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Volume 5, Issue 2, Spring 2016
Infinity Journal
Page 7
set of basic geographic (human and physical) impediments.
It may be that the physical distances are great, as they are,
for instance, in the middle of Africa. It may be that the moral
impediment is extreme, as regards, for instance, the territory
of our neighbor Canada. The second layer of the map we
call the impunity layer. It depicts foreign territorial spaces
wherein some negative set of conditions or events exist
which might create an effective quantity of American desire
to visit with force, uninvited. We base this layer on the notion
that someone somewhere will be trying to get away with
something that Americans, as a country and represented by
the US government, find impossible to tolerate. In other words,
there exist and will exist, even in the near-term, some basic
reasons for the United States government to decide to run
additional risk, and to bear costs in terms of human life,moral
authority,diplomatic leverage or simple logistical expenditure.
The third map layer depicts invitational deployment. Given
the nature of American diplomacy, the evolution of defense
treaties and other accords, and a dynamic quantity of
what other peoples perceive as American empathy for their
concerns, there also exists the possibility that a genuine
invitation would be extended for the presence of ostentatious
American military might in the form of conventional units.We
only find three places where this seems reasonably likely to
happen or continue, and as to all three (Kuwait, South Korea,
and Eastern Europe) our prediction is based on the fact
that some level of conventional US ground force structure is
already there.
There is a fourth current or set of phenomena that we do
not depict as a layer on
The Access Environment
map,
but which would nevertheless be a significant ingredient
in a decision to send or not to send US military forces into
foreign territory. That set of phenomena could be referred to
as ‘national interests’, and here refers to a set of motivations
held by US senior leaders, but not necessarily known to or
even shared by the US public. These motivations might
include selective or preferential economic advantages or
politically influential emotive or ideological values. They
might also include validly perceived threats that become
known to leadership via professional intelligence, but which
cannot be openly revealed. In any case, we are not able to
create a cartographic layer showing the influence that all
these kinds of ‘national interests’ have on the likelihood of US
global military movement and placement. They are exactly
those factors not suited to visual depiction.We mention them,
however, as an unmapped influence in order to underline
that almost any amount of risk might be accepted, run,
overcome, or costs paid if the rewards seemed sufficient or
if the predictable costs of not running the risk were deemed
too great by national leadership. We also admit as how the
elements of the four layers (three fairly easy to depict and
one not) are separable only in theory. Their overlap and
inter-relationship cannot be dismissed or drawn away, and
without the dimension of ‘national interests’, it is impossible
to comprehensively discuss a particular case. Nevertheless,
the map reminds us not that distances are neither wholly
determinant of our options nor determinant of the outcome
of our endeavors, but that without an explicit, habitual
calculation of distance we cannot reasonably compare
relative military strength. We also cannot understand the
culminating points of our various enterprises or how one
affects another, and we will not do strategy well. Whatever
levels of rectitude or existential imperative we might or might
not be able to assign to the unmapped ‘national interests’,
these latter will not be correctly framed without clarity
regarding the other layers proffered here.
Risk distance is the relevant common denominator that allows
a planner to compare the advantages and disadvantages
produced by various seemingly disparate inputs, and it gives
a strategic planner a tool for considering the effect that
one seemingly detached military or non-military action (the
employment of one or another element of national strategy)
has on all others. In order to mount a bombing raid on Libya
from a base in the United Kingdom, the distances might be
far greater than the map might initially indicate if diplomatic
relationships with France do not produce a right to overfly
French territory on the way.[xiii] Diplomatic conditions with
France might not put such a raid beyond the culminating
point in the mind of a given American President, but they
could certainly add cost distance. We could argue that the
positioning of Outpost Keating in Afghanistan was beyond
the prudent risk distance
ab initio
. It was operationally
imprudent to place an outpost at the bottom of the valley
near Kamdesh given the likelihood that the enemy could
create a disadvantageous correlation of force that would
compel our abandonment of the position.[xiv] We leave for
a separate discussion at what point the compounding of
imprudent tactical decisions constitutes imprudent strategy.
We suggest, however, that if distance theory had been a
staple in the diet of US military education – if Clausewitz’
culminating point were as favored a theme as ‘center of
gravity’ – then the design and deployment of American
military force in recent decades might have been more
effective. Going forward, in order to build a more grounded
strategic education, we think that historical investigations of
risk distance would be a healthy start.[xv]
The Access Environment
is a map of risk distances. We invite
challenge to specific assertions, to which we are hardly wed.
[xvi] We believe that risk distance is a valid and centrally
useful concept not only at the global scale, but at all scales
of military competition. A
mapamundi
divided by county-
size (county, not country) territorial units would perhaps
be more useful to special operating forces. We did not
build
The Access Environment
map or our argument from
any presumption of geographic determinism.[xvii] Rather,
inseparably mixing physical and human geography, we find
distance, as measured in costs and risk, to have a singularly
influential impact on decision-making. Failure to correctly
interpret distance is a great fouler of ill-conceived plans.
Failure to address distance at all is a failure of strategic theory.
Risk Distance
Geoffrey Demarest, Ivan B.Welch, and Charles K. Bartles