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AFJ has an intellectually provocative set of articles up. Bravo to the editors!:

Frank G. Hoffman – EXPEDITIONARY ETHOS

The geo-strategist Halford McKinder once divided major states between Land and Sea Wolves. States that have an expeditionary capability are not limited to either/or status. They crossbreed their wolf packs to swim if needed and conduct operations ashore far from home when called upon. This expeditionary capability allows a state to apply strategic leverage across the physical domains. Most critically, expeditionary capabilities allow powers to deal with or minimize geographical and environmental constraints. Expeditionary forces allow maritime powers the opportunity to exploit their mastery of the seas to their advantage. Equally important, expeditionary forces can help offset the disadvantages of a purely maritime-based approach and provide even Continental Elephants the ability to project power when their interests are served by that capability 

….Combinations. The neat distinctions or intellectual bins we make between conventional and irregular warfare are useful, but only to a degree. The future portends potentially aggravating circumstances that will make the neat distinction between state and nonstate moot, and the delineation between conventional and irregular adversaries irrelevant. Thanks in part to globalization and the rapid transmission of ideas and technology, there is a recognizable fusion or blurring of regular and irregular modes of combat, into what might be called “combinational” or hybrid warfare.

Hybrid threats incorporate combinations of different modes of warfare including conventional capabilities, irregular tactics and formations, terrorist acts including indiscriminate violence and coercion, and criminal disorder. These multimodal operations display a novel degree of operational and tactical fusion in time and space. They may confound purely conventional approaches and kinetic solutions, and may also foil today’s emphasis on population-centric counterinsurgency strategies.

This article will probably aggravate the Big Army Clausewitzians. Not because Hoffman does not take their concerns seriously, he does and sides with Colin Gray over the more utopian predictions of the end of interstate warfare, but because Hoffman regards their concerns as only one significant nodal point on a wide spectrum of national security threats.

Ionut C. Popescu – THE LAST QDR? WHAT THE PENTAGON SHOULD LEARN FROM CORPORATIONS ABOUT STRATEGIC PLANNING 

….Unfortunately, even though the U.S. military improved its ability to develop emergent strategies in recent years, particularly when it comes to dealing with tactical and operational challenges, the Pentagon’s formal strategic planning process remains grounded in the outdated premises of the rational design model. Despite its repeated manifest failures in achieving the integration of strategy, programs and budgets, the Planning, Programming and Budgeting System (PPBS), a holdover of the McNamara era, continues to represent the management approach used to build up defense budgets. Similarly, the QDR exercises, another attempt to “make strategy” through a top-down rational design model, have been so overtaken by the bureaucratic rivalries among the military services that they served little strategic purpose once they were finalized. Despite the frustration with this traditional form of planning, both among civilian and military participants, the Defense Department at an institutional level has not yet found a way to adapt its strategic planning mechanisms to meet the demands of today’s rapidly changing external environment.

….This focus on “competitive strategy” has been advocated in the debates on U.S. defense strategy by Andrew Marshall, Barry Watts and Andrew Krepinevich, among others, who have urged the U.S. military to focus on creating and exploiting asymmetrical advantages as the key to successful strategy-making. While these authors’ have been remarkable in their attempt to shift the focus away from the 1950s and 1960s traditional model of planning, recent developments in the business literature in the past decade have now moved away from this emphasis on competitive advantage (prevalent in the 1980s and 1990s) to an emphasis on strategic innovation and planned emergence.

The “learning model” of emergent strategy formation is based on Mintzberg’s premise that the “complex and unpredictable nature of the organization’s environment, often coupled with the diffusion of knowledge bases necessary for strategy, precludes deliberate control; strategy making must above all take the form of a process of learning over time, in which, at the limit, formulation and implementation become indistinguishable.”

Sharp work by newcomer Popescu. Most discussions of strategy are left disconnected from the cloying morass of Pentagon internal bureaucratic process, which ultimately needs to be addessed is performance and operational capabilities are to improve. Popescu excavates the intellectual origins and limitations of current planning models that hail from the salad days of IBM’s man in a gray flannel suit.

Joseph J. Collins – Essay: Afghan reconciliation

….Negotiators will have to deal with a number of complicating factors. For one, the Taliban has many factions. In the South, we have the original Taliban, but in the East and the Northeast, the fighters come from the Haqqani network and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s faction of Hezbi Islami, which has been at war since 1978. Complicating the issue, there are now multiple Pakistani Taliban factions, some of which operate in both countries. When we talk to the Taliban, we will have to deal with its many parts. The divisions provide us opportunities for divide-and-conquer tactics, but it also means that some factions may reconcile while others continue to fight

….Third, the Taliban regime also conducted numerous crimes against humanity for which there has never been an accounting. In addition to the extreme repression of the entire Afghan citizenry – no kites, no music, no female education, bizarre human rights practices, executions at soccer matches etc. – thousands of Afghans, especially non-Pashtuns, were killed by the Taliban. Compounding that problem, the contemporary Taliban usually try to win hearts and minds through terror tactics and repression. Even today, when they are trying to attract more followers with propaganda and Sharia-based dispute resolution, the Taliban’s approval ratings in most polls does not reach 20 percent. The Taliban rule of about five years was also a practical disaster for Afghanistan. Along with their bloody record as insurgents, the Taliban’s leaders no doubt remember that five years into their “rule,” only three countries had recognized them.

…. Political reconciliation between the Afghan government and the Taliban (or any of their factions) should require a number of key conditions. First, the Taliban must verifiably lay down their arms. They must accept the Afghan Constitution and agree to operate within it. War criminals and close associates of al-Qaida will be ineligible for reintegration. The Taliban must also forsake the criminal enterprises that have become their lifeline and agree to become a legitimate political party inside Afghanistan. There can be no offers of territorial power sharing or extra constitutional arrangements, but later, Taliban cabinet officers and appointed provincial or district governors should not be ruled out. Taliban fighters could clearly be integrated into the ethnically integrated Afghan security forces after retraining and indoctrination. Taliban farmers can be given stipends or even land as an incentive.

Col. Collins is offering a strong dose of realism regarding talks with the Taliban(s) and possible outcomes. In my view, negotiations might be better regarded as “peeling an onion” than an all-or-nothing deal.

The Forty Years War: The Rise and Fall of the Neocons, from Nixon to Obama by Len Colodny and Tom Shachtman

I mentioned this book previously, expressing some serious skepticism of the authors’ core argument of a struggle between President Richard Nixon and the Neocons. Nevertheless, I ordered a copy and found The Forty Years War to be an absorbing read; for those with an interest in the administration of Richard Nixon, the history of the late Cold War period or the politics of American foreign policy, this book is a must read. I have a good working knowledge from my own research of primary and secondary source material related to Richard Nixon and his battle to re-shape American foreign policy and national strategy; yet I can say that and Colodny and Shachtman, working with newly transcribed archival material, demonstrated that we still have much to learn about the inner workings of the Nixon administration.

The authors have three important themes in The Forty Years War:

1. The intellectual legacy of militarist- moral idealism of Fritz G.A. Kraemer, the German-born Defense Department geopolitical theorist who was a mentor, adviser or ally to a glittering constellation of policy makers including Henry Kissinger, Alexander Haig, James Schlesinger, Fred Ikle, Andrew Marshall, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld and others. Shachtman and Colodny call Kraemer:

“….the unacknowledged godfather of the George W. Bush administration’s ways of relating the United States to the rest of the world – more so than the philosophies of the university of Chicago’s Leo Strauss or those Trotskyites turned conservatives who founded the neocon movement”

2. That there has been a “forty years war” for the control over U.S. foreign policy not between Left and Right or Hawks and Doves but between foreign policy “Pragmatists” in the mold of Richard Nixon and “Neocons” or more broadly (and accurately in my view), “Hardliners” adhering to the rigid moralism and supreme confidence in military supremacy of Fritz Kraemer.

3. That Watergate, contrary to the orthodox historiography (argued by historians like Stanley I. Kutler and Robert Dallek), was exploited and aggravated by Kraemerites and proto-Neocons, especially General Al Haig, specifically to bring down Richard Nixon in an attempt to smash detente and institute more aggressive U.S. posture in the Cold War. Haig emerges as a central villain in the Watergate conspiracy in The Forty Years War and Nixon’s ability to inspire disloyalty in his closest aides is breathtaking.

While illuminating and deeply provocative, The Forty Years War is a quirky book, almost two different books with the first half devoted to the Nixon era and the second half sailing from Gerald Ford to Barack Obama. In a sense, this is unavoidable because it is the Nixon administration docs that are being rapidly declassified and subsequent administrations will not be releasing similar material for years or decades. Equal depth of treatment for every administration would also have swelled the number of pages to a staggeringly unmanageable size for authors and readers alike.

I am also not comfortable with the authors’ casual use of the label “Neocon” to describe a range of policy makers on the right, some of whom are not at all neoconservatives in a tight or ideological sense of the term. Toward the end of The Forty Years War, Colodny and Shachtman draw more nuanced distinctions that I think, is a more precise rendering of the positions of various figures in Republican administrations or Congress.

The Forty Years War is a book that deserves to have a much higher public profile as Colodny and Shachtman are marshalling new evidence to challenge conventional interpretations of late Cold War political history and foreign policy.

Strongly recommended.

Matt Armstrong has sent out a call to arms on our most important structural problem in foreign policy – that the Department of State is broken as an institution and needs a complete overhaul on the lines of The Goldwater Nichols Act:

The State of State: A Proposal for Reorganization at Foggy Bottom

….The last major reorganization of the State Department was in 1944. That reshuffling was internally driven, and today’s change could occur within the bureaucracy’s walls as well. But the complexity of the department today likely requires a major realignment of fundamentals, something on the order of magnitude of the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986. That landmark legislation shifted the Defense Department’s operational focus from the services (Army, Navy, Air Force) to the regional commands (Central Command, Pacific Command, etc.).

Foggy Bottom’s regional bureaus are, on their face, like the Defense Department’s combatant commands. But in reality, they are merely support staff for the embassies (the “country teams”). If Defense were to mimic State’s structure, it would be akin to making European Command subservient to individual U.S. military bases in Europe.

Each of State’s regional bureaus are led by an assistant secretary who reports to the under secretary for political affairs. (The under secretary also has other responsibilities, such as overseeing development and implementation of U.S. government policies with the United Nations and its affiliated agencies, as well as the fight against international narcotics and crime.) The under secretary, in turn, reports to the Secretary of State. By contrast, the combatant commander, the assistant secretary’s ostensible counterpart in Defense, has a direct line to the Secretary of Defense.¹

The State Department’s hierarchy was fine for another era when issues were confined within state borders by local authority, geography, and technology. But in recent years, the structure’s flaws have become conspicuous. The department’s ability to respond to crisis is fragmented and sclerotic. When successes do happen, they tend to be the result of individuals working around or outside the bureaucracy. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has circumvented the current system with crisis-specific czars called Special Representatives. These Special Representatives, like Richard Holbrooke for Afghanistan and Pakistan, operate like super ambassadors with regional powers that should reside – but don’t – in the regional bureaus.²

For State to be a viable national security actor, the old hierarchy must be flattened and power should be redistributed. It is hard to imagine isolating a combatant commander by reducing his rank to three-star general and having him report to a four-star general – who then decides what the Secretary of Defense should be bothered with.

Read the whole thing here.

This is a subject on which I have written many times and I am in complete agremeent with Matt.

We might even go beyond Goldwater-Nichols and think in terms of the creation of the Department of Defense in 1947 under Truman which saw the end of the Department of War and the absorbtion of the Department of the Navy into Defense along with the other armed services.  State’s perverse dysfunctionality and empty pockets budget ( blame Congress here) has crippled public diplomacy, international development aid and the interagency process in which State too often plays the role of bureaucratic obstruction or hapless bystander.

What are the civilian foreign policy tasks we need to accomplish as a country and how can we streamline and empower our agencies so that we can advance our national interests ?

Hat tip to Ian!

Decided to beef up the diplo section here to balance out all the COIN/strategic studies blogs on the roll.

Karaka Pend 

John Brown’s Public Diplomacy Press and Blog Review, Version 2.0 

Consul-at-Arms II

Diplopundit

Check them out!

More blogging later today…..