Recommended Reading
Top Billing! “Strategy Wars” – Something must be in the water. A flame war has broken out between different strategic camps…..
In addition to the two Journal of Strategic Studies “Neo-COIN” articles on which I began commenting last week and Thomas P.M. Barnett explains today Why I largely ignore the in-the-weeds COIN debate, LTC. William Astore, USAF (ret.) wrote a completely incoherent and confused, slash-and-burn, attack, “The U.S. Military’s German Fetish” for TomDispatch.com, on a basket of strategic concepts from a variety of sources that he erroneously attributes to the influence of Carl von Clausewitz on the US military.
At Milpub, seydlitz89 correctly eviscerates Astore’s weird jihad against Clausewitz in A Reflection of the State of US Strategic Thought? but then launches a strange volley of his own, essentially blaming Col. John Boyd for George W.Bush’s invasion of Iraq (which would come as news to most of Boyd’s acolytes, almost all of whom have been militant and vocal critics of the Iraq War). Fabius Maximus, his site in re-launch, goes after Dr. John Nagl with Another sad little bit of agitprop, this time from John Nagl and is joined by Dr. Bernard Finel with The Incoherence of COIN Advocates: John Nagl Edition and Visions of Empire with Ventriloquizing Clausewitz.
Not content to allow the ground-pounders to have all of the attention, Gene Myers in Fifth sense for AFJ, bemoans the impact of COIN and ground support missions on the future intermediate range and strategic long-range capabilities of the USAF and Galrahn wonders in AirSea Battle “if the final product becomes anything more a new wine in old barrels?”. On a humorous note, Joseph Fouche, asserts that military historian Martin van Creveld would run over a kitten with his car.
TDAXP – who loves counterintuitive titles for his posts, has When Stalinism is a Good Thing:
….The Scientific management of the economy was a breakthrough, new way of organizing a country, in which a rational allocation of resources would lead to economic growth. Public education rapidly spread this method, and by the early twentieth centuries the bureaucratic power needed to fix this solution had become ingrained in the United States, United Kingdom, France, Spain, Germany, Italy, Russia, and (through educated and westernized bureaucratic elites) most countries in the world. New Deal Liberalism, Socialism, Fascism, Aryanism, and Communism were all modern ideologies that assumed a scientific approach toward growth.
The last significant attempt to turn back this tide began in 1966, during Mao’s launch of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (GPCR), in which he purposefully destroyed the Party and State apparati which gave him scientific control over his country, and tried to turn back the hands of history.
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