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Occasional ZP commenter and SWJ Editor and author Major Mike Few passes the editorial torch to Major Peter J. Munson, USMC author, blogger and occasional ZP commenter:

Dave Dilegge – Small Wars Journal Change of Command

Though a change, it is not one of command. Peter Munson has replaced Mike Few as our editor.  Mike took SWJ to a new level we only hoped to attain and Peter’s vision will ensure we stay on that upward climb. Many thanks to both as we keep on, keepin’ on.

Carl Prine– Small Wars Journal Change of Command 

I’m not sure what this particular change of command entails – perhaps the ceremonial exchange of a mouse pad, followed by light refreshments and the appearance of some brown-nosing First Sergeant to congratulate both of them excessively, all done online of course – but I thought it would be nice to highlight some of the intellectual firepower they expended here as we wish them well.

We’ll start with Few who spent his sentence at SWJ largely making it relevant again after it fell into a fat vat of who gives a **** following the so-called “Surge” in Iraq.  Because Munson also suffers no fools, he’ll take on SWJ’s apparently unceasing flood of submissions with a well-sharpened pencil and a stubby eraser.

Best replacement possible.

Peter J. Munson – SWJ Editor

In my first post here, I would like to thank Dave Dillege and Bill Nagle for taking me on as editor of the Journal and for helping to start getting me snapped in to my new duties.  In the next week, I will be working through the pending submissions and figuring out the website, so bear with me as I get up to speed.  I hope to carry on the great work that Mike Few did during his tenure as editor, getting relevant and timely content to you, the reader.  More to follow this week as I get to work.

Hearty congratulations to Peter and all of us here hope that we will continue to see Mike in a larger role of author at SWJ and elsewhere!

Buried at work this week, but I wanted to take a moment to point to a review  by amigo Adam Elkus at Japan Security Watch of The Sovereignty Solution by Anna Simons:

Sovereignty and National Defense 

….their new book The Sovereignty Solution, Naval Postgraduate Institute (NPS) scholar Anna Simons and her co-authors develop an approach to global security rooted around an odd idea: every state should have the right to order itself internally under its own preferences and in turn bares responsibility for all acts of aggression that transgress the sovereignty of others. This implies tolerance for a range of governmental types, an end to expeditionary state-building (direct and indirect), and an approach to warfare built on breaking states that misbehave with conventional capabilities rather than a “whole of government” approach. While a national defense policy built around such ideas may or may not be sensible, it certainly is at variance with many cherished ideas in American and Western national security policy. To name a few, the strong and weak versions of the Responsibility to Protect and the commonly held philosophy that all foreign events are interconnected and thus of American concern.

Simons’ book, to a large extent, unintentionally describes the way that many non-Anglo Pacific governments view sovereignty and its relationship to national defense. As Amitai Etzioni noted, there is a kind of “back to the future” quality about China’s prioritization of sovereignty above all else. As the West moves away from the idea of sovereignty towards a post-Westphalian future, China has moved from a Maoist policy of sponsoring insurgencies in neighboring states to championing the idea that states should be the only legitimate force of national power within their own borders. China’s views, however, are representative of a common national security philosophy in Asia….

Hat tip to SWJ Blog

Fatboy Kim II

(Photo hat tip to Robert Young Pelton)

Colonel Dave Maxwell, now retired from active duty and working at Georgetown University as Associate Director of the Center for Peace and Security Studies and the Security Studies Program in the School of Foreign Service, is an expert on the esoteric subject of North Korea ( which he habitually writes as “north Korea”) and the idiosyncratic dynastic Communist system he terms “the Kim Family regime”. In the past few years, I can say my knowledge of the DPRK has improved markedly largely from reading Dave’s posts on The Warlord Loop.

SWJ Blog has just published an analysis by Colonel Maxwell on what the demise of Kim Jong-il portends:

The Death of a Dictator: Danger, Opportunity or Best Timing Possible?

….There are two scenarios that are likely to play out within North Korea.  The first scenario depends on the strength and power of Jang Song-taek who, along with his wife and the late Kim Jong-il’s sister, is the de facto “regent” for the young Kim Jong-un.  Has he been able to help Kim Jong-un establish sufficient legitimacy within the Regime and will they be able to consolidate power?  It is very likely that if Kim has sufficient strength and control of the
security apparatus there are very likely arrests and purges taking place even as we try to figure out what is happening. 

The second scenario is that he has not been able to consolidate sufficient power and will be
faced with internal threats from other senior members of the regime who are unwilling to allow a 27 year old four star general rule the party and the military.  If there is a power struggle many scenarios can play out ranging from internal chaos, civil war, and “implosion” to an external “explosion” – e.g., spillover of the effects of chaos and civil war into China and the ROK or the worst case: the desperate execution of the regime’s campaign plan to reunify the peninsula as the only means left to ensure survival of the Kim Family Regime.  Finally, regime collapse will occur when there is the loss of the ability of the regime to centrally govern and the loss of control and support of the military and security apparatus.    We have seen cracks in the system like hairline cracks in a dam.  The recently reported alleged defection of eight armed guards is but one indication of such cracks with water slowly dripping from through the regime’s dam – the question is are those cracks repairable or will they cause the dam to crumble and collapse; unleashing such a torrent on the peninsula that will make 1950-53 look like a minor skirmish in terms of scale of potential conflict and devastation.

Either scenario will ensure the continued suffering of 23 million north Korean people and the second scenario will expand the tragedy to the Republic of Korea and its 46 million citizens and significantly affect the other countries in Northeast Asia as well as have global effects…..

Read the rest here.

From Major Mike Few of SWJ and Fabius Maximus:

SWJ Blog (Few)  Rethinking Revolution and Do Two Wrongs Make a Right?

When is a revolution over, completed, fulfilled?  Traditionally, we prefer to quantify revolutions as ending in a win, loss, or negotiated settlement.[1]  While this framework is helpful for shaping theory, it neglects that reality is often much more complicated and messy.  As John Maynard Keynes said, “it is a method rather than a doctrine, an apparatus of the mind, a technique for thinking, which helps the possessor to draw correct conclusions.”  Simply put, it is only a guide towards understanding history and human nature.

….In his seminal work, Rethinking Insurgency, Steven Metz challenged our community to rethink the existing assumptions and relearn how to counter insurgencies.[5]  Moreover, over the past decade, scholars challenged the accepted military definition that an insurgency is “an organized movement aimed at the overthrow of a constituted government through use of subversion and armed conflict.”  

Yet, with all the evidence, scholarship, theories, and analysis, we continue to muddle through small wars.  Why?  Perhaps, we often choose mass over maneuver and speed over subtle influence in attempts to control the problem.  Small wars are wicked problems.  If we continue to plug and play the latest “new” idea to tame a problem, then we will just muddle along and only make the problem worse.

….Before we can hope to distill any lessons learned from this past bloody decade of war and rewrite the existing counterinsurgency manual[7][8] and find a suitable foreign policy for this new century, perhaps we should first seek to better understand the nature of revolution. 

Fabius Maximus – COIN- Now that we See it Failed…. and COIN, another difficulty…. 

As we walk away from the Iraq and Af-Pak Wars, we face many questions about the future.  Two of these are:

• When we should directly fight local insurgencies (what strategy)?
• When we must do so, how should we do so (what doctrine)?

Given the historical record, this series of posts suggest the answers are:

• We go to fight local insurgencies only when necessary (IMO neither Af or Iraq were necessary after their governments were overthrown).
• We lack reliable doctrine to fight local insurgencies abroad. The number of successes by foreign armies against local insurgencies is too few to draw firm conclusions (see section 3 in the previous post for details).

That does not mean that counter-insurgency is impossible for foreign armies.  It suggests that repeating failed doctrines (Vietnam, Iraq, Af-Pak) will not work.  As the old Alcoholics Anonymous saying goes, insanity is repeating the same actions but expecting a different result.

Update:  Not all foreign wars, or even all small foreign wars, are counter-insurgencies.

SWJ Blog – COIN is Alive: Know When to Use it!

In his opinion piece, COIN is Dead:  U.S. Army must put Strategy Over Tactics published November 22 in World Politics Review, Colonel Gian Gentile appears to base his argument on the premise that COIN is not a strategy, but rather a collection of methods and tactics. Given his extensive combat experience and his impressive academic accomplishments, it is clear why his analyses of recent operations carry significant weight with leaders at all levels of our Army. However, I am unconvinced that his desire to reduce COIN from doctrine to a collection of methods and tactics is prudent at a time when we appear to be on the cusp of a scientific understanding of what fuels violent group behavior and the establishment of a strategic framework to determine when and where COIN may be best applied.

The scientific approach to the study of war has resided in the backwaters of military theory since the years immediately following the First World War. However, recent advances in evolutionary biology led by Harvard sociobiologist E.O. Wilson are providing insights to what generates warlike behavior within, between, and among groups of the social species, including our species Homo sapiens. Today, evolutionary behavior can be rudimentarily characterized by adaptations that are considered either beneficial toward the individual and their kin, or to a larger group or even a species….

Rethinking Security –COIN-Ish Thoughts

….First, it is a bit too soon for us to hail or mourn the death of COIN. What this represents is the end of COIN as practiced and theorized by elements within the Army and Marine Corps from 2006-2010, just as the Kennedy-era idea of counterinsurgency within elements of the US defense establishment died with Vietnam. The United States has faced insurgencies, terrorists, armed rebellions, guerrillas, partisans, and irregular raiding forces since the early days of colonization. It will continue to do so in the near future as long as American allies, clients, and proxies face irregular threats, although the shape of the response will vary.

Second, COIN, for all of the heat and noise about it, is still rather poorly understood in Iraq and Afghanistan. So much of the debate is weighted down with external baggage, mainly because it was never entirely about Iraq or Afghanistan. Rather, the COIN debate was often a proxy for many different political, professional, interdepartmental, and other battles within the United States political and defense establishments. Ollivant’s paper, and newer research highlights significant uncertainty to cause and effect in both sides of the COIN debate that will likely not be definitely settled soon.

Colin Clark (AOL Defense) –U.S. Military To Scrap COIN; Focus on Pacific, Says Vice Chairman

Omaha: The United States, which rushed to replace and rebuild its ability to wage counter insurgency warfare over the last decade, must plan for a new future in the Pacific and leave COIN behind.

“We are not likely to have as our next fight a counterinsurgency,” he said. While America has been teaching its troops Arabic and other regional languages, training them how to win friends and influence people at the village and provincial levels, “the world has changed,” Winnefeld said. America’s enemies and competitors are “coming up with new asymmetric advantages. They’ve been studying us closely…,” he said. So, “we need to avoid the temptation to look in our rear view mirror.”

Our future conflicts, the vice chairman said, will probably occur “in a far more technically challenging environment.” As he described it, the fight will be much closer to a conventional military conflict, characterized by “intense electronic warfighting,” swarm attacks and cyberwar.

All this is occurring as 20th century’s warfare, characterized by state clashes over “nice bright Westphalian borders” fades to black. Now, “borders are simply fading away,” with cyber best exemplifying this trend. “The border between near and far…has been obliterated by the Internet…,” the admiral said. The border between public and private is fading, as is the divide between companies and countries, with “some companies acting as countries” and some individuals being used by countries as “proxies.”

It is extremely difficult to free military bureaucracies, which are budget-centric, turf-conscious and institutionally track career incentives to the former, from the tyranny of either-or thinking. Bureaucracies as complex organizations are sustained and steered culturally by cherishing and reinforcing simple narratives.

A very few astute individual leaders can shape changes in the organization’s outlook while counterintuitively using the reforms a career accelerant. CIA Director General David Petraeus is both widely admired and bitterly disparaged for having pulled off this rare neat trick with re-establishing COIN within the US Army while rising to four stars, theater and combatant command and Washington “player” status.

Normally, institutional change-agents are like Colonel John Boyd, mavericks, who opt to do something important at the career cost of being somebody important. They try to create something new, sometimes do, but metaphorically perish in the process.

Most members of any organization, civilian or military, simply go with the flow and color within the lines they are given.