"Restore(s) a little sanity into current political debate" - Kenneth Minogue, TLS "Projects a more expansive and optimistic future for Americans than (the analysis of) Huntington" - James R. Kurth, National Interest "One of (the) most important books I have read in recent years" - Lexington Green
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Previously, I read and reviewedBrynjar Lia’s Architect of Global Jihad, about Islamist terrorist and strategist Abu Musab al-Suri. A sometime collaborator with Osama bin Laden and the AQ inner circle, a trainer of terrorists in military tactics in Afghanistan and an advocate of jihadi IO, al-Suri was one of the few minds produced by the radical Islamist movement who thought and wrote about conflict with the West on a strategic level. Before falling into the hands of Pakistani security and eventually, Syria, where al-Suri was wanted by the Assad regime, al-Suri produced a massive 1600 page tome on conducting a terror insurgency, The Global Islamic Resistance Call, which al-Suri released on to the jihadi darknet.
Jim Lacey has produced an English digest version of al-Suri’s influential magnum opus comprising approximately 10% of the original Arabic version, by focusing on the tactical and strategic subjects and excising the rhetorical/ritualistic redundancies common to Islamist discourse and the interminable theological disputation. There are advantages and disadvantages to this approach.
I spend a lot of time reading and writing and I do so primarily within a specific environment – my home office. The space reflects the man, to some degree.
Surveying my office space here at home, I noticed that my desk has begun, like a coral reef, to accrete various objects, oddments and curious like a layer of bric-a-brac sediment. Some objects change, others stay forever. Exclusive of papers, books, printers and a computer, here’s what my desk holds: Read the rest of this entry »
[NEW! Incoming link from Outside the Beltway - see addendum below]
There has been much ado about Dr. Anne-Marie Slaughter’s enunciation of “Responsibility to Protect” as a justification for the Obama administration’s unusually executed intervention (or assistance to primarily British and French intervention) in Libya in support of rebels seeking to oust their lunatic dictator, Colonel Moammar Gaddafi. In “R2P” the Obama administration, intentionally or not, has found its own Bush Doctrine, and unsurprisingly, the magnitude of such claims – essentially a declaration of jihad against what is left of the Westphalian state system by progressive elite intellectuals – are beginning to draw fire for implications that stretch far beyond Libya.
People in the strategic studies, IR and national security communities have a parlor game of wistfully reminiscing about the moral clarity of Containment and the wisdom of George Kennan. They have been issuing tendentiously self-important “Mr. Z” papers for so long that they failed to notice that if anyone has really written the 21st Century’s answer to Kennan’s X article, it was Anne-Marie Slaughter’s battle cry in the pages of The Atlantic.
The following is a post by seydlitz89, a noted Clausewitzian commentator who has participated in three round tables here at Chicago Boyz, and who wanted to respond to a recent post of mine that discussed strategy and superempowered individuals, a discussion that also involved Joseph Fouche, Charles Cameron and others. For many readers in this corner of the blogosphere who are interested in strategy, Seydlitz should need no introduction, but for those that do:
seydlitz89 is a former US Marine and Army intelligence officer who served in a civilian capacity in Berlin during the last decade of the Cold War. He was involved as both an intelligence operations specialist and an operations officer in strategic overt humint collection and now blogs and posts on the internet and can be contacted at seydlitz89 at web.de. He lives with his family in northern Portugal and works in education. His writings have appeared at Clausewitz.com, Defense and the National Interest, Milpub and on threeChicagoboyz Roundtables.
Politics Requires People (a Response to “War, the Individual, Strategy and the State”)
By seydlitz89, 3 August 2011
I would like to first off thank Zen for this opportunity to guest post on his great blog.
I am essentially a small town Southern conservative who is dissatisfied with both US political parties. I search in vain for a conservative politics worth the name. So my politics are out of the way and any potential ideological influences indicated.
Strategic theory is a means to understand strategic reality (for lack of a better term). There are times when it’s just kind of interesting and times when it can help you literally survive, say if you and your Greek family lived in Smyrna in 1919 and knew that the Greek Army had just landed to fight the Turks, and that the Turks would probably win this war and treat the Greeks in Smyrna none too kindly. You would probably think it prudent to leave the city and go someplace safer, like Athens, Cyprus or Crete. Strategic theory is kind of like that, it provides understanding to events and possibly a general direction those events may take, although it is primarily a tool of military historical analysis. That is future prediction is not really part of the deal, but sometimes the relation between the stated political purpose and the military means available, not to mention the character of the enemy provide such a clear indicator of how events are going to turn out, that it becomes clear either figuratively or even literally that it is time to “get out of town”, so to speak.
Strategic theory uses a system of interlocking concepts which comprise for Clausewitzians Clausewitz’s General Theory of war. The General Theory postulates that there exists a system of common attributes to all wars as violent social interactions and that war belongs to a larger body ofhuman relations and actions known as “politics” (all wars belong within the realm of politics, but not all politics is war). While all wars share these characteristics, warfare, as in how to conduct wars, is very much based on the society and level of technology existing at a specific time. War doesn’t change whereas warfare goes through a process of constant change. Clausewitz’s General Theory need only be flexible enough to adequately understand war and act at the same time as a basis for war planning. It need not be perfect and is not expected to be so. Essentially , it need only be better than the next best theory, and so far we Clausewitzians are still waiting for this second-best theory to make its appearance.
Warfare is thus the specific “art of war” for a particular period ofhuman history, but would have to be compatible (following Wylie) with the General Theory. On War presents at the same time Clausewitz’s General Theory and his art of Napoleonic warfare, that is a theory of warfare for his time, which is one of the reasons readers find the book confusing. As new methods of warfare come into practice, new theoretical concepts emerge. It is one of these potential concepts that this particular paper and the discussion which initiated it is all about, that being the superempowered individual.
….Rumsfeld’s and Schoomaker’s redesign of the Army into a lighter, more mobile, and more expeditionary force seems permanent. Gone is the Cold War and Desert Storm concept of the long buildup of armor as prelude to a massive decisive battle. Instead, globally mobile brigade combat teams will provide deterrence, respond to crises, and sustain expeditionary campaigns. Gen. Martin Dempsey, the current Army chief of staff (and soon to be chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) recently described a sustainable brigade rotation system, an expeditionary adaptation that the Navy and Marine Corps have employed for decades. In addition, both the Army and Marine Corps have drawn up plans to shrink their headcounts back near the Rumsfeld-era levels. Rumsfeld’s concerns about personnel costs sapping modernization are now coming to pass.
There now seems to be a near-consensus inside Washington that the large open-ended ground campaigns that Rumsfeld resisted are no longer sustainable. The former defense secretary’s preference for special operations forces, air power, networked intelligence, and indigenous allies is now back in vogue. Even Gen. David Petraeus, who burnished his reputation by reversing Rumsfeld’s policies in Iraq, will now implement Rumsfeld’s doctrine in eastern Afghanistan. According to the New York Times, the U.S. will counter the deteriorating situation there not by shifting in conventional ground troops for pacification, but with “more special forces, intelligence, surveillance, air power … [and] substantially more Afghan boots on the ground.”
A kindergarten teacher in Mexico seeks to protect her students and calm their fears as narco-cartel fighters conduct a raging gun battle outside the window of her school. The woman has nerves of iron.
But hey…..Mexico can’t have an “insurgency” because the narcos don’t have “political” goals. Or a unified political goal. Or because there are still good vacation deals there at all-inclusive resorts. Or….Or…Or…. whatever flimsy rationale helps policy makers continue to punt the war next door.
Altars to Santa Muerte, “Saint Death” to the poor and the narcocultos
SWJ has been en fuego the last few days and this is the first of several that I recommend that readers give close attention.
Dr. Robert J. Bunker and Lt. John Sullivan are indicating that the canary in the coal mine phase of Mexico’s narco-insurgency has passed. Mexican society is entering a new and more dangerous period of accelerating cultural devolution. Narco-insurgent violence has shifted from the economically motivated and brutally instrumental of organized crime syndicates everywhere to culturally totemic and ghastly ceremonials out of tribal prehistory:
Pundita, the DC based foreign policy blogger, is a longtime read for me due to her shrewd observations, usually expressed with tart sarcasm. Her post below is no exception:
Even many Pakistanis believe the ISI was harboring Osama bin Laden, so there’s a lot of blame-shifting and finger-pointing going on in the government. And, as B. Raman details in his May 17 post, the armed forces feel humiliated because the U.S. was able to pull off the raid in Abbottabad right under their noses.
However, the military has told so many lies over the years to puff up their efficiency that several Qaeda-friendly jihadi groups in Pakistan don’t believe the raid could have been carried off without cooperation from a branch of the military. So those groups are on a rampage against Pakistan’s military.
In short, Rawalpindi is getting it from all sides in the wake of the Abbottabad raid. For that reason Raman is concerned that Rawalpindi might try to put a shine back on its tarnished reputation by directing terrorist attack at India. That would be a stupid move because it took everyone outside Syria all of 6 minutes to figure out that Syria’s government was behind the Palestinian ‘freedom protest’ against Israel on May 15 — 1 minute to realize what the government was up to (Bashy Assad’s attempt to deflect world attention from his brutal quashing of Syrian protests) and the remaining 5 minutes to attempt to figure out whether Bashy thought the year was 1990 or 1982. (1)
….The only people in Washington still pushing the line are influence agents in the pay of Pakistan’s government and U.S. defense analysts and NATO toadies who are so daffy they couldn’t find their hands with a flashlight. Either way, nobody’s buying the line anymore that Pakistan carries out atrocities because it’s scared of India.
Understand? Humpty Dumpty has fallen off the wall. If Islamabad and Rawalpindi think China can help put Humpty back together they’re not only behind the times, they also don’t understand the Chinese.(2)
More than they want to see India destabilized, more than they want to see the United States preoccupied with the war on terror, more than anything in the world, the Chinese want China to be a great nation and to be seen as such on the world stage. The Chinese know what it takes to be seen as a great nation. So, only provided the terrorists Rawalpindi nurtured kept it down to a dull roar was Beijing was willing to support Pakistan’s bloody-minded machinations against India and the United States. But if Pakistanis think the Chinese will risk everything they’ve sacrificed for, just to be seen by the world as supporters of a nation of anarchist terrorists, those Pakistanis need their heads examined.
If Rawalpindi doesn’t want to believe me, it needs to believe this: At the end of April, China’s government published in English) a white paper on the country’s planned next phase in its foreign aid policy . The government has more than a $1 trillion to lavish on aid. About half the aid is earmarked for North Korea but a large chunk of the remainder Beijing plans to lavish on investment in U.S. companies.
The plan is not made from the goodness of their hearts; the leaders want concessions from the U.S. government in return for their largesse. But the new policy also indicates that China’s government has listened to every criticism that’s been voiced about its earlier foreign-aid policy and is adjusting the new policy accordingly.
J. Scott Shipman, the owner of a boutique consulting firm in the Metro DC area that is putting Col. John Boyd’s ideas into action, is a longtime friend of zenpundit.com and Chicago Boyz and an occasional guest-poster. Scott has an important report regarding the “war of ideas” against the Islamist-Takfirist enemy in Afghanistan after attending a workshop hosted by DARPA.
DARPA, STORyNet and the Fate of the War
by J. Scott Shipman
I had the opportunity to attend a DARPA workshop yesterday called STORyNet. The purpose was to survey narrative theories, to better understand the role of narrative in security contexts, and to survey the state of the art in narrative analysis and decomposition tools (see below): Read the rest of this entry »
On a serious note, it would be a good idea if, say, Congressman Ron Paul were to investigate the role of Sovereign Wealth Funds in US Hedge Funds, related to the crash or their current activities today. These are not normal institutional investors. While SWFs do not set out to lose money, a Hugo Chavez, for example, makes investments with a different kind of strategic calculus than does Warren Buffet. Putting SWF dollars in Hedge Funds renders their investment decisions secret, or at least very opaque, behind the face of an American hedge fund manager. Investments that some of the SWF countries might not be allowed to make here directly and openly in specific corporations or industries for very good diplomatic and national security reasons.
Ronald Reagan’s monicker as President was always “the Great Communicator“, for his command of message and the medium of television, though Reagan had a considerable ability to read a live audience as well. Everyone acknowledged Reagan’s rhetorical wizardry, even his Democratic critics, who took some comfort in imagining that Reagan was “only a B movie actor” reading his lines. A nickname that would have pointed to one of his greatest political skills would have been “the Great Negotiator” because Reagan’s talent for winning favorable outcomes, legislatively and diplomatically, is rivaled among presidents only by FDR and LBJ. Yet few pundits give Reagan that credit of being a master of the art of the deal. Read the rest of this entry »
“NSDD” stands for “National Security Decision Directive”. In essence, the document is an executive order issued through the National Security Council to executive branch agencies represented or under the supervision of the NSC. A NSDD (or “PDD” in Democratic administrations) carries the force of law and is often highly classified, frequently being used for presidential “findings” for approving covert operations, as well as to set national security policy.
Command Posts, a group milblog in which a friend, Callie Oettinger, plays an important part, is featuring posts by Michael Reagan, commenting on his father’s 100th birthday.
I figured that if anyone from another blog deserved some space here at this roundtable, it would be Mr. Reagan. Here is a post of his that I particularly liked as it encapsulated his father’s determination as to the “ends” in the strategic trinity of “ends, ways and means”. Reagan was a rarity because as president he was the last to run an administration able to competently synchronize all three elements of strategy:
….I took my father aside in a corner of the suite and asked him, “What are you thinking about, Dad?”
“Michael,” he said wistfully, “the thing I’ll miss most by losing this nomination is that I won’t get to say ‘Nyet’ to Mr. Brezhnev. I was really looking forward to arms negotiations with the Soviets. For years, the Soviets have been telling us what we have to give up to get along with the Soviet Union. I was going to let the General Secretary of the Soviet Union choose the place, the room, and the shape of the table, because that’s how they do those things. And I was going to listen to him tell me what we would have to give up to get along with them. Then I was going to get up from the table and whisper in his ear, ‘Nyet.’ It’s been a long time since the Soviets have heard ‘Nyet’ from an American president.”
Well, 1976 wasn’t Ronald Reagan’s year—but his time was coming.
A few months later, in January 1977, defense analyst Richard V. Allen visited my father at his office in Los Angeles. During their conversation, Dad said, “My idea of American policy toward the Soviet Union is simple, and some would say simplistic. It is this: We win and they lose. What do you think of that?”
One of the key behind-the-scenes players in Dad’s administration was Herb Meyer, special assistant to CIA Director Bill Casey. “Ronald Reagan was the first Western leader whose objective was to win,” Meyer once said. “Now I suggest to you that there is a gigantic difference between playing not to lose and playing to win. It’s different emotionally, it’s different psychologically, and, of course, it’s different practically.” Ronald Reagan’s actions toward the Soviets, Meyer said, “flowed from a decision to play to win.”
This is an aspect about Ronald Reagan that is not very well understood.
I do not mean his attitude toward communism or the USSR. These things are common knowledge and were, then and even now, part of his political appeal. I mean that as a statesman Reagan was a gifted strategist. I have no idea if Reagan ever underlined sayings of Sun Tzu or pages of On War, or as president if he found his military briefings stimulating or tiresome, but if he did not study strategy, President Reagan had an intuitive grasp of its nature. He also understood, far better than the manic micromanagers, the role of a President of the United States in shepherding a strategy from formulation to execution to results.
Reagan knew that in moving policy to reality meant that choices had to be made and that part of his responsibility as Chief Executive was knowing when to get the hell out of the away, even if it meant accepting risks and costs in order to get results. The perfect, cost-free, moment of statesmanship, where all the stars align and the wind is at your back, seldom if ever, comes. Opportunities multiply when they are seized.
The war in Afghanistan might be going better today if our risk-averse rulers considered taking a page out of Reagan’s book.
Well, there’s a lot of hullaballoo about what would have been Ronald Reagan’s 100th birthday. I can’t remember a time when Ronald Reagan wasn’t part of the lexicon of California politics, even recollecting the time his face was printed on the DMV handbook. His signature even appeared on my school Report Cards. (Back then the Superintendent, the Principal’s sigs were also included).
Ronald Reagan was the sunny transplant from the midwest, the person who was proof that you could invent yourself here in the land of (then) orange trees, mild weather, and movie stars from Marlene Dietrich to Mae West. He was in radio, then movies, the president of SAG, a democrat, a republican, governor, and president. He even had a beautiful wife, and two children who were the kids he created –free thinkers. They even disagree with many of his viewpoints, but frankly, he would not have minded. Reagan was the kind of self styled rugged individualist that most people are comfortable with, one step removed from the suburbs. It was the Hollywood version of a ranch –horse trails, brush to clear, minus the livestock or orchards other ranchers depended on for their livelihood.
On 7 October 1984, just a few weeks before the November election day, President Reagan’s campaign suffered a serious setback. Having put in an unconvincing performance in the first Presidential debate against Democrat challenger Walter Mondale, serious questions were being raised about the President’s age, health, and his ability to lead America through difficult times. To some observers, he did not appear to be in full command of the details of his administration. Attention immediately turned to the second debate, on 21 October.
The initial reaction of some campaign staff was to ensure that Reagan was prepared for the next debate by force-feeding him stats on every conceivable subject. But the campaign finally worked out that this approach risked getting in the way of what voters liked best – Reagan’s character and charm. They realized the best way of getting the President to put in a winning performance was by letting him be himself – by letting Reagan be Reagan.
In You are the Message, Republican media consultant Roger Ailes (now of Fox News) talks of being brought in to help prepare Reagan for the second debate. Ailes describes seeing Reagan forced to listen to endless advice, with consultants constantly rebuking him for not remembering detail. “Every time they finished a round, somebody in the audience would raise a hand and say, ‘Mr President, the tonnage on that warhead is wrong. The date of that treaty was so-and-so’”.
Ailes told the team to cancel the mock debates and give him access to the President for a couple of hours. “’If you give me that’, I told them, ‘he’ll win. If you don’t you’ll probably lose.’ I realized that sounded presumptuous, but actually I was gambling on Reagan and his innate gift of communication. I felt pretty sure that if I could get him back to being himself again, he’d be okay.”
Those who claim to be the inheritors of the Reagan revolution badly misunderstand it. It was never about specific policies but tone and style. It won out over both Democrats and Communists because it offered better ideas and–importantly–a positive vision. Reagan was much less interested in discrediting his opponents than in inspiring supporters.
Led by Newt Gingrich and taken to hysterical heights by pundits such as Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity, and Glenn Beck, Reagan’s better ideas and positive vision gave way to deep negativity. Rather than better ideas, they offer only an unending spew of attacks against Democrats and the political left.
The commentary on the Egypt crisis by those who would claim to be Reagan’s descendents is a perfect illustration. Nearly everything they say at least begins with a slam on the Democrats, especially Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama. Making the Middle East more stable and furthering American interests is almost an afterthought, tacked on after the flames directed at the Democrats. Read the rest of this entry »
Ronald Wilson Reagan (1911 – 2004) 40th President of the United States of America
Welcome to the Ronald Reagan Roundtable at Chicago Boyz.
A few presidents have put their stamp on this nation and even fewer have done so on the world. While the top tier historical position is held, by nearly universal accalamation, by Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a select number of presidents occupy the second tier of greatness, having by their words and deeds changed America and their times, for better and for worse. Among this group, I believe, is Ronald Wilson Reagan, who entered office as the oldest man ever to be elected to the presidency and left it when a new world was being born.
Ronald Reagan would be 100 years old today, having missed the mark by a mere seven years. It would be too much to say that this has been the century of Ronald Reagan, but we should take time on this anniversary to reflect on how Reagan impacted his century. What is the legacy of President Reagan? That is the question for this roundtable, one we hope to answer in the next ten days.
All Chicago Boyz bloggers, whose names appear on the margin – including but not limited to Lexington Green, Joseph Fouche, Jonathan, Charles Cameron, Onparkstreet and Dr Helen Szamuely -are free to weigh in on this question, but we are very pleased to also have some special guest bloggers as participants in this roundtable who I would like to take a moment and introduce: Read the rest of this entry »
As previously announced, to commemorate the 100th birthday of President Ronald Wilson Reagan, there will be a Roundtable hosted here at Chicago Boyz starting February 6th, featuring all interested members of the stable of contributors at Chicago Boyz and an august panel of invited guest-posters from a range of philosophical perspectives and disciplinary backgrounds. Read the rest of this entry »
I had intended to write an analytical post about the tumultuous events in Egypt and elsewhere in the Arab world and then I recalled that a) I do not speak or read Arabic b) am not versed in contemporary Egyptian politics c) am not an Arabist by academic training d) have never visited the Middle East and e) even those who are all of these things are often doing more news updating on twitter than deep analysis.
Egypt is the demographic and geographic center of the Arab Sunni world – but without the economic resources to make Egypt the power that Nasser once aspired that it would be in the heady era of postcolonial, nationalist, Pan-Arabism. So Nasser became a client of the Soviets, who could fund his ambitions and Egypt was a quasi- Soviet satellite until Sadat kicked the Soviets out for trying to undermine him in favor of a more pliant stooge, and accepted American patronage. Sadat’s assassination gave us Mubarak and his hated familial-military-party oligarchy (Ok, the military and party were largely there, but Mubarak’s rule has discredited them).
So, instead of my projecting what will happen next, I’ll devote this recommended reading to other bloggers and news sources who are freer with their conjecture:
No Tom is not an Arabist either, but he does have experience with designing and participating in professional war games and futurism sessions inside the USG and out. The war room, to my casual observation, seems like an IT effort to synthesize expert analysis and crowdsourcing a primitive/structured prediction market. Interesting.
February 6th 2011 marks the centennial of the birth of America’s 40th president, Ronald Wilson Reagan and it is an appropriate time to reflect on the legacy of a man whose presidency altered the course of his party, his nation and the world. It is no exaggeration to say that events set in motion by the Reagan administration are still unfolding today and the ideas and values championed by Ronald Reagan continue to shape our public policies and frame our political discourse.
Therefore, to commemorate and debate this important legacy, the Ronald Reagan Roundtable, hosted here at Chicago Boyz will begin February 6th and end on the 16th. Read the rest of this entry »
found its own Bush Doctrine, and unsurprisingly, the magnitude of such claims – essentially a declaration of jihad against what is left of the Westphalian state system by progressive elite intellectuals – are beginning to draw fire for implications that stretch far beyond Libya.
