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p.41-42 Isaiah Berlin’s famous essay The Hedgehog and the Fox was
an examination of the work of Leo Tolstoy that rested on an observation from the ancient Greek poet Archilocus that ‘the
fox knows many things but the hedgehog knows one big thing’. From this platform, Berlin argued that:
there exists a great chasm between those… who relate everything
to a single central vision,…- a single, universal, organising principle - and… those who pursue many ends, often
unrelated and even contradictory, connected, if at all, only in some de facto way.
Berlin likened the former category to hedgehogs
and the latter to foxes... in Berlin’s mind, hedgehogs were not stupid or limited, they were simply focused.
p.42 War is a complex undertaking... In order
to provide a measure of cohesion to the preparation and conduct of war, a degree of focus is needed... Failure
to find this idea threatens what Berlin warned about: the pursuit of 'many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected,
if at all, only in some de facto way'. As we stumble through the maze of contemporary conflict and find ourselves
dealing with wicked problems, design thinking, complex adaptive systems, anthropology, sociology,
community policing, development aid, and the provision of reticulated water and sewerage to remote localities in the developing
world - as well as combat against a highly motivated and ruthless enemy - the need for a unifying hedgehog idea is
greater than ever.
p.42 Clausewitz settled on a simple, central, unifying
idea for the conduct of wars: ‘the destruction of the enemy is what matters most’.
p.43 The aim of this article is to investigate whether
there is still ‘a single universal organising principle’ - a hedgehog idea - that underpins contemporary warfare,
as annihilation underpinned that of the industrial age.
p.43 Because it seeks the physical manipulation of an abstract
quality, strategy is always conjectural. In essence, all strategies are based on hypothetical stimulus-response
pairings to be applied in an incompletely understood socioeconomic model. As a result, strategies can only
be validated by praxis. [JLJ - from Wikipedia, praxis is the process by which a theory, lesson,
or skill is enacted or practiced, embodied and/or realized. It is a practical and applied knowledge to one's actions.]
p.51 In 1967, Admiral J C Wylie gave us two profound
pieces of wisdom when he wrote: ‘The aim of war is some measure of control over the enemy’ and
‘the ultimate determinant in war is the man on the scene with the gun. This man is the ultimate power in war.
He is control. He determines who wins.’ If we accept Wylie’s proposition that the man on the
scene with the gun ‘is control’ then to be in control that man needs to be ‘ours’ and not the enemy’s.
p.52 Only a military can establish control and until
it is established, democracy, the economy, the rule of law, policing and social progress must wait. The establishment
of control necessarily has two aspects: one focused on the removal (by annihilation?) of the enemy’s ‘man with
a gun’, and the other in putting our soldier in that man’s place.
p.52 Conclusion
In the face of a plethora of writings about complexity and the
military system, hedgehog ideas remain important if complex organisations are to act purposefully and energetically
in the face of complicated and dynamic circumstances.
p.53 Once the enemy’s ability to contest control has
been removed, locally or generally, the establishment of friendly control can set the scene for progress
in other aspects of the campaign plan.
p.53 The beauty of accepting control as the military’s hedgehog
idea is that it places the notion of annihilation (to which it is closely akin) within a strategic and campaign context
and subordinates violence to strategy. Importantly it does not see combat as an undesirable externality or as a manifestation
of failure, but as the core business for armies.
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