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If the West is associated with a certain set of liberal institutionalized practices, and perceptions of time layered into these institutions shape its use of military power, it remains to engage the final dimension of temporality, and notably the pace of war.

Clausewitz distinguishes between abstract war—war in theory—which will escalate to absolute war without breaks in the fighting, and war in reality, in which such breaks are common for a wide variety of reasons, including the imbalance between offense and defense, and imperfect knowledge.³⁵ In the Clausewitzian tradition war is thus fought at a variable pace but has a culminating point defined by battle. Despite the historical inaccuracy of this battle-centric understanding of war, it nevertheless powerfully shapes Western perceptions of the pace of war.³⁶ It stands in contrast to supposedly Oriental conceptions of war, in which warfare is an activity not to seek battle but to deceive and conquer the mentality of the opponent—an approach commonly traced to Chinese strategist Sun Tzu but first introduced by the Greek poet Homer, who contrasted it to strategies of physical victory.³⁷ The Romans, especially, recognized the occasional “profit” in trickery but maintained—and thus shaped a stubborn idea in Western thought—that the enemy could only be truly conquered by “open hand-to-hand combat,” namely battle.³⁸ This opened a tension within Western thinking on war between the idea that the path to such decisive battles involved patience and improvisation, and thus an ability to work with the pace of war as imposed by circumstance, and the contrasting idea that Western governments had tools at their disposal to cut through such circumstances and impose speed on war, thereby steering it toward the decisive battle.

The question is thus whether the West must be subjected to the pace of war or can be its master. The impact of the Enlightenment and the rise of liberal society within the West has tended to shift Western military thought in the latter direction: one where the West can and must direct the pace of war. This is not because liberal society got involved in military affairs and sought to direct them. Quite to the contrary: because liberal society was set apart from the military domain, and because liberal society privileges human life over communal values such as national prestige or glory, military communities of Western states have come to embrace accelerated wars of maneuver that promise an end to attrition and hence quick victory. Tension and mistrust between Western liberal and military communities have thus since the late nineteenth century caused the military to explore the operational level of war, where one encounters the blitzkrieg idea that superior generalship and bold military dashes can deliver the intense but short-lived military effort that liberal society is willing to tolerate, as well as the justice it craves. Regrettably, as Freedman notes, such liberal–military compromises tend to produce problematic strategies of forced warfare that run afoul of complex realities and tragically generate the attritional warfare they were designed to avert.³⁹

Relief was offered by the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) that was in vogue in the 1990s as the Cold War ended and Western concepts of maneuver warfare prevailed in the 1991 Gulf War. The RMA promised that, with advanced electronic means of intelligence gathering and communication, new weapons and networked forces, along with robust doctrines targeting vulnerable nodes in enemy networks, Western forces would lift the fog of war and allow Western governments to direct the enemy to the point where it would be decisively defeated. The RMA embedded not only the idea of battle as the decisive element in war but also the idea that Western governments could control and accelerate the pace of war at will. In so doing it further embedded a long-esteemed tradition of premising Western international influence on operational mastery in war.

To conceptualize how such perceptions of time and war come together to shape the preparation and conduct of war, Olivier Schmitt has coined the term “wartime paradigms.” Schmitt argues that these “emerge at the intersection between socio-technological and security-political imaginaries,”⁴⁰ and that a specific wartime paradigm can be identified in Western warfare after the Cold War. Specifically, this wartime paradigm is geared toward optimizing the armed forces for speed while treating war as a form of risk management. The concept of “network-centric warfare” is related to the RMA and remains, under different names, an operational ambition. It encapsulates this perception of speed as critical to achieving battlefield superiority: network-centric warfare is fundamentally the vision of “an emerging, information superiority-driven, information technology-enabled conception of warfare, one in which the ability to gather, process, distribute, and act on information faster than the enemy is seen as the key to victory.”⁴¹ Moreover, and critically, this emphasis on speed is combined with a conception of war as risk management, meaning the definition of the security agenda in terms of risks (to be managed) instead of threats (to be deterred). The result is never-ending military operations: “cyclical open-ended approaches remain necessary since risks cannot be completely eliminated and require constant management.”⁴²

This combination led to a distinctive shape of Western warfare after the Cold War, combining a preference for military interventions (used as a tool of international policing in a risk management perspective) and a force structure favoring expeditionary capabilities.⁴³ Consequently “the post-Cold War wartime paradigm has … shaped a particular way of using force for western warfare. On the one hand, the conception of war as risk management led to a strategic posture in which armed forces have to be able to react quickly to whatever emergency may arise, while also being able to manage such risks in the long run.… On the other hand, the operational and doctrinal concepts guiding the transformation of western armed forces emphasized achieving military superiority by disrupting the adversary’s system through superior speed (in intelligence-gathering and processing, decision-making, targeting, etc.).”⁴⁴

Recent Western military interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other countries and regions have demonstrated how difficult it is for the West to translate its preponderance and its proclivity toward speed into swift victories.