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

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.

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