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Today I realized that while I decided this in concert with some of the participants it was not all of the participants, nor did I ever send out an email. At least as far as I recall. OTOH, I don’t think anyone will object to this either:

The symposium on Science, Strategy and War: The Strategic Theory of John Boyd by Colonel Frans Osinga, PhD, to be held at Chicago Boyz will take place the week of February 1st and not, as originally scheduled, this week. My apologies to any whose schedule may have been disrupted.

There will be more timely announcements and email prior to the new start date.

One of my distinguished co-bloggers at Chicago Boyz, John Jay, penned a truly outstanding post on China, incorporating history, culture, economics and linguistics, using the famous  Manchurian warlord and opium addict, ” the Young Marshal ” Chang Hsüeh-liang, as a springboard:

“ Household Armies”

“….China has historically allowed certain social forces to compete with loyalty to the state. Linguistic (and in the cases of the Hui and Uyghur, religious) groups have always retained a large amount of autonomy through the provincial governments, and in some cases provinces such as Guandong can almost be thought of as a separate country within China due to their linguistic (non-Mandarin) identity and economic self sufficiency. But Guandong gets little voice in Beijing relative to the economic might of the Pearl  River Delta. Cantonese don’t care, as long as the kleptocracy in Beijing leaves them alone (after they make their formal obeisance) most of the time, and does not attempt to steal too much wealth. That may change as peasants out West mobilize and force the central government to send more goodies their way. China never hit upon the Anglosphere’s solution of a Republican governmental federation of competing interests akin to either Great Britain or the competing American states – the Imperial authorities always wished to pretend that they were in complete control, while ceding a lot of practical authority to the provinces.  

Conflicts between the linguistic periphery and the Mandarin-speaking center have contributed to the ebb and flow of centralized power in China since even before the Ten kingdoms of the South broke away from the Five Dynasties that succeeded the Tang. The Chinese have historically seen history as cyclical, rather than linear. I think that this at least in part stems from the fact that since the fall of the Tang Dynasty, China has never bitten the bullet to reform itself by completely rethinking its social system. Systems have arisen as kludges to deal with a particular problem, but have never dealt with the fundamental flaws in society, only with their surface manifestations. As James Sheridan wrote in “Chinese Warlord: The Career of Feng Yu-hsiang” :  

Read in full here.

My friend Bruce Kesler, who takes a position of healthy skepticism on theories about warfare, sent me a piece by the colorful military writer and ex-intel analyst, Ralph Peters, a few days ago which I finally had the time to read today. The article appeared in The American Legion Magazine and might have been off the radar of some of my readers ( it was off of mine -thanks Bruce!):

12 Myths of 21st-Century War

“Thanks to those who have served in uniform, we’ve lived in such safety and comfort for so long that for many Americans sacrifice means little more than skipping a second trip to the buffet table.Two trends over the past four decades contributed to our national ignorance of the cost, and necessity, of victory.

First, the most privileged Americans used the Vietnam War as an excuse to break their tradition of uniformed service. Ivy League universities once produced heroes. Now they resist Reserve Officer Training Corps representation on their campuses.Yet, our leading universities still produce a disproportionate number of U.S. political leaders. The men and women destined to lead us in wartime dismiss military service as a waste of their time and talents. Delighted to pose for campaign photos with our troops, elected officials in private disdain the military. Only one serious presidential aspirant in either party is a veteran, while another presidential hopeful pays as much for a single haircut as I took home in a month as an Army private.

Second, we’ve stripped in-depth U.S. history classes out of our schools. Since the 1960s, one history course after another has been cut, while the content of those remaining focuses on social issues and our alleged misdeeds. Dumbed-down textbooks minimize the wars that kept us free. As a result, ignorance of the terrible price our troops had to pay for freedom in the past creates absurd expectations about our present conflicts. When the media offer flawed or biased analyses, the public lacks the knowledge to make informed judgments.

This combination of national leadership with no military expertise and a population that hasn’t been taught the cost of freedom leaves us with a government that does whatever seems expedient and a citizenry that believes whatever’s comfortable. Thus, myths about war thrive….”

Peters goes on to list and explain the following “12 myths”:

1. War doesn’t change anything
2. Victory is impossible today.
3. Insurgencies can never be defeated
4. There’s no military solution; only negotiations can solve our problems.
5. When we fight back, we only provoke our enemies
6. Killing terrorists only turns them into martyrs.
7. If we fight as fiercely as our enemies, we’re no better than them
8. The United States is more hated today than ever before
9. Our invasion of Iraq created our terrorist problems
10. If we just leave, the Iraqis will patch up their differences on their own.
11. It’s all Israel’s fault. Or the popular Washington corollary: “The Saudis are our friends.”
12. The Middle East’s problems are all America’s fault.
    

In the course of his preface and the extended “de-bunking” that follows, Peters makes a large number of points that I can agree with individually in the abstract or in isolation. To that, I cheerfully admit. My problem – and it’s a serious problem, actually – is that in the big picture, where Peters takes the simplification and conflation of complex and critical variables to the point of intellectual irresponsibility.

Peters is arguing for America taking a “Jacksonian” ( in Walter Russell Meade taxonomy) posture toward our Islamist and terrorist enemies in particular and toward the world in general. It’s an argument that may appeal to members of the American Legion, in particular the GI Generation of WWII vets who experienced fighting a total war, but it’s not a helpful strategy unless our enemies manifest a sufficiently targetable center of gravity, like, say, taking over Pakistan and making Osama bin Laden Grand Emir.

Frankly, our goal should be to never permit let our enemies reach such a position of strength in the first place. That means peeling away Muslim and tribal allies of convenience to pitch in killing the al Qaida network, not lumping the Saudis in with al Qaida, the Iranians, Musharraf and whatever itinerant Middle-Eastern types seem vaguely dysfunctional in a civilizational sense ( personally, I like reading about dead terrorists and I think their supporters, financiers, intellectual cheerleaders and mosque recruiters are all fair game for rendition or assassination, wherever they are. Doesn’t that give us more than enough of room to work with without attacking the entire Arab-Islamic world ??). I won’t even bother to go into the geoeconomic lunacy of bombing or attacking Saudi Arabia.

In my humble opinion, Peters knows all this very well. He’s a very smart guy. Certainly smart enough to comprehend downstream effects. What he’s doing these days is not strategy but shtick.

HOPPING ON THE BLOGOSPHERIC BOYD BOOK BANDWAGON

Colonel Frans Osinga, PhD, who gave a tour de force lecture at Boyd 2007, managed to prevail upon his publisher to sell a paperback version of Science, Strategy and War:The Strategic Theory of John Boyd at a price non-billionaires could afford.

I will be reviewing Science, Strategy and War in December and – tentatively – organizing a roundtable discussion at Chicago Boyz, most likely after Christmas. If you are a blogger, academic or a current or former member of the armed services and are interested in participating, send me an email at zenpundit@hotmail.com.

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE WARLORD

Kent’s Imperative had a post up that would have been worthy of Coming Anarchy:

Enigmatic biographies of the damned

“….Via the Economist this week, we learn of the death of an adversary whose kind has nearly been forgotten. Khun Sa was a warlord who amassed a private army and smuggling operation which dominated Asian heroin trafficking from remotest Burma over the course of nearly two decades. In the end, despite indictment in US courts, the politics of a failed state permitted him to retire as an investor and business figure, and to die peacefully in his own bed.The stories of men such as these however shaped more than a region. They are the defining features of the flow of events in a world of dark globalization. Yet these are not the biographies that are taught in international relations academia, nor even in their counterpart intelligence studies classrooms. The psychology of such men, and the personal and organizational decision-making processes of the non-state groups which amassed power to rival a princeling of Renaissance Europe, are equally as worthy of study both for historical reasons as well as for the lessons they teach about the nature of empowered individuals.

Read the rest here.

There are no shortage of warlords for such a study. Among the living we have Walid Jumblatt, the crafty chief of the Druze during the 1980’s civil war in Lebanon, the egomaniacal and democidal Charles Taylor of Liberia, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar the Islamist mujahedin commander and a large assortment of Somali, Colombian, Indonesian and El Salvadoran militiamen and paramilitaries. The history of the twentieth century alone offers up such colorful characters as “The Dogmeat General“, the ghoulishly brutal Ta Mok of the Khmer Rouge, “The Mad Baron” Ungern von Sternberg, Captain Hermann Ehrhardt and Pancho Villa among many others.

What would such a historical/cross-cultural/psychological “warlord study” reveal ? Primarily the type of man that the German journalist Konrad Heiden termed “armed bohemians”. Men who are ill-suited to achieving success in an orderly society but are acutely sensitive to minute shifts that they can exploit during times of uncertainty, coupled with an amoral sociopathology to do so ruthlessly. Paranoid and vindictive, they also frequently possess a recklessness akin to bravery and a dramatic sentimentality that charms followers and naive observers alike. Some warlords can manifest a manic energy or regularly display great administrative talents while a minority are little better than half-mad gangsters getting by, for a time, on easy violence, low cunning and lady luck.

Every society, no matter how civilized or polite on the surface, harbors many such men within it. They are like ancient seeds waiting for the drought-breaking rains.