The Strategy of Peace

Copyright 2005 by Perry Jones

The Strategy of Peace is not a pacifist policy. The Strategy of Peace is an assertive strategy based on military and political power. Nations which employ a pacifist stance act the role of victim and soon become victims of more powerful nations. A nation employing a policy of strength has greater potential for ensuring its security and longevity.

Underpinning the Strategy of Peace is a military truism: War is not about opposing armies, it is about the will of those who would send armies to war.

Utilizing this principle, the Strategy of Peace targets the will of the enemy leadership, convincing them that their initiation of hostilities would not only fail to attain their objectives, but would, in fact, be counterproductive to those objectives, to the entity or organization from which forces would be drawn and even to the leadership itself.

The Strategy of Peace is a simple strategy and consists of several steps:

1. Identify the enemy leadership - those who have decision-making power on whether or not to go to war.

2. Identify the organization. This could be a nation-state, political faction, regional coalition, a networked organization, terrorist pact or local gang.

Each organization seeks survival and respect. There is no organization whose objective is self-destruction, although the destruction of the individual for the sake of the organization may be a valid principle for that organization.

3. Identify the motives and objectives of the organization. What philosophy does the organization adhere to and/or seek to promote?

4. Identify the reasons and objectives the enemy entertains for hostile operations.

5. Search through all the data recovered and prepare a strategy which identifies the enemy's strengths and exploits the enemy's weaknesses while magnifying your strengths and neutralizing your weaknesses. This plan, the Strategy of Peace, will highlight and leverage Steps 7 through 9 below.

6. Prepare a fully orchestrated campaign utilizing all available channels of distribution to reach the enemy leadership and ensure that they receive your message.

The mass media, political analysts, think tanks, college students, broadcast networks and talk shows, letters between corporations, husbands and wives, parents and students; multinational organizations, intelligence organizations, sports authorities and teams, et al, all may be contacted and/or employed (openly or surreptitiously) as a means to convey the terms of the Strategy of Peace to the enemy leadership.

The message to convey to the enemy leadership must include the following points:

7. Convince the enemy leadership they cannot achieve those objectives if they do go to war.

8. Convince the enemy leadership that the material and psychological (to the mass body politick)costs of war to the enemy will simply be too great to recover from.

9. Encourage the enemy leadership that they may be able to attain the objectives they seek by going to war against some other entity.

Step 9, if successful, will serve to diminish the enemy's military capabilities, reducing its ability to prosecute a war in the future. This may also serve to fracture the political infrastructure of the state and any such fractures must be exploited.

The Strategy of Peace is as applicable with guerrilla warfare, terrorist operations and gang activities as it is with nation-state operations.