SWJ Blog Gets it’s Groove Back

Dave and Bill and the staff at SWJ went through a server migration/site upgrade recently and SWJ Blog is back to rocking and rolling on strategy, warfare and COIN. Two examples:

The Limits of our Ability to Practice War by Garrett Wood

….There are two complementary ways to describe the enormity of war. First, it is a human phenomenon whose complexities multiply according to the number of people involved. Active duty servicemen are generally a small segment of a society and yet an entire society can be transformed when faced with occupation. Then opportunities to fight increase, a farmer can become a part-time soldier relying on tools like ambush and community intimidation to grind out victory. War is open to as many changes and interpretations as there are lives it affects.

Second, as the most visceral human action war draws a response from all aspects of life. It siphons wealth from civilizations, it builds and destroys political credibility, and it polarizes the religious into zealots and pacifists. War’s effects rebound back onto itself creating criticism, support, opportunities, and constraints that were unexpected at its outset. The influence that even intangibles like faith and the economy have, combined with the endless changes wrought on the shape of war by individual participants, make for complexity beyond understanding.

War quickly exceeds our ability to know it, so we make it smaller. We discard approaches and possibilities until we have something we can grasp and practice at the expense of resources we are willing to sacrifice. In the United States we rely on a volunteer force, augmented by advanced technology and massive sums of wealth. Our military is tailored to quick decisive engagements with minimal casualties and reflects the American consensus on what war should be, even when not employed that way. The forces that shape the way we fight are numerous, powerful, subtle and beyond our ability to master completely.

Overcoming Our Dearth of Language Skills by Morgan Smiley

….Read Samuel Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order” and Thomas P.M. Barnett’s “The Pentagon’s New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century“.  In “Clash of Civilizations”, Huntington talks of potential conflicts arising along cultural “fault lines”, for example, where Christianity meets Islam (Central Asia/ Turkey/ Caucasus regions) or where Hindu culture meets Sinic culture (Himalaya/ Central Asian region).  In “The Pentagon’s New Map”, Thomas Barnett posits that the world is divided between the “connected” (primarily Western) regions/ countries and the “disconnected” or “Gap” areas, with many of those “gap” regions being in Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia, etc.  Given these two authors & ideas they put forth, the Army may want to look at educating Soldiers in Turkish, Persian, Hindi, and Chinese as well as focusing on those areas for cultural/ regional education.

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