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Iconoclastic strategist Edward Luttwak has characteristically caustic words on an Australian -American strategic entente to contain an “autistic” rising China:

Australia counters Chinese threat 

AUSTRALIA has been quietly building a regional defence coalition to restrain China’s increasingly ”aggressive” and ”autistic” international behaviour, an influential adviser to the Pentagon says.

Edward Luttwak bluntly contradicts Australian and US denials that they see China as a threat or want to contain its rise. ”Australians view themselves as facing a strategic threat,” he writes in his coming book, The Rise of China v The Logic of Strategy.

The emerging latticework of regional defence arrangements augments ”the overall capacity of the US-Australian alliance to contain China”.

The book praises Australia’s strategic initiative in forging ties with countries such as Malaysia, Indonesia and India that lie beyond America’s natural security orbit, as well as broadening the defence networks of close US allies such as Japan.

”Each of these Australian initiatives derives from a prior and broader decision to take the initiative in building a structure of collective security piece by piece, and not just leave it all to the Americans,” it says.

….The Australian National University’s Hugh White has argued that the US needs to ”share power” with what is going to be ”the most formidable power the US has ever faced”. But for Mr Luttwak, the ”logic of strategy” dictates that neighbours will naturally coalesce against the new rising threat, thus preventing China from realising anything like the relative military power that has been projected.

”The rapid accession to prosperity has been a very common way for countries to lose their sanity,” Mr Luttwak told the Herald. He said China suffered from ancient and new foreign policy weaknesses.

”The Chinese are autistic in dealing with foreigners, they have no sense of the ‘other’,” he said. ”They think they are incredibly brilliant strategists as if they had been conquering other nations, when in fact it’s been the other way around for 1500 years.”

Ouch.

China’s political system is in the midst of a particularly edgy and uncertain generational transition of power, following the succession machinery designed by China’s last “paramount leader”, Deng Xiaoping, to retain harmony among the ruling Communist Party elite.  Deng’s successors are following his script, but their hearts no longer appear to be in it – 15 years after Deng’s death, cracks have appeared in the facade of unity. Not a fatal flaw, but lacking a leader of Deng’s stature who, even in retirement, remained the supreme arbiter of China’s political system, factions of China’s elite have more room to push conflicting agendas.

In foreign policy we see the effects in China’s erratically belligerent, then conciliatory behavior towards it’s East Asian neighbors and the United States. Strategically, it makes little sense for China to repeatedly generate friction over territorial claims to the entire South China Sea with Vietnam, Philippines, Taiwan, Brunei, Malaysia, Indonesia and the United States and push a separate dispute with Japan simultaneously, yet because of intra-elite, domestic politics, Beijing is unable or unwilling to restrain enthusiast Chinese officials from doing so.

[by J. Scott Shipman]

The First Battle, Operation Starlite and the Beginning of the Blood Debt in Vietnam, by Otto J. Lehrack, Lt.Col., USMC, Ret.

This is an older book, but important. A few weeks ago I was having lunch with a good friend, Bruce. Bruce is a Vietnam veteran and since both of us are readers many of our lunch conversations revolve around the books we have read, and this meeting was no exception. Bruce enthusiastically recommended The First Battle and No ShiningArmor, both by Lt.Col. Lehrack, and Last Men Out, by Bob Drury and Tom Clavin. He said Lehracks first twenty pages of The First Battle was the best description of the situation that led the United States to become involved in Vietnam. Since my knowledge of Vietnam is embarrassingly meager, I ordered all three when I returned home from lunch. Given Bruce’s descriptions, The First Battle was first up. Lehrack begins the first chapter, Inching Towards the Abyss, with a profound first sentence:

The United States came to this pass in baby steps, characterized more by Cold War fears, hubris, and inattention than by level-headed policy examination.

(Sounds familiar doesn’t it?)

The result of Lehrack’s effort is a readable and powerfully inspiring story of the first battle of the Vietnam War fought only by Americans, specifically, the United States Marine Corps. Code named, Operation Starlite, this “first battle” was a coordinated air, sea, and land attack, but to the green, untested Marines fighting battle-hardened Viet Cong troops nothing about this first encounter was typical or routine.

Lahreck, drawing on interviews with warriors from both sides, provides the reader an up-close view of the savagery and the valor of this battle that resulted in two Americans receiving the Congressional Medal of Honor. The prose is fast paced and detailed, but not so detailed one with no experience/knowledge of Marine Corps jargon can’t keep up. Lehrack includes a fairly exhaustive glossary of the unique terms used, so the military/USMC novice will have a ready guide close-by.

The book is divided in three parts. Part 1 describes general attitudes of the American public, politicians, and military personnel with respect to Vietnam. Part 1 also provides a description of the planning process for the battle and the rationale. Also included is an assessment by the Viet Cong of their American opponents, dated 3 July 1965 (about a month prior to Operation Starlite):

American strong points

• The have reached the training level of an expeditionary force.
• Armed with modern weapons, lighter than French expeditionary forces, they have quick transportation, quick movement, have capability of quick reinforcement, thanks to vehicles, aircraft, boats.
• Usually concentrated in groups.

Weak points compared with French

• No spirit of combat; afraid of guerillas; always rely on modern weapons, so they lose initiative and self-confidence (when in contact, they call fire for support and reinforcement); sometimes artillery must conduct fire support for the whole period of operation.
• Lack of combat experience, just know combat in theory only (through field manuals). Moreover, on a strange terrain, they usually walk in the open, bewildered like ducks (we say that American troops are most opportune targets for guerrillas).
• Much effort required for messing; and water. Food must be supplied for each meal by helicopters. When moving to any place they must use helicopters and artillery fire support, so objective will always be disclosed, brining good opportunity for guerrilla follow up.
• Cannot undergo long and hard operations. When operating far from base, about seven kilometers, must use vehicles.
• Not able to bear local weather and climate, so troops will fall ill.
• Defensive positions sometimes well organized but they are slow to get that way. In one instance it took ten days to organize defenses and thirty to install mines.
• They do not know the terrain well.
• They run slowly.

(This list is offered for those readers who have insight into whether these weaknesses persist in our military—I do not know.)

In Part 2, Lehrack describes the battle, and the aims of the American commander “to isolate, and then destroy the enemy.” Lehrack follows individuals and units through the battle, and spares no detail in the hardships, risks, and depravations endured by the participants. He offers a gripping and realistic description of the “fog of war:”

The Marines quickly learned a practical lesson that all warriors have known since ancient times. Theoretically, one is supposed to line up in an assault or other planned formation and fight that way. But once battle is joined the formation rapidly degenerates into a series of isolated small actions. In Starlite, as in most battles, it seemed that the fights generally meant that four or five men on one side would be heavily engaged with a similar number on the opposite side. Each combatant became so preoccupied with taking care of his situation that he often had little knowledge of and didn’t really care what was going on a few yards away. Throw in the sounds, the smells, and the fear and you have the notorious “fog of war” that explains why such widely differing accounts describe the same battle.

Good friend of this blog, Lynn Wheeler adds this observation in another forum on the effect Starlite had on Viet Cong planning/tactics::

Perhaps the most important reason for the so-so result was that the Viet Cong had gained an enormous appreciation of the Marines’ ability to project power from the sea as a result of Starlite. Never again in the course of the war did they permit their units to tarry on the coastal plain. When they had a job to do near the water, they came in and did it, and then they fled inland again. Although they developed good antiaircraft techniques and weaponry during the war they had neither the ordnance nor the expertise to thwart an amphibious landing force.

Part 3 is titled The Blood Debt. As eloquently as Lehrack introduced the reader the to attitudes and assumptions of most Americans in his opening chapter, so he concludes. Fifty-four Americans died and an estimated six hundred of the enemy perished in Operation Starlite. By the numbers and a “body count” mentality, we “won” the battle, but in 1965 the Vietnam War was just getting started, and we know how it ended. Lehrack writes:

America spent another ten years, and more than 56,000 additional lives, to follow a failed policy. Like gamblers who have already lost their gambling money, and then the rent money, and the car payment, and then the grocery money, and then borrowed or stole in the hope of changing their luck, the Johnson and Nixon administrations kept signing markers to America for a debt in gore that they hoped a reversal of fortune would justify.

The criminal portion of this gut wrenching conclusion is that American political leaders had no confidence in a military solution in Vietnam. Lehrack quotes President Johnson speaking with a senator, “They hope they will wear us out. And I really believe they’ll last longer than we do.” Eventually, and thankfully, the American public said, “no more.” Amazingly, Lehrack citing Hugh M. Arnold‘s examination found that of an official justification of the war there “were a total of twenty-two separate American rationales: From 1949 to 1962, the emphasis was on resisting communist agression; from 1962 to 1968, it was on counter-insurgency; after 1968, it was on preserving the integrity of American commitments.”

Lehrack correctly laments American unfamiliarity with Vietnamese culture and their visceral attitude towards foreign invaders. We were making the world safe for democracy, and the Vietnamese fell back on nationalism as a recruiting tool and justification for feeding over a million people into the maw of war. Lehrack also points out that Marine leadership knew early on “that Vietnam was more a political war than military.” The Marines had the Small Wars Manual derived from their actions in the Philippines, Nicaragua, and Haiti while the U.S. Army had four pages in their Field Regulations on guerilla warfare. Lehrack speculates a pacification effort, something the Marines knew well, may have been successful if properly applied to good governance on the part of the South Vietnamese government.

Of course these speculations are just that, and there is little evidence given our current predicament in Afghanistan that we learned our lessons. The shelf-life of hubris is eternal.

Bruce was right; this is a powerful little book, and comes with my highest recommendation.

Addendum: LCDR B.J. Armstrong has an enlightening essay on rotary aircraft, which includes Operation Starlite here.

Cross-posted at To Be or To Do.

[ by Charles Cameron — my new job, solutions-oriented thinking / writing about urban poverty in 6 cities ]
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Mapping Kibera, Nairobi

Yesterday was my first day at work on my new job with Urb.Im:

The urb.im network is a global community working for just and inclusive cities. It connects practitioners in six cities and throughout the world to establish an international community of practice and learning, sharing ideas and experiences in order to innovate, replicate, and scale working solutions to the problem of urban poverty. urb.im is a project of Dallant Networks and the Ford Foundation.

The six cities we’re focusing on are Mumbai, Rio, Lagos, Mexico DF, Nairobi and Jakarta — and we are strongly solutions-oriented.

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I imagine there will be considerable overlap between the diverse interests of those who follow Zenpundit and the specific cities and issues I’ll be working with at Urb.Im — so this is both a news bulletin about my new employment (suggesting I’ll now be focusing my attention on a new problem and solution set), and an invite to ZP readers to steer me towards relevant materials (eg via hipbonegamer on Twitter), and to join in the discussions at Urb.Im as appropriate.

One of my ambitions is to get some significant cross-website conversations going, so that the widest array of bright minds and good hearts gets together to spark new ideas and possibilities, and put existing resources on the map for all interested parties…

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And speaking of mapping…

The illustration above is of a map of schools in Kibera, Nairobi, one of the largest informal settlements in the world — mapping both problem areas and available solutions is a key element in the kind of work we’ll be doing. For more details on mapping Kibera, see this Urb.Im page, and to download and enlarge the Kibera education-map image, go here.

[ by Charles Cameron – the UN panel of happiness experts, human nature on and off the freeway, and royal rainmaking in Thailand and Tanzania ]
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Seeings as how the Kingdom of Bhutan just convened a UN forum on the topic of Happiness and Well-being: Defining a New Economic Paradigm, I thought it might be interesting to compare the faces in reports of a recent, controversial congressional panel on contraceptive issues with those of the folks on the happiness panel:

And to be frank, neither panel looked particularly cheerful. I thought it might be nice to get away from all that seriousness, so I featured the Dalai Lama’s often playful eyes as an inset…

Seriously: is happiness something we should figure out in committee?

To be fair, though, they did have some decent guest speakers — Joan Halifax for one. My guess is, some people just bring their happiness with them.

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And while I have the Dalai Lama in mind and in a conveniently copiable graphic, I thought I’d post a second, quick item — this one also having to do with happiness, I suppose, and raising the question of what human nature is.

When you’re stuck on the San Diego Freeway on the way back from work, you may not feel as “one with nature” as you do when you’re out for an evening walk on the beach in Malibu. But are the ribbons of the Interstate system really that different from the veining of a leaf?

I suspect that question might bring some quiet laughter to the Dalai Lama’s eyes…

Hat-tip: I have Andrea Lobel of Concordia U to thank for this second pair of images, which she very kindly sent me knowing of my delight in such pairings.

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Time for one more?

Given my strong interest in ritual, you won’t be surprised to learn that royal rainmaking is of interest to me.

The insignia on the left is that of the Thai Bureau of Royal Rainmaking and Agricultural Aviation, founded by Thailand’s King Bhumibol Adulyadej, who holds European patents on several of his methods:

According to the notes attached to this video:

Among the best-known and most successful of His Majesty’s water provision projects has been the Royal Rainmaking programme. He began to study how clouds might be seeded to produce rain. In 1969 he carried out preliminary tests at Khao Yai National Park using a Cessna 180 and dry ice. In August 1969, he moved to Hua Hin and used two aircraft in a variety of weather conditions to determine what worked best. Initially, he financed the research with his own funds but in 1970, he sought temporary funding for a “Rainmaking Project” from the government. With it, he established the Royal Rainmaking Research and Development Institute. Based on it, he has spent succeeding years refining his techniques to accord with varying cloud conditions and to suit differing climatological and geographic areas, enjoying considerable success throughout Thailand.

On the right is the encampment for the mapolyo a mbula or ancestral offerings for rain of the Ihanzu of Tanzania.

Todd Sanders, in his book Beyond Bodies: Rainmaking and Sense Making in Tanzania, writes:

Because the Ihanzu have long depended on the rain for their very existence, it is not surprising that rainmaking is central, both conceptually and practically, to their everyday lives. They have two royal rainmakers – one male, the other female – whose job it is to ensure the rains arrive on time and fall properly each year. … Through varied rain rites carried out each year in the village of Kirumi, royal rainmakers regulate the annual movement from the dry ‘male’ season (kipasu) to the wet ‘female’ one (kitiku) and back again. These rites take various forms, as we shall see…

For a detailed account of the mapolyo a mbula rites and the legend that accompanies and explains the diagram above, see Sanders’ Reflections on Two Sticks: Gender, Sexuality and Rainmaking in Cahiers d’Etudes Africaines:

These rites take place only when the rains have utterly failed and it has been divined that the royal Anyampanda clan spirits have demanded such an offering. Offerings take place over two days, but the entire ritual sequence often lasts a month, sometimes longer. It is only the two Anyampanda royal leaders, and no one else, who can bring such rain offerings to fruition.

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Enough, I’m done for now — I’m happy.

Buried at work this week, but I wanted to take a moment to point to a review  by amigo Adam Elkus at Japan Security Watch of The Sovereignty Solution by Anna Simons:

Sovereignty and National Defense 

….their new book The Sovereignty Solution, Naval Postgraduate Institute (NPS) scholar Anna Simons and her co-authors develop an approach to global security rooted around an odd idea: every state should have the right to order itself internally under its own preferences and in turn bares responsibility for all acts of aggression that transgress the sovereignty of others. This implies tolerance for a range of governmental types, an end to expeditionary state-building (direct and indirect), and an approach to warfare built on breaking states that misbehave with conventional capabilities rather than a “whole of government” approach. While a national defense policy built around such ideas may or may not be sensible, it certainly is at variance with many cherished ideas in American and Western national security policy. To name a few, the strong and weak versions of the Responsibility to Protect and the commonly held philosophy that all foreign events are interconnected and thus of American concern.

Simons’ book, to a large extent, unintentionally describes the way that many non-Anglo Pacific governments view sovereignty and its relationship to national defense. As Amitai Etzioni noted, there is a kind of “back to the future” quality about China’s prioritization of sovereignty above all else. As the West moves away from the idea of sovereignty towards a post-Westphalian future, China has moved from a Maoist policy of sponsoring insurgencies in neighboring states to championing the idea that states should be the only legitimate force of national power within their own borders. China’s views, however, are representative of a common national security philosophy in Asia….

Hat tip to SWJ Blog