Military Affairs

Quote of the Day

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To meet its primary deterrence objective—deterrence of enemy first-strikes—Israel must seek and achieve a visible second-strike capability with the ability to target approximately 15 enemy cities. Ranges should encompass cities in Libya and Iran,with nuclear bomb yields at levels sufficient to fully compromise the aggressor’s viability as a functioning state. By utilizing counter-value-targeted warheads for maximum destruction, Israel could achieve the optimal deterrent effect, thereby neutralizing the overall asymmetry between any enemy state and the State of Israel. Enemy targets would be selected with the understanding that their destruction would promptly force the aggressor to cease all nuclear, biological, and/or chemical exchanges.

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Israel’s Strategic Future is founded on the presumption that current threats of war, terrorism and genocide derive from a very clear “clash of civilizations,” and not merely from narrow geo-strategic differences. Both Israel and the United States are unambiguously in the cross-hairs of a worldwide Islamic “jihad” that is fundamentally cultural and theological in nature, and that will not concede an inch to the conventional norms of “coexistence” or “peaceful settlement.” This threat to unbelievers” is less than comforting to Jerusalem andWashington; however, it is a threat that must be acknowledged and dealt with intelligently.

“Israel’s Uncertain Strategic Future” by Louis René Beres (from Parameters)

We are not proud of them

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Let me list all the people we are not particularly proud of in Britain at the moment. First off, are the politicians. Nothing new there, you might say. Whoever could be proud of politicians? Still, they seem to have messed up the aftermath of the Iranian hostage-taking and release in a particularly noxious fashion, not least because of their pusillanimity with regards to the boys in uniform. No, I don’t mean the Iranian Revolutionary Guard but our own boys in uniform, specifically the First and Second Sea Lords.

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Moving Foreign Policy Into A Networked Age

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Through the kind invitation of my friend, columnist and former FPRI analyst, Bruce Kesler, the well-regarded blog, Democracy Project, is running my guest post “Modern Foreign Policy Execution” subtitled “Instead of Crowning a New Czar, Bush Should Ignite A Revolution“, where I offer some suggestions for changing the decidedly broken, interagency process for foreign policy. A brief excerpt:

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O-5 and the Peter Principle

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Frequent commenter Tatyana and I have a friendly disagreement. She thinks Putin’s a putz. I don’t. Basically, Putin was a mid-level manager of spies in the KGB. A light colonel. An O-5. I do not find that much of a condemnation, although one could argue that someone who could not rise in their own hierarchy is incompetent.

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Cutting Edge Military Theory: A Primer (Part II.)

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Part I. in this series dealt with the topic of COIN, which is not a theory but rather a type of warfare. Part II. appropriately begins with the late theorist Colonel John Boyd, whose many contributions to American military thinking went generally unrecognized in his own lifetime, except for a narrow group of senior officers and political appointees. A group that included Dick Cheney, who as Defense Secretary in the first Bush administration, reportedly sought and followed Boyd’s counsel in regard to revising the warplans for Operation Desert Storm ( what John Boyd would have thought of the current Iraq war, I’ll leave to others, but that Cheney was deeply impressed by Colonel Boyd and his ideas in 1991 is difficult to dispute). In the aftermath of the Gulf War, USMC General Charles C. Krulak wrote:

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