When my colleague here at the University of Hawai'i, Anthony Marsella, asked me to join his Disaster Management and Humanitarian Assistance team last semester, I knew what the immediate job was. It was to kill trees. The trees, of course, were to be sacrificed to the University bureaucracy. For Tony had a dream, a dream of building a strong and flourishing partnership between the University of Hawai'i and the Center of Excellence. Then, out of this partnership would arise a new master's and certificate degree in "Disaster Management, Humanitarian Assistance, and International Peace-keeping". Unfortunately, in order to make this dream a reality, the "Disaster Team" (as the joke went) first had kill an enormous number of trees so as to satisfy the University bureaucracy's unending appetite for paper, paper, and still more paper. "Documentation," they call it.

As the fall semester began, we initiated the first steps towards the team's goal of submitting ten copies of a request for Authorization to Plan. To minimize the environmental damage, we used 30% recycled paper. However, if my immediate job—killing trees—was clear from the start, I was not at all clear about my long-term job. After we had killed all those trees and obtained approval for a master's and a certificate, what would my role be? I would teach, of course, but what? Political philosophy, in general, and my particular interest in the congressional war powers seemed about as relevant to humanitarian assistance as to doughnut making.

Clearly, I had nothing to offer on the technical side; the staff at the Center was immeasurably more qualified on that score. Likewise, I had nothing to offer on the refugee side. Because of Tony's leadership of the team, one of the distinguishing features of the University of Hawai'i's program is a much-needed emphasis on succoring the psychic, as well as the physical, needs of refugees and displaced persons. But again, serious psychological research is needed to do this, not political philosophy, no matter how serious. To identify my role, I had first to identify a problem for which political philosophy might provide a solution. After considerable thought over the summer, I think I have identified such a problem—the civil-military gap. In addition, bridging this gap is one of the core missions of the Center, which means that my wild conceptual musings might possibly prove useful.

The civil-military gap arises, naturally enough, from many sources. In part, it is merely historical, a recognition of the fact that the relief and assistance business has in the past been considered a civilian enterprise, especially at the international level. This part of the problem is solved simply by creating a new history, by having the military and civil organizations operate together. In part the gap is simply a personnel problem, the military and the civil personnel involved in a humanitarian operations having never met. They do not know each other. They have never worked together. How are they to cooperate if they do not know with whom to cooperate? This part of the problem is solved relatively easily by providing opportunities for people to meet each other. The Center does an excellent job of doing just that.

In part, and more important, the gap arises out of different cultures—organizational cultures. The military is rigidly hierarchical; the civilian side is much more decentralized. Worse, the military usually goes into an operation unified; the civilian side disparate, many organizationally unconnected groups, each tackling its own piece of the emergency in its own way. This part of the problem is also solved relatively easily by providing opportunities for each organization to learn of the other's structure, methods, and culture. Again, the Center does an excellent job of doing this.

In part, though, the gap arises out of the conceptual baggage that we have developed over the last three or four hundred years that we are carrying with us into our post-modern, globalizing world. It is here that I think political philosophy, in general, and my particular interest in the declaring of war might be of some value. Yes, the historical, personnel, and cultural sources of the civil-military gap can be bridged by bringing people together. But the conceptual sources will require serious, imaginative, and sustained philosophical reflection on the meaning of war, intervention, sovereignty, and a host of allied issues.

Out of this host of issues war is, unquestionably, the most important, the one that has to be tackled first. For, once a proper conception of war has been re-established, the civil-military gap vanishes—and all the other issues become tractable, if not easily resolved. But, before making the gap vanish, one needs to understand how it was created in the first place.

At the conceptual level, the civil-military gap arises because we moderns misconceive of war as armed conflict, as violence, as the violence of combat. The logical consequence of this misconception is to separate military matters, which are seen as involving the violence of combat, from civil matters, which are seen as "non-violent" in that they do not involve the violence of combat. Once so separated, a seemingly unbridgeable conceptual gap appears—the military are technicians of violence; civilians are technicians of peace—health professionals, relief workers, and such. The former, in a word, is the antithesis of the latter.

The ancients, of course, would not have understood this modern bifurcation of the social-political world onto mutually exclusive military and civil spheres. This was particularly true of the Greeks. In ancient Greece, Athena was not merely the goddess of wisdom; she was the goddess of wisdom because she was simultaneously the goddess of both war and the arts and crafts of peace. Indeed, she was wise precisely because of her skill and experience in both, precisely because she encompassed and synthesized the full range of human knowledge and experience. To illustrate this, she was usually depicted sitting, leaning on her upright spear, her helmet pushed back, her head bowed in thought.

In stark and brutal contrast, the god of battle was Ares, a furious, irrational and despicable god unloved by all. The mythological point, of course, is that the line of cleavage runs not between war and peace, but between the thoughtless, purposeless irrationality of combat on the one hand, and on the other hand, the thoughtful, purposeful rationality of social-political life, which naturally encompasses both war and peace. (As an aside, one wonders why feminist scholars have not picked up on this aspect of Greek mythology: The irrational emotionalism of purposeless action for the sake of action is a masculine trait; the rational wisdom of purposeful action is a feminine trait.)

Our modern misconception of war as violence—as Ares, and not as Athena—can be traced back to writers such as Erasmus, Thomas More, and John Colet in the early sixteenth century. But it was not until the latter half of the nineteenth century, during the long peace that followed the wars of the French Revolution and Empire, during the rise of the industrial middle-class, when the military and naval arts, following the fashions of the day, attempted to transform themselves into the military and naval sciences, that the unnatural bifurcation of the military from the civil began to have practical consequences, consequences with which we are still living. For example, it was during this period that efforts were set a foot to outlaw war. These efforts eventually found formal expression with the ill-timed, ill-fated Pact of Paris, more commonly known as the Kellogg-Briand Pact, 1928.

However, the most pernicious effects of the modern misconception of war as violence are not found in the continuing calls to outlaw war. Rather, they are found in the way in which the civil-military gap confuses and muddies the way we think. For example, in a recent article on the need to protect especially children from egregious rights abuses, Mike Aaronson, Director of Save the Children, UK, concludes that, "Therefore, responsibility [to protect the rights of displaced persons] also rests with the international community—both individual countries, and the bodies and agencies of the UN System [whenever a nation or armed group fails to provide such protection]." He next suggests that the United Nations, "Establish the principle that, where states cannot or will not meet their obligations to internally displaced persons, international humanitarian access will be granted." He then comments, "The latter is not an open invitation to intervention or a threat to sovereignty. It is recognition that the failure to protect dislocated children is an issue of international concern. This puts member states of the UN under an obligation to provide the necessary financial support for this task" (Guardian Weekly, August 3-9, 2000, p22).

Although perhaps not obvious at first, Aaronson has fallen into the civil-military gap. And having fallen in, his argument is as flawed as his conclusions are unrealistic. To be sure, his initial assertion of international responsibility for displaced persons is sound, although I worry that he may not be able to construct the argument that would lead to this conclusion. Further, the principle he wishes to establish does follow logically from his assertion of this responsibility. However, his principle is little more than a pipe dream, because it quite simply ignores the pressing problem of "granted by whom?" Establishing a principle without also establishing a political structure to determine when a state has or has not met its obligations is to talk the talk without being able to walk the walk.

More important though, Aaronson has denied the war-like implications of his principle. To be sure, Aaronson is correct: simply establishing the principle as "an issue of international concern" neither invites intervention nor threatens sovereignty. Talking the talk threatens no one; it invites no one to do anything except talk, talk, talk. However, if Aaronson desires the international community to actually do something, to actually act on his principle, then in most cases, his principle is unquestionably a threat to sovereignty and not merely an invitation to intervention, but an imperative rule requiring intervention.

Now, for several millennia before Thucydides, interven- ing in the affairs of another clan, tribe, or nation was considered a threat to that clan, tribe, or nation's sovereignty. It was casus belli, pure and simple. As Euripides makes clear in his Suppliant Women, whenever human-itarian assistance is resisted, war ensues, just as surely as stomach upset ensues from eating one too many slices of pizza. But, if war necessarily ensues from even the slightest resistance to an intervention, combat need not. The distinction requires explanation.

The civil-military gap arises out of the modern mis-conception of war as violence—the violence of combat. Superficially, the misconception is a simple reductionism in which the infinite complexity of war has been reduced to cinematographic simplicity, to that which can be captured on film. Film, of course, captures little of war but the violence of combat—as Steven Speilberg has demonstrated yet again in his Saving Private Ryan. More deeply though, the reduction is accomplished by means of a whole-part fallacy in which the whole—war—is defined by one of its parts—its violent part, combat. War, needless to say, is an immensely complex social, cultural, political, industrial, historical, psychological, logistical, and strategic enterprise. Crucially, none of these elements are violent, physically violent. Only combat is physically violent.

Thus, when one defines war as violence, one excludes most of war. It is like defining humanitarian assistance as feeding people. While not untrue in itself, humanitarian assistance is much more than passing out doughnuts, just as war is much more than the violence of combat. One can even go a step further. Anyone who believes that human- itarian assistance is just feeding people demonstrably does not understand what humanitarian assistance is. Likewise, anyone who believes that war is violence demonstrably does not understand war. The ancients understood war in its full complexity: War is Athena, not Ares.

The first consequence of this reduction of the whole to one of its parts is that the term, "war," disappears to be replaced by the term, "armed conflict." As a result of this re-labeling of the phenomenon, no "wars" have been fought anywhere in the world since 1945, although several hundred "armed conflicts" have raged. This feat is, of course, a terminological trick: "War," by definition, must be formally declared; an "armed conflict" results by default whenever the "war" is not formally declared. Since no government has formally declared war since 1945, no wars could possibly have occurred, by definition, only "armed conflicts." The second and much more important consequence is that, logically, "armed conflict" cannot be justified except in the most extreme circumstance. After all, who could justify the violence of combat, except in the most dire situations. In practical terms, this means that "armed conflict" is justified only when "vital national interests" are at stake.

This, needless to say, is the point at which Aaronson, along with the rest of us, fall into the civil-military gap: If "armed conflicts" can be justified only when the most "vital national interests" are at stake, then in all logic, the military cannot be deployed on humanitarian missions. This is the case because no "vital national interests" are at stake, only the human rights of others, who as foreigners, can never number among "our" "vital national interests." The assertion's seemingly plausible consequence can be further supported in one of two ways: On the one hand, one can argue that the military is not trained for human-itarian tasks. They are trained as technicians of violence; only civil agencies possess the appropriate skills, organization, and training. On the other hand, despite any competence the military might possess for human-itarian operations, it still should not be deployed, because to do so will degrade its ability to defend the nation's "vital interests."

In fine, the military is simply not an appropriate agency for humanitarian missions because they are technicians of violence, not of peace, which is an exclusively civilian field of expertise. And indeed, from the premise that "war" is violence (or, more accurately for moderns, that "armed conflict" is violence) the conclusion that the civil and the military are mutually exclusive follows as inexorably as French fries follow a Big Mac.

But what if the basic premise is false? What if war is not violence? In this case the modern gap between the civil and the military vanishes, at least at the conceptual level if not at the personnel and organizational cultural levels. Having vanished, one can then begin to recover the ancient wisdom concerning the denouncing of war, for example. Then, with this wisdom in hand, one can begin to identify the criteria and structures that need to be in place to legitimize humanitarian interventions. One can also begin to take the true measure of sovereignty—when it must be respected and when it must be ignored. Likewise, all the other issues that currently appear intractable, suddenly appear corrigible, despite the historical inertia and political resistance that frustrates any hope of change in the foreseeable future.

Thus, the problem that makes political philosophy relevant to the field of humanitarian assistance is the perceived gap that separates the civil from the military. The solution that political philosophy can bring to this problem is the recovery of an ancient and more complex understanding of war. In this respect one must note that during the nineteenth century the only thinker who resisted the reduction of war to the violence of combat was Carl von Clausewitz. In his famous first chapter, Clausewitz makes this point by leading the reader through a most confused and confusing dialectic. Clausewitz begins his dialectic with the assertion that, "War is thus an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will," but ends with the conclusion that, "war is not a mere act of policy but a true political instrument, a continuation of political activity by other means." What makes the dialectic so confusing is that Clausewitz begins with a straw man, which he subsequently destroys. He begins by defining war as we moderns commonly define it—as the violence of combat—as "an act of force." But, of course, "war" is not "an act of force;" only that small part of war known as combat. War—the whole of war—is policy.

But if war is policy and not violence, if war is Athena and not Ares, then equally, humanitarian intervention is also policy by other means. In other words, as soon as policy is given its rightful place as the determinant of means, then military and civil agencies can be viewed as mutually cooperative and reinforcing, instead of mutually exclusive. Depending upon the circumstances and the policy goal—the war aim—each will have its role to play in attaining that goal. In the end, there is no gap, only a goal.

This then, is my role. This is where political philosophy can be useful. Through thoughtful reflection and argument on the meaning of war, intervention, sovereignty and a host of similar questions a better understanding of civil-military relationship can be developed. For, when both focus upon the common policy goal and not their divergent histories and cultures, their relationship must necessarily be seen as symbiotic and synergistic.

Brien Hallett is an Associate Professor in the Matsunaga Institute for Peace, University of Hawai'i. For a more extensive analysis of war and its meaning, consult Hallett's latest book, The Lost Art of Declaring War (University of Illinois Press, 1998). Author's comment: "The book has nothing to say about humanitarian intervention; it is directed to the issues surrounding the congressional power to declare war. Nonetheless, it addresses the fundamental mis-conception of war as violence that colors and distorts all our thinking on both the indictment of war and humanitarian intervention."