Military Affairs

Clausewitz, On War, Book 1: Clausewitz on Military Genius

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I am reading Clausewitz because I fight as a profession. It is therefore my duty to heed my obligation to society that I read and understand my craft. Clausewitz, whether one agrees with him or not, has shaped the doctrine of all modern state-owned militaries. The capstone doctrinal document of the Marines, MCDP 1: Warfighting, is laced with Clausewitzian thought and terminology. Ask any Marine lieutenant what Friction is. He almost certainly knows!

On my road to professionalism I have wondered what makes a person a genius at the military arts and sciences. Fortunately Clausewitz provided me the Third Chapter of Book One of On War, where he dissects military genius into its component parts and discusses them. In doing so he provides a great starting point to discuss the nature of military genius. What is military genius? Where does it come from? What kinds of people are military geniuses? Do we make geniuses, or are they born?

Here I will digest the chapter and provide my thoughts, as well as questions for the Round Table.

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Superb Talk by Peter Mansoor

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This video is excellent. It is a talk by Col. Peter Mansoor about the Iraq war. Even the Q&A is good. Col. Mansoor was a brigade commander in Iraq, and he is now a military historian at Ohio State. He wrote a book about his experiences, Baghdad at Sunrise: A Brigade Commander’s War in Iraq. After listening to this talk, I am going to read his book as soon as I am finished re-reading Clausewitz. The lecture is over 90 minutes, including Q&A. The video portion is just Mansoor standing at a lectern. So, it is easy to just have the audio going while you do other stuff. You lose nothing without the video.

Highly recommended.

UPDATE: The talk is extremely critical of the Bush administration, Rumsfeld and particularly Bremer. If you don’t want to hear that criticism, don’t listen.

Good Fences Make Good Neighbors

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For the past few days, Israel has been conducting military operations against terrorist targets inside Gaza. This is in response to Hamas launching repeated rocket attacks against Israeli civilian targets.

Although very interesting, events are still unfolding so I don’t want to discuss the current chapter of Israeli-Hamas conflict right now. But I thought you might be interested to know that Egyptian border guards have reportedly opened fire on Palestinians that have broken through the border defenses between Gaza and Egypt. (Hat tip to Glenn.)

No deaths have been reported, which indicates to me that the Egyptians really aren’t trying that hard to reseal the border. But I note with a great deal of Schadenfreude that the Egyptians probably wish they had built something like the Israeli security fence. You know, the same barrier that was condemned by Egypt back when construction was beginning.

Will Egypt begin building a similar barrier along their 9 mile border with Gaza? To be frank, I really doubt the Egyptians have the kind of money it would take to construct something as effective. But I think they will start to do what they can to beef up what they have.

The world press wasn’t very sympathetic to Israel when they started to build their security barrier. What do you want to bet that they won’t bother to report any activity by Egypt to seal their own border with Gaza?

Under The Command

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Andrew Sullivan does one of his now famous about faces and rants about Bush. [h/t Instapundit] At the end he captions a photo:

Photo: a prisoner in US custody smeared with his own excrement at Abu Ghraib, under the command of president George W. Bush. [emp added]

Of course, Sullivan leaves out a little history. He neglects to mention that: A soldier, under the command of President George W. Bush, discovered the abuse and reported it to the Judge Advocate General of the U.S. Army. The Judge Advocate General,  under the command of President George W. Bush, launched and investigation, arrested those involved. Under the command of President George W. Bush, the  Judge Advocate General informed the media that the abuses had occurred. Trials were conducted for dozens of individuals, under the command of President George W. Bush. At the end, in addition to the imprisonment of the main perpetrators, 29 officers up the rank of  colonel  were cashiered, under the command of President George W. Bush.  

Andrew Sullivan joins the ranks of those who handed Cambodia over to Pol Pot by mutating  every abuse, crime or even mistake by anyone in the military into a dark conspiracy on the part of the military itself and the civilian leadership.  

[update (2008-12-15-4:10): Just to clarify. I am not saying Sullivan is a Pol Pot sympathizer. I am saying he has now joined the ranks of those whose lies and exaggerations drove us to a policy that caused us to abandon the people of Cambodia to their horrific fate. Like those of the previous generation, Sullivan has gone way, way over the top merely to satisfy his own self-interest with a studied indifference to the consequences his polemics have on others.  ]

[update  (2008-12-15-6:20): I read the executive summary of the report that Sullivan refers to. He claims:

What if, in Reynolds’ terms, the torture at Abu Ghraib was indeed “top-down policy”? This is now factually indisputable, according to the bipartisan Senate report issued last week.

The report actually says:

Conclusion 19: The abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib in late 2003 was not simply the result of a few soldiers acting on their own. Interrogation techniques such as stripping detainees of their clothes, placing them in stress positions, and using military working dogs to intimidate them appeared in Iraq only after they had been approved for use in Afghanistan and at GTMO. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s December 2, 2002 authorization of aggressive interrogation techniques and subsequent interrogation policies and plans approved by senior military and civilian officials conveyed the message that physical pressures and degradation were appropriate treatment for detainees in U.S. military custody. What followed was an erosion in standards dictating that detainees be treated humanely.

So, in sum, the report says nothing new but merely repeats the claims made when the military first revealed Abu Ghraib, i.e., that Bush’s authorization of enhanced interrogation created a moral climate that lead to Abu Ghraib. It does not say Abu Ghraib was the intentional, top-down policy as Sullivan claims.

Sullivan lied. ]

Pearl Harbor – 67

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Let’s not forget.

If you want information, the Naval Historical Center archive that we linked in last year’s post is as good a place to start as any.

Maybe it’s normal for cultures to lose their memories, or at least to roll them forward to more-recent events. By that logic, perhaps September 11, 2001 should serve as the current generation’s version of December 7, 1941. Does it? I don’t think so. I think we’re losing the memories, old and new, as we lose cultural self-awareness. We’re losing cultural self-awareness because we are losing cultural self-confidence. We are losing cultural self-confidence in large part because we allowed our educational system to be taken over by people who see cultural self-confidence as a crime.

From the Naval Historical Center:

By late November 1941, with peace negotiations clearly approaching an end, informed U.S. officials (and they were well-informed, they believed, through an ability to read Japan’s diplomatic codes) fully expected a Japanese attack into the Indies, Malaya and probably the Philippines. Completely unanticipated was the prospect that Japan would attack east, as well.

Change the details and this story becomes generic. The most important events tend to be unanticipated, and not for anyone’s lack of trying to anticipate them. We should remember this truth even if we fail to remember specific events, though I suspect that the forgetting of events begets the forgetting of principles.

Interesting times ahead.

UPDATE: Via David Foster, this excellent post from Neptunus Lex.