zenpundit.com

Campaign Reboot –Forever War: Losing Track of Strategy 

….The Forever War is, unsurprisingly, a book about war. It charts the conflict between humanity and an alien species called Taurians. The Taurians are alien in the classic sense, unknown and for the majority of the book unknowable.

The core of the book is the war, but it is also a book about disconnection, since the protagonists suffer from the effects of time dilation every time they go on tour, with hundreds of years potentially passing each time they ship out and return home. The same is true of the Taurians, meaning that in every engagement is is impossible to know whether the Taurian enemy is operating with technology from the future, or the past (from the perspective of the protagonists).

Over time the characters become disconnected from their own species, as guided evolution turns humanity into a species in which they have no part. Despite being the cream of the crop when recruited (all recruits have an IQ of 150+, the effects of this brain drain are explored in the book) they are left behind by a humanity which has chosen to pursue a guided evolution.

Strategy is at it’s most effective when the environment over which a conflict is going to be fought is understood. Terrain is part of this, however the mindset and moral elements of the opponent must also be understood. The Forever War is a study in what happens when a conflict is unmoored from reality, indeed it never has a root in reality, since the Taurians are unknown and unknowable.

Dr. Tdaxp – The Humanities, the Sciences and Strategy 

The Servants of Strategy

The humanities and the Sciences are siblings. Both serve Strategy. Graduates from the Sciences can usefully serve Strategy to the extent they understand the tools of prediction and control: improvement, and are not distracted by non-normal, revolutionary science. Graduates from the Humanities can usefully serve Strategy to the extend they understand the tools of understanding and explanation, and are not distracted by critical political agendas. 

Opposed Systems Design – PRC, DC and the Myth of Scheming 

….All of this reminded me of Luttwak’s recently released The Rise of China vs. the Logic of Strategy.  Luttwak argues that the purported strategic wisdom of Chinese history actually impedes China’s ability to successfully carry out policy in the international sphere.  During the waring states period, massive intrigue and Game-of-Thrones-esque maneuvering was possible because of a common language, in addition to ethnic and cultural homogeneity.  International politics, on the other hand, is marked by disparate languages, ethnic groups and cultural  heritages.  In this hodge-podge, deep stratagems aren’t feasible because people have a hard enough time understanding one another when they aren’t attempting to dissemble.  In short, the fear of inscrutable Chinese strategists playing a brilliant long con on the world is simply not plausible because it would require a degree of cosmopolitan understanding of other nations and societies that no nation has successfully achieved.

Fabius Maximus – Who lies to us the most? Left or Right? 

Many posts on the FM website have described similarities between the Left and Right in America.  Some discuss their similar policy recommendations (eg, economic policy should benefit banks, foreign policy should be dominated by the military and advance our global hegemony). Some note how both Left and Right are OK with lies to start our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and to support torture and shred our civil liberties.  Some discuss their similar method of gaining public support: use exaggeration of threats to build fear that stampedes the public (DDT, ALAR, nuclear winter, climate change, government debt, creeping Sharia, al Qaeda).

This raises another question with which I’ve long grappled: magnitudes. Magnitudes matter.  While similar, which party does this the most — and the most egregiously?

A speculative diagram by Crittenden Jarvis.

SWJ – Book Review: Saddam Hussein’s Ba’th Party: Inside an Authoritarian Regime 

That’s it.

Top Billing! Galrahn at USNI blog –Honesty can be Uncomfortable

During the panel discussion on the Chinese Navy last week at the USNI West Conference in San Diego, Captain James Fanell, Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence and Information Operations for US Pacific Fleet had some “bracing” comments about the Chinese Navy. When I quote “bracing” I am actually quoting Sam Roggeveen of the Australian Lowy Institute Interpreter blog.

What makes the comments “bracing” is that they are both blunt and honest in commentary. Sam noted the Captain’s comments like this:

Fanell’s language is, well, bracing. He calls China ‘hegemonic’ and says it displays ‘aggression’; he claims China ‘bullies adversaries’ and that it has become a ‘mistrusted principal threat’. Watch Captain Fanell’s presentation from about 21 minutes into the above video, or read below for some more select quotes:

• (China’s) expansion into the blue waters are largely about countering the US Pacific fleet.’
• The PLA Navy is going to sea to learn how to do naval warfare…Make no mistake: the PRC navy is focused on war at sea, and sinking an opposing fleet.’
• On China Marine Surveillance, which supervises and patrols China’s claimed maritime territory: ‘If you map out their harassments you will see that they form a curved front that has over time expanded out against the coast of China’s neighbours, becoming the infamous nine-dashed line, plus the entire East China Sea…China is negotiating for control of other nations’ resources off their coasts; what’s mine is mine, and we’ll negotiate what’s yours.’
• China Marine Surveillance cutters have no other mission but to harass other nations into submitting to China’s expansive claims…China Marine Surveillance is a full-time maritime sovereignty harassment organisation’.
• In my opinion, China is knowingly, operationally and incrementally seizing maritime rights of its neighbours under the rubric of a maritime history that is not only contested in the international community but has largely been fabricated by Chinese government propaganda bureaus in order to “educate” the populous about China’s rich maritime history, clearly as a tool to sustain the Party’s control.’

Sam Roggeveen is right to describe Captain Fanell’s comments as “bracing,” because it has certainly been awhile since we have seen an American in a public forum speak the truth about China in this way. While we will never see an American diplomat speak like this, nor does the opinion of a US Navy Captain carry the weight of, say, a four star Admiral; this is still very powerful commentary when it comes from a man who is responsible for the evaluation of all intelligence gathered by Pacific Command every single day. 

HG’s World – My Own Pivot to the Sea 

….This past week I was privileged to attend the West 2013 Conference in San Diego, where I was able to attend several panel discussions and a very informative luncheon where the guests were the Chief of Naval Operations ADM Jonathan W. Greenert, Commandant of the Marine Corps Gen James F. Amos, and Commandant of the Coast Guard ADM Robert J. Papp Jr. who participated in a round table discussion of the future of the sea services. I have linked the video below, and encourage all to take an hour to listen carefully the their words. 

Another, panel I attended discussed the Chinese Navy and her intentions, be they a challenge or a potential partner in maintaining safe passage for all maritime global commerce. That video is also below. 

Adam Elkus at AFJ – Competition in Cyberspace 

….Network-centric warfare is a paramount example of how cyber-enabled military operations merged with mainstream tenets of American strategic culture. Adm. Arthur K. Cebrowski and his collaborators married technology with an expansive geopolitical vision of American ability to determine “rule sets” in an international system that he judged to be imperiled by information-technology-enabled regional actors. Network-enabled force and flexible logistics would help the United States contain the damage from such actors, spread globalization’s connectivity to disconnected regions and deter new conflicts. These geopolitical ideas, while wrapped in metaphors from systems science and economics, are at their core very much rooted in a traditionally American brand of liberal internationalism. The United States does not trust a balance-of-power system abroad to create national security, and thus has historically sought the military capability to create favorable regional, national-level and substate political outcomes.

American military hegemony, coupled with a penchant for cyber-enabled regional intervention, is what is driving adversaries’ search for countermeasures. A military competition is underway over military cyber power. 

Steven Metz  at WPR –Strategic Horizons: Make North Korea Understand the Cost of Provocation

Dan Trombly – The Sources of Perpetual War  

Thomas P.M. Barnett –Interesting Panel on the Chinese Navy (video) 

Razib Khan – Jared Diamond and the Anthropologists and Against the Cultural Anthropologists 

Dan Nexon – How Reality-based is the Community?  

SWJ –“In the Service of Humanity and Civilization”? The Austro-Hungarian Occupation of Bosnia and Hercegovina (1878)

Dart Throwing Chimp –Advocascience 

Recommended Viewing:

Top Billing! Zero Hedge  –Taleb On “Skin In The Game” And His Disdain For Public Intellectuals 

Nassim Taleb sits down for a quite extensive interview based around his new book Anti-Fragile. Whether the Black Swan best-seller is philosopher or trader is up to you but the discussion is worth the time as Taleb wonders rigorously from the basic tenets of capitalism – “being more about disincentives that incentives” as failure (he believes) is critical to its success (and is clearly not allowed in our current environment) – to his intellectual influences (and total disdain for the likes of Krugman, Stiglitz, and Friedman – who all espouse grandiose and verbose work with no accountability whatsoever). His fears of large centralized states (such as the US is becoming and Europe is become) being prone to fail along with his libertarianism make for good viewing. However, his fundamental premise that TBTF banks should be nationalized and the critical importance of ‘skin in the game’ for a functioning financial system are all so crucial for the current ‘do no harm’ regime in which we live. Grab a beer (or glass of wine, it is Taleb) and watch…

Via Redmond Weissenberger of the Ludwig von Mises Institute Of Canada,

SWJ Blog Announcing Peter J. Munson’s “War, Welfare & Democracy” and Exemplar, Not Crusader 

….My book is in large part intended to be a corrective to the driving imperative of our foreign policy.

No matter what portion of the ideological spectrum Americans come at world problems from, their views are shaped in a way by the idea of the “end of history.” We think that political development has a single endpoint, that being liberal democracy.

I’m not arguing that there’s a better endpoint.

Instead, I’m arguing that America cannot get the world to that endpoint in the near term. America needs to be more humble in its foreign policies, more realistic than its current expectation of instant modernization without any instability, and more cognizant of the significant challenges it faces in getting its own house in order.

In a phrase, I argue that America should focus more on being an exemplar than a crusader.

First, the world is undergoing a massive wave of change, bringing rapid development and modernization to more people than ever before. I show that this change is intensely destabilizing. It took the West centuries to progress from the corrupt rule of warlords to liberal democracy.

There is no reason to believe that America can remake the world—or even a corner of it—in its image in the course of a few years. We are going to face a period of intensifying instability in the developing world and we need to understand that some things just cannot be neatly managed, much less controlled. We can’t bring on the end of history by using war to spread democracy and the welfare state (used in the academic, not pejorative sense).

Dr. Tdaxp –Science is Real. Measurement is Real. Improvement Is Real and This Too Shall Pass 

Longtime blogfriend Dr. Tdaxp has been on an epistemological tear of late.

Duck of Minerva –Podcast No. 19: Interview with Daniel Drezner and   Lifting the Combat Ban for Women: why the policy change is the right choice

Dr. MacKenzie’s post celebrates a change in policy that is going to be extremely difficult to implement once the military moves beyond the very few female soldiers and Marines who can meet minimum PT standards for combat specialties and are highly motivated to join combat arms. Aside from the issue of qualifying standards (two or one or one new “de-gendered”) the women admitted to combat will still have to shoulder a pack and gear that now can tip the scales at an astronomical 120 lbs and then march and fight under that weight. This is three times the weight of the WWII GI’s kit and more than twice the weight of medieval plate armor. We are going to have to either find very tall and athletic women or expect a very high rate of knee, hip and back injuries during sustained campaigns removing female soldiers from their units. There is also the issue of the difference between sporadic combat seen in COIN with shorter stints “outside the wire” where women have made valorous contributions and the day to day, week to week, month to month grind of total war conventional battles like D-Day, Okinawa, the Bulge or Chosin which have a much different actuarial logic than COIN.  Any conflict of that order will require a mass army based on conscription and not a small,  selective, professional AVF and drafting millions of young women into combat is something to be viewed with skepticism

The Glittering Eye – When You’re Rich They Think You Really Know
Dave takes a very different tack on the Bill Gates op-ed and the utility of measurement than Dr. Tdaxp

Thomas P.M. Barnett –China’s future with a only-child society 

China embarked on the greatest demographic social engineering experiment in history. The results are now with us.

That’s it.

Top Billing! DemocracyNow! “An Incredible Soul”: Larry Lessig Remembers Aaron Swartz After Cyberactivist’s Suicide Before Trial

Global Guerrillas –How an Internet of Drones will be Built: Think 2,400 baud and Dronet: Think Interactive TV (iTV)

Something as big as Dronet (and Internet of drones) isn’t going to emerge overnight, fully functional, for a variety of reasons.

A big reason is that it’s too risky for a big company to invest the billions required to lock up a section of it.  

Here’s why, by way of a story. 

Back in 1994, before I became Forrester‘s first Internet analyst, I did a bit of consulting for a big Telco on the potential of interactive television (iTV).  

They were stuck.  The money it required to build an iTV network was huge and all of it had to be invested upfront before it made any money…..

SWJ Blog –French Operations in Mali Roundup

Intelligence Officer’s Bookshelf 

Huffington Post-Darrell Issa Probing Prosecution Of Aaron Swartz, Internet Pioneer Who Killed Himself

DefenseNews –Nathaniel Fick, Former CNAS Chief, Heads Cyber Targeting Firm

VB –Do this now, before Facebook’s Graph Search embarrasses you

[by J. Scott Shipman]

Defining “the best” is at best subjective. In no particular order save the first two, these are the best books I read in 2012:

Best Non-Fiction: Inventing Grand Strategy and Teaching Command, Jon Tetsuro Sumida

Best Biography: The Last Lion, Winston Spencer Churchill, Defender of the Realm, 1940-1965, William Manchester and Paul Reid

National Security Dilemmas, Colin Gray

America in Arms, John McAuley Palmer

Antifragile, Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The Admirals, Walter Borneman

Creating a Lean R&D System, Terence Barnhart

The Twilight War, David Crist

Catherine The Great, Robert K.Massie

Rubicon, Tom Holland

Honorable Mentions:

The First Battle, Otto Lehrack

Master and Commander, Patrick O’Brian

Clausewitz’s On War, A Biography, Hew Strachan

John Quincy Adams, Harlow Giles Unger

Cross-posted at To Be or To Do.