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My schedule recently did not permit much in the way of my normal, extensive, blogsurfing  that is the genesis of my regularly scheduled Recommended Reading posts. I would however, like to highlight Matt Armstrong’s recent, in depth, post on AFRICOM. Much like 7-Up, if the vision pans out, AFRICOM is to be “The Un-Combatant” Command. Sys Admin from the inception, interagency “jointness” in conception. But will that actually happen in the real world?

AFRICOM: DOA or in need of Better Marketing? No and Yes.

By Matt Armstrong

Like Mark Twain’s “death” in 1897 (he died in 1910), reports of AFRICOM’s demise may be exaggerated.  Concerns that AFRICOM hasn’t been thought out or is unnecessary aren’t supported by the actions and statements of those charged with building this entity.  However, based on the poor marketing of AFRICOM, these concerns are not surprising.

I attended USC’s AFRICOM conference earlier this month and between panel discussions and offline conversations, I came away with a new appreciation (and hope) for the newest, and very different, command. 

This is not like the other Combatant Commands (one DOD representative said they dropped “Combatant” from the title, but depending on where you look, all commands have that word or none of the commands include that adjective).  Also unlike other commands, this is “focused on prevention and not containment or fighting wars.”  This is, as one speaker continued, is a “risk-laden experiment” that is like an Ironman with multidisciplinary requirements and always different demands (note: thank you for not saying it’s a marathon… once you’ve done one marathon, they’re easy, you can “fake” a marathon… Ironman triathlons are always unpredictable, I know, I’ve done five.).  The goal, he continued, was to “keep combat troops off the continent for 50 years” because the consensus was, once troops landed on Africa, it would be extremely difficult to take them off. 

General William “Kip” Ward realizes that only once in several generations is there the opportunity to stand up a new command.  General Ward has worked hard to create something new and unique that addresses modern security dilemmas.  Modern communications and the vastness of Africa make a singular location for AFRICOM impractical.  For example, the Democratic Republic of the Congo alone is nearly 1/4 the size of the U.S. and has 130 million people alone.  Across the continent political boundaries on the map mask tremendous language and cultural variations. 

The goal, as it was laid out in the conference, is to divide AFRICOM into four tiers because it is “easy to overwhelm our African partners in [both] enthusiasm [and] size.”

Read the rest here.

Two years ago, Dr. Chet Richards released Neither Shall the Sword: Conflict in the Years Ahead, a radical treatise on global trends toward  the privatization of military capabilities and the erosion of the efficacy of state armed forces.  If We Can Keep It: A National Security Manifesto for the Next Administration is not a sequel to Neither Shall the Sword but rather a logical extension of that book’s premises upon which Richards builds a stinging critique of American grand strategy and a profligate United States government that Richards argues wins enemies and alienates allies while squandering hundreds of billions of dollars on weapons systems of dubious usefulness against what genuine threats to our security still exist.  It is a provocative thesis that leaves few of the Defense Department’s sacred cows grazing unmolested.

Dr. Richards has a trademark style as a writer: economical clarity of thought. One can agree or disagree with his analysis or dispute his normative preferences but within his parameters, Chet will give his audience an argument that is internally consistent and logically sound, without much in the way of redundancy or wasted words. As a result, If We Can Keep It is about as lean a book as Richards would like the U.S. military to be while giving the reader no shortage of things to think about as he hammers away at conventional wisdom regarding defense policy, national security and the war on terror.

A number of intellectual influences resonate within If We Can Keep It. Unsurprisingly, given Richards’ history as a military thinker, these include the ideas of Colonel John Boyd, Martin van Creveld, Thomas X. Hammes and 4GW Theory advocated by William Lind.  Also present as a strategic subtext is Sun Tzu along with elements of Eastern philosophy and the recent work of British military strategist General Sir Rupert Smith, whose book, The Utility of Force, shares a similar title with one of Richards’ chapters. Finally, Richards is channeling, in his call for a grand strategy of Shi and for America to focus on ” being the best United States that we can be “, a very traditional strand of foreign policy in American history. One that diplomatic historian Walter McDougall has termed “Promised Land” but which may be most accurately described as “Pre-Wilsonian“; not “Isolationist” in the mold of the 1930’s but rather a hardheaded realism with very skeptical view of the efficacy of military intervention beyond purely punitive expeditions against violent ideological networks like al Qaida.

In enunciating this case, Richards argues that the “war on terror” conducted since 9/11 by the Bush administration  does not qualify as a “war” and that “terrorists” is an empty label  slapped on to many types of problems, most of which are best handled by law enforcement and intelligence agencies ( Richards recommends giving the IC the lead and budget for fighting al Qaida, not the DoD); the “war” model is costly in terms of treasure and civil liberty without yielding positive strategic results; While COIN is ” a piece of the puzzle” for fighting “true insurgencies” it is not a strategic magic bullet and COIN is historically ineffectual against “wars of national liberation”; that given the lack of serious external threats from foreign states or justification to intervene abroad militarily in most instances (aside from raids and strikes against violent non-state networks) the American defense establishment can be drastically scaled back to roughly $ 150 billion a year to support a superempowered US Marine Corps with Special Forces and tactical Air power.

(Dr. Richard’s last bit should be enough to kill off most of America’s general officer corps from heart attacks and take a fair number of the House of Representatives with them)

Chet Richards makes a strong argument for the declining utility of military force and the consequent budgetary implications before calling for a radical shift in American foreign and strategic policy. Much of his criticism of the strategic status quo is praiseworthy, bold,  incisive and insightful and could serve as the basis for commonsense discussion of possible reforms. However, Richards’ argument can also be contested; in part from what Richards has said in If We Can Keep It, which will mostly attract the attention from specialists in military affairs, but most importantly from what has been left unsaid. It is the consequences of the latter with which the public and politicians must seriously consider in entertaining the recommendations of Dr. Richards.

In terms of what was “said”, I am dissatisfied with the sections dealing with the differentiation between “true insurgencies” and “wars of national liberation which suffers from some degree of contextual ahistoricality. For example, the Malayan Emergency ( which is listed in tables IV and V as being in both categories) has a result of ” UK declares victory and leaves”. True enough, but in the process of doing so, an ethnic Chinese Communist insurgency with ties to Beijing was crushed and the population reconciled to a legitimate, pro-Western state. That’s a victory, not a declaration. Communist Vietnam may have ” withdrawn” from Cambodia but their puppet ruler, the ex-Khmer Rouge Hun Sen, is still Prime Minister today. That’s a victory, even if Hun Sen’s power has been trimmed back somewhat by a UN brokered parliamentary-constitutional monarchy system.  The case of the Portuguese colonies of Angola and Mozambique have as much to do with the utter collapse of the decrepit, semi-fascist,  Salazar regime in Lisbon a brief Communist coup as the military prowess of the insurgencies.

Reaching for a dogmatic rule, which the 4GW school is currently doing with “foreign COIN is doomed”, is an error because the more heterodox and fractured the military situation in a country happens to be, the more relative the concepts of “foreigner” and “legitimacy” are going to become to the locals. Rather than binary state vs. insurgents scenarios, historical case studies in military complexity like China 1911-1949, the Spanish Civil War, South Vietnam 1949 -1962, Lebanon 1980’s, West Afrca 1990’s and Iraq, Afghanistan, Colombia and Central Africa the 2000’s should be pursued to better understand 4GW and COIN dynamics.

In terms of what has been left “unsaid” in If We Can Keep It, would be the downstream global implications of a radical shift in America’s strategic posture. Richards is no isolationist but his smoothly laconic style belies the magnitude of proposals which entail a top to bottom reevaluation of all of the alliances and military relationships maintained by the United States ( itself not a bad thing) – most likely with the result of terminating most and renegotiating the rest. The extent to which American securrity guarantees originating in the aftermath of WWII, have interdependently facilitated peaceful economic liberalization and integration is a factor ignored in If We Can Keep It and frankly, I’m not sure how we can abruptly or unilaterally exit our security role in the short term without creating a riptide in the global economy.

If We Can Keep It is a fascinating and thought-provoking book as well as an absolutely brutal critique of the numerous shortcomings and strategic mismatches we suffer from as a result of ponderous, Cold War era, legacy bureaucracies and weapons systems and ill-considered foreign interventions. It is also, a pleasure to read. I highly recommend it to any serious student of defense policy, military strategy or foreign affairs.

ADDENDUM – Other Reviews of If We Can Keep It:

William Lind

TDAXP

“If there is ever another war in Europe, it will come out of some damned silly thing in the Balkans” – Otto von Bismarck

“I think what we did in Kosovo was profoundly important.” – Bill Clinton

A new nation declared itself today after close to a decade as a UN protectorate; a fragment of a fragment of an extinguished artificial state once built upon the polyglot ruins of European empires and Muslim sultanates. This particular geographic node, Kosovo, has a quality that all of it’s larger forerunners lacked – the cultural unity of identity that will make the nation the primary loyalty of the overwhelming majority of it’s citizens. A fact on the ground that trumps diplomatic protests over the finer points of international law or the mythic appeal of seven hundred year old Lost Causes.

Kosovo’s declaration of independence is ultimately rooted in an overwhelming demographic reality that could have only been altered by Kosovar Serbians having had larger families three and four decades ago than their poorer Albanian neighbors; and the Yugoslavian and Serbian governments having given rural Serbs some kind of economic incentive not to migrate to Belgrade or the larger towns of Serbia proper. As such, Kosovo’s declaration is worrisome to all multiethnic states plagued by separatism where the majority population is in decline – from the windows of the Kremlin, Serbia today must look hauntingly like Russia writ small.

However demographics alone was probably not enough here to explain Kosovo – Kurds, Shan, Tamils, Basques, Tibetans, Palestinians, Uighurs, Baluchis, Pushtuns and in previous centuries, the Irish – all thoroughly dominate their respective homelands but are not yet being welcomed into independence by great powers. What hapened is that the adversaries of the Kosovar Albanian, the Serbians nationalists, also morally de-legitimized themselves under Slobodan Milosevic, with years of atrocities and ethnic cleansing in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. Milosevic and his murderous policies had considerable popular support until the very end; they still retain support from a not inconsiderable, defiant, hardcore as evidenced by the inability or unwillingness of Serbia to bring Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic to justice. As the Germans bade farewell forever to East Prussia and Silesia in 1945, Serbians today can reflect on Sarajevo’s impact upon their legal claim to sovereignty over Kosovo.

That being said, events can be handled well or poorly. Kosovar independence would have gone down better in a world where Russia was a prosperous, democratic state, thoroughly integrated into the Core and a regional strategic partner of the United States instead of a bitter, increasingly paranoid, plebiscitary “soft” dictatorship that views America with grave suspicion and the EU with contempt.  That was not an outcome that Washington could have created alone but a relationship that three administrations might have attempted to build with Russia but elected not to do so. Benign neglect mixed with pressure toward Moscow was a deliberate choice on our part, one that might have made Berlin, London and Paris happy in the 1990’s but it wasn’t to our long term strategic benefit.

Independence is good for the Kosovars and in the last analysis, inevitable; but our statesmen should be arranging matters so that the United States profits from inevitable events rather than simply bearing the diplomatic costs.

Kosovo Links:

Coming Anarchy  ,  Duck of Minerva,   TDAXP,  Aqoul,  Outside the Beltway,   Centerfield,   John Robb,  Matthew Yglesias   Catholicgauze – New!,     Weekly Standard -New!

UPDATE:

The United States government has formally recognized the independence of Kosovo via the State Department but, significantly, with an accompanying statement by President Bush.

Abu Muqawama pointed to a  must-read essay in The New York Times Magazine by Parag Khanna of The New America Foundation ( if you are not familiar with this think tank’s orientation, you can get some idea by checking out their board of directors). This is a lengthy, grand historical ( and overly deterministic) narrative of relative American decline and a coming age of superstate multipolarity with a critical “swing vote” being held by New Core/Seam states like Russia and Brazil.

“Waving Goodbye to Hegemony”

The Geopolitical Marketplace

At best, America’s unipolar moment lasted through the 1990s, but that was also a decade adrift. The post-cold-war “peace dividend” was never converted into a global liberal order under American leadership. So now, rather than bestriding the globe, we are competing – and losing – in a geopolitical marketplace alongside the world’s other superpowers: the European Union and China. This is geopolitics in the 21st century: the new Big Three. Not Russia, an increasingly depopulated expanse run by Gazprom.gov; not an incoherent Islam embroiled in internal wars; and not India, lagging decades behind China in both development and strategic appetite. The Big Three make the rules – their own rules – without any one of them dominating. And the others are left to choose their suitors in this post-American world.

The more we appreciate the differences among the American, European and Chinese worldviews, the more we will see the planetary stakes of the new global game. Previous eras of balance of power have been among European powers sharing a common culture. The cold war, too, was not truly an “East-West” struggle; it remained essentially a contest over Europe. What we have today, for the first time in history, is a global, multicivilizational, multipolar battle.

Read the rest here.

My reaction to Khanna’s essay, distilled from his upcoming book The Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order, are mixed.  Clearly, great effort and thought that has been put into this project by the well-read Mr. Khanna and his Thomas Friedmanesque globetrotting reportage is nothing but impressive. Clearly, Parag Khanna “gets” that globalization is a dynamic and complex system with interdependent “frenemies”; which I infer that he splices liberally with geopolitics and  the hard cultural conflict of Sam Huntington. A synthesis of civilizational conflict and convergence.

While erudite, Khanna’s geo-economic/political argument regarding the inevitable decline of the liberal international order has been made before (anyone recall Lester Thurow or Paul Kennedy?) in the early 1990’s, the 1970’s, late 1950’s, early 1930’s and perhaps originally in the gripping angst of the Lost Generation of WWI. Perhaps even further, as Russian intellectuals of the Silver Age like Aleksandr Blok were already worrying themselves sick about ” the Yellow Peril” even before the Russo-Japanese War.  And as he freely admits, Khanna’s geopolitical model of three, contending global centers of gravity bears a strong resemblence to Orwell’s. Khanna offers some sound, if modest, advice for American policy makers though the soundness of his counsel is independent of the validity of his thesis. There’s a great deal of glossing over the longitudinal weaknesses of the EU and China and minimizing of  the adaptiveness of America in this essay in order to make the declinist narrative as deterministic  as it comes across.

That being said, well worth your time to pop open a cold one and read it.

ADDENDUM:

Dr. Nexon has his evaluation of his former student’s work at The Duck of Minerva

ADDENDUM II:

CKR has an awesome critique in the comments section here.

Dr. HistoryGuy99 has entered the building.

Libby at The Newshoggers takes note.

protein wisdom rejects it as unwise – and I agree that the article probably reflects the geopolitical hopes of some NYT editors in their lighter moments when they are not too busy slandering Iraq War veterans.

Love fest from Washington Note.

Please see the introductory post here.

Blogfriend Dave Schuler lost no time in taking up Cheryl Rofer’s challenge. An excerpt from his post at The Glittering Eye:

“Nuclear Weapons Policy in the 21st Century”

“Let’s begin this discussion with a premise and some facts. First, the premise. Nations work actively and rationally to extend their power and influence and to avoid losing power or influence. That’s consistent with Napoleon’s dictum cited above: the two great levers are fear of loss and hope of gain. Now the facts.

Worldwide there are approximately 32,000 nuclear weapons (source: Nuclear Threat Initiative). Of these more than 30,000, roughly 95%, are in the possession of either the United States (roughly 10,000) or Russia (roughly 20,000). For the United States if all nuclear weapons everywhere were to magically vanish from the face of the earth very little would change. The U. S. would continue to be the wealthiest country in the world. It would continue to have the biggest GDP in the world. It would continue to have the strongest military in the world. It would continue to wield great social influence. It would continue to be the world’s sole superpower.

The situation is different for Russia. Without nuclear weapons Russia would continue to be an enormous, sprawling country with a populous heartland and a remote sparsely populated hinterland, not unlike Canada in that respect. It would have a GDP roughly that of Canada’s, too, although with a significantly larger population it would be a good deal poorer than Canada. It would have no warm water ports which substantially limits its ability to project ports.

Although its role as a regional power is inescapeable it would not be a world power.

Russia will never relinquish its nuclear arsenal. To do so would relegate it to third class status. “

Read the rest here.