US decision for a precipitous departure from Iraq in 2011 contributed directly to the near collapse of Iraq in 2013/14 under, first, the infiltration of the so-called Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) in 2013, and later the full-frontal assault of ISIL in 2014, crushing four Iraqi army divisions, capturing Mosul, threatening Erbil, and driving on Baghdad. Though the US departure could be legally justified as the result of the failure to secure a bilateral security agreement on thestatus of American forces in Iraq, it actually afforded Nouri al Maliki, the Iraqi Prime Minister, the opportunity to settle a series of scores with his enemies and more broadly with his Sunni opposition and to emerge as the sectarian tyrant we always worried he would be.

Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, a series of U.S. decisions concerning the size and drawdown schedule of the US and NATO residual force, called RESOLUTE SUPPORT, substantially under-resourced the post ISAF requirement, and nearly derailed the entire post-war stabilization effort, causing the American President both to reduce his draw down goals and to extend the schedule for the departure of his forces deployed to that continuing conflict.

Syria and Libya are catastrophes in nearly every measurable way and, while not expressly the result of US policy failures, were propelled towards their respective crises by policies adopted by the United States.

This seems harsh criticism but it begs the question: did US. policy in these areas fail because of an inability of the US to formulate comprehensive policy, or were these the actual policy outcomes we either wanted or were willing to tolerate? No answer to either of these questions is going to satisfy the reader.

The truth is, under the previous several administrations, the US. has demonstrated a remarkable inability to formulate coherent policy, derive optimal strategies, and achieve the outcomes desired. If we ever possessed it, we seem to have lost our capacity to think at the grand strategic level in anything like the comprehensive and integrated manner necessary to address both the complexities we face, for the length of time we must remain involved.

No military on the planet conducts decisive kinetic operations more effectively than does that of the United States. The Taliban and the armed forces of Saddam Hussein were utterly and decisively crushed during the U.S. onslaught in 2001/2 and 2003 respectively. But in the aftermath, because we failed to thoroughly integrate all the measures of national power, we struggled mightily with the subsequent insurgencies. The reality is, of course, that counter insurgencies are won through long term commitments, and through the careful integration and orchestration of civil/military capabilities at the ground level, closest to the population, while simultaneously, building institutional capacity at the provincial and national levels. Where the US has failed … and where any power so engaged in this kind of endeavor will fail … is in the long term, comprehensive government commitment to the protection and stabilization of the population, while creating the capacity for indigenous security, governance, and economic development.

While one could be tempted to find nothing but fault, there have been recent US examples where some of the components of such a successful grand strategy found their way into our efforts in countering the insurgencies during the so-called war on terror that has dominated the last fifteen years. One of the most effective was found in Iraq, in the Al Anbar Province in the years 2006 through 2009. The emergence of the Awakening movement of the Arab tribes of the Euphrates was one of the classic examples of the result of the combinations of all the various aspects of power, combat power to be sure, but also carefully coordinated outreach to the tribes in a manner that leveraged development and diplomacy to simultaneously build security, governance, and economic capacity. And while it was the text book counterinsurgency effort of the war, it did not come without cost as hundreds of American troops and Iraqis paid for this unique moment with their lives to throw off the yoke of terror that had descended on Al Anbar at the hands of Al Qaeda.

The Awakening spread across the theater and would be at the heart of the broader concept of the Sons of Iraq. In the end, the failure in Iraq was far more about the decision for a precipitous withdrawal than the failure of the combination of our capabilities at the ground level. We were simply not finished in Iraq, and our departure on December 31, 2011, left undone much of the security evolution, political capacity building, and local-to-national economic development. Our departure also removed much of what political and diplomatic pressure we could have continued to exert over the Al Maliki regime which, following our departure, began the systematic persecution of the Sunnis and the dismantling of key security structures the U.S. had put into place. At that point, the subsequent and disappointing outcome was completely predictable.

No one should have been surprised when the so-called Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) found a willing partnership with many Sunnis in the winter of 2013/14, nor should anyone have been surprised at the incapacity of the Iraq Security Forces to defend against the conventional attack of ISIL. The sheer collapse and abject rout of the Iraqi Army was a combination of our unfinished work, and Al Maliki’s dereliction of duty as the Iraqi commander in chief. The two principal and most profound lessons to be learned were those we’ve seen before: only comprehensive, coordinated efforts can create the effects we want, and only time can permit us to complete the task. Remove one or the other … or both … and the outcome will always be the same.

To that end, and as we consider our options for the future, we must confront the very great likelihood that we will be involved in some form of low-level conflict, or the rescue of fragile or failing states, for the foreseeable future. Enter Steve Young and his book, The Theory and Practice of Associative Power: CORDS in the Villages of Vietnam 1967-1972.

First, Steve brings us exceptional insights into the issues I’ve presented in this foreword. He was neither just a bystander to the war in Vietnam, nor was he, or is he, solely an academic. He was, rather, an active participant in this most divisive conflict in modern American history. Thus, his authority to offer his views and commentary is unquestioned and unsurpassed. From personal experience, Steve draws on the history of one of the most successful moments in the Vietnam war, the CORDS program, to illustrate that there is an option … a middle ground … between the use of hard power and soft power. He proposes that this middle ground is associative power, a term that navigates the combination of the use of force concurrently with the employment of carefully applied policy, diplomacy, economic measures. As I reflect on the last 15 years of constant conflict, and as I consider the years ahead, Steve’s work will have historic and immediate relevance, and will be valuable to policy makers and commanders alike. In this, Steve Young has done us all a great service.

John R. Allen

General, U.S. Marine Corps (Ret.)

Veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan

Mount Vernon, Virginia

November 10, 2016

Introductory Thoughts

Associative Power

and Strategic National Intelligence Capabilities

I congratulate Steve Young for documenting the story of the CORDS organization during the Vietnam War in new and important ways. Equally, I congratulate Steve for giving us as part of his analysis a new scope for thinking about American national security – his concept of Associative Power.

The well-being of the American people since our founding through a war of independence has depended on a supportive world community of nations and peoples. Our economy thrives better when the world thrives. Our security is more perfect when the world is law-abiding. Both global prosperity and peace are facilitated by the institution of democratic checks and balances in the social and political constitutions of nations and when tolerant respect for the rights of others prevails in the councils of elites and power-brokers.

American security cannot be divorced from the realities of other nations and their peoples. For us to be prosperous in a peaceful world obedient to the constructive purposes of the Law of Nations we Americans need to engage with others in joint and collaborative efforts.

As a rule, unilateralism on our part does not often lead to the ends we seek to enjoy. That fact, a sort of natural law, has been reaffirmed recently by our disappointments in Iraq and Afghanistan where we have not securely achieved our aims through the use of arms, the provision of financial assistance, and the application of technically sophisticated counter-terrorist tactics.

As Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in the 99th Congress from 1985 to 1987, I sought to focus the attention of senior policy makers on our long-term strategy. I felt strategic interests and objectives should determine our efforts to collect data from all intelligence sources. The big picture, I believed, should point us in the right directions as we work on coming to see clearly the little pictures of life around us.

The most appropriate and effective tactics flow as a response to reality.

The big picture is no other than a field theory of reality, complex and at times inscrutable.

What drives reality are people. Not to understand them, not to engage with them, is to drive blindly forward through the darkness and storms of life confident that we will reach our chosen destination in good time without unacceptable cost.

During the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan as the United States was seeking to counter such aggression, I felt more confident in listening to the wisdom of Ahmad Shah Masood than accepting prima facie the assurances of our most senior officials. What did they really know, I asked myself, about the Afghans?

His question to us was Will you stay? Afghan behaviors would turn on our answer. If we were to be reliable partners, they would act one way. If we were only in and outers, they would plan for their futures differently.

For them to act constructively, they needed confidence in a friend. They would need the United States to be a partner, an associate, of theirs; a faithful and wise steward of their best interests.

I head the same aspiration from elders in Somalia as that country was turning into a failed state. Where have you been, I was asked as civil war and terror had been growing inexorably.

In this book Steve provides us with insights into Vietnamese realities and reports on how well American’s in the CORDS program integrated our efforts with Vietnamese nationalism and village conditions.

He also affirms that we as Americans can be wise and faithful stewards and good partners in collaborative efforts to make our world more prosperous and more peaceful

David Durenberger, United States Senator, Retired

St Paul, Minnesota

November 10, 2016

Chapter 1

ASSOCIATIVE POWER

Holding the Center

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

—From The Second Coming by William Yeats

In war, the moral element and public opinion are half the battle.

—Napoleon Bonaparte

Since the end of World War II, the United States has enjoyed mixed success in achieving its national security objectives. The Korean War ended in stalemate; the Marshall Plan and NATO protected Western Europe from Soviet domination until the 1989 collapse of the Soviet Union; the defense of South Vietnam was a failure and Laos and Cambodia fell to Communist regimes; counter-insurgency efforts in El Salvador ended opaquely; a 14-year war against Salafi Muslim terrorists continues; Iraq was not transformed into a liberal democracy; ten years of counter-insurgency in Afghanistan did not produce the substance of victory; genocide in Rwanda, tribal mayhem in Somalia, extremist Islamic brutality in northern Nigeria, civil war in Syria, were tolerated as acts of force majeure; the Arab Spring evolved away from American policy preferences; and a militant Sunni political regime (ISIS) emerged without challenge in eastern Syria and eastern and northeastern Iraq.

In both August 2014 and again in June 2015 American President Barack Obama admitted that the United States did not have a fully formed or complete strategy to defeat the Sunni Muslim fundamentalists fighting with determination for ISIS in Iraq and Syria.[1] Neither had the President and his national security advisors found a way to frustrate Russian President Vladimir Putin’s use of force and local partisans to destabilize Ukraine.

Underlying these American frustrations was, and continues to be, a parochial understanding of power. National security elites have oscillated between an embrace of hard power and a fascination with its supposed opposite, soft power. Forms of power in between the extremes have been only fitfully attended to.

For example, Secretary of State Robert McNamara ruefully concluded that his faith in hard power—the bombing of North Vietnam and the deployment to South Vietnam of modern, high-technology military equipment, forces, and doctrine was misplaced. In retrospect he saw his failure as not having adapted American military tactics to the task of winning the hearts and minds of people from a totally different culture.[2] And yet his state-of-the-art managerial mind could not conceive a proper form of power with which to defeat insurgencies.

Similarly, in 2014, Daniel P. Bolger, a retired Lieutenant General in the US Army, wrote with frustration a study of the American efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan from 2001 to 2014 under the title Why We Lost.[3] Bolger’s critique of American strategic decision-making is that we did not find a proper enemy fit for the military tools we had at hand. His premise was that American hard power was our national security weapon of choice but that it could not win victory against those we opposed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Bolger calls what American soldiers did best in both Iraq and Afghanistan was tactical manhunting. And he tellingly describes success after success in such manhunting. But at the end of the day when President Barack Obama ended major American military commitments in each country, Bolger complains that American policy goals of stabilizing nation-building were still unachieved. We had won all the tactical battles, spending over one trillion dollars, but somehow lost both political wars.

Bolger’s point was well-taken but left him open to the charge that if all you have is a hammer, then you should scan the world looking only for nails to hit. If you can’t find any nails, then don’t engage with your hammer. Bolger did not consider the development and deployment of tools other than metaphorical hammers.

Bolger neatly put the strategic question for American decision-makers with reference to a little manhunting raid that had atrocious consequences in Balad, Iraq, in the opening phase of the American occupation: Who was the enemy? Around bad areas, as 1-8 Infantry discovered, the answer was only too simple: everybody.[4] He added: Winning over a majority of twenty-eight million people to U.S. goals was no easy proposition.[5]

Where preferred American national security outcomes are essentially the emergence of stable, institutionalized, political orders respectful of the Rule of Law and democratic decencies, hard power cannot achieve a positive critical mass of either strategic or tactical success factors.[6]

The recent American bi-polar policy disorder of bouncing back and forth between hard and soft forms of power, between interventionist, militaristic America and isolationist, Fortress America, in the planning and execution of national security priorities comes naturally to strategists who assume that the world’s condition can be neatly summarized in the conceptual framework of sovereign nation states. This is little more than the Napoleonic paradigm of defeating armies and capturing capital cities in order to subdue a sovereign state and bend its will to your liking.

The over-emphasis on hard power, which hindered the achieving of success in South Vietnam, was a natural result of basic premises held by policy makers and politicians about how international relations are to work. Most American, and for that matter European as well, policy makers still take for granted the primacy of an international order descending from the mechanics used in 1648 by the Treaty of Munster to resolve religious conflicts in early modern Europe. The subsequently named Peace of Westphalia built upon a consensus of ruling powers that mutual respect for territorial sovereigns should be the fundamental ordering principle of multi-cultural relations. Contemporary international law, including the United Nations and all international conventions and agreements between sovereign governments, assumes the rights of sovereigns to exclusive management of territory under their effective police control.

The conceptual predicate attached to the Westphalian system of diplomacy and international relations is the theoretically impenetrable density of each sovereign nation state. No other sovereign is authorized to interfere in the internal affairs of another sovereign.[7] Under such an assumption, sovereigns are left with only the tools of war or diplomacy to impose their will on other states. There is very little conceptual room for a middle path that is more than the soft power of supplicating diplomacy but less than military conquest.

As the Westphalian system evolved over three centuries, military strategy came to focus on delivering crushing blows to the center of sovereign power in order to achieve political superiority over that state. The center of sovereignty was appropriately taken to be the capital city of the state’s ruling authority. Thus, Napoleon sought to humble Russia by taking his army to Moscow and the Allies in World War II made the capture of Berlin their primary objective in the campaign to end German aggression in Europe. The Union objective in the American civil war was likewise to capture Richmond, the capital of the rebellious Confederate states.

But in order to capture a capital, it was most often necessary to defeat in battle the armed forces sent to defend its approaches. Thus doctrines of hard power—of search and destroy combined with naval blockades—evolved as the centerpiece of national prowess.

The Westphalian strategic mindset immediately becomes dysfunctional when powers other than sovereign nation states are active. Where there are failed states such as Somalia or the former Yugoslavia or non-state actors such as Al-Qaeda, ISIS, or the Taliban or insurgencies such as in South Vietnam or El Salvador, reliance only on the alternatives of hard and soft power cannot bring about desired policy results in a timely and cost effective manner. Where resolution of tribal and sectarian conflicts are concerned—to be forestalled or terminated—neither hard nor soft power provides either calming remediation or lasting promotion of mutual forbearance.

Nor is the Westphalian system of absolutist nation state sovereignty suitable for accommodation of value-based movements such as the demand by civil society for better human rights, reduction of corruption in the state sector, more corporate social responsibility, a more responsible global process of financial intermediation and reduction of climate change hazards. None of these strategic challenges can be addressed with hard power and only fitfully can they be resolved through the use of diplomacy and other forms of soft power.

United States strategic policy making has succumbed to this Westphalian tyranny of the bi-polar or and ignored the genius of the multi-polar and.[8] When choices are defined as either/or, policy options condense themselves to unpalatable alternatives. Often one alternative is a disproportional attempt at hard power while the other is a seemingly feckless exercise in the abstractions of soft power.

But when choices are put in terms of and, a continuum of mid-range options emerges. Military deployments are not taken as a satisfactory substitute for diplomacy and diplomacy does not obviate the use of military force. This employment of a continuum approach to power echoes the recommendations of Basil Liddell Hart on the necessity of grand strategy, a vision of mobilizing all forms of power—financial, diplomatic, commercial, ethical - which could be brought to bear on an enemy’s will to fight on. Essential strategy thus expanded the scope of its operational capability beyond the pure utilization of battle or hard power strictu sensu.[9]

The most effective strategic approach is an associative one: different forms of power are aligned one with another in a comprehensive operational deployment.

The Contributions of Softer to Harder

Power Victories

Few famous military victories prove the point that combinations of power are most effective. One thinks of Hernan Cortes’ reliance on the advice and political skills of his consort, La Malinche, and thousands of armed Totonacs from Cempoala and Nahuas from Tlaxcala in his defeat of the Aztec Empire.

The heroic stand of Wellington’s infantry squares against Napoleon’s cavalry would have been for naught if Blucher’s Prussian IV Corps had not arrived at the battle late on the afternoon of Sunday, June 18, 1815. Wellington later called the battle "the nearest-run thing you ever saw in your life." Of the forces under his command, 17,000 were Dutch and 20,000 from the German principalities of Hanover, Brunswick and Nassau. Only 25,000 were British. Napoleon brought to the battle 72,000 French veterans.

American independence would never have been achieved without the alliance with the French monarchy. De Grasse’s fleet in the Chesapeake Bay made Washington’s defeat of Cornwallis possible. Furthermore, how could the colonies have come to the resolve to declare their independence from Great Britain without the voluntary committees of correspondence? And, was not the Continental Congress a necessary base of support for Washington’s field army?

British support for the Confederacy was foreclosed by Lincoln’s issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation, which put the terms of war in moral terms for a nation which had condemned slavery. Had the British government taken the side of the Confederacy to insure access to stocks of cotton for its factories, the hard power equation in arms and munitions which favored the Union would have shifted towards the secessionist states.

In alliance strategy of partnerships and collaboration was Winston Churchill’s strategy for waging a cold war against the expansion of Soviet Communism.[10] His over-all strategic concept was insuring the safety and welfare, the freedom and progress, of all the homes and families of all the men and women in all the lands. Patently this strategy relied above all on soft power and did not recommend a primary use of hard, kinetic application of military force as the best road to ultimate success in the conflict. His organizational preference for managing such an application of softer power was the United Nations, saying hopefully that We must make sure that its work if fruitful, that it is a reality and not a sham, that it is a force for action and not merely a frothing of words, that it is a true temple of peace in which the shields of many nations can someday be hung up . . . .

A most notable contribution of this softer use of power to success in strategic competition was the use of alliances by the United States as recommended by Churchill—The Organization of American States, NATO, CENTO, SEATO, a Mutual Defense Treaty with Japan—during its Cold War confrontation with expansionist Communists movements ruling Russia and its Soviet Union client states and China. American national security strategy of containment famously combined nuclear deterrence—very hard power—with coalitions of the willing to protect common interests.

In the Vietnam War, American forces won the conventional battles but the United States lost the war to defend South Vietnam from Communist aggression. The American failure was not in insufficient use of hard power. Politically, it was an inability to rally understanding and moral support from the American people to persevere in order to reap the results of military success on the ground attained by 1972 with the defeat of Hanoi’s summer offensive after its sponsored insurgency within South Vietnam had rather thoroughly dissipated.[11]

To emphasize the fundamental structural inadequacy of American hard power to accomplish the American goal of containing Vietnamese Communist power in the northern half of Vietnam, Hanoi’s fearsome Minister of Interior, General of Police, and member of its Politburo, Mai Chi Tho, once boasted: Ho Chi Minh might have been a fierce ghost and Nixon a great man. But we won and the Americans were defeated because we convinced people that Ho Chi Minh was a great man, Nixon a murderer and the Americans were aggressors.[12]

A supposedly contrary dictum of Mao Zedong testifying to the superiority of hard power is misunderstood. Mao said political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.[13] What the Chairman left unsaid was that before guns can be brought to bear on an enemy, soldiers must be mobilized to use the guns. Mobilization of men responds to soft power of belief and perceptions of who is an enemy and why. Mao’s success was less military than ideological and political. He mobilized millions to fight for his party. It was his access to softer forms of power that led to the defeat of Chiang Kai Shek and the Kuomintang.

Mao’s truth had previously been put quite nicely by Napoleon in his quip: A revolution is an idea which has found its bayonets. Napoleon also advised that the moral is to the physical as three to one because he believed There are only two forces in the world, the sword and the spirit. In the long run the sword will always be conquered by the spirit. Thus, for the use of hard power, he famously cautioned: Put your iron hand in a velvet glove.

Colin Powell notably said that Perpetual optimism is a force multiplier.[14]

Insight into the importance of what is hard to see and to measure emerges in the ancient Chinese classic Taoist text, the Tao Te Jing:

Thirty spokes converge on a single hub;

It is on the hole in the center that the use of the cart hinges.

We make a vessel from a lump of clay;

It is the empty space within the vessel that makes it useful.

We make doors and windows for a room;

But it is these empty spaces that make the room livable.

Thus, while the tangible has advantages;

It is the intangible that makes it useful.[15]

He who knows how to guide a ruler in the path of Tao does not try to override the world with force of arms. It is in the nature of a military weapon to turn against its wielder.[16]

In June 2012 the American Joint Chiefs of Staff released a study of lessons learned on the part of American military forces during their deployments to Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003.[17] The analysis concluded that US government and military applied a strategy and force suited for a different threat and environment in that Department of Defense policies, doctrine, training and equipment were often poorly suited to operations other than major combat, forcing widespread and costly adaption.[18] Conventional warfare approaches often were ineffective when applied to operations other than major combat, forcing leaders to realign the ways and means of achieving effects.[19] Conventional warfare was precisely defined as the use of hard power at scale: it was exemplified by fighting in World War II, Korea and Operation DESERT STORM where military force was the chief agent of national policy and targeting opposing uniformed military forces and there was centralized command and control and intelligence to support the massing of resources against the center of gravity of enemy forces with the purpose of weakening the opposing military force until capitulation of the nation state is achieved.[20]

President Barack Obama has acknowledged the strategic limitations of hard power as a plenipotentiary instrument for American national security remedial undertakings.[21] President Obama observed that, just because the United States has a hammer in its hard power capability, not every national security threat becomes a nail. He affirmed that not every problem has a military solution; he denied that military intervention is the only way for American to avoid looking weak; and he asserted firmly that . . . U.S. military action cannot be the only—or even primary—component of our leadership in every instance.

Clausewitz

An acceptable and familiar rubric for conceptualizing the respective roles of hard power, soft power and what lies between was provided by Clausewitz. His dictum that War is merely the continuation of policy by other means opens up a range of strategic possibilities for intense consideration.[22] The master framework for Clausewitz within which military power must be used is policy. But by this, Clausewitz does not imply a necessary polarization of power approaches to a duality of war as opposed to politics. Far from it. He rather implies that politics extends over a range of means, one of which is war, his particular fascination. Thus it follows that without any inconsistency wars can have all degrees of importance and intensity, ranging from a war of extermination down to simple armed observation.[23] The political object—the original motive for the war, wrote Clausewitz, will thus determine both the military objective to be reached and the amount of effort it requires.[24]

In his discussion of elements of strategy, Clausewitz puts first moral factors, asserting that the physical seem little more than the wooden hilt, while the moral factors are the precious metal, the real weapon, the finely-honed blade.[25] Essential to any fight is the will to engage, a moral factor of the first order.[26] Clausewitz found estimation of an enemy’s will far more difficult than his means for execution of that will. Indeed such difficulty confounded American strategists during the Vietnam conflict to defend South Vietnam from North Vietnam’s program of conquest.

The heart of Clausewitz’s recommendations on war is this: Essentially war is fighting, for fighting is the only effective principle in the manifold activities generally designated as war. Fighting, in turn, is a trial of moral and physical forces through the medium of the latter. Naturally, moral strength must not be excluded, for psychological forces exert a decisive influence on the elements involved in war.

A bi-polar continuum of actions along which policy can be executed can be formulated between politics and war that each is an extension of the other. The most interesting part of the continuum lies in its middle, where politics alone seems ineffectual but war is not an option either, as it would be illegal, too costly, impolitic, or bootless. In this middle range of policy alternatives, hard and soft power intermingle as a duality, not opposed as rivals one to the other. The commander’s choice is always some blend or combination of each. The strategic danger of course is that the chosen blend does not correspond to the needs of the situation.

The Limitations of Soft Power

Hard power has its limitations. As Clausewitz noted, the state may lack the funds or political will to use hard power as required under the circumstances, or it may not have readily at hand sufficient substance to make its hard power effective. Then, too, the instrumentalities of hard power may not be well suited to the political needs of the moment or may come at too high a political cost. Inherent in any use of hard power is momentum towards escalation of force and expense as the conflict encounters unexpected challenges and resistance on the part of the enemy or even allies. Embarking on deployment of hard power often precludes settlement of the issues in dispute at a lower level of cost and injury.

Thus in the heady atmosphere of American triumphalism upon the collapse of the Soviet Union and victory in the Cold War, Harvard Professor Joseph Nye called attention to the advantages of what he defined as soft power.[27] Nye proposed that there is workable form of power that did not require application of coercion, either through arms or economic suasion. It was stipulated to be a power of attraction, a psycho-cultural force field radiating out from the society supporting a state having a magnetic capacity to attract willing cooperation from outsiders. In the operative aspects of this soft power, a society’s beliefs and ideals, its lifestyle and cultural productions, its discourse, carried more universal appeal. Won over by this moral or ethical weltanschlaung, other governments, political movements or individuals would unconditionally rally behind the foreign policy of the radiant state to assist it in accomplishing its national security objectives. Nye presented soft power as a power of attraction.[28]

In this Nye followed in a redoubtable American cultural tradition. The Puritan leader John Winthrop set forth the vision of founding a New Jerusalem in the Massachusetts Bay Colony centered on Boston harbor. Winthrop wrote of the new community becoming a city upon a hill to which the eyes of the world would direct their admiring gazes. During the later American Revolution to assert the independence of that city upon a hill in the international Westphalian order of nation states, General George Washington would call upon his side in the struggle against the British King and Parliament to raise a standard to which the wise and the honest may repair.[29]

Thus presented, soft power comes conceptually with the comforting implication that it is relatively costless. The alliance of others comes naturally, automatically, without recourse to arms or compensation. The costs to the state of accumulating soft power are sunk. The domestic mores and institutions that generate soft power have already been paid for by the cultural dynamic with its political expressions that has given rise to the people or the nation-state in question. Nye supposed that power comes in two principle forms—command power or hard power and co-optive power, or soft power.[30]

Following Nye, a school of thought, perhaps even a discipline, has grown to provide recommendations for the application of soft power in national strategy. Though not every commentator has remained within the more passive vision of soft power that Nye presented as resting in the capacity for the attractive features of a nation and its culture—its moral high ground so to speak - to provoke unsolicited and willing adherence to its political and military endeavors.

In his presentation of soft power, Nye overlooks the contributions to a nation’s security needs which can be achieved by coalitions, alliances and collaborations. Nye’s vision of power is a force that can be wielded unilaterally in zero-sum manipulations of others. He defines power as the ability to get the outcomes one wants and avoids discussion of the outcomes which others may want. Nye associates power with simple equations of cause and effect, as in the rooster who thinks his crowing makes the sun rise.[31] It is a command and control model of international relations. Those whom we can’t control live beyond the pale in some unknown barbarian state of mind and being. This understanding of power echoes the arrogance of the Athenian negotiators who informed the inhabitants of the island of Melos upon their utter defeat in battle by Athenian forces that The strong do what they will; the weak what they must.[32] It is ultimately fear based. Such a formulation of power is misguided and adding to it a derivative category of soft power is naïve to say the least.

To the extent it exists in a global system of real politique and national, ethnic and sectarian ambitions, it would be on the far extreme of a Clausewitzian continuum of the forms of power opposed to operations of hard power. It is presented by Nye as the antithesis of hard power.

An appropriate analogy for soft power lies in Max Weber’s construct of charismatic authority. In the presence of a charismatic individual, followers are moved to loyalty and obedience by their perception of some magnificence, some transformative, transcendental, meaning brought to them by the leader. In return for this life-giving gift, they offer up their devotion and dedication to his cause and his instructions.

In the case of Vietnam, much commentary sought to explain the war’s dynamics as the emotional soft power of Ho Chi Minh to attract the loyalties of many Vietnamese, who would as a result of this power dedicate themselves to his cause, even to the point of death.

The telling point about charismatic authority is that it is the followers who create the power, not the leader. The leader is dependent on the followers from the perspective of power, not the other way around. If no one should acknowledge the presence of a charism in the would-be leader, he or she would remain quite ordinary without any worldly attribute of this form of power to attract loyalty.

The Ideal of Smart Power

Even Nye himself came to recognize the practical limitation of soft power. He therefore aligned himself with an alternative concept of smart power. He asserted that smart power was needed to counter the misperception that soft power alone can produce effective foreign policy."[33]

The Center for Strategic and International Studies has defined smart power as an approach that underscores the necessity of a strong military, but also invests heavily in alliances, partnerships, and institutions of all levels to expand American influence and establish legitimacy of American action.[34] Chester Crocker has described smart power as the strategic use of diplomacy, persuasion, capacity building, and the projection of power and influence in ways which are cost-effective and have political and social legitimacy."[35] Secretary of State Clinton called her smart power approach as one of elevating diplomacy and development assistance alongside defense.[36]

Smart power admits the limitations inherent in soft power by moving the focus of efforts from passive accumulation of appealing virtues to more hands-on engagement with others in joint undertakings.

Other commentators have placed their recommendations for efficacy in foreign policy in and around the camp of soft as opposed to hard power configurations of activity.

Associative Power

If, according to Clausewitz, war seeks to compel while purely rhetorical politics only to persuade, both seeking to clear away opposition to our will, then the middle range of power is that which achieves alignment between our will and the actions of others. This power is the ability to find allies and associates, to make common cause with those who can make a difference in the end. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton once noted with approval that America cannot solve the most pressing problems on our own . . . [37] Prof Joseph Nye, originator of the thought form of soft power agreed, saying Americans cannot achieve all their international goals acting alone. . . . We must also think in terms of power to accomplish goals that involves power with others.[38] And, Nye acknowledges that co-optive power, an aspect of his proposed soft power can be used to obtain hard power resources in the form of military or economic assistance.[39]

President Obama confirmed his belief in the need for a new form of power. He has said When crises arise that stir our conscience or push the world in a more dangerous direction but do not directly threaten us . . . in such circumstances we should not go it alone. Instead we must mobilize allies and take collective action. We have to broaden our tools . . . . We have to work with others because collective action in these circumstances is more likely to succeed, more likely to be sustained, less likely to lead to costly mistakes.[40]

What fills the void when hard power is unavailable or unproductive and soft power is too ephemeral is the fiduciary power of partnership, of joint ventures. For example, the US Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Decade of War analysis called for the application of associative power as a lesson learned from a decade of fighting and nation building in Afghanistan and Iraq. Weaknesses in the American efforts that needed to be overcome were said to be uneven interagency coordination and establishing and sustaining coalition unity was a challenge due to competing national interests, cultures, resources, and policies. Moreover, the analysis concluded that partnering was a key enabler and force multiplier, and aided in host-nation capacity building. However, it was not always approached effectively nor adequately prioritized and resourced.[41]

In May 2014 President Obama called for American counter-terrorism strategy to shift to a partnership model. But he had no doctrine, no guidelines, no field manual for implementing such a shift in strategic thinking.

Associative power cannot be compelled. A forced friend is a false friend. War is not the right means to bring about a strong partnership. Partners have duties to one another. The law calls them duties of loyalty and due care. Partnership rests on the moral sense, not on exploitation or repression.[42]

Nor is associative power soft in Nye’s sense. The attraction of soft power - that others like our values and what we stand for and so align their fortunes with us, can be strong but it can also be a weak force for cooperation. Those whose help we need may not fully share our values, our culture, our aspirations. This seems to have been the case in Iraq and Afghanistan and with many Muslims worldwide in the War on Terror. Interests may align, but not hearts. And even where interests may appear to align, unsettled hearts may refuse to act on such potential commonality of interest.

Associative or integrative power lies between two poles of unilateral power—hard and soft as defined by Nye. Associative power is the high mid-point on a normal Gaussian curve distribution of intentional policy activity, reflecting a different set of circumstances.[43] Whereas hard power operates through command and the exercise of dominion and soft power is similarly unidirectional bringing about full alignment with our values and objectives, associative power must blend the interests, values, fears and aspirations of two or more parties.

Associative power offers the reality of more resilience than either hard or soft power can. Hard power lacks stamina and can be defeated by tactics of attrition and asymmetric, micro-scale warfare. Soft power is easily defeated by just saying No!. Associative power offers a range of options, different levels of engagement, and many arenas of competition and potential success.

Associative power embraces the tactical arenas of economics, communications with techniques of persuasion and rhetoric, social networking, cultural anthropology and psychology, political alliances, friendship and offering to perform the offices of a friend, crass and self-interested hard bargaining and deal-making, more gentle negotiations and mediation, and much more. Associative power runs along the gamut of human relations and motivations accumulating and aggregating social force with which to sustain collaboration in joint undertakings.

The practical need giving rise to such associative power is the motivation which calls forth partnerships, joint ventures and agency appointments—the fact that one party cannot succeed on its own. Neither its hard power nor its soft power appears sufficient to accomplish its objectives unilaterally.

An identified fault with American efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to the US Joint Chiefs of Staff analysis, was that the planned end states were based largely on US expectations instead of those consistent with the host nation and mission. For example, the planned end state for Afghanistan was envisioned to be a strong central government despite no record of such a government in Afghan history and lack of broad popular support for system of government.[44]

The application of associative power expands the total quantum of power available in the social system. Where nothing happens due to a lack of combination of skills, will and resources, stasis and entropy are carried forward. But in such cases cooperation brings about new enterprise and new achievements. Progress happens; change comes about. Working together produces more results than working singly. This is why associative power always occurs in tandem with growth—in economic productivity, in expansion of political participation, and in intensification of social prowess. Lone rangers may be heroic but they can’t scale their accomplishments without partners.

The application of associative power is a virtuous circle: associative power augments the scale of outcomes and raises the probability of success; more accomplishment empowers more people to participate in new associative power arrangements. Thus, associative power provides a way for successful containment of insurgencies. The power of an insurgent or a terrorist wanes as the people associate themselves with public governance, making it a real presence in their communities from small to large. Associative power is a counterinsurgency force multiplier.

But for associative power to be effective the reliance of associates on one another must be protected. Partners in a joint venture need to have fiduciary duties to one another if they are to cooperate to the maximum in furtherance of their common objective.

Associative power has two aspects: extension of capability through recruitment of others and denial of such capability to opponents. Just as the United States can use associative power, so too can its adversaries. They can mobilize their own allies and bring into being their own coalitions of the willing. Thus application of associative power—such as keeping Great Britain from coming to the aid of the confederacy of southern states during the American Civil War—to deny power to adversaries is a strategically vital task. In the context of insurgencies and terrorist movements, this aspect of associative power seeks to keep communities from supporting the insurgents or the terrorists.

In particular, where there are insurgencies and terrorist movements and failed states producing conflict and distress, the United States needs an effective mechanism by which to rally those who can help confront and defeat such purveyors of violence and oppression. Mere neutrality on the part of a population subjected to insurgency and terrorist recruitment is not enough to eliminate such movements. Rather, affirmative affiliation with the counterinsurgent or the counter terrorist by the people turns the tide of history against those who seek to establish their own authority by first destroying that of another.

The appropriate application of Associative Power

Associative power is more strategic than either hard power and soft power. Hard and soft power lend themselves to interim tactical accomplishment. Hard power is best deployed in battle, as Clausewitz recommended. But when victory cannot be obtained by battles alone, hard power fails as a strategy. Soft power is best deployed within an existing framework of association and collaboration. It is not strong enough to bring forth lasting cooperation outside of its home culture and society. Soft power can be easily nullified through selective assassination of its advocates and through terror in general.

Generally, the most fitting use of hard power is in the short-term when the enemy’s organized military units can be brought to battle in the open field and destroyed, such as in the defeat of Saddam Hussein’s army in the first Iraq War to liberate Kuwait. And further, as a general rule, hard power is not appropriate to use against insurgencies and terrorists. Associative power is.

The insurgent and the terrorist trade space for time. They surrender space—police control of territory—in order to buy time. Time always works against conventional hard power forces. They are expensive and depend on home front enthusiasm for the war. A war that goes on too long at too great a cost becomes a political liability and so becomes harder and harder to maintain. Thus the first goal of the insurgent or the terrorist is to buy time to keep up the fight day in and day out.

But when the insurgent or the terrorist seeks to buy time, he must retain access to a base of popular support as a source of supplies and new recruits. As Chairman Mao gloated: guerillas are fish who swim in the sea of the people. To catch such fish, the sea needs to be drained. Conventional search and destroy operations passing briefly through village communities can’t drain the sea of popular support away from territorially nimble insurgents or from terrorists lying low with their families and friends.

To deny insurgents and terrorists access to a supportive base, counter-insurgency must be population centric. Associative power is more appropriate than both hard and soft power in denying insurgents and terrorists access to their life line and their ability to buy time.

Further, most insurgencies and terrorists use associative power to blunt the government’s deployment of hard and soft power. Up against soft power, associative power uses violence within the local community. Up against hard power, associative power uses tactics of retreat and return to maintain dominion over local communities. Within associative power also lie the instruments of ideology and politics to foment dissent against conventional forces billeted in local communities. Thus, terrorists and insurgents and their supporters can often operate with impunity in open defiance of conventional forces assigned to clear and hold tactical deployments.

To counter the associative power of the insurgents, there is no better option than to mobilize different associative power on behalf of the government. This was the perspective taken by Ambassador William Colby when he became head of CORDS in 1968. He resolved to fight a people’s war against the Viet Cong insurgency.

Notes

1. Colleen McCain Nelson, G-8 Grapples over Moscow, Islamic State, Wall Street Journal, June 9, 2015, p.A6

2. McNamara, Robert, In Retrospect: the Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam (New York; Times Books) 1995; pp. 321,322

3. Bolger, Daniel. P. Why We Lost, (Boston Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2014)

4. Ibid, p. 157

5. Ibid, p.158

6. Weber, Max, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, Talcott Parsons editor (New York, Oxford University Press 1947); Huntington, Samuel P., Political Order in Changing