Recommended Reading
Top billing SWJ- (Munson) Q&A with Owen West: Advisors in Iraq and (Elkus) A Critical Perspective on Operational Art and Design Theory
Two very different, but must-read pieces. Owen West comes off in his interview as incisive and provocative while Adam Elkus tackles the murkily defined concept of Design and it’s relationship with Operational Art:
….Design is conceptually linked, though not identical to, operational art. But what is operational art? Ideas of operational art and the alleged “operational level of war” are heavily contested in military doctrine and theory. The preeminent questions guiding the study and practice of the operational art have hardly been resolved. Is operational art a cognitive process that links tactics to strategy, as Huba Wass de Czege has argued? Or is the operational level an empirically valid evolution in the structure of the military art? James J. Schneider has observed a qualitative difference in pre-industrial warfare, governed by concentration into a small space to achieve tactical effect, and the industrial practice of distributed campaigns and massed firepower. Of course, the two are not mutually exclusive. Operational art could be both cognitive device and historical fact. But Schneider, and landpower specialists like Christopher Bellamy discuss landpower in strikingly different terms than Wass de Czege, emphasizing the physical element of operational art over the cognitive emphasis of campaign planning.
Line of Departure (Mike Few)–Finding Niebuhr
Mike Few returns to the blogosphere with a guest post on the complex and deeply influential theologian and public intellectual, Reinhold Niebuhr:
The Serenity Prayer was penned by Reinhold Niebuhr, the most influential American theologian of the 20th Century. Originally a German-American socialist and pacifist who spent his youth striving for social justice for factory workers of Detroit’s auto plants, Niebuhr in his middle years became a liberal interventionist.
He advocated armed American intervention to defeat the evil of Nazi Germany. In his silver years, he also provided the philosophical and moral bedrock of America’s containment policy against the Soviet Union. As such, the Calvinist evangelical preacher helped to articulate the meaning of our nation’s new-found political, economic, and social power in the mid-20th Century.
For a generation of Cold Warriors, Niebuhr became a trusted counsel, explaining to them just war theory, the meaning of freedom and the need for social justice, both here and abroad.
A key architect of the Truman Doctrine, American diplomat George Kennan rightly proclaimed Niebuhr “the Father of us all.” The Rev. Martin Luther King wrote in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail that Niebuhr’s gift to us was the terse reminder that ultimately “groups are more immoral than individuals.”
TechCrunch –Interview: John Robb | TechCrunch
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