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Top Billing! Inkspots (Jason Fritz) – Antony Beevor’s “The Second World War”: Strategic analysis and myth-busting

In the acknowledgements to his latest history, TheSecond World War, Antony Beevor says that he wrote this comprehensive tome on one of the biggest events in human history because he wanted to fill in the gaps to his own knowledge of the topic. But, he says, “above all it is an attempt to understand how the whole complex jigsaw fits together, with the direct and indirect effects of actions and decisions taking place in very different theatres of war.” In this, Beevor succeeds where no other historian I have read has. Weighing in at 833 pages (with notes), Beevor deftly describes and analyzes the political and military strategic events, people, and decisions that started, fought, and ended World War II. Potentially more importantly, he debunks one myth after another surrounding this war.

Geographically and politically, the European and Pacific Theaters were fairly cordoned off from each other, outside of the involvement of the United States and the British, but not entirely. Beevor pulls the thread to examine how the Soviet victory at Khalkhin Gol in eastern Mongolia in the summer of 1939 ensured that the Soviets stayed out of the eastern war (Beevor is not, of course, the only historian to make this important point) and how that affected both theaters. As he pulls the thread further, the interactions of east and west, Axis and Allies, become more acute. Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan have almost no strategic interaction (there are a handful of exceptions), but their actions on three or four fronts each create a strategic graph theory problem of biblical proportions for the Allies. As a big-picture example, the United States did not just face a Pacific versus Europe resource competition. The United States faced resource competition between Stillwell’s command supporting the Chinese Nationalists, MacArthur’s forces, Halsey’s forces, the preparation for an invasion of western France, operations in North Africa and then Italy, strategic bombing campaigns on both sides, and Lend-Lease to many a slew of locations. To compound this, American leaders needed to maintain support for the war at home and keep the Alliance together while trying to shape the post-war world through a political minefield of communists, socialists, fascists, colonialists, revolutionaries, and democratists. All while trying to actually win the war. If you consider the number of facets and decisions required in this complex world, multiply these considerations by the same problems with which all of the other Allies (and enemies) were forced to contend. The result is an exponentially large equation to determine the outcomes of a world in flux moving at the speed of a tank. Beevor is at his best in this work when he examines these interdependencies of these fronts, the Allies’ force structure to address them, and the inter- and intra-national political considerations.  For students of strategy, this alone makes The Second World War worth reading.

Fast Transients –What hath Boyd wrought? 

Or “wrote.” Written.

Boyd is sometime criticized for not having sat down and written Patterns and his other briefings into nice books. They claim that his ideas are hard to fathom just from his briefings.

But Boyd’s framework, although deep and complex, is not esoteric. In addition to “Destruction and Creation,” Boyd produced a continuous stream of writings from August 1976 until January of the year before his death:

Item	Date	Pages	Words	W/P
D&C	9/1976	–	3,900	–
PoC	12/1986	185	21,000	113.5
OD	5/1987	37	3,400	92
SG	6/1987	59	4,700	80
CS	8/1992	38	2,900	76
EOWL	1/1996	4	350	87.5
TOTAL (x. D&C)		323	32,350	100
TOTAL			36,250

“Destruction and Creation” is a special case. Set in 12 pt. Arial and double-spaced, it runs about 15 pages or slightly over 250 words/page. Applying that ratio to the body of Boyd’s post-retirement work equates to a book of some 145 pages.  Which is not long, but not insubstantial, either, about the same length of Cleary’s The Japanese Art of War or the Griffith edition of Sun Tzu, both including the commentaries but without appendices. By comparison, the Sun Tzu text itself typically runs 8,000 – 10,000 words depending on the translator.

Given how long it takes to write a manuscript, not to mention finding a publisher who will promote it, it’s hard to see where Boyd would have found the time. Publishers typically want manuscripts of 80-100,000 words, which produces a 400 page book that can be priced in the $25-30 range (today’s prices). Check out Tom Barnett’s books, for example. Obviously, established authors can get different deals, but Boyd would have been a risk. And it would have been a big risk for Boyd because only a tiny fraction of manuscripts by unknown authors ever get published….

Campaign Reboot – Decision making and Failing at mental modelling 

Ribbonfarm –Economies of Scale, Economies of Scope 

Dart Throwing Chimp – A Chimp’s-Eye View of a Forecasting Experiment and When Is a Forecast Wrong?

Steven Pressfield Online – (Callie Oettinger) Outreach, Part I: The Introduction and (Shawn Coyne) Why It Takes So Long to Publish a Book

Slouching Toward Columbia – Kindly Seeking Mastery?

Dr. Tdaxp – The Rise of the Communists and the Fall of the KMT  

Michigan War Studies Review – Fighting Elites: A History of U.S. Special Forces and The War and Its Shadow: Spain’s Civil War in Europe’s Long Twentieth Century 

That’s it.

[by J. Scott Shipman]

Creating a Lean R&D System, by Terry Barnhart

Friend of this blog, and friend, Terry Barnhart’s new book is available on Amazon. Terry is one of the leading thinkers among those who admire John Boyd’s work.

Terry has spoken at the last three Boyd and Beyond events, and much of the substance of those talks are reflected in this book. I’ve read most of it, and believe it will have wide applicability outside the “lean” community. His sections on the use of A3’s (the subject of his talks at B&B this year) for problem identification/solution and rapid learning have potential at the personal and the organizational level. At the core, Terry is advocating a culture of innovation and providing tools he has proven in practice.

Recommended.

A version is cross posted at To Be or To Do.

[ by Charles Cameron — on play, games, vertigo and koan — technically this is a ludibrium, a jeu, a jest — a dervish whirl for the mind ]
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I’m joining the conversation Jane McGonigal is leading over on Big Questions Online — our topic is How Might Video Games Be Good for Us? — and she came up with a gem of a quote from Huizinga‘s Homo Ludens which pointed me to two other quotes that are part of the collection I keep in mind, one from Wittgenstein, the other from Roger Caillois.

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I’ve strung them together here because the way the mind hops and skips from one idea to the next in this series enchants me:

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There’s more to those three quotes taken together, along with the leaps between them, than there is in keeping them apart. They have, what was it Wittgenstein said? — a family resemblance. They belong together. You could start with the third quote, in fact, and then hop to the first and second, and the effect would be much the same, you could make a ring of them.

**

They spiral so closely in on one another, indeed, as to induce ilynx, vertigo. Let’s keep on spinning.

To my mind, the master of vertigo in our times is Jorge Luis Borges, who uses the word “vertiginous” at least four times in his fictions — my favorite arriving in his story The Circular Ruins, where he writes:

He understood that modeling the incoherent and vertiginous matter of which dreams are composed was the most difficult task that a man could undertake, even though he should penetrate all the enigmas of a superior and inferior order; much more difficult than weaving a rope out of sand or coining the faceless wind.

Blam! — is there anything more vertiginous than paradox, enigma, koan, mystery?

**

In perspective, there’s the vanishing point. In service to others, there’s forgetfulness of self.

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While we’re on the subject of play, I have a confession to make. Several times on this blog and elsewhere, I have cited the art historian Edgar Wind as saying that Ficino’s motto was “studiossime ludere” and that he translated it “play most assiduously” — Marsilio Ficino being the intellectual hub of Renaissance Florence under the Medici. When I was putting together my initial post to Jane McGonigal for her Big Questions discussion, I wanted to use that quote, but couldn’t quite find it in the source I thought it came from. Well, I’ve been doing some checking since then, and Wind does quote something very similar in his Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance — but the phrase is “studiosissime ludere”, and what he writes is this —

Serio ludere was a Socratic maxim of Cusanus, Ficino, Pico, Calcagnini — not to mention Bocchi, who introduced the very phrase into the title of his Symbolicae quaestiones: ‘quas serio ludebat’.[1]

which he then footnotes thus (translation coming up shortly):

[1.] cf. Ficino, In parmeniden (Prooemium), Opera, p. 1137: ‘Pythagorae, Socratisque et Platonis mos erat, ubique divina mysteria figuris involucrisque obtegere, … iocari serio, et studiosissime ludere.’

Then there’s Ioan Couliano, another great scholar of Renaisssance thought — and a victim of Ceausescu‘s secret police — in Eros and Magic in the Renaissance, translates for us (pp. 37-38):

Pseudo-Egyptian hieroglyphics, emblems and impresae were wonderfully suited to the playful spirit of Florentine Platonism, to the mysterious and “mystifying” quality Ficino believed it had. “Pythagoras, Socrates, and Plato had the habit of hiding all divine mysteries behind the veil of figurative language to protect their wisdom modestly from the Sophist’s boastfulness, of joking seriously and playing assiduously, iocari serio et studiosissime ludere.” [34] That famous turn of phrase of Ficino’s — translation of a remark by Xenophon concerning the Socratic method — depicts, at bottom, the quintessence of every phantasmic process, whether it be Eros, the Art of Memory, magic, or alchemy — the ludus puerorum, preeminently a game for children. What, indeed, are we doing in any of the above if not playing with phantasms, trying to keep up with their game, which the benevolent unconscious sets up for us? Now, it is not easy to play a game whose rules are not known ahead of time. We must apply ourselves seriously, assiduously, to try and understand and learn them so that the disclosures made to us may not remain unanswered by us.

Couliano footnotes the quote thus:

[34.] Proem. in Platonis Parmenidem (Opera, II, p. 1137). This is simply the Latin translation of an expression Xenophon had used to designate the Socratic method (paizein spoude). On the custom of the “serious games” of Ficino and his contemporaries, see Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance 3d ed. (Oxford, 1980), pp. 236-38.

**

Okay, I was trying to check a Latin tag that I’d obviously been quoting from memory, and things just kept on spinning — and weaving — together.

So where are we now? We’re talking of “playing with phantasms, trying to keep up with their game” (Couliano) — and thus back at that Borges quote, too, with its “incoherent and vertiginous matter of which dreams are composed”…

Which is us.

I mean, “We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.”

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Okay. Practical matters. To go along with Witty Wittgenstein and the others on my recommended reading list, here’s an image of McGonigal’s dissertation and book:

The dissertation is available here as a .pdf: the book is available here on Amazon.

[ by Charles Cameron — prisoner releases in Arab springtime, abu Musab and Dr Fadl; Daveed G-R and Aaron Z; two major rules of expertise: detail and humility ]
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video edit-bay photo credit http://www.cdmastercopy.com

When you watch a well edited movie, the experience is seamless — despite the fact that the film itself was made with hundreds of cuts and splices. Film critics, mavens and the director’s fellow auteurs who make close readings and detailed studies of the film will see and appreciate the juxtapositions and graphic matches, the fine-tuned timing of the edits and the rhythm they give the film — but for the regular viewer, one continuous fabric of story unspools from opening to final credits. The editor’s skill lies in getting the splices right to a degree beyond the perceptual acuity of the audience.

Similarly, a fine carpenter will often want to make joints that are imperceptible to the client, seeking a sensitivity to changes in height that is an order of magnitude greater than that required for the quick, cheap performance of the same task.

True expertise is at least one order of magnitude deeper and more self-critical than it needs to be to satisfy a cursory examination.

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Thus when Daveed Gartenstein-Ross and Aaron Zelin tackle the important — and easily overlooked — question of How the Arab Spring’s Prisoner Releases Have Helped the Jihadi Cause in the Atlantic, they offer us both far more than we knew we needed to know, and yet less than they themselves know about the topic, let alone the broader current of jihadist movements of which this particular topic is a single strand.

It’s a significant topic, though, as their opening paragraphs neatly show:

The investigation of the devastating Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, that killed American ambassador Christopher Stevens — limited as it is by security concerns that hampered the FBI’s access to the site –has begun to focus on a Libya-based Egyptian, Muhammad Jamal (a.k.a. Abu Ahmad al Masri). As a detailed Wall Street Journal report explains, Jamal is notable not only for having fighters under his command and operating militant training camps in the Libyan desert, but also for having recently gotten out of Egyptian prison.

This latter fact makes Jamal part of a trend that has gone largely unremarked upon in the public sphere since the beginning of the “Arab Spring” uprisings: prisons in affected countries have been emptied, inmates scattering after being released or breaking free. In many cases, it is a good thing that prisoners have gone free: the Arab dictatorships were notorious for unjustly incarcerating political prisoners, and abusing them in captivity. But jihadists have also been part of this wave of releases, and we are now beginning to see the fruits of the talent pool that is back on the streets.

I recommend it highly, as does at least one other more knowledgeable than I.

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A short piece in the Atlantic is just right for an overview, but not the place to lay out the next level of detail, though — and there are three people in particular whose names I am always on the lookout for, names of people who vanished from public view into some form of imprisonment, and who are of considerable interest to me personally — primarily for their theological significance.

The first of these is the Imam Musa al-Sadr, whose “disappearance” in Gaddafi’s Libya at the age of 50 in 1978 deprived the Lebanon of an inspiring leader — in a manner that eerily paralleled the ghayba or “occultation” of the Twelfth Imam of the Ithna ‘ashariyah.

The second would be Sayyed Imam Al-Sharif, aka Dr. Fadl, whose book The Essentials was one of the major works of AQ ideology and the #2 jihadist manual downloaded from the net according to the CTC Atlas (p.10), and who recanted it from Egyptian prison, writing his Rationalizing Jihad in Egypt and the World which so severely critiqued AQ-style jihad that al-Zawahiri felt obliged to pen a 200-page counter-argument. In Dr Fadl’s case, the interest would be to see what he would say if liberated now.

And my third “person of interest”? That would be Mustafa Setmariam Nasar aka Abu Musab al-Suri, whose massive Call to Global Islamic Resistance is a key document that chides bin Laden for “leading them to the abyss”, says “Al Qaeda is not an organization, it is not a group, nor do we want it to be. It is a call, a reference, a methodology”, and calls for “terrorism created by individuals or small autonomous groups (see Lawrence Wright, The Master Plan). Abu Musab, who may have been released from prison in Syria recently, is of interest to others as potentially the jihadi’s foremost strategist — and to me chiefly because of his use of apocalyptic forecasting in his Call.

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Since their Atlantic piece was a short context-setter rather than a longer analytic paper, I asked Gartenstein-Ross and Zelin — Daveed and Aaron — net acquaintance and friendship is a funny thing, we haven’t worked out the etiquette as yet — about Dr Fadl and Abu Musab, not mentioned in the piece itself but surely not far from their thoughts.

Twitter, of course, is even more drastically reduced than a piece in the Atlantic, so you can think of their tweeted responses as something along the lines of snapshots of footnotes. Nevertheless, they give me, as an inquiring mind, a quick glimpse of what a couple of those at least an order of magnitude deeper into these things know or conjecture about two people whose names and potential activities we should all keep stashed quietly away on some easily accessible mental shelf.

Three things emerge from these tweets — how little we actually know, how important what we don’t know may be, and how honest the best analysts are about the limits of their knowledge. I’d tweeted, congratulating them on their piece and saying:

hipbonegamer: i note no mention of Musab a-S – any idea what’s up with Dr Fadl? Dead? Released? Still held?

And they responded:

Aaron Y. Zelin: Details still too murky on Abu Mus’ab and no info on Dr. Fadl.

D. Gartenstein-Ross: However, I think the question “where is Dr. Fadl, and why haven’t we heard from him?” is important for many reasons.

D. Gartenstein-Ross: But Aaron is right: I haven’t seen any open source info that speaks to his fate.

That’s two things at once: not very much, and a great deal.

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So if lesson #1 of this post is that True expertise is at least one order of magnitude deeper and more self-critical than it needs to be to satisfy a cursory examination, lesson #2 must be…

True expertise never claims knowledge that is one order of magnitude deeper or more exact than is actually known.

Putting that in other terms: having an accurate mapping of one’s archipelago of knowledges within one’s oceanic ignorance is a highly significant form of meta-knowledge, lacking which one’s knowledges have blurred edges and little definitional value.

And that in turns means — especially in terms of human intelligence — humility.

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It’s Follow Friday (#FF) on Twitter: @DaveedGR and @azelin are two folks you can follow and trust.

Gunpowder & Lead (Drunken Predator Drone) –Pakistan’s “Sovereignty” Canard 

….Every time I cross the border, every time an American missile hits Pakistani soil, Pakistan’s government exercises their sovereignty by choosing not to blow me out of the sky. I operate openly, and Pakistan’s doing so would be a huge bummer, butwell within their technical capacity. Yes, the sole act of not starting a war doesn’t equate to government permission. But sovereignty implies a range of options and authorities beyond war, and Pakistan has visibly exercised that sovereign authority in the recent past.

After the May 2011 bin Laden raid (which, as a side note, constituted a real sovereignty violation, with no warning whatsoever and American boots on the ground deep inside Pakistan) bilateral relations were already sour. But on November 17^th of that year, a nighttime gun battle between NATO and Pakistani forces (the latter of whom were suspiciously close to fleeing Taliban) resulted in an air strike that killed 26 Pakistani border police near a village called Salala. Pakistan halted trucks resupplying NATO forces in Afghanistan, kicked American drone operations out of the Shamsi air base, and demanded an unprecedented cessation of drone strikes.

And we listened. Drone strikes that had been commonplace ground to a total halt. It took six weeks before U.S.-Pakistani ties had mended to the point where the strikes could resume. In contrast, it took six months of diplomacy and a public apology before Pakistan reopened the “Ground Lines of Communication.” This incident made it clear that, behind closed doors, Pakistani authorities could grant authority for American air strikes in the tribal areas- but they could also take it away. That’s sovereignty.

Pundita –Lara Logan to Gen. John Allen: “American soldiers continue to die because of the support Pakistan gives to America’s enemies.” Allen to Logan: “You’ve just stated the truth.” 

CBS correspondent Lara Logan has earned respect as a war reporter in the only way anyone can earn such respect — through sheer slog work over years in very dangerous situations. So today her views are as much an important part of her interviews as those of the persons she questions.  Her latest report from Afghanistan, The Longest War, broadcast during last Sunday’s 60 Minutes, features her discussion with a Taliban commander about al Qaeda in Afghanistan and ‘insider’ killings of NATO troops, and with ISAF/US commander Gen. John Allen and Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai. The entire report is worth viewing (also available in transcript form) but here I focus on her exchanges about Pakistan:

CTOvision (Alex Olesker) –History of Cyber Intelligence Discussion 

….Gourley began with his own question for the panelists. Can we meaningfully explore the history of cyber in an unclassified way? Jay Healey, who is currently the lead investigator for the Cyber Conflict Studies Association’s cyber history book, thought you could. Right now so much information comes from the private sector, and hence is unclassified. Today’s model of cyber information sharing relies on the private sector to provide the intelligence, as it is typically their networks and infrastructure that comes under attack. In the theoretical division of labor, it is then the government’s role to solve the problem, but in practice, it has always been the network owners and private companies that take action, suggesting that the relationship should be reversed. As it stands, classified information isn’t terribly important as it stays within the government anyway. Devost added that while classified information is valuable and government agencies should be studying that history themselves, we can still form a cogent story without it for the private sector. Sean Kanuck noted that the unclassified parts of the story are typically the most important. More critical for the full story is including two kinds of cyber analysis that work best together: the forensic, which is done both by government and industry, and the analytic, which can determine why the attack occurred and is performed by the intelligence community but also by business intelligence. RADM Cox answered that while the classified aspects of history are required to get the full picture, the account without them can still be a useful and accurate one.

The first comment from the audience was that when we study history to understand cyber, we should go back even further, which led to a discussion of valuable historical works that can inform intelligence. Some suggested reading from audience members and panelists included Machiavelli, Alvin and Heidi Toffler’s War and Anti-War, the 1999 Chinese PLA manual Unrestricted Warfare, international law and humanitarian law textbooks, and The Victorian Internet, which explores the first cyber attacks and cyber espionage using telegraphs.

Volokh Conspiracy –Cybersecurity and Attribution — Good News At Last? 

….Right now, policymakers are intent on improving network security, perhaps by pressing the private sector to improve its security, or by waiving outmoded privacy rules that prevent rapid sharing of information about attackers’ tactics and tools.

Those things would improve our network security, but not enough to change our strategic position – which is bad and getting worse.  The hard fact is that we can’t defend our way out of the current security crisis, any more than we can end street crime by requiring pedestrians to wear better and better body armor.

That’s why I’ve been urging a renewed strategic focus on catching attackers and punishing them.  Catching and punishing rulebreakers works for street crime.  It even works for nation states.  So why hasn’t it worked in the realm of network attacks?  Mostly because our intelligence community insists that attribution is just too hard.

I think that’s wrong, and I’ll spend this post explaining why.

My theory is simple: The same human flaws that expose our networks to attack will compromise our attackers’ anonymity. Or, as I put it in speeches, “The bad news is that our security sucks.  The good news is that their security sucks too.”

War is Boring – I’m Hit! I’m Hit!’

City Journal (Sol Stern) –The Curriculum Reformation

The Carnegie Endowment – New Leaders, New China?

The Hudson Institute –Global Tribunals V. U.S. Values

The Claremont Institute –Boys to Men

Slate – Cormac McCarthy Cuts to the Bone (hat tip to Feral Jundi) 

RAND –Do Targeted Killings Work?

RECOMMENDED VIEWING: