HNN is running a symposium on Jonah Goldberg’s recent book, Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning:

While I know a great deal about the historical period in question, I have not read Goldberg’s book, so I am not going to comment on his core proposition except to say that IMHO, I tend to find arguments that the intellectual roots of Fascism and Nazism are located exclusively on one side of the political spectrum are flatly and demonstrably wrong. Goldberg’s polemical thesis though, yields a hysterical reaction because he is jubilantly shredding the hoary (and false) assertion of the academic Left, going back to the pre-Popular Front Communist Party line of the 1930s, that Fascism is a form of radicalized conservatism and a secret pawn of big-business capitalism.

Therefore, the following series amounts to an intellectual food fight between Goldberg and (mostly) a band of clearly enraged leftist professors. Enjoy!:

HNN Special: A Symposium on Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism

• Neiwert: Introduction
• Paxton: The Scholarly Flaws
• Griffin: An Academic Book – Not!
• Feldman: Poor Scholarship, Wrong Conclusions
• Berlet: The Roots of the Book
• Michael Ledeen Responds to Liberal Fascism
• Goldberg: Definitions and Double Standards
• Feldman: An Open Letter to Mr. Jonah Goldberg
• Griffin: Definitions and Double Standards – A Rebuttal
• Neiwert: Goldberg’s Response Fits His History of Evasion

After all, who doesn’t like an intemperate, online argument about Nazis? :)

Learning to Eat Soup with a Spoon Again……

There has been, for years, an ongoing debate in the defense and national security community over the proper place of counterinsurgency (COIN) doctrine in the repertoire of the United States military and in our national strategy. While a sizable number of serious scholars, strategists, journalists and officers have been deeply involved, the bitter discussion characterized as “COINdinista vs. Big War crowd” debate is epitomized by the exchanges between two antagonists, both lieutenant colonels with PhD’s, John Nagl, a leading figure behind the U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual and now president of the powerhouse think tank CNAS , and Gian Gentile, professor of history at West Point and COIN’s most infamous arch-critic.

In terms of policy and influence, the COINdinistas ultimately carried the day. COIN advocates moved from a marginalized mafia of military intellectuals who in 2004 were just trying to get a hearing from an indifferent Rumsfeld Pentagon, to policy conquerors as the public’s perceptions of the “Surge” in Iraq (masterminded by General David Petraeus, Dr. Frederick Kagan, General Jack Keane and a small number of collaborators) allowed the evolution of a COIN-centric, operationally oriented, “Kilcullen Doctrine” to emerge across two very different administrations.

Critics like Colonel Gentile and Andrew Bacevich began to warn, along with dovish liberal pundits - and with some exaggeration – that COIN theory was achieving a “cult” status that was usurping the time, money, talent and attention that the military should be devoting to traditional near peer rival threats. And furthermore, ominously, COIN fixation was threatening to cause the U.S. political class (especially Democrats) to be inclined to embark upon a host of half-baked, interventionist “crusades“in Third world quagmires.

Informed readers who follow defense community issues knew that many COIN expert-advocates such as Nagl, Col. David Kilcullen, Andrew Exum and others had painstakingly framed the future application of COIN by the United States in both minimalist and “population-centric” terms, averse to all but the most restrictive uses of “hard” counterterrorism tactics like the use of predator drones for the “targeted assassinations” of al Qaida figures hiding in Pakistan.

Unfortunately for the COINdinistas, as George Kennan discovered to his dismay, to father a doctrine does not mean that you can control how others interpret and make use of it. As the new Obama administration and its new commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal conducted its internally contentious review of “AfPak” policy in 2009 on what seemed a geological time scale, the administration’s most restless foreign policy bigwig, the Talleyrand of Dayton, proposed using COIN as nation-building on steroids to re-create Hamid Karzai’s Afghanistan as the secure, centralized, state that it has never been. Public reaction to this trial balloon was poor and the administration ultimately pared down General McChrystal’s troop request to 30,000 men, hedging a COIN based strategy toward policy suggestions made by Vice-President Biden.

So, COIN still reigns supreme, albeit with trimmed sails?

No.

We are forgetting something important about the ascendancy of COIN. It was not accepted by a reluctant Pentagon and the Bush administration because COIN is a very effective operational tool in the right strategic context – although that is certainly true. Nor was it because the advocates of COIN were brilliant policy architects and advocates – though most of them are. COIN became the order of the day for three reasons:

1) The “Big Army, fire the artillery, fly B-52s and Search & Destroy=counterinsurgency” approach proved to be tactically and strategically bankrupt in Iraq. It failed in Mesopotamia as it failed in the Mekong Delta under Westmoreland – except worse and faster. Period.

2) The loudest other alternative to COIN at the time, the antiwar demand, mostly from Leftwing extremists, of immediately bugging-out of Iraq, damn the consequences, was not politically palatable even for moderately liberal Democrats, to say nothing of Republicans.

3) The 2006 election results were a political earthquake that forced the Bush administration to change policy in Iraq for its own sheer political survival. COIN was accepted only because it represented a life preserver for the Bush administration.

We have just had another such political earthquake. The administration is now but one more electoral debacle away from having the president be chased in Benny Hill fashion all over the White House lawn by enraged Democratic officeholders scared out of their wits of losing their seats next November.

Republican Scott Brown, the winner in a stunning upset in Massachusett’s special election for Senator, certainly had no intention of undermining President Obama’s commitment to Afghanistan. To the contrary, he is for it in a far more muscular manner than was his hapless Democratic opponent. But that’s irrelevant. What matters is that in all the recent elections, Democrats have been clobbered by a “Revolt of the Moderates” – socially liberal, fiscally conservative, independent voters who came out in 2008 for Obama and are now shifting radically away from him. For the next year, politicians of both parties will be competing hard for this bloc which means “deficit hawks” will soar higher than defense hawks.

America’s nine year drunken sailor spending spree is officially over.

Defense experts have long known that the post-9/11, record DoD budget expenditures were not going to be politically sustainable forever and that either a drawdown of combat operations or cancellation of very big, very complicated and supremely expensive weapons platforms or some combination of both would eventually be needed. That eventuality is here and will increase in intensity over the next five years, barring an unexpected economic boom. Spending $60 billion annually on Afghanistan, a nation with a GDP of roughly $20 billion, for the next 7 years, is not going to be in the cards. Not at a time of 10% unemployment, when the Congress will be forced to cut Medicare, education, veterans’ benefits, eliminate COLAs on Social Security or raise the retirement age and income taxes. Who is going to want to “own” an ambitious “nation-building” program at election time?

There is a silver lining here. Really.

COIN is an excellent operational tool, brought back by John Nagl & co. from the dark oblivion that Big Army partisans consigned it to cover up their own strategic failures in Vietnam. As good as COIN is, though, it is not something akin to magic with which to work policy miracles or to substitute for America not having a cohesive and realistic grand strategy. Remaking Afghanistan into France or Japan on the Hindu Kush is beyond the scope of what COIN can accomplish. Or any policy. Or any president. Never mind Obama, Superman, Winston Churchill and Abe Lincoln rolled into one could not make that happen.

Association with grandiosely maximalist goals would only serve to politically discredit COIN when the benchmarks to paradise ultimately proved unreachable. Austerity will scale them back to the bounds of reality and perhaps a more modest, decentralized, emphasis. COIN will then become a normal component of military capabilities and training instead of alternating between pariah and rock-star status inside the DoD.

Austerity may also force - finally – the USG to get serious about thinking in terms of comprehensive and coherent DIME-integrated national strategy (Ok – this is more of a hope on my part). Instead of having every agency and service going off in its own direction with strategic nuclear arms reductions being proposed out of context from our conventional military obligations and urgent security threats we might stop and look at how the two fit together. And how these should be in sync with our fiscal and monetary policies and our need to deeply invest in and improve our unsteady economic position in a very competitive, globalized world. The latter is of much greater strategic importance to national security than Afghanistan or whether or not Israel and Hezbollah fight another mini-war.

We are all COINdinistas now. Instead of being controversial, COIN having a secure place in our operational arsenal of ideas has become the new “conventional” wisdom; it is past time to look at some of the other serious challenges America has ahead.

Innovation blowbackFive years ago, John Seely Brown and I wrote an article for the McKinsey Quarterly entitled “Innovation Blowback: Disruptive Management Practices from Asia.” In that article, we described a series of innovations emerging in Asia that were much more fundamental than isolated product or service innovations. We drew attention to a different form of innovation – institutional innovation. In arenas as diverse as motorcycles, apparel, turbine engines and consumer electronics, we detected a much more disruptive form of innovation.In these very diverse industries, we saw entrepreneurs re-thinking institutional arrangements across very large numbers of enterprises, offering all participants an opportunity to learn faster and innovate more effectively by working together. While Western companies were lured into various forms of financial leverage, these entrepreneurs were developing sophisticated approaches to capability leverage in scalable business networks that could generate not just one product innovation, but an accelerating stream of product and service innovations.

…. Institutional innovation is different – it defines new ways of working together, ways that can scale much more effectively across large numbers of very diverse enterprises. It provides ways to flexibly reconfigure capability while at the same time building long-term trust based relationships that help participants to learn faster. That’s a key breakthrough – arrangements that support scalable trust building, flexibility and learning at the same time. Yet this breakthrough is occurring largely under the radar of most Western executives, prisoners of mindsets that prevent them from seeing these radical changes.

Read the whole thing here.

Hagel is describing a mindset that is decentralized and adaptive with a minimum of barriers to entry that block participation or information flow. One that should be very familiar to readers who are aware of John Boyd’s OODA Loop, the stochastic/stigmergic innovation model of John Robb’s Open Source Warfare, Don Vandergriff’s Adaptive Leadership methodology and so on. It’s a vital paradigm to grasp in order to navigate and thrive in the 21st century.

Western executives (think CEO) may be having difficulty grasping the changes that Hagel describes because they run counter to cultural trends emerging among this generation of transnational elites ( not just big business). Increasingly, formerly quasi-meritocratic and democratic Western elites in their late thirties to early sixties are quietly embracing oligarchic social stratification and use political or institutional power to “lock in” the comparative advantages they currently enjoy by crafting double standards through opaque, unaccountable authorities issuing complex and contradictory regulations, special exemptions and insulating ( isolating) themselves socially and physically from the rest of society. It’s a careerism on steroids reminiscient of the corrupt nomenklatura of the late Soviet period.

As the elite cream off resources and access for themselves they are increasingly cutting off the middle-class from the tools of social mobility and legal equality through policies that drive up barriers to entry and participation in the system. Such a worldview is inherently zero-sum and cannot be expected to notice or value non-zero sum innovations.

In all probability, as an emergent class of rentiers, they fear such innovations when they recognize them. If allowed to solidify their position into a permanent, transnational, governing class, they will take Western society in a terminal downward spiral.

Here’s an idea. Let’s start using basic counterintelligence principles to screen prospective travelers to the United States and bar those young, unmarried, Muslim men having affiliations with radical mosques, madrassas, imams, extremist Islamist political groups or a history of mental illness and erratic behavior from receiving visas to enter the United States. This clown should never have been able to get a visa. His own father, a senior government official of a foreign nation, was trying to red-flag him as a potential al Qaida terrorist for us(!).

Would such a policy catch every prospective terrorist? No. Nothing will.

But it should at least keep out the no-brainer cases who currently are admitted to the U.S. under our politically correct TSA-DHS-State immigration regime. There’s really no upside to allow radical activists, recruiters for Hizb ut-Tahrir, Hezbollah fundraisers, and other enemies of civilized existence into our country. Or better yet, any Western country. Sure, CAIR will complain but as that organization is an unindicted co-conspirator in a terrorism case, in terms of civil rights, they are not exactly the NAACP.

In the meantime, maybe the airlines will start distributing catheters to pasengers whose landings are delayed.

The Human Face of War by Dr. Jim Storr

An important new book on military theory and history by British defense expert Dr. Jim Storr, a retired Lt. Colonel, King’s Regiment and an instructor at the UK Defence Academy, was reviewed in Joint Forces Quarterly ( hat tip Wilf Owen) by Col. Clinton J. Acker III:

The Human Face of War

….Surveying an array of disciplines including history, psychology, systems theory, complexity theory and philosophy, Storr (a former British officer) looks at what a theory of combat should include, then provides one. He goes on to apply that theory to the design of organizations, staffs, leadership, information management and the creation of cohesion in units. In doing so, he takes on many currently popular theories such as Effects-Based Operations, the observe-orient-decide-act loop, the use of postmodern theory and language.

….Storr’s position is best summed up with this passage:”Critically, military theory should not be a case of ‘this is the right course of action’ but rather ‘doing this will probably have beneficial outcome’

I have not read this book, as it is new and not yet released over here but I have to stop here and comment that the ability to make effective, reasonable, probablilistic estimates based on uncertain or incomplete information is perhaps one of the most important cognitive skills for strategic thinking. This applies whether we are discussing decision making in business, sports, warfare or games of strategy.

….After developing his precepts in the first three chapters, Storr uses the rest of the book to deal with the specifics about how to apply those precepts to “Tools and Models”, “Shock and Surprise”, “Tactics and Organizations”, “Commanding the Battle”, “The Soul of the Army” ( a fascinating discussion of leadership styles) and “Regulators and Ratcatchers”….The discussion in these chapters presents a superb treatise on the use of examples and counterexamples to support points of view. A single counterexample is not sufficient to falsify an argument, for there are no absolutes. Rather we are looking for patterns that appear better than others…”

Read the rest here.

Charles Cameron, former Senior Analyst with The Arlington Institute and Principal Researcher with the Center for Millennial Studies at Boston University. He specializes in forensic theology, with a deep interest in millennial, eschatological and apocalyptic religious sects of all stripes.

Charles will be doing a series of guest posts at Zenpundit that will drill down into the important but often elusive religious-cultural connections that impact American national security and foreign policy issues.

First post:

Guest Post: Speak the Languages, Know the Modes of Thought

…..A couple of other recent items in the news about languages and translation at home and abroad should concern us.A report from the US Department of Justice on the FBI’s Translation Project was less than enthusiastic, not only finding that significant quantities of material collected in the Bureau’s highest-priority counter-terrorism and counter-intelligence collection categories were never evaluated, but that the number of translators inn the FBI pool had diminished since a 2005 audit, that in 2008 the FBI met its hiring goals for linguists in only 2 of its 14 critical languages, that security clearance and language proficiency training for a new linguist took 19 months before hiring could take place, and that 70 percent of the FBI’s own linguists in the field offices tested did not attend the FBIs required training course.
”

Xenophon the Socratic soldier and admirer of Sparta would never have written a book like On War because the character of war would have been of less interest to him than the character of men who waged it. Or at least the character of the Greeks who waged war and that of the leaders of the barbarian armies, Cyrus, Tissaphernes and Artaxerxes (ordinary, individual, barbarians are of no consequence to Xenophon except insofar as they are instrumental in carrying out the designs of their leaders). And their character at war and in peace were inseparable and constant, though having different effects, as Xenophon explained in his passages on Clearchus and his captains and his paean to Cyrus the Younger. It has been remarked in this roundtable by Joseph Fouche that Xenophon was thoroughly Greek in his attitude toward the barbarians which Joseph Fouche called a “mirror image” to the attitude of Herodotus toward the Others of the East. I agree, to an extent. The countervailing example though is Cyrus, on whom Xenophon lavished praise with so heavy a hand that it must have struck Athenian eyes as bordering on sycophancy toward a would-be basileus. Few Greek writers, other than Herodotus, were ever so generous with their pen to a barbarian.

The Anabasis of Cyrus is a broad book that contains many levels of understanding; we might even say deceptively broad because the literary style of a war memoir gives it a simpler impression than it actually contains. One can find lessons on leadership, human nature, psychology and always and above all, politics in Xenophon’s march upcountry. Writing in the ancient world was not done for profit as it is today (though “books” circulated or were “published” then far more widely than most moderns realize) but to acquire intangible benefits of influence, a reputation of a sort that the later Romans called “auctoritas”, or to have put in a final word for posterity. Xenophon is never an objective observer and The Anabasis is not a record of the deeds of the Ten Thousand, but instead is Xenophon’s advocacy for The Ten Thousand and most of all, for himself.

Finally, I must put in a word for the translator, Dr. Wayne Ambler, who has mostly been absent from this discussion. I am not a competent judge of linguistics nor is ancient Greece my historical specialty, but I thoroughly enjoyed his edition of The Anabasis of Cyrus. For me, Xenophon was “present” on the pages as I read it. One could see a determined, sweating, short of breath Xenophon dismounting and marching on foot in heavy bronze armor to shame those in the ranks who were complaining about the measures Xenophon was taking for the good of the army. This Xenophon lives and strives. He is not a distant, marble, statue of antiquity, inaccessible to the modern reader.

Xenophon’s Anabasis of Cyrus continues to be read after 2400 years, I suspect, because the narrative of struggling to overcome terrible odds – and succeeding – appeals to our better nature. It is a construct of hope that our daring and our intelligence are enough to see us through any tight corner, given sufficient courage and inexorable drive.

We should all, at some point in our lives, march upcountry.

“As they were thinking about all this, they began to turn to Xenophon. The captains approached him and said that army was of this judgment, and each showed his goodwill and tried to persuade him to undertake the rule. Now in some ways Xenophon wished for this, for he believed that in this way he would obtain greater honor for himself in the eyes of his friends; his own name would be greater when he should arrive in the city; and perchance he could become the cause of some good to the army.”

Leadership often brings with it opportunity, and by nature, leaders tend to be people who have in their characters, an ample amount of ambition. Most people tend to lose their heads when such opportunities arise and permit their ego satisfaction become a driver of their decision-making process. That stupid but ambitious officers are dangerous is an oft remarked truism, variously attributed to a constellation of German generals and field marshals. Xenophon was anything but stupid. Instead he had an intuitive, statesmanlike, grasp of the larger political realities of the Greek world even as he discerned the temper of the hoplite and peltast soldiers in the army to be one of shortsighted enthusiasm for his leadership that could wane when it created difficulties or danger.

Xenophon’s response to the soldiers also demonstrated the keen calculation of self-interest along with political realism:

“Now such considerations stirred him to desire to become co-ruler with sole command. But when on the other hand, he reflected that it was unclear to every human being how the future would go, and because of this there was danger of throwing away even the reputation he had already earned, he was at a loss.”

Xenophon decided to “consult the gods” in order to end his quandry. The sacrifice ( the reading of the entrails) warned against accepting sole command. To refuse the offer of rule from the predominantly Peloponnesian soldiers, it was certainly convenient for Xenophon to do so from a position of unimpeachably pious ground:

“When it seemed clear that they would elect him if someone would put it to a vote, he stood up and said the following: ” I am pleased, men, since I am a human being, to be honored by you, and I am grateful and pray that the gods grant that I may become the cause of some good to you. However, my being chosen ruler by you, when there is a Lacedaemonian man present, does not seem to me to be advantageous to you, but on account of this you would obtain less, if you should need anything from the Lacedaemonians. And as for me,, in turn, I do not believe this to be very safe at all. For I see that the Lacedaemonians did not cease making war on my fatherland until they made the entire city agree that they were their leaders. When they agreed to this, the Lacedaemonians stopped making war right away and no longer continued to beseige the city. So if I, in spite of having seen all this, should seem – wherever I might have the power to do so – to be undermining their authority of their position, I am concerned that I would quickly be brought to moderation. As for what you have in mind, that there would be less faction when one rules rather than when many do, know well that if you choose someone else, you will not find me being factious. For I believe that whoever is at war and is factious against his ruler, this one is factious against his own safety. But if you elect me me, I would not be amazed if you should find someone being vexed at both you and me.”

Xenophon’s wisdom and oratory carried the day and Cheirisophus was elected ruler of the Ten Thousand in his place. There is much to sift through here.

Xenophon was a relatively young aristocrat who struck out for the East, for greener pastures because any ambitions were likely to be thwarted at home. Athens was a broken empire,just defeated at the hands of Sparta in classical antiquity’s equivalent to WWI. The opportunities for service abroad in the name of Athens were nonexistent. Chances for leadership within the city itself were likewise grim. Xenophon came from a notorious circle in Athens, the followers of Socrates, who were in disfavor with the ruling democrats, being suspected of “factious” inclinations and oligarchical sympathies. Two of their number, Alcibiades and Critias were reckoned as infamous traitors and usurpers. Furthermore, Socrates’ continued lack of participation in the Assembly and the private symposia held by his aristocratic students, appeared to indicate a latent political opposition to Athenian democracy itself.

The reputation that Xenophon returned to Athens with could have very serious consequences for him and this uncertainty tempers his ambition. Xenophon does not take command of the army nor does he found any city in his own name, as his critics charged he intended to do. This passage can be read as more than political advice to rough and ready soldiery; it’s an assurance to Athenian democrats that Xenophon, now a proven leader, eschews factionalism and conspiracy. That he is, unlike Alcibiades or Critias, the master of his ambition, rather than being mastered by it, a cautious and loyal man who seeks the common good. Wayne Ambler, the translator of our edition, remarks in the Historical Note section that it was “…the unsettled politics of Athens, especially for a student of Socrates, may have influenced Xenophon’s decision to accept Proxenus’ suggestion that he get to know Cyrus”.

With that hope having come to grief, Xenophon had to make his peace with Athens.

Throughout the text Xenophon gives contrasting examples of leadership in the narrative, and as with Cyrus and Clearchus, his explicit commentary. Xenophon’s conception of leadership goes beyond that of command and embraces political acumen, foresight and the moral example provided by Greek and Persian rulers ( used here in the same sense as Ambler’s translation, of anyone holding authority over others). In this conception of leadership, I think the teachings of Socrates lies heavily on Xenophon and the passages about Xenophon pressing forward to go East with Proxenus were included mainly to assert the independence of his judgment to his fellow Athenians.

How did Xenophon present the notable “rulers” in The Anabasis? A few examples:


Clearchus the Spartan: Clearchus is presented by Xenophon as a competent and fearless commander but one lacking in wisdom, deeply flawed by a character that was given over to wrath. Xenophon, who was an admirer of Spartan military prowess, nevertheless portrays Clearchus as a martinet and something of a fool:

“Clearchus, was agreed by all those who had experience of him, to have seemed to be a man who was both war-like and war-loving to an extreme….When it is possible to be at peace without shame or harm, he chooses to make war; when it is possible for him to turn to an easygoing life, he wishes to do hard labor, so long as it be in making war….
….He was also said to be fit to rule, as far as this is possible with a character such as he had. For he was competent as any other in thinking out how his army might have provisions and in providing them; and he was competent also to impress it upon those who were with him that he, Clearchus, had to be obeyed. This he used to do by being severe. For he was stern to behold and harsh in his voice; and he always punished with severity, sometimes in anger, so that there were times when even he regretted it.
….Amid dangers, therefore, his soldiers were exceedingly willing to listen to him, and they would choose no other. For they said that his sternness….and severity seemed to be a strength against the enemy, so that it seemed to betoken safety and be severity no longer. But when they were out of danger and it was possible to go away and be ruled by others, many would leave him; for he had no charm but was always severe and fierce. The soldiers consequently were disposed toward him as boys toward a teacher.”

Xenophon’s assessment comes after Clearchus is beheaded by the Great King, having been betrayed by the treacherous Tissaphernes, to whom Clearchus stubbornly went under truce and unarmed, against all advice. Hotheaded and suspicious, he provokes a brawl with the soldiers of Menon, fear of whose intrigues causes Clearchus to trust his enemy, Tissaphernes, more than his fellow Greeks. Clearchus, despite his physical bravery and military skill lacks both the judgment and justice required of a true leader.

Cyrus: Xenophon lavishes extensive praise on Cyrus, more so than on any other figure in the book. To some extent this is an apologia for a deceased man in whose cause the Ten Thousand marched, justifying their expedition to posterity. What Xenophon stressed foremost, was not the generalship of Cyrus –perhaps understandably – but his propensity as a ruler for generosity, mercy and justice. Qualities necessary for a legitimate basileus and that contrast handsomely with those of his brother the Great King, whom Cyrus sought to depose:

“Thus did Cyrus end his life, a man who, of all the Persians born since Cyrus the Elder, was both most kingly and most worthy to rule, as agreed by all those reputed to have had direct experience of Cyrus.
….if he made a treaty with someone, if he made an agreement with someone, or if he promised something to someone – not to be false in any respect. And therefore the cities that turned to him, trusted him, and men trusted him. When Cyrus made a treaty, even if someone was an enemy, he trusted that he would not suffer anything contrary to the treaty. Accordingly, when he made war against Tissaphernes, all the cities voluntarily chose Cyrus instead of Tissaphernes, except the Milesians…
….Nor yet could anyone say that he allowed malefactors and the unjust to laugh, but punished them most unspariungly of all….Consequently, it became possible in Cyrus’ realm for both Greek and Barbarian, if he did no injustice, to travel without fear wherever he might wish, while having with him whatever suited him”

Cyrus looks particularly good next to his enemy Tissaphernes, an intriguing betrayer without honor, and the Great King, who appears both vindictive and rather cowardly in facing the Ten Thousand with vastly superior forces. What goes unremarked by Xenophon, was how colossal a failure of military-political judgment it was that led Cyrus to challenge his brother with greatly inferior forces and then, with battle engaged, to be unable to prevent his own Persians from breaking while the Ten Thousand advanced. Cyrus, who brought his Greek mercenaries to war initially under false pretenses, could not deliver as a warlord and paid the ultimate price. A ruler must be able at war before he can demonstrate his mastery in peace and Cyrus was not able, Xenophon’s praise notwithstanding.

The other rulers, Menon etc. look worse in their short descriptions than did Clearchus.

Xenophon, though he does not stoop often to openly praise himself, demonstrates the fusion of martial abilities, judgment, justice, foresight and moral example as The Anabasis unfolds. One could say that Xenophon’s leadership exemplifies a Socratic balance – and in case we missed that point, “Theopompus” (i.e. Xenophon) is compared to a philosopher in an exchange by a Greek herald of the enemy.

Of course, Xenophon is our reporter. He has the luxury of writing the history and neither Clearchus nor Tissaphernes, who ultimately came to a very bad end, are there to dispute his account. That said, fact or fiction or self-promoting “spin”, Xenophon is using the story of the Ten Thousand to present a political subtext on leadership that is at odds with that of the ruling democratic faction of his day in Athens.

Perhaps that was always his motive.

The Bloody White Baron: The Extraordinary Story of the Russian Nobleman Who Became the Last Khan of Mongolia by James Palmer

Special note: It was Lexington Green who brought this book to my attention.

The 20th Century was remarkable for its voluminous bloodshed and civilizational upheaval yet for inhuman cruelty and sheer weirdness, Baron Roman Nikolai Maximilian Ungern von Sternberg manages to stand out in a historical field crowded with dictators, terrorists, guerrillas, revolutionaries, fascists and warlords of the worst description. Biographer James Palmer has brought to life in The Bloody White Baron an enigmatic, elusive, monster of the Russian Civil War who is more easily compared to great villains of fiction than real life war criminals. Palmer’s bloodthirsty Mad Baron comes across like a militaristic version of Judge Holden from Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian or perhaps more like Hannibal Lecter with a Mongol Horde.

Ill-tempered, impulsively violent, insubordinate and socially isolated even among fellow aristocratic officers, Baron Ungern was, as Palmer admits, without much wit or charm, a complete failure in Tsarist society and the Imperial Army until the coming of the Great War. As with many “warlord personalities” the chaos and ruin of the battlefield was the Baron’s natural element and for the first time in his life, experienced great success, his maniacal bravery under fire winning Ungern promotions and the highly coveted St. George’s Cross. This is an eerie parallel with the life of Adolf Hitler, and numerous times in the text, Palmer alludes to similarities between the Baron’s apocalyptic views on Communists and Jews, and that of Baltic-German refugees like Alfred Rosenberg and Max Scheubner-Richter who contributed eliminationist anti-semitism and theories about “Jewish-Bolshevism” to Nazi ideology.

A fanatical monarchist and philo-Buddhist fascinated with far-off Mongolia and Tibet, the Baron regarded the Russian Revolution as the greatest of calamities and joined the Whites under the leadership of the gangster-like Ataman Semenov to rape, loot, torture and murder with a hodgepodge Cossack horde across the Transbaikal region of Siberia. The Baron’s fiefdom under Semenov was a macabre, bone-littered, execution ground ruled by reactionary mysticism and ghoulish exercises in medieval torture visited upon the Baron’s own soldiers scarcely less often than on hapless peasants or captive Reds.

Dismayed by Semenov’s corruption and dependence on the Japanese and the collapsing fortunes of Russia’s White armies, Palmer recounts how the Baron fled with a ragtag band of followers to Chinese occupied Mongolia, where, in a series of bizarre circumstances, the Baron managed to destroy a sizable Chinese army (charging on horseback straight into enemy machine gun fire and emerging unscathed), seized the fortified capital, restored the “living Buddha” the Bogd Khan to the throne and become celebrated in the eyes of the Mongolians, variously as the reincarnation of Ghengis Khan and/or the prophesied coming of the “God of War”. Naturally, to further his dream of building a pan-Asian Buddhist Empire, Baron Ungern unleashed a nightmarish reign of terror in Mongolia, taking especial and personal delight in the executions of Jews and captured commissars.

Ungern’s final foray in battle, before his capture, trial and execution at the hands of the Bolsheviks, is like something out of the Dark Ages:

With this final defeat, Ungern shed any trace of civilization. He rode silently with bowed head in front of the column. he had lost his hat and most of his clothes. On his naked chest numerous Mongolian talismans and charms hung on a bright yellow cord. He looked like a prehistoric ape-man. People were afraid to look at him.

Despite the best efforts of the Bolshevik prosecutor to focus upon political motives, even the Soviet revolutionary tribunal that condemned him to death on Lenin’s orders, considered the Baron to be a dangerous madman.

James Palmer has shed a great deal of light on one of the darkest corners of the Russian Civil War, Baron Ungern von Sternberg, a subject that largely eluded prominent historians like W. Bruce Lincoln, Orlando Figes and Richard Pipes. The Bloody White Baron is a fascinating read and a window into the life of the 20th century’s strangest warlord.

Creeping Chavezismo in the MSM in regard to President Obama. From Drudge:

On the night of June 24, the media and government become one, when ABC turns its programming over to President Obama and White House officials to push government run health care — a move that has ignited an ethical firestorm! Highlights on the agenda:

ABCNEWS anchor Charlie Gibson will deliver WORLD NEWS from the Blue Room of the White House.

The network plans a primetime special — ‘Prescription for America’ — originating from the East Room, exclude opposing voices on the debate.

Imagine if ABC news delivered a report on religion from the Vatican and excluded non-Catholics. What message would that send? This is an amazing level of sycophancy toward a president by a major media outlet, even a Democratic president.Let us hear no more whining about bias on FOX or talk radio, this stunt by ABC amounts to unpaid advertisng and a de facto government TV program. Why is this happening? Simple Obama-worship at ABC? Unlikely.

John Podesta, is the lead strategist of the effort to coordinate the media with Liberal-Left Democratic political needs, published his think tank’s strategy in regard to censoring talk radio. We can only imagine what advice Podesta gives to Obama administration officials in private, but the report was a strong signal to all broadcasters to toe the political line or face increasingly onerous FCC regulation, escalating fees, fines and denial of licenses over the next four years.

Republicans and conservatives need to wake up that the Obama administration is not playing the traditional “issues” game beloved of partisan interest groups bent on fighting over microscopic technical changes in abortion laws or .5 % of the capital gains tax rate. They could care less about that minutia for now, seeing it as distracting crap; the aim of the Obama administration is creating long-term, strategic advantages for Democrats and progressive leftists by changing the rules of the game for the long haul. So the Obamaites are focusing on controlling the media discourse, turning the Census Bureau into a political tool of the Democratic Party, redrawing the congressional map and raising the barriers to entry to participate in the political process for independent or conservative demographic groups.

Either the GOP gets it together in the next two election cycles or it is finished for a generation.

Dr. John Nagl, president of CNAS, lead author of The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual, retired lieutenant colonel and top COIN expert, has penned an important review of Accidental Guerrilla by Col. David Kilcullen, in the prestigious British journal RUSI. Unfortunately, at present no link is is available, but my co-author Lexington Green is a subscriber and sent me a copy of the review, which I read last night. I now look forward to reading Kilcullen firsthand and have put Accidental Guerrilla near the top of my summer reading List.

I state that Nagl’s review is important because beyond the descriptive element that is inherent in a review, there is a substantive aspect that amounts to an effective act of policy advocacy. First, an example of Nagl’s descriptions of Kilcullen’s arguments:

We do not face a monolithic horde of jihadis moti vated by a rabid desire to destroy us and our way of life (there are some of these, although Kilcullen prefers to call them takfiris); instead, many of those who fight us do so for conventional reasons like nationalism and honour. Kilcullen illustrates the point with the tale of a special forces A-Team that had the fight of its life one May afternoon in 2006. One American was killed and seven more wounded in a fight that drew local fighters from villages five kilometres away who marched to the sound of the guns – not for any ideological reason, but simply because they wanted to be a part of the excitement. ‘It would have shamed them to stand by and wait it out’, Kilcullen reports

Tribal and even “civilized” rural people, often find ways of making social status distinctions that relate to behaviour and character rather than or in addition to the mere accumulation of material possessions (Col. Pat Lang has a great paper on this subject, “How to Work with Tribesmen“). We can shorthand them as “honor” cultures and they provide a different set of motivations and reactions than, say, those possessed by a CPA in San Francisco or an attorney in Washington, DC. People with “honor” are more obviously “territorial” and quick to defend against perceived slights or intrusions by unwelcome outsiders. This is a mentality that is alien to most modern, urbanized, 21st century westerners but it was not unfamiliar all that long ago, even in 19th and early 20th century, Americans had these traits. Shelby Foote, the Civil War historian, quotes a captured Southern rebel, who responded to a Union officer who asked him, why, if he had no slaves, was he was fighting? “Because you are down here” was the answer.

While relatively short and designed, naturally, to help promote a book by a friend and CNAS colleague, Dr. Nagl has also taken a significant step toward influencing policy by distilling and reframing Dr. Klicullen’s lengthy and detailed observations into a reified and crystallized COIN “doctrine”. A digestible set of memes sized exactly right for the journalistic and governmental elite whose eyes glaze over at the mention of military jargon and who approach national security from a distinctly civilian and political perspective:

There is much first-hand reporting in this book, based on Kilcullen’s [Robert] Kaplan-esque habit of visiti ng places where people want to kill him. After chapters detailing his personal experience in Afghanistan and Iraq, he returns to his doctoral fieldwork in Indonesia, discusses the insurgencies in Thailand and Pakistan and evaluates the complicated plight of radical Islam in Europe. While all of these confl icts are related to each other, they are not the same, and cannot be won based on a simplistic conception like the global War on Terror; instead, the enemy in each small war must be disaggregated from the whole, strategy in each based on local conditions, motivations, and desires. One size does not fit all, and there are many grey areas. A ‘with us or against us’ approach is likely to result in far more people than otherwise being ‘against us’ in these conflicts.

John Boyd would have agreed that isolating our enemies and winning over groups as allies is much preferred to needlessly multiplying our enemies. That paragraph is more or less boilerplate in the COIN community but this RUSI review is aimed not at them but at political decision makers, national security bureaucrats, diplomats and elite media and constituted a necessary set up by Nagl for “The Kilcullen Doctrine” [bullet points are my addition to Nagl's text, for purposes of emphasis]:

….In direct oppositi on to the ideas that drove American interventi on policy two decades ago, Kilcullen suggests ‘the anti -Powell doctrine’ for counter-insurgency campaigns.

• First, planners should select the lightest, most indirect and least intrusive form of intervention that will achieve the necessary effect.

• Second, policy-makers should work by, with, and through partnerships with local government administrators, civil society leaders, and local security forces whenever possible.

• Third, whenever possible, civilian agencies are preferable to military intervention forces, local nati onals to international forces, and long-term, low-profile engagement to short-term, high-profile intervention.

New doctrines emerge because ideas are articulated at the moment in time when they both fit the circumstances and the intended audience is ready to accept their implications. George Kennan, the father of Containment in 1946-1947 had attempted to give the State Department and the Roosevelt administration essentially the same advice about Soviet Russia in the 1930’s and the reaction of the White House was to order the State Department’s Soviet document collection destroyed and exile critics of Stalin like Kennan from handling Eastern European affairs ( Kennan saved the collection by storing it in his attic). Neither Stalin’s nature nor Kennan’s opinion of the USSR changed much in the next decade, but the willingness of American liberal elites to consider them did, making Containment doctrine a reality.

The post-Cold War, Globalization era elite is in the ready state of mind for a “Kilcullen Doctrine”. They are ready to hear it because systemic uncertainties have made them justifiably skeptical of old prescriptions and they are seeking new perspectives the way the Truman White House invited Kennan’s Long Telegram. This situation is both good and bad in about equal measure.

The good comes from the fact that the Kilcullen Doctrine is operationally sound, at least for specifically handling issues of complex insurgencies. It is also politically astute, in that it encourages statesmen and military leaders to first tinker with minimal measures while listening acutely for feedback instead of charging in like a bull in a china shop, to empower locals rather than engaging in the military keynesianism equivalent of enabling a kind of welfare dependency, as the U.S. did in South Vietnam and initially in Iraq. Kilcullen is also a reluctant interventionist, a healthy sentiment, albeit one unlikely to survive in doctrinal form.

The bad is multifaceted. None of these are dealbreakers but all should be “handled” by the COIN advocates of a “Kilcullen Doctrine”:

First, Kilcullen’s three principles are an operational and not a genuinely strategic doctrine. In fairness, no major COIN advocate has ever said otherwise and have often emphasized the point. The problem is that a lot of their intended audience – key civilian decision makers and opinion shapers in their 30’s-50’s often do not understand the difference, except for a minority who have learned from bitter experience. Most of those who have, the Kissingers, Brzezinskis, Shultzes etc. are elder statesmen on the far periphery of policy.

Secondly, this operational doctrine requires a sound national strategy and grand strategy if it is to add real value and not merely be a national security fire extinguisher. Kilcullen may say intervention is unwise but that is really of no help. Absent a grand strategy with broad political acceptance, policy makers, even professed isolationists, will find situational (i.e. domestic political reasons) excuses for intervention on an ad hoc basis. That George W. Bush entered office as a sincere opponent of “nation-building” and proponent of national “humility” should be enough to give anyone pause about a president “winging it” by reacting to events without a grand strategy to frame options and provide coherence from one administration to the next.

Thomas P.M. Barnetthas been articulating a visionary grand strategy since 2004 in a series of books, the latest of which is Great Powers: America and the World After Bush, where he essentially models for the readers how a grand strategy is constructed from historical trajectories and economic currents to make the case. Barnett’s themes have a great consilience with most of what COIN advocates would like to see happen, but Dr. Barnett’s public example of intellectual proselytizing and briefing to normal people outside of the beltway is even more important. Operational doctrine is not enough. It is untethered. It will float like a balloon in a political wind. It is crisis management without a destination or sufficient justification for expenditure of blood and treasure. If these blanks are not filled in, they will be filled in by others.

COIN advocates will have to bite the bullet of working on national strategy and grand strategy, building political coalitions, speaking to the public and wading into geoeconomics and the deep political waters of the long view. For a some time, they have had the excuse that as uniformed officers, such questions were above their pay grade – and this was the scrupulously, constitutionally, correct position, so long as that was the case.

That era is swiftly passing and most of these brilliant military intellectuals now have (ret.) in their titles and wear business suits rather than fatigues. COIN is not an end in itself. The horizon is much wider now and we should all be ready to pitch in and help.

WASHINGTON, DC – Flanked by the embattled President of Mexico, Felipe Calderon and the Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano, a weary looking President Barack Obama used a press conference to angrily denounce as “Alarmist and inflammatory” a recent report issued by the conservative Heritage Foundation that declared the massive chain of UN administered Mexican Refugee camps in Arizona, New Mexico and Texas as “a bottomless well for narco-insurgency” and “a threat to the territorial integrity of the United States”. The camps, home to at least 2.5 million Mexican nationals, are dominated by the “Zetas Confederales”, a loose and ultraviolent umbrella militia aligned with the feuding Mexican drug cartels that now control upwards of 80 % of Mexico.

President Obama’s political fortunes have been reeling recently in the wake of high profile incidents that include the kidnapping of his Special Envoy for Transborder Issues, former New Mexico governor Bill Richardson, and the car bombing assassination of popular California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger that killed 353 people in Sacramento last month. Both events have been tied directly to factions of Zetas “hardliners” who operate with impunity on both sides of the US-Mexican border. President Obama used the conference to point to the “clear and hold” COIN strategy that has recently restored order and even a degree of tourism to Las Vegas, once the scene of bloody street battles between Zetas, local street gangs and right-wing American paramilitary groups, as a sign of the success for his administration. Democratic leaders on Capitol Hill remain skeptical and say that it is likely that President Obama will face a primary challenge next year from Senator Jim Webb (D- Va), a former Secretary of the Navy in the Reagan administration, who called the president’s COIN strategy “The right course of action” but ” Two years too late”….

That fictional scenario above is offered as a thought experiment.

Thursday, in a statement that was issued in part for public diplomacy purposes, DNI Adm. Dennis Blair, dismissed any strategic implications regarding the strength of Mexico’s drug cartels that the Mexican government is struggling to suppress:

Mexico is in no danger of becoming a failed state. [Let me] repeat that. Mexico is in no danger of becoming a failed state. The violence we see now is the result of Mexico taking action against the drug cartels. So it is in fact the result of positive moves, which the Mexican government has taken to break the baneful influence that many of these cartels have had on many aspects of Mexican government and Mexican life.

While it might be tempting to ask what the good Admiral is smoking, Blair is neither a naif nor a fool but a very experienced and saavy intelligence manager who is engaged in pushing a political line of the Obama administration, in deference to the wishes of the government of Mexico. The line is being peddled on many fronts; Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano has just declined offers for increased appropriations for improving border security in favor of “surging” Federal agents on a temporary basis (i.e. a political show that will accomplish nothing). Here is SECSTATE Hillary Clinton on the same subject on the same day as Adm. Blair while on an official visit to Mexico:

On Thursday, Mrs. Clinton noted that no official of the Obama administration had ever used the phrase “failed state.” She said Mexico faced a “public safety challenge,” likening it to the surge of drug violence in American cities in the 1980s. And she lavished praise on the Mexican president, Felipe Calderón, for taking strong measures against the drug cartels.

This line that Mexico is fundamentally sound, while helpful to President Calderon’s political standing when expressed in public, is analytically speaking, sheer nonsense, and if enforced in private, counterproductive to having sober USG interagency planning sessions to make certain that worst case scenarios, like the one imagined above, never come close to materializing. Such politicized groupthink also interferes with effective cooperation with Mexico to address a 4GW type problem that has already mestastasized to a dangerous degree into American territory. Earlier, while still free of Mexican diplomatic and political pressure, the U.S. military accurately assessed the potential threat of Mexico devolving into a failed state in this JFCOM planning document (we won’t be seeing anything like this in public again, barring leaks):

In terms of worst-case scenarios for the Joint Force and indeed the world, two large and important states bear consideration for a rapid and sudden collapse: Pakistan and Mexico.

….The Mexican possibility may seem less likely, but the government, its politicians, police, and judicial infrastructure are all under sustained assault and pressure by criminal gangs and drug cartels. How that internal conflict turns out over the next several years will have a major impact on the stability of the Mexican state. Any descent by Mexico into chaos would demand an American response based on the serious implications for homeland security alone.

Banning terminology like “failed state” or admission of adverse data points from Mexico or the Southwestern U.S. (!) into an integrated analytical picture because the self-absorbed and greedy oligarchy that rules Mexico heatedly objects, is a recipe for policy failure and “snowballing” interrelated problems as each new development is inadequately addressed for political reasons. This new eggshell to tread carefully upon is going to be added to our longstanding, politically determined, refusal to contemplate our own drug policy honestly in light of it’s effect on our national security interests (We are turbocharging guerillas, Islamist insurgents, terrorists and criminal networks all over the globe with billions of American narco-dollars and corrupting and demoralizing our own allies in the process).

If the current situation in Mexico existed anywhere else in the world, our national security elite would already be discussing the potential for a mass exodus of refugees at given levels of escalating violence. The United States government conceives of the border in terms of an economic immigration problem not as a political mass-migration problem; such an event, spilling over into the hot deserts of the American border states, would very likely overwhelm the capacity for adequate humanitarian response. A Katrina moment in the cacti.

Recall the difficulties the Cater administration had with the relatively minor refugee influx in 1980 known as the Mariel Boatlift when 120,000 Cubans were permitted by Fidel Castro to flee the Communist paradise for life in the United States, along with imprisoned criminals and mental patients whom Castro deported along with the boatlift. A full blown civil war in Mexico could generate 20 to 30 times that number of refugees, among whom narco-guerillas or terrorists or independent bad actors could operate freely, much as refugee camps elsewhere in the world have been breeding grounds for militias, criminal organizations and terrorists.

SECSTATE Clinton, at least, should know all of this very well. The handling of the Marielitos issue by Jimmy Carter probably cost her husband the governorship in Arkansas and led him later as President to enforce a very tough line against Haitian refugees, fearing a deluge of desperately poor Haitians fleeing dictatorship and internecine political violence. It would be far better to prioritize Mexico as a national security issue today, than let it evolve into a transnational powder keg tomorrow. There are, I must observe, far more Mexicans than Haitians in this hemisphere.

But proper resonse requires empirical investigation and analytical clarity, followed by sensible and determined policy designed to short-circuit negative trends, not empty political assertions designed to tread water, obfuscate and delay action. We have time, but not unlimited time.

(Special thanks to Morgan, Pundita and John Robb for their insights, concerns and/or suggested links yesterday on this issue which were helpful in clarifying my thoughts).

ADDITIONAL LINKS:

State of Siege: Mexico’s Criminal Insurgency (Full PDF Article) Stratfor reports on Mexico, news ignored by our mainstream media

Latest Academic Mexico Trip Report “Mexico: On the Road to a Failed State?” Mexico’s Instability Is a Real Problem

Mexico – Failed State/Failed Policies? Among top U.S. fears: A failed Mexican state Why Vicente Fox is going straight to Hell

MEXICO’S BAZAAR OF VIOLENCE What if A State Failed and Nobody Cared? American Narcotics: $10 Billion In Mexico

Mexico: Growing Terror and Close to Collapse The effects of our drug war in Mexico

Mexico is not a poor country Assessing the threat at our southern border Mexico’s Columbian Exchange State of War

Look who’s sneaking into the country using known drug routes Mexico plagued by myriad interlaced netwars – a TIMN analysis

“…we say that there is only one result that counts: final victory“.
- Carl von Clausewitz

On War is a classic of military strategy and perhaps the greatest work ever produced on the nature of war. Clausewitz’s genuine rivals are very few – Sun Tzu and Thucydides come to mind but these comparisons, though equally great in stature, are also at best inexact. How important is Carl von Clausewitz? In the words of the arch-Clausewitzian Professor Chris Bassford:

Clausewitz is the theoretical cornerstone of all the US military’s mid- and senior level PME (Professional Military Education) schools and all US military doctrine. I can say that fairly authoritatively, since I teach at the National War College and have tought at the USMC Command & Staff College and the Army War College, and have also been a US Army soldier (field artillery) and a USMC and Joint Staff doctrine writer

Yet at the same time, Clausewitz is often forgotten, as by the Kaiser’s Grossgeneralstab on the eve of the Great War or by America’s four star grandees at MACV when JFK believed in “flexible response” and LBJ in “escalation”. Then, painfully, after national hubris or martial incompetence brings some great historical debacle, Clausewitz is remembered again, sometimes to be blamed or to be offered up as a savior and the dog-eared copies of On War are taken from the shelf and dusted off.

I think we are living in such a time.

This roundtable has been a delight. Not only did it force me, someone who was not particularly in tune with Clausewitz to give On War a second and more serious reading but the other participants who have posted here or discussed CvC further via email have been enlightening and in some cases, caused me to reconsider prior opinions. For that I thank all of you.

America needs more military strategists and more statesmen who understand how to think strategically. It is a shame that On War and other classics are not required reading in the universities that produce the American elite and it is daunting to consider that we regularly elect politicians to posts of high responsibility who never managed to get through key texts like The Republic or On War. If you couldn’t stare down the ghosts of Plato or Clausewitz from the comfort of your dorm room how will you look a Putin or Ahmadinejad in the eye? How can you steer the ship of state when you do not know the fundamentals of navigation?

Therefore, despite my partiality for Sun Tzu and my unapologetic admiration for John Boyd, I hope more people elect to pick up On War and wrestle with the author until they understand his unsparing but subtle philosophy of war. America can only benefit from a Clausewitzian revival.

No wonder Carl von Clausewitz was in awe of defense.

“If defense is the stronger form of war, yet has a negative object, it follows that it should be used only so long as weakness compels, and be abandoned as soon as we are strong enough to to pursue a positive object. When one has used defensive measures successfully, a more favorable balance of strength is usually created; thus the natural course in war is to begin defensively and end in attacking”

One of the anomalies of the crusade of Napoleon’s Grande Armee into the Russia of Tsar Alexander is that the Russians began in a position of numerical inferiority, something that had not happened at any other time except during the Mongol Yoke. Even Hitler’s massive onslaught of 150 Wehrmacht divisions hurled into the Soviet Union during Operation Barbarossa in 1941 did not enjoy the advantage in numbers held by Napoleon in 1812. Napoleon’s host had an almost mythic quality, reminiscent of the army of Great King Xerxes in The Persian Wars. Historian Alan Schom writes:

“Napoleon’s mighty force was phenomenal in size and strength as it continued its advance. They were marching by the thousands, the tens of thousands, the hundreds of thousands. It was incredible, it was fascinating, it was aew inspiring, but above all, it was terrifying. All Europe was trembling at the very thought of this massive Gallic-led horde, the likes of which had not been seen since the eighth century invasion of Europe by the Arabs and Berbers, and before that by Attila the Hun. Bavarians, Wurttemburgers, troops from Berg, Hesse-Darmstadt, Frankfurt, Nassau-Aremberg, Isenburg, Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, Wurzberg, Saxony, Anhalt-Berburg, Schwarzburg-Sondershausen, Waldeck, Schaumburg-Lippe, Westphalia, Mecklenburg-Strelitz, Oldenburg, occupied Denmark, occupied Prussia, occupied Spain and Portugal, occupied Holland, occupied Switzerland, northern Italy, the occupied Papal States, Danzig and Illyria, tiny San Marino and the miniature principality of Liechtenstein….the marched hundreds of miles, some ultimately two thousand miles, because once more Napoleon Bonaparte had refused peace, because – obsessed beyond any rational thought – he demanded war and further conquest”[1]

Tsar Alexander responded to the “Gallic horde” by trading space for time, evacuating Vitebsk and famously, Moscow, which was set to the torch. Alexander made use of the terrain, Russia’s vast and unforgiving span of earth to decimate the invaders whose lines of supply stretched vaporously thin.

Carl von Clausewitz wrote in chapter 3 of Book VI of On War:

“…But if for some reason, the attacker has to advance with divided forces – and problems of supply often leave him little choice – the defender obviously reaps the benefit of being able to attack a part of his opponent with his own full strength.
In strategy, the nature of flank and rear attacks on a theater of operations changes to a significant degree….

….3. Because of the greater areas involved in strategy, the effectiveness of the interior and therefore shorter lines is accentuated and forms an imortant counterbalance against concentric attacks.”

In Chapter 8 “Types of Resistance” , we see that Tsar Alexander’s retreat of scorched earth has provided a template for Clausewitz regarding the use of territorial space by armies on the defensive:

“….and therefore, two kinds of reactions are possible on the defending side, depending whether the attacker is to perish by the sword or by his own exertions.

….Indeed, the latter can essentially take place only where the retreat penetrates deeply into the interior of the country. It is in fact the only reason that can justify such a retreat and the great sacrifices it entails.”

The late, great, historian of old Russia, W. Bruce Lincoln, wrote of Napoleon’s predicament in smoldering Moscow:

“Throughout the fall of 1812, Napoleon waited in vain for Alexander’s peace proposals to arrive in the Kremlin. When none came, he made overtures of his own, but Alexander sent no reply. As the days stretched into weeks, Napoleon came to see that he, not Alexander, faced a truly desperate situation, for Russia’s armies grew stronger by the day while his own dwindled from desertions and the ravages of disease. He faced the hopeless prospect of wintering in Russia without adequate food, shelter, or supplies, surrounded by a people so hostile that they burned their grain rather than sell it for French gold. As winter approached, and as the Russian partisans stepped up their attacks on his rear, Napoleon saw that his line of communications, which relied upon a perilously vulnerable corps of couriers who raced from Paris to Moscow in fourteen days, must soon collapse.” [2]

As with Spain, in Russia Napoleon Bonaparte met with the “rage of the people” in addition to the Tsarist armies and Cossack hosts. And as in the case of Spain’s campesinos, the Russian muzhik was fired by religious zeal against the unholy invader. On Russia’s long suffering peasantry, it’s “dark people” still enthralled in serfdom then, J. Christopher Herold wrote of the popular reaction to the French:

“Alexander’s proclamation to his people, issued at the time of the French invasion, appealed to these deep seated feelings: Napoleon had come to destroy Russia; the entire nation must rise against ‘this Moloch’ and his ‘legions of slaves’. ‘Let us drive this plague of locusts out! Let us carry the Cross in our hearts and steel in our hands!’ The proclamation was read in all the churches, and the priests supplemented it with embellishments of their own. The comte de Segur, at this time an aide-de-camp to Napoleon, wrote: ‘They convinced these peasants we were a legion of devils commanded by the Antichrist, infernal spirits, horrible to look upon, and whose very touch defiled” [3]

Russia was well suited to all of Clausewitz’s conditions for which a general uprising would be effective; that is to say, Clausewitz determined his conditions for a general uprising from the Russian partisan experience against the French (and perhaps also, upon reflection, that of the Spanish guerrilla as well but Clausewitz saw Russia with his own eyes).

“The following are the only conditions under which a general uprising can be effective:

1. The war must be fought in the interior of the country.
2. It must not be decided by a single stroke.
3. The theater of operations must be fairly large.
4. The national character must be suited to that type of war.
5. The country must be rough and inaccessible because of mountains, or forests, marshes, or the local method of cultivation.”

Only five percent of the soldiery of the mighty Grand Armee that boldly marched into Imperial Russia with Napoleon made it out alive. Roughly the same percentage as of the Wehrmacht troops who had served under Field Marshal von Paulus at Stalingrad.

Despite the claims of abstract universalism put forth on behalf of On War by Clausewitzians, the great insights of General von Clausewitz – and they truly are great – are firmly rooted in time and place. Mother Russia casts a shadow long and deep.

[1] Schom, Alan. 1997. Napoleon Bonaparte. HarperCollins. NY.NY. 594.
[2] Lincoln, W. Bruce. 1981. The Romanovs: Autocrats of all the Russias. The Dial Press. NY.NY. 400.
[3] Herold, J. Christopher. 1963. The Age of Napoleon. Houghton Mifflin Company. Boston, Mass. 348

My background is in 20th century diplomatic and economic history, with an emphasis in the Cold War and related Soviet Studies. Our former Communist adversaries, especially the doctrinaire ideologues among them, were fond of employing a term “correlation of forces” to describe the geopolitical situation as being favorable or unfavorable to some proposed course of action. While it was woodenly uttered Marxist jargon, “correlation of forces” was far from meaningless as a phrase. It was a reminder in that grotesquely ideological world that it was important in affairs of state to calculate rationally. Even the old monster Joseph Stalin was known to bark at his henchmen” This is not a propaganda meeting!” when matters of war were being discussed in council.

Clausewitz devoted Book III of On War to matters of general strategy and he has an important section on the nature of calculation ” Possible Engagements are to be Regarded as Real Ones because of Their Consequences“:

“In both cases results have been produced by the mere possibility of an engagement: the possibility has acquired reality….Even if the whole enterprise leaves us worse off than before, we cannot say that no effects resulted from using troops in this way, by producing the possibility of an engagement; the effects were similar to a lost engagement.

This shows that the destruction of the enemy’s forces and the overthrow of the enemy’s power can be accomplished only as the result of an engagement, no matter whether it really took place or was merely offered but not accepted”

A passage rich in implications.

Clausewitz assumes here that opponents would have rough knowledge of each other’s actions and maneuvers. A position held entirely in secret by one side cannot become part of his enemy’s assessment and calculation. This is entirely logical given the small geographic context of the Western-Central European battlefield in the 18th and 19th centuries when field commanders had a shared understanding of warfare and armies had been raised on precision drill since the days of Gustavus Adolphus. It is also logical for the “higher” level of supreme command, the soldier-statesmen like Frederick the Great or Dwight Eisenhower who had to read situations in warfare like geopolitical, multidimensional, chess many moves ahead of their next, actual, move.

In essence, Clausewitz is explaining how movement of an army to a position of potential conflict forces an opponent to constantly re-calculate the potential impact upon all of their future options and weigh their potential costs. The movement itself forecloses options to both sides that had previously existed immediately before, resources, distance and time imposing constraints on a commander’s freedom of action. The decision tree is re-written. Sufficient velocity movement in strategic zones of operation are themselves enough to create either paralyzing uncertainty or impetuous decision in an adversary.

Where does Clausewitz’s principle of possible engagements equating to real ones begin to break down? Scenarios where the “fog of war” renders the battlefield opaque to the commander’s vision.

Naval battles at close quarters, especially in the ancient world, resembled land battles and were overseen by experienced generals like Pompey, Agrippa or Sparta’s duly appointed Navarch. Conflict on the open ocean was another matter, even as late as the Second World War, the location of the enemy at sea was typically unknown, frequently up until the moment of decision. The endless space of the seas put commanders in the position of playing chess blindfolded. It is telling that Napoleon’s genius failed him in Russia, where the vast steppes created a battlefield that most resembled those of the ocean.

Cultural differences, too, when civilizations are at war, create a cognitive “fog” for commanders. Alien value systems create a “noise” that interferes with the “signal” intended by the offer of engagement by one side to the another. They will not be calculated “right” because the shared understanding of war and the valuation of objectives is much more limited. The Iran-Iraq war dragged on as a Middle-Eastern version of WWI primarily because of the differences in worldview between the leadership of Saddam Hussein’s secular, Baathist, Sunni dominated, Arab, Iraq and the radical Shiism of Ayatollah Khomeini’s revolutionary, Persian, Iran. Two countries in the center of the same Muslim civilization! How much greater is the “fog” between Washington and the hills of Pushtunistan where al Qaida’s leaders reside?

This is not to say that Clausewitz’s principle of possible engagement does not exist under conditions of opacity, it just offers far less data to work with for the commander. The “unknown unknowns” predominate.

“Ten Questions with Thomas P.M. Barnett”

…. 4. In Great Powers, you delve deeply into American history. What lessons did you find in our nation’s past that the diplomat overseas, the Army colonel in Afghanistan or the U.S. Aid worker in Africa should know to navigate their mission today?

This is all about frontier integration. Globalization is like America’s rapid and aggressive push Westward across the 19th century: a lot of the same bad actors and a lot of the same tools applied. So don’t be surprised when the Pinkertons show up, or when the covered wagons are attacked, or when the Injuns head to the Badlands for sanctuary. Thus, the goals of our frontline players are fairly straightforward: create the baseline security to allow the connectivity to grow. Focus on social trust and institutions as much as possible, but co-opt existing structures whenever and wherever you can. It doesn’t have to be perfect and it sure as hell doesn’t have to measure up to America’s mature standards. This is a frontier setting within globalization-treat it as such. The good news is, the settlers are already there, with more uncredentialed wealth than we realize (see Hernando DeSoto), if you respect their existing rule-sets and realize they will change only when the locals see the need themselves, so no instant rule-set packages applied by outsiders, please. Finally, acknowledge that with growing connectivity with the outside world, you will see more nationalism, more ethnic tensions, and more religious identity. These are all natural reactions, and not signs of your failure, so patience is the key.

Read the whole thing here.

Special thanks to Dave Dilegge for providing the forum and to Sean Meade and Lexington Green with editorial assistance and astute advice.

I am both excited and very pleased to announce the release of Threats in the Age of Obama by Nimble Books.

Edited by my friend Michael Tanji, a former senior member of the intelligence community, the volume is a 224 page A-Z anthology on the cutting edge security challenges faced by the United States in the 21st century and the strategic thinking required to deal with them. Tanji recruited an impressive stable of experts, many with high level USG and private sector experience, in intelligence, cyberwarfare, terrorism, pandemics, nuclear proliferation, human terrain, information operations, public diplomacy, foreign policy and national security. It was a high honor for me to be included among the authors, who are:

Dan tdaxp, Christopher Albon, Matt Armstrong, Matthew Burton, Molly Cernicek, Christopher Corpora, Shane Deichman, Adam Elkus, Matt Devost, Bob Gourley, Art Hutchinson, Tom Karako, Carolyn Leddy, Samuel Liles, Adrian Martin, Gunnar Peterson, Cheryl Rofer, Mark Safranski, Steve Schippert, Tim Stevens, and Shlok Vaidya. And last, but really first, editor, contributor and chief cat-herder, Michael Tanji.

“….If you are on a mission to change the way government works, particularly in the national security arena, this is one a place where some independent and intellectually diverse thinking is to be found. In these essays, we offer our view of some of the more pressing threats the Obama administration will have to deal with in these early days of the 21st century.”

If support the idea that the national security establishment needs to embrace change, then this is the book for you.

Social factors can play a pivotal role in an engagement. During the Kamakura period the Japanese style of one on one combat with longswords was forever changed after facing a Mongol cavalry charge and a wall of Chinese spearmen. Furthermore, social factors abound in the first Book of On War where Clausewitz lists the general variables of war (see my equation for examples). Part of Clausewitz’s military “genius” could be “social intelligence”. This type of intelligence plays an important role in understanding personal relations, navigating and influencing politics, and affects interpretive skills such as those needed in intelligence analysis. As in the Mongolian example above, social rules periodically clash with changing times or new enemies. A military “socialite” would have the attuned social intelligence to not only detect these changes but to be able to react to them.
 
Clausewitz was correct to identify the social dimension as a weak point of the materialists. His only fault was being 250 years ahead of his time, before social constructivism had an established framework to deal with the problem.

A nice piece of analysis by Younghusband. I was stirred to ponder along a related tangent by Clausewitz’s passage ” War is an Act of Human Intercourse”:

We therefore conclude that war does not belong in the realm of arts and sciences; rather it is part of man’s social existence. War is aclash between major interests, which is resolved by bloodshed – that is the only way which it differs from other conflicts. Rather than comparing it to art we could more accurately compare it to commerce, which is also a conflict of human interests and activities; and it is still closer to politics, which in turn may be considered as a kind of commerce on a larger scale. Politics, moreover, is the womb in which war develops – where its outlines already exist in their hidden, rudimentary, form, like the characteristics of living creatures in their embryos.

Clausewitz is telling us that war is transactional. War is also one facet of a larger phenomena of ur-conflict of which commerce and politics are different yet elated forms of competition. Book II may be ” a jumble” as many commenters have noted, but this insightful paragraph is true brilliance.

Nation-states are superorganisms and warfare constitutes a form of collective bargaining, a market of blood. Lyndon Johnson in the basement of the White House, pouring over maps of North Vietnam, picking out bombing targets was attempting to bargain with Hanoi through the martial gestures of escalation. Even amidst the total war of WWII, the belligerents made calculated gestures in the intransigence of Stalingrad, the reckless dash for Cairo or through the Ardennes, in the step by step horror that was Okinawa, to signal to the enemy “the price” for continuing the war. Hiroshima and Nagasaki cleared the table of all but the most dangerous of gamblers.

Bravo, General von Clausewitz!

I am by training, a historian and that education leads me, when I am reading great books like On War, to ask fundamental questions about them as I read – “Is Clausewitz the last, best and final word on the nature of War?” or ” How far did Clausewitz see and where was he blind?”. Such training also inclines me to pay closer attention to the cultural and historical context in which seminal works emerged.

Should American officers today be leading troops or planning campaigns without having had the benefit of the lessons Clausewitz can teach? Supposedly, Moltke the Younger and his generation of officers on the Grossgeneralstab disdained to read Clausewitz(1) but given the results of the Great War, it is reasonable to assume that they and Imperial Germany might have profited from the exercise.

It is is difficult not to be impressed with the brilliance of Clausewitz’s insights as I read Book I. His disciplined yet speculative mind was not constrained by the Newtonian paradigm that governed the 19th century’s increasingly deterministic understanding of nature; nor did he become intoxicated by the mythic Romanticism that pervaded European elite culture and abandon the rigor that can be found on every page of On War. There is ample evidence to be found in Book I. of Clausewitz surpassing his times to grasp concepts and truths that do not emerge in other fields for decades or more than a century.

Yet there are also passages that show the rootedness of the worldview of a European military officer who survived the cataclysm of the Napoleonic wars. I finished Book I. firmly convinced of Clausewitz’s genuine greatness as a philosopher but remain unconvinced that that he has discovered the eternal nature of war in all it’s varied manifestations – I am also deeply skeptical that such a thing could even be possible.

Before I try to bury Clausewitz on that score, allow me first to praise him. In his lonely and self-critical reflections on war, Carl von Clausewitz saw far. Intellectually, the man was a giant.

A few examples:

On “The Maximum Exertion of Strength”

“….Assuming that you arrive in this way at a reasonably accurate estimate of the enemy’s powers of resistance, you can adjust your own efforts accordingly; that is, you can either increase them until they surpass the enemy’s….But the enemy will do the same; competition will again result and, in pure theory, it must again force you to both extremes.”

This is the “Darwinian Ratchet” with Charles Darwin shouldering a rifle and field pack – decades before Origin of the Species.

On “War is never an Isolated Act”

“….Each side can therefore gauge the other to a large extent by what he is and does, instead of judging him by what he, strictly speaking, ought to be or do”

Clausewitz is discussing here the principle of “,Countervailing Power“, which does not appear in Economics until the early 1950’s with John Kenneth Galbraith’s American Capitalism.

Another modern subject that is present throughout Book I., though there are other members of this roundtable who are better qualified to discuss it than I am, is Clausewitz’s intuitive grasp of complexity in his discussion of the interrelationships between the variables involved in war and their capacity for dynamic variance and feedback loops. While Clausewitz rightly ridicules the idea of reducing war to “algebra”, that he argued that war consists of relational elements which influence one another at times with ” the slightest nuances” and “uncertainty” would be difficult to dispute.

I am however troubled by the absolutist assertion that Clausewitz makes that war “…. is always an instrument of policy” [ emphasis in original]. This statement is wrong or at least is more true in some cultural and historical epochs than others – unless we are to define “policy” in some new way that permits it to possess a universal scope that covers most human activities in all cultures throughout history. Most likely, given his military experience, Clausewitz was thinking of war between Europeans or non-European civilizations of Asia Minor and not warfare carried out by, say, the Ibo or the Sioux.

Clausewitz explicitly and sensibly linked “policy” with the “state” which we can reasonably say could encompass the various kinds of organized, “civilized” governments from the Greek polis to Chinese dynasties to early modern European bureaucratic nation-states:

“If the state is thought of as a person and policy is the product of its brain, then among the contingencies for which the state must be prepared is a war in which every element calls for a policy to be eclipsed by violence”

Such a contingency is alien to some cultural worldviews. The voraciously bloodthirsty, religiously oriented Aztecs could not conceive of “policy” in the Clausewitzian sense even when the Spanish under Cortez inflicted repeated catastrophic defeats and desecration of their holiest shrines upon them, invaded their capital, humiliated their semi-divine Emperor and freed their tributary slaves. The Aztecs did not lack courage or a warlike tradition – just the cultural requirements for carrying out war as Clausewitz envisioned it in theory or from personal observation.

Clausewitz writes a little – very little – in Book I. of war made by “savage” and “semicivilized” peoples, except generally to remark upon their inferiority compared to great civilizations. In the latter instance we might infer he meant the Turks, Persians and Arabs and in the former case, perhaps the barbarians of antiquity or the tribes of North America or Subsaharan Africa. However we do not know for certain because Clausewitz does not say whom he meant. Writing two centuries earlier, Montesquieu had more specific citations of the customs of distant lands in The Spirit of the Laws than Clausewitz does in On War.

Clausewitz’s pure, abstract theory of war that he adroitly balances against the modern practice of war cannot substitute for actual knowledge of how war was made by semicivilized or savage peoples. It may be, that Clausewitz had such knowledge but I see no evidence for it in the text. It seems more likely to me that Clausewitz was drawing there from reading of classical antiquity but even there we should be cautious. The Greeks certainly made war from “policy” as Clausewitz articulated the concept but with powerful governing considerations that are absent in Clausewitz’s day.

The Spartans, for example, were called “the craftsmen of war” but this was not meant in regard to their prowess in battle, as historian Paul Cartledge explained:

“Again, when Xenophon described the Spartans as ‘craftsmen of war’ he was referring specifically to military manifestations of their religious zeal, such as animal sacrifices performed on crossing a river frontier or even the battlefield as battle was about to be joined. The Spartans were particularly keen on such military divination. If the signs (of a acrificed animal’s entrails) were not ‘right’, then even an imperatively necessary military action might be delayed, aborted or avoided altogether”(2)

That is not war from “policy” or even, strictly speaking, “chance”, is it ?

None of this is to argue that Carl von Clausewitz should not be regarded as a genius or even as the most important philosopher of war in the last 1000 years. No, it means that we have to be careful with attributing an eternal transcendence to a State-centric work written during a particular epoch, European modernity. Many of the concepts in On War apply well to wars far outside the historical framework in which Clausewitz fought, thought and wrote his magnum opus but we should also test Clausewitz’s philosophical prescriptions against what records exist.

We should still read Clausewitz.

Footnotes:

1. Williamson Murray, MacGregor Knox, Alvin Bernstein (Holger). 1994. The Making of Strategy: Rulers, States and War. Cambridge University Press. 251-252.
2. Paul Cartledge. 2004. The Spartans. Vintage Books. 176.