Iraqi boy with American soldier, Sadr City, June 20.
Found here, via Neptunus Lex.
Military Affairs
No Fun Beyond the Khyber Pass
Douglas Hurd, former British Foreign Secretary, has a review in the Spectator of A Million Bullets: The Real Story of the War in Afghanistan
The book recounts the brave performance of the British Army and RAF in Afghanistan, under difficult circumstances. Nonetheless, the mission is not going well. Hurd tells us that Fergusson quotes one Captain Leo Docherty:
You don’t win hearts and minds with soldiers; you need engineers, builders, the development people from DFID. We have embedded journalists; they risk their lives to do their jobs. Why can’t we have embedded development individuals? That’s what we need.
This is yet another iteration of Tom Barnett’s long-standing cry for a SysAdmin force to “win the peace” once the initial round of shooting has died down.
Without such a capacity, it is categorically impossible to realize the kind of ambitious “nation building” goals that Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair articulated once the current two wars got under way:
The MSM Misses the Bout: Part I
As an amateur historian, I am given to musing about the flow and processing of information. People make mental models of the past, but those models are usually highly skewed. As both Napoleon and George Orwell are alleged to have observed, it is the winners who write history. Beyond that, most historians rely primarily on written sources, which further skews our perspective to the prejudices of a given time’s literati, as well as limiting our perspective by that self-same “intelligentsia’s” intellectual shortcomings. The uptake curve of any new trend is difficult to perceive at its inception. Important events often show up as important only well after the fact. Of all the news stories of today, how many human beings can predict what story will actually shape the world of 50 years from now? Even experts fail at this. And often, the true import of events is obscured until the generation who experienced those events has passed away, along with their distorted perceptions.
The MSM Misses the Bout: Part II
If “fourth generation warfare” is, as I suspect it is, the leading edge of one of the greatest historical trends of our generation, then the mechanisms of that trend should be the subject of serious academic and journalistic study. The trend may be part of a larger trend that encompasses the gradual weakening of the modern state’s attempt to monopolize violence that was heralded by the Treaty of Westphalia and celebrated by Max Weber.
As I mentioned in Part I, small scale conflict is largely a police action if one or both combatants are restricted to small arms. Sophisticated weapons, especially anti-aircraft systems, are crucial for fourth generation actors to rise beyond the street gang level when operating against states that have not yet collapsed internally.
The MSM Misses the Bout: Part III
The press coverage on the arrest of Viktor Bout has been sporadic. It is a sad commentary on the MSM that one of the best reports I’ve been able to find is from Mother Jones. Given Bout’s importance, a fourth estate that is actually fulfilling its part of the social contract should be blasting the story of Bout’s arrest from every headline.
Reading through this mound of background material for these posts, I still have some very nagging questions that cry out for some decent investigative reporting, the most prominent of which are: