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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.

Colonel Paul Yingling hits a theme much beloved here at ZP:

An Absence of Strategic Thinking

….The future of Pakistan is more difficult to predict. It could limp along as a failing state, or suddenly fail with little warning. The West knows so little about the internal dynamics of the country that virtually any significant change will come as a surprise. Although the exact timing and extent of state failure in Pakistan is difficult to predict, the consequences of such failure are not. Partial or total state failure of a nuclear Pakistan would pose a grave threat to the United States. In such a scenario, the White House would not know who controlled Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal. A nuclear-armed al Qaeda, Lashkar-e-Taiba, or other extremist group would be difficult if not impossible to deter.

ISAF’s exit from Afghanistan has much more to do with American domestic politics than with coalition strategy. American fiscal constraints and political paralysis set this course in motion long ago, and corrective measures are unlikely in the absence of a crisis. Too often, what passes for strategic thought in the United States is actually a struggle among self-interested elites seeking political, commercial, or bureaucratic advantage. Such behavior is the privilege of a country that is both rich and safe. However, a pattern of such behavior is self-correcting: no country that behaves this way will stay rich or safe for long.

Hat tip to The Warlord Loop and SWJ Blog.

Wiggins at the Wohlstetterian Opposed Systems Design blog weighs the question of a grand strategy board and finds it to be wanting:

Everyone wants their greybeard panel but relationships and timing matter

….The influence of these sorts of boards depends massively upon relationships and timing. Senior leaders have tight schedules and must makes decisions with whatever information they have at hand. If the SECDEF or the National Security Advisor knows and trusts someone, even if they don’t have a formal role in government, then an informal conversation with that person might be able to help. But what the senior leader needs at that point is cogent and focused advice, which is why the relationship (does the leader trust the adviser? does the adviser understand what the leader really needs?) and timing (can the right advice be delivered at the right time?) matter so much.

Strategy, fundamentally, cannot be routinized. It cannot, therefore, be broken down into a bureaucratic process. Thus, any attempt to improve strategic thinking through bureaucratic reorganizations misses the point. That reality is unsatisfying and messy but accurate.

A fair point by Wiggins. The existence of a grand strategy board would be a goad to remind an incoming administration that “strategy” is important and would put a tool at their disposal. It would not guarantee strategic thinking in policy making any more than the NSC guarantees an orderly national security decision making process.

Presidents currently get the NSC they want rather than the one that they deserve, and the same would be true of a grand strategy board. Some who recognized the utility though, would use it well.

[ by Charles Cameron, h/t Mike Few — bananas, cucumbers, tomatos and piano legs as sexual objects, reading the world as a book, Iraq recently, Shakespeare a while back, Robert Hooke ]
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Louis XV grand piano legs, hard maple. Image credit: http://www.balaams-ass.com/grandlegs.htm

MikeF in a comment on my post, Let me put my banana in your fruitbasket, pointed us to his Small Wars Journal article The Break Point: AQIZ Establishes the ISI in Zaganiayh, in which he reports that the Mujahedeen Shura Council in Iraq passed out propaganda pamphlets providing “instruction on the proper actions of good Muslims” in preparation for the establishment of an Islamic State of Iraq. One example of “proper actions” given was as follows:

One cannot eat tomatoes and cucumbers together because one is male and the other is female. This action is immoral. Failure to comply will result in death.

Think long and hard on that one!

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By way of light relief:

Frederick Marryat‘s 1839 book A Diary in America, in which he describes (as his title stipulates) American, not British, customs, seems to be the source of the idea that the (British, the urban legend having undergone a transatlantic metamorphosis here) Victorians covered the Legs (think: ankles, see diagram above) of their pianos for modesty’s sake.

Marryat, a credulous fellow as Matthew Sweet describes him in his Inventing the Victorians (p. xiii.), may well have been being teased when told this tale by his American friends. In any case, he reported that in an American girl’s school he visited, the head mistress “to preserve in their utmost purity the ideas of the young ladies under her charge” had “dressed all four limbs” of the school piano “in modest little trousers, with frills at the bottom of them!”

“Was this practice ever pursued, even in America?” Sweet asks sweetly, and answers himself: “Probably not.” And further, “whatever the case, the synecdochic relationship that now exists between Victorian sensibilities and the clothed piano leg is wholly fraudulent.”

Sweet is marvelous on this whole business, going on about it for pages. Most useful for my own purposes is his quotation from Richard Sennett‘s (1986) The Fall of Public Man, which argues:

that cultural change, leading to the covering of the piano legs, has its roots in the very notion that all phenomena speak, that human meanings are immanent in all phenomena.

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And a tad more seriously…

Interestingly enough, that very notion is indeed to be found in Islam, where the Qur’an asserts that nature is to be read like a scripture. In the words of Seyyed Hossein Nasr:

The Quran refers constantly to the world of nature as well as to the human order. The sky and the mountains, the trees and animals in a sense participate in the Islamic revelation, through which the sacred quality of the cosmos and the natural order is reaffirmed. The sacred scripture of Islam refers to the phenomena of nature as ayat (“signs” or “portents”), the same term used for its verses and the signs that appear within the soul of human beings according to the famous verse: “We shall show our portents (ayat) upon the horizons and within themselves, until it be manifest unto them that it is the Truth” (41:53). Natural phenomena are not only phenomena in the current understanding of the term. They are signs that reveal a meaning beyond themselves. Nature is a book whose ayat are to be read like the ayat of the Quran; in fact, they can only be read thanks to the latter, for only revelation can unveil for fallen man the inner meaning of the cosmic text. Certain Muslim thinkers have referred to the cosmos as the “Quran of creation” or the “cosmic Quran” (al-Qur’an al-takwini), whereas the Quran that is read every day by Muslims is called the “recorded Quran” (al-Qur’an al-tadwini). The cosmos is the primordial revelation whose message is still written on the face of every mountain and tree leaf and is reflected through the light that shines from the sun, the moon, and the stars. But as far as Muslims are concerned, this message can only be read by virtue of the message revealed by “the recorded Quran.”

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This view is not solely an Islamic one: Duke Senior, exiled to the Forest of Arden in Shakespeare‘s As You Like It (Act II Scene 1) declares:

And this our life: exempt from public haunt,
Finds tongues in trees, books in running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in everything.

And if Shakespeare be considered too worldly a source, here is Hugh of St. Victor (twelfth century):

For this whole visible world is a book written by the finger of God, that is, created by divine power … But just as some illiterate man who sees an open book looks at the figures but does not recognize the letters: just so the foolish natural man who does not perceive the things of God outwardly in these visible creatures the appearances but does not inwardly understand the reason. But he who is spiritual and can judge all things, while he considers outwardly the beauty of the work inwardly conceives how marvellous is the wisdom of the Creator.

More recently and less theologically, the scientist Robert Hooke (1635 – 1703), friend of Robert Boyle and discoverer of Hooke’s Law, wrote that in the interests of science it was:

much to be wisht for and indeavored that there might be made and kept in some Repository as full and compleat a Collection of all varieties of Natural Bodies as could be obtain’d, where an Inquirer might be able to have recourse, where he might peruse, and turn over, and spell, and read the Book of Nature, and observe the Orthography, Etymologia, Syntaxis, and Prosodia of Natures Grammar, and by which, as with a Dictionary, he might readily turn to and find the true Figures, Composition, Derivation, and Use of the Characters, Words, Phrases and Sentences of nature written with indelible, and most exact, and most expressive Letters, without which Books it will be very difficult to be thoroughly a Literatus in the Language and Sense of Nature.

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All of which is to say that it may be unwise to read spiritual texts in too literal a manner.

A fascinating online discussion between US Army intellectuals Colonel Gian Gentile, Colonel Paul Yingling and journalist and Iraq War veteran Carl Prine:

Paul Yingling  A Failure in Generalship  –AFJ

….Having spent a decade preparing to fight the wrong war, America’s generals then miscalculated both the means and ways necessary to succeed in Iraq. The most fundamental military miscalculation in Iraq has been the failure to commit sufficient forces to provide security to Iraq’s population. U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) estimated in its 1998 war plan that 380,000 troops would be necessary for an invasion of Iraq. Using operations in Bosnia and Kosovo as a model for predicting troop requirements, one Army study estimated a need for 470,000 troops. Alone among America’s generals, Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki publicly stated that “several hundred thousand soldiers” would be necessary to stabilize post-Saddam Iraq. Prior to the war, President Bush promised to give field commanders everything necessary for victory. Privately, many senior general officers both active and retired expressed serious misgivings about the insufficiency of forces for Iraq. These leaders would later express their concerns in tell-all books such as “Fiasco” and “Cobra II.” However, when the U.S. went to war in Iraq with less than half the strength required to win, these leaders did not make their objections public.

Gian Gentile A Few Questions for Colonel Paul Yingling on Failures in Generalship – Small Wars Journal

….Perhaps you see it differently, but the failure that I see in American generalship in both wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (with precedence in Vietnam) is the idea that tactical and operational excellence through a certain brand of counterinsurgency (or any other form of tactical innovation) can rescue wars that ultimately are failures of strategy, or as Schlesinger more harshly puts it “national stupidity.”

In light of how you respond to these questions might you consider writing “A Failure of Generalship, Version 2” for Afghanistan?

If not, might you spell out the differences between what you saw as the failure of American generalship in Iraq from 2003-2006 with the past two years plus in Afghanistan.  In other words, how has American generalship been a failure in Iraq and not in Afghanistan?

Paul Yingling The Gentile-Yingling Dialogue: ISAF Exit Strategy – Neither International nor an Exit nor a Strategy – Small Wars Journal

….Those of us charged with strategic thinking ought to heed this example.  Imagine a failed Pakistan that results in a terrorist organization acquiring one or more nuclear weapons.  What would our response be in the aftermath of such a crisis?  What intelligence capabilities do we need to locate compromised nuclear materials?  What civil security and law enforcement measures might disrupt or minimize the impacts of such a threat?  What counter-proliferation capabilities are required to seize and render safe compromised nuclear weapons or materials?  Imagine further the capabilities required to avoid such a crisis.  What diplomatic measures might change the Pakistani strategic calculus that lends support to extremism?  What broader engagement with Pakistani civil society might render this troubled country less amenable to radical ideology?  Now imagine still further back to the institutional arrangements that generate national security capabilities.  Do we have the right priorities?  Are we buying the right equipment?  Are we selecting the right leaders?  Are we making the best use of increasingly scarce tax payer dollars?

Too often, what passes for strategic thought in the United States is actually a struggle among self-interested elites seeking political, commercial or bureaucratic advantage.  Such behavior is the privilege of a country that is both rich and safe.  However, a pattern of such behavior is self-correcting: no country that behaves this way will stay rich or safe for long.

Carl Prine A Colonel of Truth – Line of Departure

….Gentile and I agreed nevertheless that Yingling failed to seal the deal by naming names, something that would’ve allowed readers the chance to test empirically whether the LTC’s overall thesis had merit.  Here’s Yingling’s nutgraf, words scribbled during the worst days in Iraq when Gentile commanded a cavalry squadron in Baghdad and I was stuck in Anbar as a lowly infantry SPC:

These debacles are not attributable to individual failures, but rather to a crisis in an entire institution: America’s general officer corps. America’s generals have failed to prepare our armed forces for war and advise civilian authorities on the application of force to achieve the aims of policy. The argument that follows consists of three elements. First, generals have a responsibility to society to provide policymakers with a correct estimate of strategic probabilities. Second, America’s generals in Vietnam and Iraq failed to perform this responsibility. Third, remedying the crisis in American generalship requires the intervention of Congress.

….Perhaps because it was so brief, Yingling’s essay lacked subtlety.  It’s not true that America’s generals in Vietnam saw the conflict merely in terms of conventional warfare, although some surely did.  He spun a dubious bit of scholarship on Malaya by John Nagl into a larger argument about Cold War generals choosing to orient American arms toward highly kinetic campaigns – as if the threat of Soviet arms in Europe had nothing to do with that.  And he peppered his analysis with bromides that remain unproven, perhaps my favorite being the chestnut that “?opulation security is the most important measure of effectiveness in counterinsurgency.”

That read better in 2007 than it does today. But Yingling’s larger point held true:  America’s generals failed to adapt our shrinking forces to how policymakers might direct their use, even if there was a re-emphasis on operations other than conventional war both in practice (Kurdistan, Bangladesh, Haiti, Somalia, Kovoso, Bosnia, Timor, Cambodia) and theory.

This is an important discussion because the failure of generalship is merely part of a larger paradigm of leadership by abdication and moral evasion that is corroding the fabric of American society to a degree not seen since the 1970’s. Or perhaps since the 1870’s. Colonel John Boyd once chided his brother officers for being willing to take a bullet for their country but not willing to risk their careers for their country. How much worse then is an elite civilian political class that grabs the largesse of government contracts with great gusto but is chronically unable to do the hard work of providing strategic leadership when in office?

Truman’s famous desk sign that indicated the buck stopped at his desk. To update the sign to fit the spirit of the times would require replacing it with a dead fish rotting from the head.

Received a tremendous amount of feedback on this topic, mostly offline, but also on twitter and on other sites. Interestingly, of the minority who are strongly disagreeing with me, they tend to have their own problems with R2P doctrine. The next installment should be up tomorrow evening. In the meantime, here are a few more posts:

Bruce Kesler at Maggie’s Farm:

R2P: Right To Protect or Right To Preen?

….Neither COIN nor R2P are strategies. Unlike COIN, however, which is a set of tactics that may be applicable in some circumstances in pursuit of strategic goals (even if those goals may be arguable), R2P doesn’t have any operational tactics. R2P is more a clarion call to action, including actions that are contrary to US laws or popular will, in pursuit of internationalist goals for global governing as defined by transnational elites.

Further, R2P is cloaked in humanitarian rhetoric that allows liberal elites to preen, displaying their caring feathers, regardless of their ignorance of the military, regardless of the cost-benefit to US national security, and regardless that it isn’t their children being sent into harm’s way.

Lastly, R2P is reactive, not prescriptive of avoiding future threats to US security as a strategy must be. Much the same coterie who want to raise R2P to dominance over US foreign and military policies are largely dismissive of severely hobbling US allies or hollowing our military.

A brutally succinct assessment. 

Kesler, a veteran of the war in Vietnam and a former foreign policy analyst, is in sync here with many veterans whose experiences have made them skeptical of basing military intervention on grandiose idealism, along with the school of foreign policy realists. On the other hand, Anti-interventionists of all political stripes and backgrounds look askance at the assurance from R2Paternalistic advocates that enshrining R2P is not risky because such military interventions will be “rare” ( myself, I’d just like to see them done competently , in line with a coherent strategy, when the potential benefits significantly outweigh the costs).

Ken White, a respected senior voice at the Small Wars Council had this to say in an extended analysis of R2P in the comments section at SWJ Blog:

…. I’ll note that those whom Zenpundit rightly says will be “fired” will not be those who do the actual Protecting nor will they be the ones who pay the costs of such abject foolishness.

The R2P theory is the tip of an iceberg wherein the State — a State? — has overarching responsibility in all things and individuals have no responsibilities for them selves, indeed, no responsibility other than to act as the State directs. That is indeed monstrous.

In her paper linked by Zenpundit, Dr. Slaughter writes: “States can only govern effectively by actively cooperating with other states and by collectively reserving the power to intervene in other states’ affairs.” The first clause is possibly correct, the second is a road to unending warfare — quite simply, humans will not long tolerate it. I suggest that if that idea is applied to individuals, then I am endowed with the ability to get together with my neighbors and we can attack another neighbor whose only crime is to behave differently than do most of us. My suspicion is that will not work on several levels.

….She also writes: “The principal advantage is that subjecting government institutions directly to international obligations could buttress clean institutions against corrupt ones and rights-respecting institutions against their more oppressive counterparts.” Admirable. My question is what standard is applied to the determination of corruption and oppressiveness? What cultural norms are to be heeded and which are to be ignored? Who makes these determinations? If it is a collective decision, what precludes either mob rule or a ‘might makes right’ led possibly quite wrong determination…

Popular support for R2P may be inverse to the degree of public scrutiny the idea receives.