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I thought I would call the attention of the readership to a debate that has been ricocheting around different social media platforms on R2P ( “Responsibility to Protect“). I have dealt with the topic several times in the past, related to the ideas of Anne-Marie Slaughter, but not much recently until Victor Allen, over at The Bridge, put up an enthusiastic post:

Strong State, Weak State: The New Sovereignty and the Responsibility to Protect

The Responsibility to Protect doctrine represents a leap forward in accountability for states and does not infringe upon their sovereignty, as states are no longer held to be completely self-contained entities with absolute power over their populations. Rather, there is a strictly defined corpus of actions that begin the R2P process?—?a process that has different levels of corrective action undertaken by the international community in order to persuade, cajole and finally coerce states into actively taking steps to prevent atrocities from occurring within their boundaries. That R2P does not violate sovereignty stems from the evolution of sovereignty from its Westphalian form in the mid 17th century to the “sovereignty as responsibility” concept advanced by Deng, et al. Modern sovereignty can no longer be held to give states carte blanche in their internal affairs regardless of the level of suffering going on within their borders. This does not diminish state agency for internal affairs, but rather holds them responsible and accountable for their action and inaction regarding the welfare of their populations…

Victor’s post deserves to be read in full.

I did not agree with Victor’s framing of the legal character of state sovereignty, to put it mildly, nor his normative assessment of R2P.  Mr. Allen also described R2P somewhat differently than I have seen from other advocates, but I was less concerned by that as the concept does not seem to be presented with consistency by the community of  R2P advocates and theorists. Having seen similar theoretical debates over the years about angels dancing on pins over 4GW, constructivism, EBO, Network-centric Warfare, OODA,  Clausewitz’s remarkable trinity,  nuclear deterrence, preemptive war, COIN,  neoconservatism, free market economics, the agrarian origin of capitalism in England, Marxist theory etc. I am not too worried if Victor’s interpretation in its specifics is not ideologically perfect. It is representative enough.

I responded to Allen’s post somewhat crankily and with too much brevity:

R2P: Asserting Theory is not = Law 

….As far as premises go, the first point is highly debatable; the second is formally disputed by *many* states, including Russia and China, great powers which are permanent members of the UN Security Council; and the third bears no relation to whether a military intervention is a violation of sovereignty or not. I am not a self-contained entity either, that does not mean you get to forcibly enter my house.

That R2P does not violate sovereignty stems from the evolution of sovereignty from its Westphalian form in the mid 17th century to the “sovereignty as responsibility” concept advanced by Deng, et al. Modern sovereignty can no longer be held to give states carte blanche in their internal affairs regardless of the level of suffering going on within their borders.

Academic theorists do not have the authority to override sovereign powers (!) constituted as legitimized, recognized, states and write their theories into international law – as if an international covenant like the Geneva Convention had just been contracted. Even persuading red haired activist cronies of the American president and State Department bureaucrats to recite your arguments at White House press conferences does not make them “international law” either – it makes them “policy” – and that only of a particular administration. 

This riff  set off something of a reaction on Facebook in private groups and on Twitter as Mr. Allen, who I am sure is a fine gent, has a large set of common colleagues with me, some of whom are Boydians and all of whom are sharp strategic thinkers. Consequently,  Victor’s post(s) as well as mine and a later follow up by a “Leonidas Musashi” ( great nom de guerre)  made it into a high caliber defense forum as well as other sites online. My spleen-venting provoked the following rebuttal at The Bridge:

R2P: A Spectrum of Responses 

….Safranski’s final point about sovereignty as carte blanche seems to be a stealth argument for the principles of R2P:

States always could and did take military action in self-defense when disorders in neighboring states threatened their security or spilled over their border outright.R2P seeks to minimize harm caused by disorder through early action taken prior to conflicts spilling over borders that can potentially cause larger conflagrations, but more importantly, it recognizes that atrocities can happen entirely within the confines of a state, and that the international community will not allow them to continue unchecked. This recognition is easily seen in the rhetoric and discussions regarding rebels in both Libya and Syria. Libya is admittedly a flawed example of the use of R2P, with second-order effects seen in the Russian and Chinese opposition to UN-sanctioned stabilization operations in Syria, but that concern for the population first and the state second were common facets to both bear mentioning in the debate and illustrate the shifting nature of intervention and sovereignty. This shift is exemplified in the contrast between discussions in the UN General Assembly regarding Kosovo/East Timor and Syria: “most of the 118 states that mentioned Syria at the UN General Assembly in 2012 expressed concern about the population, up from less than a third who invoked Kosovo and East Timor in 1999… It is clear that a fundamental shift has taken place regarding humanitarian intervention and that more and more states embrace the broad values expressed by R2P.” (“Democracy, Human Rights, and the Emerging Global Order: Workshop Summary,” Brookings Institution, 2012)

Again, I caution about reading posts in full.

Here in this rebuttal Victor doubled down, which I admire because that is interesting, but with which I agree with even less because he seems to be far removed from how the world really works in terms of international relations, not merely in practice, but also in theory as well.  That said, his response deserves a much more serious reply than my first post evinced. I have been fiddling with one ( I seem to be moving slowly these days) but another voice – “Leonidas Musashi” – has entered the debate at The Bridge with a sharp retort against Allen’s conception of R2P:

Responsibility to Protect: Rhetoric and Reality 

….My main observation, however, is that the discussion thus far has been focused more on a “right” to protect than a “responsibility” to do so. The arguments indicate that a state has a responsibility to protect its people but takes for granted that third parties somehow inherit this responsibility when the state cannot fulfill it. There is a missing explanation here. The need to justify such efforts may seem callous, but a nation’s highest moral order is to serve its own citizens first. Such an explanation would certainly be a legitimate demand for a mother that loses a son who volunteered to defend his nation, or for a government entrusted by its people to use their resources to their own benefit. While it is often stated that the international community “should” intervene, explanation of where this imperative comes from is not addressed other than by vague references to modern states being interconnected. But this implies, as previously stated, a right based on the self-interest of states, firmly grounded in realistic security concerns, rather than any inherent humanitarian responsibility to intervene. Instability and potential spillover may very well make it within a nation’s vital interests to intervene in another country and pursuing humanitarian and human rights goals within the borders of another state may well be in a nation’s secondary interests. But if this is the case, the calculus of the political leadership will determine if pursuing this goal is worth the cost/potential costs – as has been done in such cases as North Korea, Iran, Zimbabwe, Tibet and Syria. In either case, the decision is determined by what is in the nation’s interests, a reality that makes R2P not a mandate, but a merely a post hoc justification for interventions that do occur.

Leonidas makes many good points, in my view, but the intellectual fungibility of R2P as a concept, its elastic and ever evolving capacity to serve as a pretext for any situation at hand is the most important, because it is potentially most destabilizing and threatening to other great powers with which the United States has to share the globe. In short, with great responsibilities come greater costs.

In part II. I will lay out a more methodical case on the intellectual phantom that is R2P.

[by Mark Safranski, a.k.a. “zen“]

At The Bridge, Victor Allen pontificates on R2P (“Responsibility to Protect“) as if it were an established, cardinal point of international  law and not a pet theory of a few years vintage pushed by a small but politically connected clique of Western elite activists.

Strong State, Weak State:The New Sovereignty and Responsibility to Protect 

The Responsibility to Protect doctrine represents a leap forward in accountability for states and does not infringe upon their sovereignty, as states are no longer held to be completely self-contained entities with absolute power over their populations. 

As far as premises go, the first point is highly debatable; the second is formally disputed by *many* states, including Russia and China, great powers which are permanent members of the UN Security Council; and the third bears no relation to whether a military intervention is a violation of sovereignty or not. I am not a self-contained entity either, that does not mean you get to forcibly enter my house.

That R2P does not violate sovereignty stems from the evolution of sovereignty from its Westphalian form in the mid 17th century to the “sovereignty as responsibility” concept advanced by Deng, et al. Modern sovereignty can no longer be held to give states carte blanche in their internal affairs regardless of the level of suffering going on within their borders.

Academic theorists do not have the authority to override sovereign powers (!) constituted as legitimized, recognized, states and write their theories into international law – as if an international covenant like the Geneva Convention had just been contracted. Even persuading red haired activist cronies of the American president and State Department bureaucrats to recite your arguments at White House press conferences does not make them “international law” either – it makes them “policy” – and that only of a particular administration.

Nor did the legal principle of non-interference in another sovereign state’s internal affairs ever mean carte blanche in diplomatic practice. States always could and did take military action in self-defense when disorders in neighboring states threatened their security or spilled over their border outright. They could also choose to recognize insurgents in a neighboring state as lawful belligerents or even grant them diplomatic recognition as the legitimate government.

The rest of the piece continues on in this fashion.

This kind of breezy overselling of R2P, given the exceptionally slender diplomatic reeds on which it is based, is a cornerstone of R2P advocacy, usually for ill-considered or astrategic interventions motivated by “do something!”

[by Mark Safranski, a.k.a. “zen“]

My reading at CNAS, which had once been frequent, declined with the waning of the Abu Muqawama blog. While formerly I usually scanned through CNAS reports on a regular basis after reading what Exum and his commenters had to say, toward the end I only visited when Adam and Dan had new posts up.

At the gentle nudging of Frank Hoffman, I decided to read the latest CNAS product;  I’m pleased to say with the release of ” 20YY:Preparing for War in the Robotic Age“ by Robert Work ( CNAS CEO and former Undersecretary of the Navy) and Shawn Brimley (CNAS Executive V.P. and former NSC Strategic Planning Director) CNAS has rolled out an intellectually provocative analysis on an important emerging aspect of modern warfare.

Work and Brimley have done a number of things well and did them concisely (only 36 pages) in “20YY”:

• A readable summary of the technological evolution of modern warfare in the past half century while distinguishing between military revolutions,  military-technical revolution and the the 80’s-90’s  American “revolution in military affairs“.
• .
• A more specific drill-down on the history of guided munitions and their game-changing importance on the relationship between offense and defense that flourished after the Gulf War. 
• .
• An argument that the proliferation of technology and information power into the hands unfriendly states and non-state actors is altering the strategic environment for the United States, writing:
• .
• “Meanwhile in the 13 years since the last 20XX game, foreign nation-state C41, surveillance and reconaissance systems, and guided munitions-battle network capabilities have become increasingly capable.  Indeed, these systems now form the very robust and advanced “anti-access and area denial”  (A2/AD) capabilities envisioned in the 20XX game series. The effect has been that the dominance enjoyed by the United States in the late 1990’s/2000’s in the area of high end sensors, guided weaponry, space and cyberspace systems and stealth technology has started to erode. Moreover the erosion is now occurring at an accelerated rate.”
• .
• Positing the near-future global proliferation of unmanned, autonomous, networked and swarmed robotic systems replacing( and leveraged by diminishing numbers of) expensive manpower and piloted platforms on the battlefield and altering the age-old relationship between a nation’s population base and the traditional calculation of its potential military power.
• .
• An argument that “warfare in the robotic age” will mean substantial to fundamental shifts in strategic calculation of deterrence, coercion, the use of force, operational doctrines and the evolution of military technology and that the United States must prepare for this eventuality.

This report is well worth reading.  In my view there are some areas that require further exploration and debate than can be found in “20YY”. For example:

• While the power of economics as a driver of unmanned, autonomous weapons is present, the implications are vastly understated. Every nation will face strategic investment choices between opting for simple and cheaper robotic platforms in mass and “pricing out” potential rivals by opting for “class” – fewer but more powerful, sophisticated and versatile robotic systems.
• .
• The scale of robot swarms are limited primarily by computing power and cost of manufactureand could be composed of robots from the size of a fly to that of a zeppelin. As John Robb has noted, this could mean billions of drones.
• .
• The US defense acquisition system and the armed services are ill-suited for fast and inexpensive introduction of robotic warfare technology – particularly if they threaten to displace profitable legacy platforms – as was demonstrated by the CIA rather than the USAF taking the lead on building a drone fleet.  Once foreign states reach parity, they may soon exceed us technologically in this area. A future presidential candidate may someday warn of  a growing ” robot gap” with China.
• .
• Reliance on robotic systems as the center of gravity of your military power carries a terrific risk if effective countermeasures suddenly render them useless at the worst possible time (“Our…our drone swarm….they’ve turned around…they are attacking our own troops….Aaaaahhhh!”)
• .
• The use of robotic systems to indiscriminately and autonomously kill is virtually inevitable much like terrorism is inevitable. As with WMD, the weaker the enemy, the less moral scruple they are likely to have in employing lethal robotic technology.
• .
• For that matter, the use of robotic systems by an authoritarian state against its own citizens to suppress insurgency, peaceful protest or engage in genocide against minority groups is also highly probable. Is there much doubt how the Kim Family regime in north Korea or Assad in Syria would make use of an army of “killer robots” if they feel their hold on power was threatened?
• .
• International Law is not currently configured for genuinely autonomous weapons with Ai operating systems. Most of the theorists and certainly the activists on the subject of  “killer robots” are more interested in waging lawfare exclusively against American possession and use of such weapons than in stopping their proliferation to authoritarian regimes or contracting realistic covenants as to their use.

All in all “20YY:Preparing for War in the Robotic Age provides much food for thought.

[by Mark Safranski, a.k.a. “zen“]

 

Yale organizational behaviorist Rodrigo Canales has an interesting talk on the Narco-insurgency in Mexico ( which he correctly sees as having been as lethal as Syria’s civil war). While this won’t be news to close students of Mexico’s cartel wars, Canales explains how Los Zeta, La Familia, Knights Templar and Sinaloa cartel violence is neither random nor strictly criminal on criminal  violence but is used as part of organizational strategies to create distinctive “franchise brands”, amplify political messaging,  reinforce effects of social service investment in the communities they control and maximize market efficiency of narcotics sales and other contraband. COIN, 4GW and irregular warfare folks will all see familiar elements in Canales management theory driven perspective.

A useful short tutorial considering the cartels are operating inside the United States and their hyper-violent tactics are eventually going to follow.

(by Adam Elkus)

One of my favorite television shows when I was younger was the Japanese sci-fi anime Gundam Wing. The characterization was awful, the giant robots were kind of lame, and the fights often were not all that suspenseful. However, it had a very interesting social and political universe that was far more sophisticated than your average Toonami fare. I remember one episode in particular, now that discussion has turned to the ever-topical future of war and technology.

In a Earth Sphere Alliance military base on Corsica, an special operations officer named Walker greets Gundam‘s antagonist Zechs. Zechs has come to inspect an old prototype mobile suit that Zechs and Walker both believe holds the key to understanding the terrifying new and poorly understood Gundam mobile suits that have been annihilating Alliance bases left and right. The base’s foolish commander, having been forced to cease production of mobile suits due to a terrorist attack on the facility, stages a large display of force with base units to demonstrate that he is in control. The implied purpose is to grandstand to the special operations group that Zechs and Walker belong to, demonstrating that the regular army can do hold the base without the help of the “specials.”

At one point, Walker asks Zech to take the prototype suit from the base with him. Zechs, knowing that the Gundam will likely attack, asks Walker if he is going to die for him. Walker responds that he is following Zechs’ example and fighting for the soldiers of the future. Sure enough, a Gundam does arrive and Walker and his special operations unit suicidally fight to allow the base commander and Zechs to escape. Walker, in commanding his men to fight on despite the certainty of destruction, quite literally casts it as a struggle for the soldiers of the future. The combat data that the fight will produce will help the military fight the Gundams later. And Walker also wants Zechs and the prototype to escape for similar reasons. Zechs himself sorrowfully departs, knowing that he has effectively doomed Walker.

When thinking about World War I, I often see a lot of Walkers. Many of the military theorists, soldiers, and technologists could see nearly all of the challenges of future warfare stemming from C3I, logistics, campaign design, and tactics. Walker most reminds me of Ardant Du Picq, both in his interest in the future of war and untimely end. The problem all of the prewar era’s military theorists faced was that they were caught between something very old and familiar and something new and terrifying — much like the juxtaposition of the proto-Gundam Zechs inspects and the actual Gundam that kills Walker and his team (thus generating combat data). The familiar is tangible, the future is patchy and a black box. Still, that isn’t exactly why WWI was such a slaughterhouse.

An interesting contrast to Gundam is seen in another anime I watched recently, Night Raid 1931.  Set in the 1930s, the anime’s antagonist is a supernaturally empowered Imperial Japanese Army military officer who forsees World War II and the use of the atomic bomb. Prophecy is a very big theme throughout Night Raid — a oracle-like woman is used by the closest echelons of the Japanese government and military to make decisions about war and peace. There is something fitting about the idea that the prime source of information for decision is an esoteric and religiously based strategic forecaster.

The antagonist, afraid of the consequences of world warfare, attempts to enlist the peoples of Southeast Asia in revolt against both Japan and the colonial powers to produce a new order. He takes drastic measures to create his own prototype atomic weapon — which he plans to utilize on Shanghai in order to force the world powers (all of whom have settlements there) to take actions that will demonstrate the deterrent power of his new weapon. He is foiled, but the protagonists all understand that they have only postponed the inevitable.

The perspective in Night Raid is one in which the future is deterministic — even if it cannot be predicted completely. The initial conditions are clear — some sequence of events is on the horizon, ending in the usage of the atomic bomb. The antagonist only can glimpse a very hazy outline of this vision, and he tries and fails to prevent it. Undoubtedly the fact that he tried and failed influenced the outcome somewhat — but the anime implies WWII happens anyway (and the bomb presumably does as well).

The deterministic perspective in Night Raid is contrasted with Gundam 00, in which a Hari Seldon-like figure creates an organization for carrying out a 200-year plan designed to result in a desired future and a massively powerful biological artificial intelligence agent to help plan and direct the process through the centuries. However, after he puts himself in suspended freeze to wait out the future, the components of his organization begin to develop different ideas about it. Factions develop and feud and 200 years later the desired future is very much in doubt.

Though the good guys win in the end (it’s TV), it is by no means implied that the initial conditions are sufficient to produce a deterministic outcome. The end outcome is an emergent product of contingent decisions by all of the anime’s political, military, and economic entities as well as the specific decisions and personalities of the main characters. In fact, there are many points in the anime in which complete derailment of the desired future are very plausible. The fact that the end leads to the heroes triumphant doesn’t necessarily say much about the probability of it occurring. The story tries to present it as such, but this can be dismissed as a narrative contrivance designed to impose a comfortable sense of signal to noise.

The question of what the future holds for war depends in part on how you view the nature of social systems. The key idea of Night Raid is a teleological climb to some higher mountain. Exactly how high no one really knows, but by the end of the anime they are sure that there is some peak much higher that they will ascend to. In contrast, Gundam 00 seems to imply that there are micro interactions that produce fleeting intermediate structures. Furthermore, the interaction between micro and intermediate levels produces a macroscopic outcome that then affects the micro level again.

The challenge is always to avoid the Black Swan problem. It is easy to impose a spurious coherence on past events that you believe gives them teleological order. Much of what Lynn Rees talks about is the problem of imposing such coherence with fuzzy and value-laden ideas about strategy. But as some commenters have noted in the legibility thread, legibility is at heart any process that we use to try to force the world to fit our own mental models. Every time we write history, we inherently distort reality into a soda straw view because no history can capture the complexity of the world as it once was. It is often ironic to see humanities thinkers make this very criticism about mathematical modeling and statistics, when if anything the process of imposing conceptual order on the past is far more fraught with peril than building a clearly specified computer model.

With this in mind, we can see another interesting distinction in the various anime series surveyed in this post. In Night Raid 1931, the antagonist attempts to force the future to fit his own mental model, and fails miserably. The deterministic nature of events is implied by his failure to get the anti-colonial groups to trust him and cooperate — something that could only happen after World War II. However, in Gundam 00 the very act of changing the future also imperils that future — the creation of a large organization to carry out the Foundation-esque dream inevitably splits into factions and personalities that try to twist the plan to fit their own ends.

To return to the Walker-WWI parallel in the beginning — what I’m coming to believe about WWI is not that the greatest risk is failing to see the future clearly or of not collecting the right data. It is that we do not give enough reflective thought to how our anticipations of the future also change it. The preparations of the various powers for war they knew would require large armies, mobilization networks, and speed famously complicated prewar diplomacy. And preparations for Cold War turning “hot” and the scientific and technical spawn they generated in turn also created the roots of American dominance and profitable technological industries today.

Much discussion about future war involves banning or regulating technologies, taking steps to insure that X or Y capability is preserved or scrapped, etc. But that focus renders invisible the problems involved in trying to force the future to be legible, as well as the interesting lack of reflexivity about the combination of predicting the future and seeking to alter it.