Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago School economists and fellow travelers.
Everything old is new again. Via Richard North comes this interesting discussion of innovative mine-detection and -clearing techniques used by the white Rhodesians against Mugabe’s insurgents.
See also this post and this post for an insightful and much broader discussion of British military capabilities and political/military errors in the Iraq war. (These posts are not recent but remain highly relevant.)
In an earlier blog review of Stoic Warriors – The Ancient Philosophy Behind the Military Mind, I looked at some of the issues facing the American military as society changes its attitude toward individual suffering.
For several years past, I’ve attended the Banff Mountain Film Festival, which is a spectacular assembly of films on mountain subjects — usually relating to outdoor pursuits, natural environments, and exotic cultures. There, I found the same male appetites for adventure, risk, and camaraderie … with many of the same grim consequences of fear, trauma, loss, and sudden death faced by soldiers. But there was a difference. A big one.
The trailer (below) for a recent year of the Banff film festival runs about five minutes. It does contain advertising but the ads are as interesting as the film excerpts for giving a feel for the festival and, by implication, for the prevailing social ethos.
After the jump, my views on the difference …
Fourth Generation Warfare (4GW)
Of the military theories developed in the last quarter century, none have stirred the heated feelings in the defense community quite like Fourth Generation Warfare has done. In part, this is due to the unsparingly harsh criticism that leading 4GW advocates have directed at both the mainstream Pentagon establishment and the rival school of Network-centric Warfare; mostly though, it is because 4GW questions the validity of the current defense establishment itself. If 4GW theory is correct, then much of the American defense budget amounts to so much waste. As 4GW theorists would have it, money ill-spent for exquisitely high tech weaponry that will not work as promised, purchased for the kinds of wars that are never again going to be fought. The 4GW school is riding high right now; not simply because the GWOT lends fertile field for study and examples but because the outcome of the 2006 Israeli-Hezbollah War was far more accurately predicted by 4GW theorists than by the conventional military experts. This was despite the fact that Hezbollah is not quite a “true” 4GW military force, but a state sponsored hybrid whose vulnerabilities the IDF failed to exploit.
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:
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: