Understanding Wylie’s Concept of ‘Control’
I’ve spent near enough two years examining and discussing the work and ideas of J.C. Wylie, a man I consider to have been a vastly underrated strategic thinker. Rarely do I receive critical commentary on his work that actually engages with some aspect or issue with the nuts-and-bolts of his thinking. In most cases it is about his pithy quotes or a perceived lack of originality when held up against a certain Prussian cholera victim.
One of the few comments I’ve received (more than a few times now) that represents a legitimate questions about his theory is what, precisely, he meant by control. Control is after all a simple but imprecise word on which to hang a lot of intellectual and theoretical weight. In defense of the question I think it’s one of the few areas where Wylie’s tightly packed prose failed to render with the needed clarity. The reason for this is that the answer, I believe, can in fact be found in the text. Unfortunately it simple must be taken from two separate portions of the text and spliced back together. Quoted below are the two portions I think Wylie might’ve been better served keeping together rather than separating by sixteen pages.
“The ultimate determinant in war is the man on the scene with the gun. This man is the final power in war. He is control. He determines who wins. There are those who would dispute this as an absolute, but it is my belief that while other means may critically influence war today, after whatever devastation and destruction may be inflicted on an enemy, if the strategist is forced to strive for final and ultimate control, he must establish, or must present as an inevitable prospect, a man on the scene with a gun. This is the soldier." (Wylie, USNI ed., p. 72)
"Destruction in each of these two cases is only one component of control, and not the whole of it. The soldier exercises ultimate control by his unchallenged presence on the scene. The sailor contributes to control in part by destruction, but as much by other components. Like the soldier, in some cases, by his presence. Or, as often as not, by making possible various political or economic pressures toward control." (Wylie, USNI ed., p. 88)
By failing to specify what the ultimate manifestation of control actually is, Wylie made it more difficult to discern, from a casual reading, what precisely one should consider the benchmark of Control. And since his theory of control is prefaced on control existing in various states or forms, best understood in a matter of degrees. One can only properly scale those individual degrees with the knowledge of one or both absolute ends that provide clear delineating benchmarks. Once this benchmark is established, however, it becomes much, much easier to see where the degrees stretch out from there. From this point it is a fairly straightforward process of reverse-engineering where one can mark the different degrees that connect Wylie’s idea of the ‘man on the scene with the gun’ all the way up through his ideas of coercion and deterrence.
Simply the idea of the ‘unchallenged presence’ is something that could, and probably should, be more fully explored and perhaps someday soon I or someone else will write that article. Because it has a great deal to do with the broader ideas of choice, consent, coercion, deterrence, and destruction in the practice of strategy. That being said Adam Elkus, Dave Lyle, and myself touched on the cognitive aspects of choice and consent in strategy and power for the excellent Personal Theories of Power series.
