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From our friends at Infinity Journal:

LTC Ron Tira – The Uncommitted Commitment: US Military Involvement in Libya

At the time of this writing the United States may or may not still consider itself engaged in a limited-means campaign in Libya, whose declared objective is to protect Libyan civilians and whose implicit objective is regime change. This military endeavor is, or has been, conducted in contravention of hard-learned American strategic doctrines; and it is an odd pick when contrasted with other more pressing and significant challenges to US vital interests in the Middle East.

As is the case with many lessons learned, the US has paid a high price for the insights embodied mostly in the Weinberger Doctrine and also in the Powell Doctrine. Yet, as is also often the case, it has offhandedly brushed aside that hard-earned strategic prudence.

….Yet the planners of the Libyan operation have preferred force economy and risk aversion over winning. First and foremost has been the demarcation of acceptable risks and consequently acceptable modes of military operation, while the gap between those tolerable ways and means on the one hand and the ends on the other hand remain knowingly unaddressed. The operation’s architects have only been willing to commit and risk limited assets applying standoff fire and possibly special operations, and whatever those can achieve – will be achieved. It is not the objectives and theater characteristics but economy and risk aversion that have driven the campaign’s design.   

Read the rest here ( free registration required).

From SWJ Blog where they are about to launch their subscription newsletter, where I debut as the Recommended Reading columnist with Crispin Burke of Wings Over Iraq:

SWJ Monthly E-News (Bumped – Updated)

Once a month, beginning on 1 May, we will be sending out an e-mail overview of the latest news, issues, events and more from SWJ and the broader Small Wars / Irregular Warfare community of interest and practice.

Have something you think should be included in future newsletters? Send it along to mailto:%20comment@smallwarsjournal.com. Care to advertise in future newsletters? Contact SWJ at mailto:%20advertise@smallwarsjournal.com for details.

Keep abreast of what’s happening in the far flung reaches of the SWJ Empire – sign up below for our newsletter today.

***Sign up now – One lucky SWJ E-News subscriber will win a copy of the 1987 reprint of the Small Wars Manual.*** ***This copy is in new condition – never been opened and has been priced as high as $101.00 on Amazon.com***The contents of SWJ E-News No. 1 will include:

* SWJ News – Journal articles and blog entries, Council debates and discussions, This Week at War and a sneak preview of our SWJ challenge coin,
* Doctrine Man @ SWJ – DM’s exclusive for Small Wars Journal cartoon commentary,
* Professional Reading – Snapshots and links to articles of interest from a wide array of professional journals,
* SWJ Interviews – A recap with links covering our SWJ interview series,
* Starbuck and Zenpundit – Recommended reading,
* Book Review – Bing West’s The Wrong War,
* Upcoming Events – Small Wars-related workshops, conferences, seminars and webcasts,
* More…

Signup for our Monthly E-News

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Finally, Wikistrat has released the latest Core-Gap Bulletin:

CoreGap 11.11 Released – What to Do With Despots Who Fight to the Bitter End?

Wikistrat has released edition 11.11 of the CoreGap Bulletin.

This CoreGap edition features, among others:

• Terra Incognita – What to Do With Despots Who Fight to the Bitter End?
• Bahrain Repression Indicates Just How Scared of Iran the Saudis Truly Are
• IMF and Standard & Poors Both Issue Warnings on Unprecedented US Debt
• As Libyan Stalemate Looms, NATO Increases Involvement
• South Africa Formally Joins BRIC Group, Signaling China’s Dominance

And much more…

The entire bulletin is available for subscribers. Over the upcoming week we will release analysis from the bulletin to our free Geopolitical Analysis section of the Wikistrat website, first being “Terra Incognita – What to Do With Despots Who Fight to the Bitter End?”

Read the full piece here

I accepted an offer from Dave Dilegge to join the new SWJ Monthly E-News to do a Recommended Reading column with Crispin Burke of Wings Over Iraq – sometimes we’ll both do a column….depends how much reading is worth recommending 😉

SWJ Monthly E-News

Once a month, beginning on 1 May, we will be sending out an e-mail overview of the latest news, issues, events and more from SWJ and the broader Small Wars / Irregular Warfare community of interest and practice.

Have something you think should be included in future newsletters? Send it along to mailto:%20comment@smallwarsjournal.com. Care to advertise in future newsletters? Contact SWJ at mailto:%20advertise@smallwarsjournal.com for details.

Keep abreast of what’s happening in the far flung reaches of the SWJ Empire – sign up below for our newsletter today.

The contents of SWJ E-News No. 1 will include:

* SWJ News – Journal articles and blog entries, Council debates and discussions, This Week at War and a sneak preview of our SWJ challenge coin,
* Doctrine Man @ SWJ – DM’s exclusive for Small Wars Journal cartoon commentary,
* Professional Reading – Snapshots and links to articles of interest from a wide array of professional journals,
* SWJ Interviews – A recap with links covering our SWJ interview series,
* Starbuck and Zenpundit – Recommended reading,
* Book Review – Bing West’s The Wrong War,
* Upcoming Events – Small Wars-related workshops, conferences, seminars and webcasts,
* More…

They Just Don’t Make Caliphates Like They Used To….

SWJ Blog featured a lengthy (30 page) essay by Dr. Tony Corn on….well….many things. Corn begins with caliphates and then sort of takes off much like a blown up balloon abruptly released by a child prior to tying a knot in the end.

The Clash of the Caliphates: Understanding the Real War of Ideas by Dr. Tony Corn

….For one thing, within the global umma, there appears to be as many conceptions of the ideal Caliphate as there are Muslims. This grass-roots longing for a symbol of unity should be heard with the proverbial Freudian -third ear,?? and seen for what it really is, i.e., a symptom rather than a disease. For another, by agreeing to establish diplomatic relations with the 57-member Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), America and Europe have, in essence, already granted the OIC the status of a Quasi-Caliphate.

More important still, it is time for Western policy-makers to realize that the ideological rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran that has been going on since 1979 constitutes nothing less than a Clash of the Caliphates. Through a soft power strategy blurring the distinction between -public diplomacy?? and -political warfare,?? -humanitarian aid?? and -religious propaganda,?? the two states have been the main drivers of the re-Islamization process throughout the Muslim world. The one-upmanship dynamic generated by the rivalry between these two fundamentalist regimes is the main reason why, from the Balkans to Pakistan, the re-Islamization of the global umma has taken a radical, rather than moderate, dimension.

Ok, “caliphates” as a metaphor/analogy for geopolitical rivalry of Muslim states works but it is not really what Islamists or normal Muslims would mean by the term. It is a very odd usage. I’m not overly bothered by that because I tend to like analogies but Corn’s device here is apt to make the heads of area studies and Islamic history scholars explode. The whole essay is in this meandering, idiosyncratic, vein.

Now that is not to suggest that you should not read the piece. Dr. Corn held my attention all the way through and he has a number of excellent observations on many, loosely related, subjects. For example, after discussing the pernicious effects of Saudi donations and Edward Said’s agitprop theory of “Orientalism” on the intellectual objectivity of academia, Corn writes:

…The combined effect of the House of Saud and the House of Said is the first reason why the Ivory Tower has done such a poor job identifying the nature of Muslim Exceptionalism. A more indirect, yet more insidious, reason is that, unlike in the early days of the Cold War, American academics across the board today are trained in social sciences rather than educated in the humanities. For social scientists, Explanation (erklaren) and -theory-building?? take precedence over Understanding (verstehen) and -policy-making. The victory of the -numerates over the -literates in the 1970s has produced a generation of scholars who show a certain virtuosity when it comes to -research design, but display an amazing lack, not just of historical literacy, but of -historical empathy as well. Not to make too fine a point: the Long War is being waged by a generation of policy-makers who, however articulate, never learned anything about history in their college years

Corn is spot on here. Not only is it spot on, it is likely to get much worse. After a brief qualitative “bump” from Iraq-Afghan war  language trained vets, diplos, analysts and spooks peters out, we will have the Gen Y kids with K-12 educations scrubbed free of history, foreign languages and science graduating from college with communication and marketing degrees and entering government service. Hang on to your hat when that happens.

What Corn really requires to vault his essays to the next level are the services of an experienced editor because less would be more. The man is erudite and insightful. He writes forcefully and raises a number of points that are important and with which I agree. Corn, commendably, also makes more of an effort to connect the dots than most. But maybe, if you have an essay that references David Kilcullen, Trotsky, neo-Ottomanism, lawfare, Sam Huntington, neo-COIN, Nasser, Vatican II, the Comintern, the Hapsburgs, Ataturk, public diplomacy, al- Qaradawi, social media, Fascism, Marc Lynch, Youtube, network theory, the UN, hybrid wars and the Protestant Reformation, it might be time to up the Ritalin dosage a notch. Jesus, there’s either a book proposal or four different articles in that kitchen sink of an op-ed!

Read it and take what is useful.

This is a MSM and USG/DoD one stop shop of links at SWJ Blog.

I was involved in a discussion elsewhere regarding the excellent and thought provoking article at SWJ by General Huba Wass de Czege on operation art, design and thinking:

Operational Art is Not a Level of War

Strongly recommend you read the article first. My remarks follow, slightly revised:

I have only read a few pieces by General Wass de Czege, those published at SWJ but the caliber of the general’s self-reflective, professional, thinking is something we should strive to emulate.

Here is what seems to be the crtical point in his article, after which I have a comment:

 “We doctrine writers of the 1980’s inserted operational art as a mid-level of war between tactics and strategy – making it the art of translating the governing strategy into the implementing tactics of the “tactical echelons.” And thus, making operational art the province of “campaigning” generals. Because of the way I was conditioned to think then, that strategy was the business of the upper echelons and tactics the business of the lower ones, I miss-translated an idea borrowed from Soviet doctrine about the mediation between strategy and tactics. I was then a product of indoctrination in the US Army’s War and Command and Staff Colleges. These institutions, and the business schools of the time, taught based on the industrial age organizational model of the head (where strategic decisions are made) and the rest of the body (where tactical decisions implement the strategy). I now believe that, without violating the historical meaning of the terms strategy and tactics, this is a much more useful and natural way to think of the relationship between tactics, strategy and operational art.

In fact, this allows one to close the conceptual gap between our bifurcated way of thinking about warfare between nation states and that between states and armed movements of any kind. It also helps do the same for the two tactical operating modes that have recently surfaced in new Army concepts – “combined arms maneuver” and “wide area security.”

Campaigning, another word for operational art, can occur at any scale, and in any milieu, as a close look at what our best company, battalion, and brigade commanders have been doing in Iraq and Afghanistan. “

I think maybe this should be qualified – re; operational art is not a “level”. It is a level of war and it is not at the same time.
 
The difference between the two I think is *how* we are employing the term: “Operational art” as a historical, taxonomic, description of how a military-political command structure has behaved/behaves as a warfighting institutional culture vs. methodologically how they *could* and *should* think about warfare and in turn behave at any “level”.
 
It is not surprising to me, thinking in terms of history, that Wass de Czege, where he wrote that he was in error, was drawing from Soviet examples. If we think about “operational art” as a “level of war” we are led to military powers where powerful ideological constraints systemically interfered with the “natural” clausewitzian connection between Policy and Strategy.
 
The USSR’s Red Army, from the early days of Commissar-Commander relationships in battle, through the Stalinist era to the more modern and restrained (i.e. non-murderous) controls of the Army’s Political Department and vetting security checks for promotion carried out jointly by the military, State Security and Party organs, created an atmosphere where deferral of political implications caused a) a segregation of an officer’s intellectual initiative to organizational and technical military questions and b) constructing military strategy and operational campaigns to at least nominally reflect Marxist-Leninist dogma and the Party line as a matter of necessity, and for a period, in an effort to try and avoid being physically liquidated.
 
Most of the Soviet Union’s most gifted military strategists and tacticians were unsuccessful in this regard and perished (ex. Svechin, Tukhachevskii, Blyukher). Arguably that left an institutional legacy in it’s wake that narrowed the conceptual framework with which Soviet Marshals and generals approached planning for war, including nuclear war.
 
Germany is another example, with the policy-strategy split favoring a professional military focus on operational art emerging as early as 1870 in tensions between Bismarck and Moltke over the war with France, growing worse during the Great War until during the Third Reich, a state of enforced paralysis occurs after 1942 on the Eastern Front. In theory, Hitler, who was his own war minister and commander-in-chief of the Army in addition to being the Supreme Commander, Fuhrer and Reich Chancellor, could (like Stalin) have resolved any contradictions or discordance between Policy and Strategy. Hitler deliberately chose not to do so and his paranoia led him to eventually limit even his field commander’s tactical flexibility (some generals, like Rommel, resisted this more effectively than others).
 
The US military, in my view, suffers a similar fixation. The reasons are very different – proper constitutional deference to civil authority coupled with a limited or absent capacity of most civilian political authorities to think in a complementary strategic fashion that would allow them to best guide their military commanders in jointly constructing a seamless bridge between policy-strategy-operational campaign. Another reason, though I do not want to go into it here, is a cultural reaction to the experience of the Vietnam War that became embedded in the officer corps during the shift to the AVF starting with the Nixon administration.
 
Tom Ricks had a very interesting post at Best Defense while back on the Hew Strachan article in which Ricks argued against the existence of an operational level of war, but as we are not discussing platonic forms, militaries are at whatever “level” of war for which their culture institutionally encourages officers to think about and plan. So in that sense, Wass de Czege is absolutely correct – they can and should be thinking across the whole range and not in “slots”. However, if they don’t do what he suggests and if they do predominantly focus on one “level” as most of their thinking and planning, be it tactics, operations, strategy. Then that level “exists”, it leaves a bureaucratic “trail”, grows a structure to execute it and will be put into practice during a war – at least initially until events force a change of practice from below (the field) or above ( political leaders).