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Berlin 1945

I have been reading The End by Ian Kershaw and it struck me that the story therein of Hitler’s Reich going down to total destruction is really a recurrent phenomena.

It is interesting that Kershaw, who began his earlier 2 volume biography of Adolf Hitler with the hypothesis that the Fuhrer was more the opportunistic vehicle of grand historical forces, in this study of the Nazi Gotterdammerung has accepted that the pull of Hitler’s inexorable authority over  Nazi and traditional German elites was charismatic, personalized and beyond challenge, even when Hitler was encircled by Soviet forces in his subterranean bunker and hours from suicide. Kershaw details how Hitler and his die-hard Gauleiter apparatchiks repeatedly demanded not only the militarily impossible, but the nonsensically insane, from the Wehrmacht, the Waffen-SS and the German people themselves. Virtually everyone struggled to comply.

This story is far from unique.

The Imperial Japanese, it must be said, surpassed even their Nazi allies in stubborn refusal to accept empirical reality and determination to fight to uttermost ruin. After the destruction of their Navy, loss of 100,000 men in Okinawa (their entire army there, minus a handful, fought to the death), the ruin of their cities, approaching famine, exhaustion of aviation fuel and gasoline stocks, the declaration of war on Japan by the Soviet Union and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima – Imperial Japan’s war cabinet deadlocked on a vote to surrender. The Kamikaze enthusiasts among the flag officers proposed a battle plan for their home islands to the war cabinet picturesquely titled “Honorable Death of 100 Million”, with gruesome implications for Japan’s civilian population.

Emperor Hirohito inspects Hiroshima after the atomic bombing

Many years later, Prime Minister Nakasone, who had been conscripted as a mere boy to meet invading American soldiers and Marines on the beach with a sharpened bamboo stake, credited the two atomic bombs with having saved his life. Without them, Japan’s warlords, with the tacit approval of their Emperor, would have coerced the Japanese nation into a gloriously genocidal defeat. A policy that while irrational,  faithfully followed the cultural spirit of Bushido and Japan’s mythic 47 Ronin.

Then there was the ancient example of Masada, the defiance of Titus by the Jewish Sicarii in 73 AD, as described by Josephus:

…. Miserable men indeed were they, whose distress forced them to slay their own wives and children with their own hands, as the lightest of those evils that were before them.  So they being not able to bear the grief they were under for what they had done any longer, and esteeming it an injury to those they had slain to live even the shortest space of time after them,-they presently laid all they had in a heap, and set fire to it.  They then chose ten men by lot out of them, to slay all the rest; every one of whom laid himself down by his wife and children on the ground, and threw his arms about them, and they offered their necks to the stroke of those who by lot executed that melancholy office;  and when these ten had, without fear, slain them all, they made the same rule for casting lots for themselves, that he whose lot it was should first kill the other nine, and after all, should kill himself. Accordingly, all these had courage sufficient to be no way behind one another in doing or suffering;  so, for a conclusion, the nine offered their necks to the executioner, and he who was the last of all took a view of all the other bodies, lest perchance some or other among so many that were slain should want his assistance to be quite dispatched; and when he perceived that they were all slain, he set fire to the palace, and with the great force of his hands ran his sword entirely through himself, and fell down dead near to his own relations. So these people died with this intention, that they would leave not so much as one soul among them all alive to be subject to the Romans.

….Now for the Romans, they expected that they should be fought in the morning, when accordingly they put on their armor, and laid bridges of planks upon their ladders from their banks, to make an assault upon the fortress, which they did,  but saw nobody as an enemy, but a terrible solitude on every side, with a fire within the place as well as a perfect silence So they were at a loss to guess at what had happened. At length they made a shout, as if it had been at a blow given by the battering-ram, to try whether they could bring anyone out that was within;  the women heard this noise, and came out of their underground cavern, and informed the Romans what had been done, as it was done, and the second of them clearly described all both what was said and what was done, and the manner of it:  yet they did not easily give their attention to such a desperate undertaking, and did not believe it could be as they said; they also attempted to put the fire out, and quickly cutting themselves a way through it, they came within the palace,  and so met with the multitude of the slain, but could take no pleasure in the fact, though it were done to their enemies. Nor could they do other than wonder at the courage of their resolution and the immovable contempt of death, which so great a number of them had shown, when they went through with such an action as that was.

What does the phenomenon of bitter-end political leadership mean in terms of strategy?

To the extent that war is a contest of wills or a form of bargaining between two political communities, the fanaticism of bitter-enders simplifies strategy while often complicating the warfare necessary to execute it.  Strategy is simplified because, to borrow a term from labor relations, the “last, best offer” has been refused. No bargaining is taking place – one or more sides refuses peace at any price short of total victory (“unconditional surrender”) or complete defeat. This represents movement away from a limited war for limited ends closer toward Clausewitz ‘s theoretical “Absolute War” by becoming, for the losing party, an existential conflict. The implicit threat to fight to the bitter end in any war – assuming the resources and will to make good on the threat exist – is really a primitive form of psychological deterrence; most states seeking limited objectives will avoid getting trapped in this dynamic.

This means the strategic calculus is altered by such a stance. The war itself and the driving need to wage it to it’s ultimate conclusion may have come to outweigh the value of the original “End” over which the conflict began; perhaps a policy concession or bit of territory or admission by a state’s rulers of a subordinate place in the diplomatic pecking order. While adopting a “bitter-end” position logically seems disadvantageous to the weaker party, it presents the enemy with a new set of problems. The “Means” or costs required to wage a war of conquest and lengthy occupation may be economically or attritionally prohibitive, or even physically impossible. Israel has a fine military and nuclear weapons but the Jewish state is too small to subdue and rule over the Arab states; Imperial Japan, for all it’s martial ferocity and cruelty, could not swallow the vastness of China, divided by civil war and fighting without allies, even before Pearl Harbor. Reach can exceed grasp.

Likewise, the moral burden and diplomatic friction of waging war not only against the opposing army, but the enemy population as well – of bombing or blockading into starvation women, children and the elderly – may be more than a political community or it’s leadership are able to bear and remain unified. As callous and narcissistic leaders of great countries usually are, few of them (fortunately) aspire to follow in the footsteps of Hitler, Stalin or Mao and openly spill an ocean of blood.  The impressive firepower of the bombing campaigns of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon did not break Hanoi’s will to fight the Vietnam War, they broke the Eastern Establishment’s will to pursue anticommunist Containment by force in Vietnam or elsewhere. The brutal counterinsurgency tactics of the French Army in the Algerian War destroyed the Algerian rebels militarily, but it shattered the Fourth Republic politically.

Insurgency, the “war of the weak”, is powerful because it inherently contains elements of bitter-endism. To rise up against one’s own society usually is an act of politically burning your boats and wearing, so far as the state is concerned, the mantle of treason and all that it entails. A desperate act by desperate men and conversely,  many of the leaders of states, being tyrants, are in no better position. Tyrants are widely despised; the Gaddafis or Mussolinis know that their power is their only guarantee of safety and their fate, if they fall into the hands of their people, would be terrible, so any rebellion must be crushed immediately, lest it gain traction. The Shah by contrast, was a congenital coward but a realist. He knew what might happen if he and his family fell into the hands of his political opponents, so the Pahlavi dynasty preemptively fled at the first sign of trouble (twice).

Finally, a word must be said about the position of a people under the leadership of  bitter-ender rulers in a war. Caught between a rock and a hard place, they essentially have three choices, none of them attractive:

1. Make a supreme effort to win the war.

2. Make a supreme effort to overthrow the government and sue for peace.

3.  Desert the cause as quietly as they can on an individual basis and hope for the best.

The best almost never happens. Kershaw’s history of the fate of the Germans in 1945 would have been well understood by Thucydides, even if the Melians were as blameless as the Germans were deserving of their fate:

….About the same time the Melians again took another part of the Athenian lines which were but feebly garrisoned. Reinforcements afterwards arriving from Athens in consequence, under the command of Philocrates, son of Demeas, the siege was now pressed vigorously; and some treachery taking place inside, the Melians surrendered at discretion to the Athenians, who put to death all the grown men whom they took, and sold the women and children for slaves, and subsequently sent out five hundred colonists and inhabited the place themselves.

If you want the bitter end, be prepared to drink the last drop.

[ by Charles Cameron -- why is non-actionable (useless) intelligence sometimes the most intelligent (useful)? - importance of multiple frames for complex vision ]
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I have fun choosing my data points, I’ll admit, and I enjoy the art of juxtaposition for its own sake — but the particular juxtaposition above is frankly useless.

Readers of the Chuang-Tzu, however, will be familiar with the idea that the useless is not without its uses…

Here, then, is the method to this madness.

What I want to establish in myself – and in others who choose to follow me – is a rich supply of frames, of analogies, of patterns that can be seen at a glance. And the ways to do this are (a) to read widely in those arts and sciences which make frequent use of symmetry, analogy, metaphor, and pattern, and (b) to practice, oneself, the techne of analogy-, metaphor-, symmetry-, and pattern-making.

1.

In the two image-frames above, the lower image shows a still from a Haqqani network training video from SITE — which could be viewed as the fulfillment (albeit in Afghanistan, and waking reality) of a prophecy made earlier (about Scotland, a not-entirely-dissimilar country, mountainous, clannish, proud), in suitably oracular fashion, in Shakespeare’s Macbeth Act IV Scene 1 (shown in the upper frame, from the First Folio edition).

Here, you might say, the Taliban come to high Dunsinane Hill.

But…

This is not actionable intelligence.

The injunction to “keep a lookout for people on the move pretending to be trees” is not a useful addition to tradecraft.

It is, however, vivid. And it’s an instance of “the leap” from one idea to another that’s at the heart of the process of insight and discovery. It is an example of a specific skill of considerable analytic importance.

2.

Karl Weick and Kathleen Sutcliffe, in Managing the Unexpected: Assuring High Performance in an Age of Complexity, p. 42, [quoted in Fishbein and Treverton and Jeffrey Cooper ] define mindfulness thus:

By mindfulness we mean the combination of ongoing scrutiny of existing expectations, continuous refinement and differentiation of expectations based on new experiences, willingness and capability to invent new expectations that make sense of unprecedented events, a more nuanced appreciation of context and ways to deal with it, and identification of new dimensions of context that improve foresight and current functioning.

How’s that for a prose version of the basic OODA insight?

3.

Obviously, I am not talking about the kind of tactical intelligence that is concerned with materiel and logistics here, but with mindset and morale.

This may get overlooked, since…

Emphasizing current intelligence for actionable exploitation may have created an unintended mind-set that undervalues the immense importance of knowing and understanding the adversary’s intentions throughout the course of the confrontation, even at cost of foregoing exploitation of these sources for temporary advantage on the battlefield or in the diplomatic conference room.

[Cooper, Curing Analytic Pathologies: Pathways to Improved Intelligence Analysis, p.30]

4.

What I am talking about here is that “willingness and capability to invent new expectations that make sense of unprecedented events, a more nuanced appreciation of context and ways to deal with it, and identification of new dimensions of context that improve foresight and current functioning mentioned above.

New dimensions of context? What this boils down to is multiple frames of vision… which the IC understands very well, as expressed in the often-repeated chess master analogy — good for strategic thinkers of all stripes. Here’s Robert Sinclair‘s version, in Thinking and Writing: Cognitive Science and Intelligence Analysis, p. 13:

Simon estimates that a first-class player will have 50,000 of these patterns to call on — by no means a small number, but orders of magnitude less than the theoretical possibilities that flow from any given position. The expert can use them to drastically reduce the number of choices he must consider at any point in a game, with the result that he often hits on an effective move with such speed that the observer attributes it to pure intuition.

Enter Neustadt and May, whose book Thinking in Time Zen reviewed here just the other day — enter, in fact, history, as a store of stories.

Richards Heuer explains [Psychology of Intelligence Analysis, p. 38]:

An analyst seeks understanding of current events by comparing them with historical precedents in the same country, or with similar events in other countries. Analogy is one form of comparison. When an historical situation is deemed comparable to current circumstances, analysts use their understanding of the historical precedent to fill gaps in their understanding of the current situation. Unknown elements of the present are assumed to be the same as known elements of the historical precedent. Thus, analysts reason that the same forces are at work, that the outcome of the present situation is likely to be similar to the outcome of the historical situation, or that a certain policy is required in order to avoid the same outcome as in the past.

And the analogies and insights can come from fiction as well as history, as Charles Hill is quoted here as saying:

That is why Alexander the Great carried the Iliad with him on his conquests, and why Queen Elizabeth studied Cicero in the evenings. It is why Abraham Lincoln read, and was profoundly influenced by, Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass,” and why Paul Nitze paged through Shakespeare on his flights to Moscow as America’s chief arms negotiator.

Further, the appropriate insights and possible framings can come from future and/or speculative histories — hence the meetings between IC members and various science fiction authors and thriller screenwriters which then DDI Jami Miscik arranged in an attempt “to see beyond the intelligence report and into a world of plot development”.

As I noted a few days back, I’m particularly impressed by Frank Herbert‘s ability to recognize the importance of the oil / desert / ecology / major powers / jihad / Mahdi complex – back between 1957 and 1965, while writing Dune.

5.

But all this takes me back to a comment I made a while back on Mark Stout‘s On War and Words blog, on “the notion of the kinship of spycraft and literature.” I wrote there:

I think that idea has a lot of merit. Chaucer was a spy, as was Kit Marlowe, and Wordsworth, and Basil Bunting. Somerset Maugham and Graham Greene spied, and John le Carre – and if I’m not mistaken, much of the early OSS was recruited from the Yale literature department by the likes of Archibald MacLeish…

My own suggestion would be that this is because the literary mind is well suited to understanding and expressing complex relationships, just as (it has been suggested) the engineering mind is suited to seeing things in black and white – you’ve probably seen Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog’s paper on Engineers of Jihad, in which they determine that “engineers, in particular, were three to four times more likely to become violent terrorists than their peers in finance, medicine or the sciences”.

I don’t know whether that allegation is accurate, or just an artifact of their research methods – but if it’s true that literature offers a different (and in some ways more subtle) means of modeling the kinds of complex situation we’re all facing these days, maybe we need to increase the intake of lit and humanities majors into the IC, and stop being so tech-centric about our analytic methods. The human mind might just be better at selecting and connecting the right dots than our datamining programs.

Keith Oatley‘s paper Shakeapeare’s invention of theatre as simulation that runs on minds might give us a hint or two.

And we’re back to Shakespeare.

6.

Why?

Because what’s important in all this is the quality of imagination expressed. And the core insight is that the greatest poets, dramatists, science fiction writers and historians create pocket universes — worlds invented or perceived in which the logics of the many binary oppositions, tides, undertows, tipping points and emergent patternings of our profoundly complex world are found in miniature.

The mind in a nutshell, the world in a grain of sand…

Perhaps clearest statement of this perspective comes from the great scientist Gregory Bateson, who writes about poetry in these terms:

One reason why poetry is important for finding out about the world is because in poetry a set of relationships get mapped onto a level of diversity in us that we don’t ordinarily have access to. We bring it out in poetry. We can give to each other in poetry the access to a set of relationships in the other person and in the world that we are not usually conscious of in ourselves. So we need poetry as knowledge about the world and about ourselves, because of this mapping from complexity to complexity.

7.

If it is great imaginative power that provides the deepest insights into a complex world, great minds and hearts will be those you need to follow — not minds cowed by the pressures of bureacracy and success.

“You want some new ideas? Read some old books” Marine Gen. James Mattis told his audience at the 14th annual American Veterans Center conference the other day, in a speech which “recommended books by and about leaders like Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King Jr., George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.”

Great hearts, great minds. And not always well-tolerated by those around them.

8.

Jami Miscik again, at a conference discussing “The Power of Impossible Thinking: A Prerequisite for Profitable Growth“:

Embrace the maverick.

Miscik is clear that the purpose isn’t only to be widely read, but to be independently and courageously thoughtful.  Bureaucracies are not by nature the most friendly places for independent thinking, stove-piping and soloing, seniority and comfort all militate against it — hence the need to embrace the maverick, to develop (in fact) a culture that embraces the maverick.

Miscik addresses that issue, too: “She also warned the audience that a single spate of change is not enough; an organization will always have to change again.”

Or as Sinclair has it in Thinking and Writing (op. cit., p. 9):

I do believe diversifying the workforce in this way would require a cultural shift at least comparable to that involved in a shift to online substantive collaboration. Without such a shift, the directorate, like any organism under threat, would identify people who failed to fit the dominant pattern as foreign bodies and extrude them.

9.

I am thinking, in all this, of those whose task it is to provide the richest, highest level analysis of “the adversary’s intentions” — the readers of minds by which history is about to be written.

Those whose job it is to be concerned about the threats that face us, from the Haqqani, from the Chinese, from Pakistan, from wherever, will do their job better, with greater insight – with greater critical doubt and critical confidence – if their minds are richly sown with myths and histories, matter for analogies pattern languages, than if they have focused down along the scope of a single silo…

As Mattis, Hill, Miscik, Sinclair, Bateson, Oatley, Heuer and company, each in their own way, suggest…

10.

When you come right down to it, audacious, insightful thinking is its own form of special ops.

[by J. Scott Shipman]

The Forum and The Tower by Mary Ann Glendon

“The relationship between politics and the academy has been marked by mutual fascination and wariness since the time of Plato.”

The first sentence on the flap of the dust jacket of this very good and informative small book. Professor Glendon, who is the Learned Hand Professor of Law at Harvard Law school, set out to write a book for her students that would answer ageless questions such as:

“Is politics such a dirty business, or are conditions so unfavorable, that couldn’t make a difference? What kinds of compromises can one make for the sake of getting and keeping a position from which one might be able to have influence on the course of events? What kinds of compromises can one make for the sake of achieving a higher political goal? When does prudent accommodation become pandering? When should one speak truth to power no matter what the risk, and when is it acceptable, as Burke put it, to speak the truth with measure that one may speak it longer? When does one reach the point at which one concludes, as Plato finally did, that circumstances are so unfavorable that only the reasonable course of action is to “keep quiet and offer up prayers for one’s own welfare and for that of one’s country”?”

Professor Glendon answers these questions and more through brief examinations of the lives and works of some of history’s most important figures:

Plato

Cicero

Justinian, Tribonian, and Irnerius

Machiavelli

Thomas Hobbs and Edward Coke

John Locke

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Edmund Burke

Tocqueville

Max Weber

Oliver Wendell Holmes

Eleanor Roosevelt and Charles Malik

All in all, I believe Professor Glendon has provided a uniquely valuable book to help her students and other readers to answers those questions. In short but focused chapters of about 20 pages each, she provides mini-biographies of the subjects above and how they answered the some of the questions both in their lives and in their philosophy. Some of her subjects were thinkers lacking the abilities for the public square, Plato, for instance, but were enormously influential just the same. Rare were those like Cicero and Burke who were equally comfortable in the political arena or the academy.

My favorite chapters were on Plato, Cicero, Machiavelli, and Burke—mostly because I’ve read a respectable amount of their work. That said, I have not read Plato’s The Laws—and Professor Glendon suggests it is much better than The Republic—which I have read and did not much enjoy. Not surprisingly, The Laws will be on my list for this winter.

The inclusion of Eleanor Roosevelt and Charles Malik was something of a surprise, but Professor Glendon is weaving a sub-story through each chapter and illustrating how Roosevelt and Malik’s work on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was something of culmination and extension of over 2,000 years of thinking and political action—not in the context of human progress towards a utopia of sorts, which she wisely rejects,  but rather a reflection the common threads of political thought throughout history.

While this is not criticism, I would have liked to have seen a chapter on John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, and a chapter on Karl Marx, whom she frequently mentions.

This is a book that is approachable and readable, and in our tumultuous domestic and global political climate, important.

She closes with this illuminating sentence:

“If one message emerges from the stories collected here, it is that just because one does not see the results of one’s best efforts in one’s own lifetime does not mean those efforts were in vain.”

Professor Glendon is to be commended for a job “well done!”

The book comes with my highest recommendation and may be the best book I’ve read this calendar year. Add this book to your must read list.

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Referenced works you may find of interest (some of these works are out of print and expensive—for simplicity I’ve used Amazon links): 

The Laws of Plato, translated by Thomas Pangle

Cicero: The Life and Times of Rome’s Greatest Politician, by Anthony Everitt

Cicero, A Portrait, by Elizabeth Rawson (Glendon praised this book.)

A Panorama of the World’s Legal Systems, John Henry Wigmore

The Life of Nicolo Machiavelli, Roberto Ridolfi

The Prince, translated by Harvy Mansfield

Machiavelli, by Quentin Skinner

The Lion and the Throne, Catherine Drinker Bowen

The Spirit of Modern Republicanism, by Thomas Pangle

Statesmanship and Party Government, by Harvy Mansfield

The Great Melody, A Thematic biography of Edmund Burke, by Conor Cruise O’Brien (I read this wonderful book in 1992 when it was released: highly recommended.)

My sometime Chicago Boyz colleague, Joseph Fouche, had an interesting if somewhat meandering post on how power is used, not used and possibly abused.

The Chains of the Improbable vs. The Chains of the Impossible

An old Vulcan proverb advises us that only Sulla could march on Rome. This proverb may contradict another ancient proverb that claims that all roads lead to Rome. This seeming contradiction is resolved when you include little used roads, off the beaten track, the roads not taken. Sherlock Holmes once chided John A. Watson, M.D., saying, “How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?” Some roads to Rome are impossible, leading to the insurmountable. Lucius Cornelius Sulla Felix took a road that, while thought impossible, proved to be merely improbable.

Sulla, consul of Rome for the year 88 B.C., was in camp preparing to take his army east to fight King Mithridates VI of Pontus. Two envoys arrived to tell him that his command had been taken away by the vote of one of the people’s assemblies in Rome. These envoys of the Roman people expected that Sulla would do the only thing possible: lie down there, obedient to their commands, as every Roman army commander before him had done. Unfortunately, what they thought was impossible was only improbable.

Sulla gathered his men, announced what the will of the Roman people was, and asked them what the will of the army was. Sulla’s soldiers answered by stoning the envoys of the Roman people to death, much to the surprise of the envoys of the people. Sulla’s soldiers then petitioned Sulla to take an impossible road, a road never taken, and lead them to Rome to reclaim his Mithridatic command. Sulla, much to the surprise of his own officers, who thought such a course impossible, decided to heed his men and march on Rome. His officers resigned en masse except a happy few. But the poor bloody legionaries of Sulla’s army eagerly began the march on Rome.

Envoys from Rome streamed towards Sulla’s army as it marched north.These envoys were shocked and grew increasingly shocked as they protested to Sulla that surely, surely it was impossible that he wanted to march a Roman army through the city limits and into Rome itself. The law forbade it. The unwritten constitution forbade it. The Republic forbade it. The gods forbade it.

Sulla responded to the effect of, “Go tell the Romans that I don’t lie here obedient to their commands. I’m coming to Rome and hell’s coming with me.” The tone of these envoys’ entreaties and the mood of the people of Rome grew increasingly hysterical as the improbable dawned on them: not only could a Roman army commander march an army on Rome, it was increasingly probable that Sulla would march armed Roman legionaries right into the heart of Rome itself to deal with his political enemies. Indeed, Sulla led his men across the sacred pomerium that divided the “public thing” (res publica) of sacred Roma herself from land that was merely the property of Rome. Sulla’s veteran legionaries easily dispatched the hastily gathered mob of gladiators and other ruffians that his political opponents had thrown together at the last moment in a futile attempt to stop them.

Sulla had revealed that the impossible was merely the improbable.

Sulla spent the rest of his life trying to disguise this state of improbability as a mere state of impossibility.

He failed.

That was merely Fouche’s introduction. The post is well worth reading in full.

The post caught my eye because of Sulla, a Roman who did a monstrous thing but who was himself no monster. Much like a surgeon whose patient’s body is riddled with cancer, Sulla attempted to buy the old Roman Republic time and restore a semblance of political health by ruthlessly cutting out a tumorous faction and ratcheting back a host of constitutional gimmickery that had been welded onto Roman government over the years by ambitious politicians. Older, original rules of the game, or new ones in their spirit, were restored after blood shed in the proscriptions was scrubbed from the forum. Sulla even formally stepped down from the supreme power he held, like Cincinnatus, to further drive home the point to his fellow Romans regarding the sanctity of their traditions – though reportedly Sulla remained, even in a debaucherous retirement, a terrifying figure and stringpuller.

Fouche is correct that Sulla’s extreme measures failed. The underlying structural problems of the Republic were rooted in an increasing concentration of wealth, primarily in land ownership by Patricians and politically favored trading opportunities in “the East”, held mostly by the elite of Rome’s Italian “allied” city states, that left many Roman citizens too impoverished to perform military service or to be active in politics, except as dependent members of a clientela. The Republic’s legions and it’s political virtue had been based on an economically independent smallholding class who were being despoiled by politically powerful Patricians. Sulla’s reforms may have tempred political conflict within the ruling class for a time, but they also aggravated the social grievances that provided the Populares with political support from ordinary Romans and tilted the delicate political balance in the Republic toward extreme oligarchy.

In his retirement, observing the young Julius Caesar, whom Sulla had reluctantly spared, his toga fashionably loosely belted, long sleeved and wearing boots, like the ancient kings of Alba Longa, Sulla remarked “ He contains many Mariuses“. Caesar did. And unlike Marius but like Sulla, Julius Caesar was successful, Sulla having shown him the way to cross a Rubicon.

Power is power but power coupled with legitimacy endures. Sulla to Caesar to Augustus is the continuum.

I would like to welcome seydlitz89 who is guest-posting at ZP, for purposes of rebuttal to my previous post, War, the Individual, Strategy and the State. For many readers in this corner of the blogosphere who are interested in strategy, Seydlitz should need no introduction, but for those that do:

seydlitz89 is a former US Marine and Army intelligence officer who served in a civilian capacity in Berlin during the last decade of the Cold War. He was involved as both an intelligence operations specialist and an operations officer in strategic overt humint collection and now blogs and posts on the internet and can be contacted at seydlitz89 at web.de. He lives with his family in northern Portugal and works in education.  His writings have appeared at Clausewitz.com, Defense and the National Interest, Milpub and on three Chicagoboyz Roundtables. 

Politics Requires People (a Response to “War, the Individual, Strategy and the State”)

By seydlitz89,  3 August 2011

I would like to first off thank Zen for this opportunity to guest post on his great blog. 

I am essentially a small town Southern conservative who is dissatisfied with both US political parties.  I search in vain for a conservative politics worth the name.  So my politics are out of the way and any potential ideological influences indicated.

Strategic theory is a means to understand strategic reality (for lack of a better term).  There are times when it’s just kind of interesting and times when it can help you literally survive, say if you and your Greek family lived in Smyrna in 1919 and knew that the Greek Army had just landed to fight the Turks, and that the Turks would probably win this war and treat the Greeks in Smyrna none too kindly.  You would probably think it prudent to leave the city and go someplace safer, like Athens, Cyprus or Crete.  Strategic theory is kind of like that, it provides understanding to events and possibly a general direction those events may take, although it is primarily a tool of military historical analysis.  That is future prediction is not really part of the deal, but sometimes the relation between the stated political purpose and the military means available, not to mention the character of the enemy provide such a clear indicator of how events are going to turn out, that it becomes clear either figuratively or even literally that it is time to ”get out of town”, so to speak.

Strategic theory uses a system of interlocking concepts which comprise for Clausewitzians Clausewitz’s General Theory of war.  The General Theory postulates that there exists a system of common attributes to all wars as violent social interactions and that war belongs to a larger body ofhuman relations and actions known as ”politics”  (all wars belong within the realm of politics, but not all politics is war).  While all wars share these characteristics, warfare, as in how to conduct wars, is very much based on the society and level of technology existing at a specific time.  War doesn’t change whereas warfare goes through a process of constant change.  Clausewitz’s General Theory need only be flexible enough to adequately understand war and act at the same time as a basis for war planning.  It need not be perfect and is not expected to be so.  Essentially , it need only be better than the next best theory, and so far we Clausewitzians are still waiting for this second-best theory to make its appearance.

Warfare is thus the specific ”art of war”  

for a particular period ofhuman history, but would have to be compatible (following Wylie) with the General Theory.  On War presents at the same time Clausewitz’s General Theory and his art of Napoleonic warfare, that is a theory of warfare for his time, which is one of the reasons readers find the book confusing.  As new methods of warfare come into practice, new theoretical concepts emerge.  It is one of these potential concepts that this particular paper and the discussion which initiated it is all about, that being the superempowered individual.

I do this by describing what is an ideal type of the superempowered individual.

To start I think it first necessary to provide the entire interaction that triggered Zen’s post and in turn this one.  The discussion was on one of Charles Cameron’s threads concerning the recent act of the Norwegian terrorist Breivik (ABB)  To save on space I won’t reproduce the entire interaction here but limit it first to four points that I made:

• Clausewitzian strategic theory pertains to collectives, all concepts – war, political purpose, military aim, victory, defeat, strategy, operations, the various trinities – pertain to collectives, and a very particular collective at that – political communities.
• The violent/destructive actions of an individual representing only himself (even a superempowered individual) operating against a state or other political community do not constitute war, they are rather by definition the actions of a criminal.
• The mindset of such individuals is a pathological condition of our times, the result in part of the age of TV, alienation, “reality” without context, and endless sensuous banalities.
• ABB and super empowered individuals do not constitute war or a political program, but could potentially be seen as a weapon of a foreign political program, one possibly at odds with the goals of the actual individual, making that individual into something along the lines of a false-flag suicide bomber.

Originally, I had included „tactics” in the mix of the first point regarding concepts.  Tactics can be both individual (although in a different sense) and collective, as in the tactics of the individual soldier and the tactics of a rifle company, although the individual soldier always acts in relationship to the group.  I have also added some addiitional concepts to indicate how universal this collective aspect in fact is. 

The last point I have expanded just a bit by including the last concept mentioned “ffsb”.

Joseph Fouche in that same Cameron post commented in response to me:

From Clausewitzian perspective, Breivik’s actions are the conjunction of the three poles of the Trinity, two of which have nothing to with Breivik’s rationality. If CvC can’t be applied to madmen, criminals, mass murderers of children, or men trapped in their own little world, then Van Creveld’s contention that the actions of madmen can’t be considered political (in noted Clausewitzian Christopher Bassford’s use of the word) is correct. War would be “nontrinitarian”.
The words and ideas of murderous stooges have consequences as well as their actions. CvC can shine as much light on them as he can on any other field of human conflict.  
Can Breivik’s actions can be considered war? Can an individual wage war? By his own sinister lights, Breivik considered himself at war, the Pied Piper of a host of other Breiviks born and unborn, even if that host only existed in his fevered imagination. 
Can an individual have a strategy? Or can an individual only have a strategem? Breivik had a plan that had a tactical expression and a political effect (as here we comment on the doings of an otherwise obscure Norwegian). Does the jumbled mass of tissues that connect his evil ends with his evil means rise to the level of strategy?

These are all very good questions and fundamental as Zen points out, but from my Clausewitzian strategic theory perspective I would have to answer “no” to all -except the penultimate one – of them. 

I also think these questions very tied to our particular time and place, the US in 2011 and our political context, or rather what I would refer to as our current “political dysfunction” which encompasses us, something along the lines of political determinism which is arguably Clausewitzian as well (see Echevarria’s third meaning of the term Politik).  If modernity is seen as a series of crises involving renewed conflict between the individual and the collective, and how they relate to each other, going back thousands of years, to Thucydides who first described it, then this Is perhaps the final such crisis where the individual supersedes the collective as the ultimate focus, which means essentially in my mind the end of the collective as a social action orientation at least in the US. 

This post is organized as a sequence of concepts and ideas which address the simple question as to whether the violent actions of an isolated individual acting alone can be described as “war”.  To answer this fundamental question from a Clausewitzian perspective requires clear definitions of a whole series of related concepts and descriptions of how they are all interlocked with one another, forming a whole which is socio/political relations.

Let’s start off with a simple definition of politics.  Politics is “the striving to share power or striving to influence the distribution of power, either among states or among groups within a state” (Max Weber).  Hans Morgenthau’s definition is even more to the point: “interest de?ned as power”.  Harold Lasswell’s functional definition fits within this general concept as well: “who gets what, when and how”.  Essentially politics is the sphere of power/the sharing of power within and between groups.  Notions that “the purpose of warlike acts reaches beyond the state and politics” are incoherent from this strategic theory perspective since politics would involve all power relations between social groups of whatever kind, and would not be limited to the state, which is simply an apparatus of political control.  It is for this reason that Clausewitz includes war as part of the nature of political relations.  Even a purpose which reaches beyond politics, such as a believer serving God, has a political aspect, since the believer is part of a larger community and acts due to a range of motivations. 

A political community is a group who share the same political identity, defining themselves as opposed to those outside this community.  Different elements can go into this identity such as a common language, ethnicity, religion, geography, shared historical (or even mythical) experiences, a common struggle, but there are a few basic requirements according to Weber.  For instance social action oriented towards the group which goes beyond economic activity, the claim of loyalty and sacrifice (even of one’s life) which the member feels towards the group and vice versa, and a collection of “shared memories”.  It is important to note that the concept of the political, is the only secular value sphere where one’s death has meaning, “having died for one’s country”.   Political communities go back to the dawn of civilization and can be states, but not necessarily so.

So the state is simply an apparatus by which the rulers of a political community achieve material cohesion and exercise control.  A classic definition of the state is Max Weber’s an entity which has a monopoly of the legitimate use of force within a given territory.   This is very simple definition which covers a wide range of institutions going back to antiquity, that is far beyond 1648.  Two things here to consider: monopoly of force and legitimacy.  Force here is essentially violence or the threat of violence (coercion) and legitimacy is how the people of the political community perceive that potential or real violence.  A policeman motioning a car to pull over is legitimate coercion, whereas a mugger stealing someone’s wallet is illegitimate force.

What is important to consider though, is that legitimacy, force and especially coercion play a much larger role in political relations than we realize.  In Classical Realist thought which includes Clausewitz, Weber, Reinhold Niebuhr, Hans Morgenthau and many other thinkers/theorists, legitimacy and coercion are what hold political communities together   As Niebuhr wrote in his famous Moral Man and Immoral Society of 1932:

Our contemporary culture fails to realize the power, extent and persistence of group egoism in human relations. It may be possible, though it is never easy, to establish just relations between individuals within a group purely by moral and rational suasion and accommodation. In inter-group relations this is practically an impossibility.  The relations between groups must therefore always be predominantly political rather than ethical, that is, they will be determined by the proportion of power which each group possesses at least as much as by any rational and moral appraisal of the comparative needs and claims of each group. The coercive factors, in distinction to the more purely moral and rational factors, in political relations can never be sharply differentiated and defined. It is not possible to estimate exactly how much a party to a social conflict is influenced by a rational argument or by the threat of force.  It is impossible for instance, to know what proportion of a privileged class accepts higher inheritance taxes because it believes that such taxes are good social policy and what proportion submits merely because the power of the state supports the taxation policy.  Since political conflict, at least in times when controversies have not reached the point of crisis, is carried on by the threat, rather than the actual use, of force.

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With this quote we can see how the concepts fit together, including the view that power relations between groups are politics by definition. 

At this point we need to introduce two other important Weberian definitions, the first of which is power: “Power is the probability that one actor within a social relationship will be in a position to carry out his own will despite resistance, regardless of the basis on which this probability rests”.  Notice that power for us here is a social relationship between members of the same political community, although the concept is flexible enough to apply to any social relationship  Notice too the similarity between Weber’s definition of power and Clausewitz’s definition of war , “war is thus an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will”. (On War, Book I, Chapter 1, Section 2).

And the last concept, which I have mentioned repeatedly but not defined is legitimacy, which is the willingness of the ruled within a political community to accept this rule as personally binding.  Illegitimate rule does not exist by definition, but would be simply force.  What allows a political system, which need not necessarily be a state, to exist over time is the legitimate use of power.  Still, as Niebuhr reminds us, the actual compliance can be a mixture of both acceptance (based on legitimacy) and coercion (the thread of force).  It is useful to conceive of both power and legitimacy as being similar to sliding scales of very low to very high.  The levels of both can vary over time.

Politics or simply who in a society gets what, when, and how is an art. The slow drilling through hard boards as Weber described it, hard work, talking, working out differences, long discussions into the night: in a democracy something that requires a vocation, a calling, to aspire to.  Hard decisions over a long period of time and living with the consequences, that is what politics used to be like, even In our country . . . believe it or not.

How should politics be approached?  Maybe like what the Norwegians were teaching their kids on that island, what the Norwegian terrorist wished to destroy?

If one takes just a moment to consider, what for instance the great questions were in 1917 (among people like Weber, Thomas Mann, Walter Lippmann, John Dewey and others) and approximately how far we are politically and intellectually from that standpoint, I think you start to get an idea of where I see us presently.

So, let’s consider that list of important questions from the year JFK was born.  These, one would have to add (or put at the top of such a list):

• Given that democracy is the only permanent option for social stability, how do we set up a truly democratic system, that is where the various elite interests (traditional, economic) are not engulfed by the interests of the common folk?
• Can a modern mass state be democratic? Are bureaucratized political parties the answer? How should they be organized/structured? How should political leaders be trained? What experiences should they have?
• Is there an easier way?

So why bring this up?  To give a feeling for where we are now and where we were.  Also to point out the simple fact that the superempowered individual (SEI) does not act at the political level.  This individual never really interacts with anyone politically at least in terms of social action.   Since they are assumed to be isolated, alienated individualists with little traditional, affective or value-rational social contact, they will be almost by necessity radical egotists who preen constantly in their own assumed glory, emperors  of their own little world.  From their perspective, essentially every person is viewed as a tool, something to be manipulated in their search for gratification of whatever sort. 

Nor does the SEI enjoy any sense of legitimacy. The government/state or even the people themselves are the victims of what they see as a criminal act.  If the government were widely seen as corrupt and even dictatorial, such an act would probably provide them with legitimacy in how they dealt with the crisis as long as it appeared effective.  The SEI gains notoriety through the act, any excuse provided will most likely come across as incoherent (due to the lack of any preceding dialogue).

The SEI’s situation is due to the demands of simple operational security. No one must know of what the SEI Is doing, let alone their motives.  They must not call attention to themselves through any overt political behavior.

Only at a certain time will the act of mass violence occur.  As it did in Norway recently. 

So we have a (domestic) act of violence, in the Norwegian instance, terroristic violence used against the most innocent, trusting and precious of any society, lured in and massacred.  One hits a society at all sorts of levels and in all sorts of ways with an act such as this.  This act was horrible, I’ll leave it at this.

It is crucial to recall that the SEI is unknown up to the time of the act.  Their act sweeps the society like a storm and leads to shock among the people.  If the SEI is killed or arrested that ends their ability to interact independently of the state.  Once the SEI has been unmasked the operation comes to an end.  The ability of the SEI to communicate (the most important strategic capability following Svechin) strategically (and do everything else) ends.   

The SEI is by definition an individual operating outside the political community they attack, but not part of another political group, so politics does not play a role, rather simply the ego of one person.  Since the SEI’s act is by definition not political, how can it be the continuation of politics by other means, or simply war? From this perspective the SEI cannot be so described, but rather is the act of an individual acting alone against a political community/society, which makes the SEI simply an outlaw.  The scale of destruction the SEI can cause does not change this situation.

Which means that the SEI is not only not operating in the political sphere of social action, but also has no capability of exercising coercion.  The gunman on the street can force, but it takes the Mafia to coerce.  It takes an organization, a bureaucracy, something that can last past the first operation, even for criminals to achieve this.  Once it has passed into history the SEI’s act will only be seen as a tragedy caused by a sick idiot, which is the way it will be portrayed by the state.  There is no social carrier present to “spread the word”, nor could there be given the requirement for absolute isolation.  Who ever is the next SEI will follow exactly this same pattern, due to operational security, which all adds up to self-assured strategic dysfunction/failure from a Clausewitzian perspective.

Still in terms of politics and society, we are dealing with something much more basic here.  Humans are social beings, it is our interactions with other humans which provide the foundation of civilization itself.  Our identities as individuals are formed through a discourse with others.  As Richard Ned Lebow, yet another Clausewitzian writes in his The Tragic Vision of Politics:,

Social reality begins as a conversation among individuals that ultimately leads to the creation of societies, and they in turn socialize individuals into their discourses.  Individuals nevertheless retain a degree of autonomy. This is due in the first instance to the cognitive processes that mediate individual understandings of the values, rules, norms and practices of societies.  Contrary to the Enlightenment assumption of universal cognition, people perceive, represent and reason about the world in different ways.  These processes entail reflection, and this may lead individuals to some awareness of the extent to which they are products of their society.  Such recognition is greatly facilitated by the existence of alternative discourses.  In their absence, as Achilles discovered, it is difficult, if not impossible, to construct a different identity for oneself even when highly motivated to do so.  For Thucydides, alternative discourses are initially the product of other societies (e.g., other Greek poleis and non-Greek states), which may become role models for disaffected individuals or the raw material from which new individual and social identities are constructed.  Modern societies, as Shawn Rosenberg observes, are composed of many locales of social change, each with discourses that are to some degree distinct.  

According to Thucydides, the starting points of transformation are behavioral and linguistic.  Previously stable patterns of social interaction become uncertain and ill-defined, and this weakens the social norms that support them.  Discourses also become unstable when identity and practice diverge.  Language is subverted because people who reject old practices, or pioneer new ones, generally feel the need to justify them with reference to older values.

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So even (radical) social change is a discourse among members of the social/political community in question.  These discourses can be confused since those desiring change can add new and self-serving meanings to words.  Self-interest is decided in relation to the community as a whole and justice results. This is how social change takes place.

For the SEI however, the only discourses are going on inside their own heads.  No politics, no strategy, no political community, no war.  Only their “operations”.

One last point needs to be made in terms of politics.  Zen is right, the only examples we have of individuals achieving strategic effect in prior history are to a large extent, political assassinations.  Considering that since say 1860, probably before, anyone with a rifle could have killed a king.  A rifle provides that ability.  Have an independent means of monetary support, have a rifle and simply wait for your opportunity.  Kings were all notorious hunters, so how difficult would it have been?  Exactly up to JFK, how many heads of state, or even important political figures, were assassinated at long range with a rifle?  Were in fact many of these assassinations up to 1963, all very political acts, with the assailants willing to trade their lives for that of the political leader they had targeted at close quarters?  Was it considered necessary for them to do so to give their lives for the political community they claimed to represent?  Consider, for instance the attempt on President Truman in 1950.

In terms of strategy, I come from a Clausewitzian strategic theory perspective, and since there has been so much confusion in the past as to what exactly “strategy” is, I’ve developed my own definition which I think true to this school of strategic thought.   I use a specific definition of strategy, that being:

Focused adaptation of divergent sources of power assisted by control over time in pursuit of a political purpose through methodological theoretical construct (strategic theory) with the aim of creating strategic effect/a strategic dynamic greater than the sum of the individual power sources. For the strong political community, strategy can be an option, for the weak it is a necessity.

For the reasons stated above, it is difficult for me to see the SEI engaging in “strategy”.  The way I understand the SEI concept it uses force and little else, which is not really a strategy in terms of my definition above, but simply force and personality.  Force alone can produce strategic effect, which does not actually require a strategy.  This does not preclude using a different definition of strategy, but I feel that one that includes individuals needlessly confuses the issue.  That is one point in this regard, another is that the act of an SEI is an operation by definition.  To be strategic this operation would have to essentially end the conflict with one act, but at the same time war is started by the defender who resists, an act of aggression without resistance is not war.  Only by being able to carry out successive and connected operations towards a strategic goal would this be strategy.

In his comment, Joseph speaks of political effect that the terrorist has achieved, but that is not what it is, We are simply discussing a news story which does not add up to political effect.  Whatever strategic/political effect exists is first of all up to the victim, that is the society which has been attacked.  If the society that has suffered such an attack refuses to change their policies and educates the public as to the reason behind their stand, there is no political/strategic effect at all.  In fact the opposite effect theoretically.  From the perspective of the perpetrator, the act becomes thus meaningless, that is aside from mass murder.  There could be a reaction among outside political communities, but each case would have to be studied separately. Could not a natural disaster create the same sort of response?

Zen has been kind enough to give me his current definition of an SEI

“To qualify as a superempowered individual, the actor must be able to initiate a destructive event, fundamentally with their own resources, that cascades systemically on a national, regional or global scale. They must be able to credibly, “declare war on the world”.

From what I have provided so far, I think there are at least two problems with this definition. First, “cascades systemically”.  Does this not require the sequence of reactions of the target political community or communities?  Or is this system beyond their influence?  If not, then the target community can simply decide not to change their policies, to simply absorb the attack and treat the SEI as a criminal.  This is what most societies do in relation to crime, the criminal’s family are not taken hostage, their property seized, their lives destroyed, the act is that of an individual and the individual suffers the consequences.

Second, “credibly ‘declare war on the world’”.  What type of war?  Limited or unlimited?  How would the SEI be able to sustain operations over time?  How would such a war be resolved?  Is this not simply the technologically-driven ego of the SEI grown to monstrous proportions?    I am reminded of the diary entry by Maxim Gorky in the 1930s who noted that Stalin had become a “monstrous flea” that state propaganda and mass fear had enlarged him out of all proportion to the very crude person he actually was.  It seems that this SEI could be much the same thing, but divorced from any political community, unlike Stalin.

The true potential of the SEI is thus not as a maker of war or as a form of warfare, but as a weapon.  Since the SEI does not act politically, they lend themselves to manipulation by actual political interests.  What better way to attack a hostile state than to have them come across to their own people as impotent in dealing with the havoc spread by SEIs acting according to their own whims?  SEIs thus could be used as powerful weapons by states which desire to hide their actual involvement.  The interested state could approach likely recruits covering their actual identity relatively easily, providing support and assistance.  By linking SEIs and their actions a state sponsor could initiate and sustain very destructive campaigns at little to no cost to themselves.  This is the logical next step to what Bill Joy was talking about with KMD back in 2000.

–

In 1991, Martin van Creveld published his The Transformation of War, which predicted the crisis and eventual collapse of the state, but without considering what exactly would replace this apparatus of rule.  Instead of this collapse of the state we have experienced something quite different, the state waging war as before, but for unspecified goals.  Instead, propagandistic “war aims” for public consumption are concocted (as in the war in Iraq/the US intervention in Libya) or an act of war is perpetrated and never actually acknowledged (Pakistan and the Mumbai attacks).  Wars strategically lost are carried on operationally since the state lacks the political will (and necessity) to end them, the public having been conditioned through state propaganda to see war as the norm (US involvement in Iraq/Afghanistan/the Global War on Terror and Russia in her own Muslim areas).  Mercenary armies are employed at a high price (and high investor profit) to sustain what are essentially lost wars strategically, but are still economically profitable for investors.

All of this would be familiar to Clausewitz, who would see this as a collapse of not only strategic thought, but the material cohesion of the state in question. 

I don’t see this as a new era of warfare, but possibly the end if it ever comes about of society as we know it:  The end of the Hobbesian commonwealth and the emergence of a new dark age where political communities are at the mercy of psychopathic and monstrous fleas.  That the fleas enjoy no political purpose is small compensation for the destruction they could bring about.

Copyright 2011