It’s old news – three days old when “Truth Hates Delay” – but A& L links to Fulford celebrating A&L Dutton makes 21st century “haste” with the eclectic curiosity of eighteenth century conversation; maybe man hasn’t changed much from the coffee houses of Congreve to Starbucks at Barnes & Noble, but the borders have. Dutton teaches philosophy in Christchurch and the managing editor, Tran Huu Dung, economics in Dayton. This distance hints at the width of their interests – but then, its the nature of the net. He’s one of those people – it is one of those projects – that makes me feel lucky to live in the 21st century. I’m grateful – they make me laugh, make me think, and, by pulling together endless links, puts many the riches of the web within a click or two. (Though of course one would think they’d include the incomparable Chicagoboyz on their blogroll.) Of course, it’s seductive – always beckoning with far more charm than grading papers or cleaning house.
Academia
Book Review: The Changing Face of War
Eminent Dutch-Israeli military historian Martin van Creveld has the rare distinction among historians of having been more right about the future than he has been about the past. His earlier 1990’s works, The Transformation of War
Van Creveld’s latest book, The Changing Face of War: Lessons of Combat From the Marne to Iraq
The perspective here is theoretical ( “trinitarian” vs. “non-trinitarian”), systemic and Germanocentric. Van Creveld clearly admires the technical and cognitive martial prowess of the Wehrmacht and the old Imperial German Army that stamped itself so heavily on the bloody history of the twentieth century. He clearly relates the connection between effective logistical coordination between a mass production, capitialist, industrial economy and the armies in the field, unlike most historians, accurately crediting the Kaiser’s Quartermaster-General, Erich Ludendorff ,for having had the breakthrough insights into the political economy of Total War.
The most interesting chapters are the last ( here I agree with William Lind) where Van Creveld takes premier military historian John Keegan to task and critiques the performance of American arms in Iraq. Van Creveld is returning the warm embrace that the Fourth Generation Warfare school has given his body of work in disputing Keegan’s contention that a Nazi-occupied Europe could not have been liberated by indigenous partisan forces. In my view, van Creveld is correct that the Manhattan Project would have rendered the whole question moot but is wrong in overestimating the ability of partisans to have overthrown Nazi domination.
Assuming the defeat of the USSR, Hitler would have simply liquidated the Serbian people as an example, incorporated the Scandinavian countries into a racial confederation system with Greater Germany, and been satisfied with a National Socialist “Findlandization” of the rest of Europe. Except for Russia, which Albert Speer indicated in his final book had been slated for depopulation and Slavic enslavement with no fewer than 30 million eliminated or worked to death building massive transnational autobahns. Preponderant force would have been used by the Nazis to quell open resistance to the ” New Order” but most European countries would have resembled Denmark or Vichy France, not Poland’s rump state “General Gouvernment”.
Van Creveld’s assessment of American performance in Iraq is bitterly harsh, bordering on vicious, but it is accompanied at the very end by a wise set of ” rules” for counterinsurgency warfare ( van Creveld advises throwing out the bulk of COIN literature as having been written by ” losers”) that merit widespread dissemination. One case study of successful counterinsurgency he points to favorably is the British experience in Northern Ireland where the use of military force was highly economized ( a case he omits, curiously, was El Salvador, where it was not), a general consideration for winning at the “moral level of warfare” when powerful state forces seek to defeat a “weak” opponent.
While The Changing Face of War is not the pathbreaking text that The Transformation of War represented, it is highly accessible to the layman, clearly written and coherently argued. It fits well on the shelf of any serious student of military history.
Links:
Cutting Edge Military Theory: A Primer (Part III.) – UPDATED
William Lind review at DNI
Fabius Maximus review at DNI
Pox Americana, Pox Churchill
James McCormick’s charming review of Steven Johnson’s The Ghost Map reminded me of a series of incidents I was trying to make sense of when I wrote the “Gospel as Gossip.” These thoughts were prompted by a comment on another blog: “Yes, the United States must be above even ‘false stories’ of torture. We are the United States.” Well, that sounds noble and I can understand how we should avoid the appearance of impropriety. At this point, we are a powerful nation and with that comes a grave responsibility; with it also comes the likelihood of unforeseen consequences and hubris. However, being above being questioned is problematic: this ambition misunderstands human nature. While little bad is breathed about candidates with 99% of the vote, I doubt that is a good thing. And myths can permeate our thinking – that Alger Hiss was pursued by witchhunters long dominated thought about the fifties and remains a valid example to many. Can a court system ever be above murmurs that an innocent is found guilty? We would not want to live in a society in which such thoughts were never spoken; one of the reasons is that, given man’s fallibility and nature, such a fact would be true at times.
Wow! Turns Out It’s Me!
Plato was a philosopher. He neither “sowed nor reaped.” Instead, he made his place in the world by thinking and talking persuasively. In “The Republic” he turned his intellect to the question of creating the perfect society. He thought about the matter very hard and discovered that the best people to govern society were philosophers, i.e., people just like Plato.
Imagine his surprise.
Knowledge vs Knowingness
Lead and Gold excerpted a very interesting article by Michael Kelly, the Atlantic editor who was killed during the early days of the Iraq war. In the article, published in February of 2002, Kelly draws a distinction between knowledge and knowingness;:
Knowingness, of course, is not knowledge—indeed, is the rebuttal of knowledge. Knowledge was what squares had, or thought they had, and they thought that it was the secret of life. Knowingness is a celebration of the conceit that what the squares knew, or thought they knew, was worthless.
(go read the entire excerpt)
It strikes me that many trends in today’s society–especially in academia but by no means limited to it–are at least partly about enabling the attitude of knowingness.