zenpundit.com

Have not done one of these in quite a while. Overdue.

Top Billing! Robert Paterson – Is America Ruled by an Aristocracy Now? Of course it is!, Politics in America – It is not the Right vs the Left – It’s Them vs Us and The “Dunbar Science” Behind Twitter & Social Leverage

A trio of good posts from Paterson, an excerpt from the last

….All social systems are in effect “Biological Markets” we need other people to care about us to get things that we want.

This is, in effect, what Twitter does, allowing us to do this over time and space at a very low cost in time, effort and dollars.

This realization raised another “aha” for me: we have been here before… the prevailing ideas about how language itself began are rooted in humans finding a cheaper way of grooming. Language enabled us to groom at a distance and left our hands free and our eyes on the look out.

Robin Dunbar (Dunbar Numbers etc) has a theory about the evolution of language that enables us to see tools like Twitter in a new light….

Thomas Ricks –Dueling historians: Lt. Col. Bob Bateman’s takedown of Victor Davis Hanson

Most ZP readers will enjoy this one as the debate between prolific scholar and pundit Victor Davis Hanson and the influential military officer and historian Robert Bateman manages to feature a clash of politics ( conservative vs. liberal), field ( classics vs. military history), historical epoch ( ancient vs. modern) and methodology.

The Glittering Eye – Federal Chief Operating Officer?

Dave Schuler artfully dismantles a superficially clever proposal that is the domestic equivalent of George W. Bush’s “war czar”.

Lexington Green – Before, During and After the Election

An interesting and thoughtful essay from Lex on his experience as the political analogy to the Maytag Repairman – a GOP poll watcher on the mean streets of Chicago’s West Side.

Steve Hynd – The Rich Ate All The Pie – Whatcha Going To Do About It?

In a nod to our friends on the Left, here is Steve at Newshoggers.com en fuego about the exact same data as is Rob Paterson up top.

Thomas P. M. Barnett – Trying to unwind this demonization trend  and Whither Russia: the latest tilt to the West

It seems that Tom’s move to join Wikistrat  has freed him to focus on what he does best – serious geopolitical strategic analysis. While I have always concurred with Dr. Barnett’s emphasis on geoeconomics as an analytical cornerstone, ever since Great Powers his thinking has steadily incorporated greater and deeper historical context. Economics gives the connections and universals, history the particulars and the exceptions. A snippet of Tom on Russian political schizophrenia:

It used to be that these tilts, one way or the other, went on for decades–centuries!  But since Cold War’s end, it seems, like everything else in this networked world, to come and go so much faster.

Yeltsin’s time was an age of aping the West, then Putin led the return back to Russian-ness.  Now Medvedev and others sound the age-old alarm about “falling behind the West/world” and needing to modernize once again.  It’s the same old Westernizers versus Slavophiles debate:  Russia is a failure in its isolation and backwardness and must adopt the ways of the West versus Russia is not a failure but unique and wonderful and the champion of Slavs everywhere and we must stand up to the West and protect our brothers . . . by sucking them into our empire and putting a big wall around them!

If the last bit sounds like some modern-day Islamic radical fundamentalist impulse, it’s because it is very similar.  It’s just an earlier version of rejecting the capitalist west.

That’s it.

A dynamic duo.  

Blogfriend Crispin “starbuck” Burke of Wings over Iraq scored a high-profile guest post at Thomas Rick’s The Best Defense blog at Foreign Policy.com:

A few words in defense of MacArthur

Those that have been following along at this blog are aware that its Pulitzer Prize-winning author, after extensive research into U.S. generalship, has deemed General Douglas MacArthur the worst general ever, edging out George McClellan and even Benedict Arnold. Certainly, MacArthur was responsible for some colossal military blunders. His botched defense of the Philippines in 1941-2 and his irresponsible, headlong rush to the Yalu River during the Korean War are among the most epic failures in U.S. military history. Additionally, as Tom notes, MacArthur was openly defiant towards Presidents Hoover, Roosevelt, and Truman….

….Nevertheless, MacArthur is not without his redeeming qualities. In particular, MacArthur’s term as the superintendent of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point should serve as a source of inspiration for those attempting to grow the next batch of military leaders.

I concur with Burke. MacArthur’s historical reputation as a general in my view is much like how Richard Nixon or LBJ could be categorized as president – both great and terrible, brilliant and self-deluding. Like him or hate him, MacArthur is a towering, contradictory,historical figure because he was not simply “just a general” in the way that, for example, Omar Bradley was or that any serving officer would be permitted to behave today. MacArthur’s weird preeminence was a political throwback to an earlier America and an “Old Army” that no longer exists. Or even existed when MacArthur accepted Japan’s surrender in 1945.

SWJ Blog – Dr. Robert J. Bunker –  The U.S. Strategic Imperative Must Shift

….The drug cartels and narco-gangs of the Americas, with those in Mexico of highest priority, must now be elevated to the #1 strategic threat to the United States. While the threat posed by Al Qaeda, and radical Islam is still significant, it must be downgraded presently to that of secondary strategic importance. Europe, due to the threat derived from changing demographics, larger numbers of citizens radicalized, and proximity to Islamic states, many of which contain Islamist insurgent forces, will continue to identify the threat of radical Islam as their #1 strategic imperative and should be allowed to take the opportunity to share, if not take the strategic lead, in this important area of concern. The recently heightened tensions in Europe with the threat of Mumbai style attacks directed at a number of its capital cities are indicative of the mandate which should now be provided to allied states such as Great Britain, France, and Germany and that of the more encompassing European Union. The US must help defend the line in Europe against terrorist attack, the imposition of Sharia law, and other threats to the social organization of our allies such as the disenfranchisement of women, while acknowledging for the immediate future, we have ignored for too long a new type of threat which has arisen far closer to home

A must read piece.

I would add Pakistan to the list of strategic threats to American security as it is the dark, global, epicenter of state-sponsored Islamist terrorism and insurgency, with the potential to destabilize central Asia up to and including a regional nuclear war. 

Top Billing!Lexington Green – Afghanistan 2050 Roundtable Summing-Up

Lexington Green wraps up the Afghanistan 2050 Roundtable with an analytical essay:

[….] B. Failure of the American Effort in Afghanistan

Our posters were nearly unanimous that the current American effort in Afghanistan would not succeed, or even have a long-term effect on Afghanistan. That is an expected, but still damning vote of no confidence on the decade-long Bush-Obama non-strategy for Afghanistan. The strongest counter-example was Trent Telenko, who suggested a strategy to secure the country that sounds plausible to me, an non-expert.

Joseph Fouche had my second favorite observation of the Roundtable: “America has the firepower to destroy a large country, the heavy forces to invade a medium country, and the manpower to occupy a small one.” The USA and its military are not configured to do the kind of nation-building the US Government seems to want to do. Thomas P.M. Barnett has long observed that these tasks, if they can be done at all, require lots of people. The USA has a military composed of a small number of highly trained and expensively equipped people. The only way that a country the size of Afghanistan could be pacified is to put lots of boots on the ground. The only countries that have that many boots are China and India. Afghanistan will not be pacified by the USA, using hearts-and-minds methods. It may be pacified by one of the two large Asian powers, using more direct method. Jim Bennett speculated on what it would look like if China moved in, bulldozer fashion. His vision seems highly plausible over the long term.

Fringe provided a thoughtful analysis of the US failure in Afghanistan, which I won’t summarize but I strongly suggest you read. I think it is the single most informative post in the Roundtable. He notes that successful US wars have not had an “exit strategy.” To the contrary, they consisted of a battlefield success followed by an extended occupation. This provides an initial test, before the outset of a war. If it is not worth an occupation, it is not worth invading in the first place. “With few exceptions, if it’s worth a war, there is no exit strategy.”

One intriguing set of predictions was of ongoing, networked non-governmental efforts to provide some relief for the Afghan people. Dr. Madhu predicts ongoing turmoil, with NGOs doing humanitarian work where governments are unwilling or unable to go. David Ronfeldt foresees a “secretive ethicalist netfirm” operating swarms of surveillance UAVs to protect Afghan women. While this seems exotic at first glance, David is probably tapping into what seem to me to be the likely trends.

Radical advancement in technology may make much of our current thinking obsolete by 2050, and probably a lot sooner. Zenpundit noted in a comment that “[t]he DIY movement combined with high tech sectors like desktop manufacturing and nanotechnology are going to permit [individuals] and small groups to have their own capacity for military intervention.” The bad guys will take advantage of this first, since governments will try unsuccessfully to control the process. Once that fails, we will see a massive breakout of self-help as military scale violence becomes accessible and ubiquitous. Once this happens, the nation-state itself will be an over-priced, unusable legacy system that not only fails at providing the core function of providing physical security, but obstructs it. We will have to move to a different arrangement entirely. Goodbye, Westphalia, you won’t be missed very much. The good guys will win but the process will be ugly. This was roughly what I predicted in my initial post, with a posited dissolution of the USA, followed by a networked regrouping of the successor entities

The New Ledger –Chris Albon and Craig Hooper – A Second Great White Fleet

….After January’s earthquake in Haiti, the U.S. military and Coast Guard vessels transported supplies, provided security, and even conducted air traffic control for Toussaint L’Ouverture International Airport. During the ongoing flooding in Pakistan, helicopters from U.S. warships have delivered critical food aid and airlifted thousands to safety. Both disasters presented a side of America that is too rarely seen on the world stage: young American men and women sent to aid beleaguered nations.

However, in both these cases the U.S. flotilla was ad hoc, assembled either by reassigning ships from more traditional duties or, as in the case of the hospital ship U.S.N.S. Comfort, deployed from port only through the Herculean efforts of her crew. There was no dedicated squadron trained and tasked for humanitarian assistance and disaster relief. We should change this.

Thomas P.M. Barnett – Deep Reads: “The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt” (1979) & “Theodore Rex” (2001)

Anyone who’s read my history-of-America in “Great Powers” knows TR is the pivotal figure in so many ways, not the least of which being the profound influence he had on his cousin–FDR.

If you’re only going to read one, read the first, simply because the ride up is always more interesting than the time at the top. As soon as I read this book, I thought to myself, why isn’t there a big Hollywood movie of such a seminal figure in our history. Scorsese is making a movie of the book, with DiCaprio in the title role. Scorsese makes a lot of sense, because of the NYC connection.

Seydlitz89 – A Total War Doctrine Masquerading as Strategic Theory?

Here we see the distinction between the study of “war” and the study of “warfare”. War remains the same and a general theory may apply, whereas warfare is specific to the time and interaction in question. Each of the theorists I mention above – -including Clausewitz – dealt with both in their analyses, many times quoting Clausewitz or assuming a general theory foundation and then developing their own specific “art of warfare” based on military history/personal experience for their own epochs. It is this art of warfare for the particular epoch which in turn supplies the basis for military doctrine

John Robb –JOURNAL: Koran Burning

An unexpected global event occurs.  What caused it?  The event was produced by an individual, relatively powerless by traditional standards.  However, since this is the 21st Century, this individual is able to use unfettered access to a global super-network to leverage and amplify his actions.  The event he creates disrupts established global social networks and puts them into turmoil.  That turmoil creates the opportunity and sustenance needed to activate dozens of small subnetworks/groups.  As these groups interact, a new dynamic is formed.  

Here’s an interesting theoretical question:  How long will it take for someone in the open source swarm forming around this, to surpass and replace Terry Jones now that a systempunkt has been both identified and proven to work?  His fumbling makes it possible for new entrants to run with this.  These efforts don’t meet the level necessary to surpass/trump the efforts of Jones, but they add to the confusion.  

Eide Neurolearning Blog –Risk-Taking and the Entrepreneur Brain

ScienceDaily–Mental Maturity Scan Tracks Brain Development

Current Intelligence –Hannah Arendt and the Challenge of Modernity

SWJ Blog–Hezbollah in South America

That’s it!

Top Billing! Shepherd’s Pi –  Free Tools for the New Scientific Revolution

This important post by Lewis Shepherd is of particular interest to those readers who are quants, scientists, university researchers, computer experts, intel analysts, DIY geeks, engineers and business innovators:

….One groundrule was that invited private-sector speakers were not allowed to give anything resembling a “sales pitch” of their company’s wares. Fair enough – I’m no salesman.  The person who immediately preceded me, keynoter Vint Cerf, slightly bent the rules and talked a bit about his employer Google’s products, but gee whiz, that’s the prerogative of someone who is in large part responsible for the Internet we all use and love today.

I described in my talk the radical new class of super-powerful technologies enabling large-data research and computing on platforms of real-time and archival government data. That revolution is happening now, and I believe government could and should be playing a different and less passive role. I advocated for increased attention to the ongoing predicament of U.S. research and development funding.

….To supplement those points from my talk, here are some items from Microsoft Research’s new focus on scientific tools, available for free here. Most of these are open-source tools and “research accelerators”

The post is long and rich in links, apps and explanations.

 Defense Horizons (Dr. Sean Kay) – From Sputnik to Minerva: Education and American National Security

….Public discourse following the September 2001 terrorist attacks initially implied that this new challenge would inspire a Federal response in realigning educational security infrastructure, as had Sputnik. By 2003, however, evidence indicated that the level of educational investment was disappointing. For example, the United States had enormous deficits in critical language expertise, especially in Arabic, Farsi, and Pashto. In 2003, the Department of Education noted that, of the 1.8 million graduates of American colleges and universities,a total of 22 students had completed degrees in Arabic.11

The Washington Monthly (Kevin Carey) – The Mayo Clinic of Higher Ed ( Hat tip to Eddie)

….Next, Lehmkuhle had to hire professors and decide how to organize their work. Traditional universities isolate their faculty in academic departments that often view one another as strange denizens of another planet at best, outright enemies at worst. Departments also accumulate administrative structures-chairs, vice chairs, and so on-over time. Lehmkuhle didn’t have enough money to pay for vice chairs, and he wanted professors from different disciplines to work together. The solution: no departments.

Traditional universities also separate teaching from research. These functions are not just disconnected, but often antagonistic. Many professors vying for tenure in the publish-or-perish system are openly encouraged to neglect their students in favor of scholarship. Lehmkuhle resolved this tension by making tenure at UMR contingent on three factors: teaching, research in the academic disciplines, and research about teaching. For UMR professors, applying their analytic powers to their own teaching practice would be a standard part of the job.

….I saw Muthyala’s approach to teaching in action when I attended one of his classes. For more than an hour, he stayed in motion, moving in a 270-degree arc around the room, alternating between short explanations of the material and friendly interrogation. Questions and diagrams popped up on wall-mounted projection screens as students used their laptops to examine data on spreadsheets and flip back and forth between charts on PowerPoint slides. Some pulled portable whiteboards down from racks and began scrawling out equations with green markers as other members of their team pointed and offered suggestions. “Can we rule out an ester unambiguously?” Muthyala asked at one point. “No, we cannot. Make sure you read up on proton NMR spectroscopy before you come to the next class.” This went over my head, but the students seemed to understand completely. And I did understand the term “creatine” when it was mentioned. After all, it had come up in another class already.

SWJ Blog (Ann Marlowe) –David Galula: His Life and Intellectual Context and (G. Murphy Donovan)- Signals and Noise in Intelligence

Yet almost nothing has been published about the life and intellectual context of Galula, who died of a sudden illness while at the height of his intellectual achievements, at the age of 48, in 1967.

Little in Galula’s career was predictable, and much of his brilliant work reflects his varied and rich life. Though he is best known for writing about his experiences as a captain and major in the French Army in Algeria, Galula had almost completely formed his theories before taking command. Like Forrest Gump, Galula seems to have turned up everywhere that a military theorist of his time needed to be

Next excerpt:

….Roberta Wohlstetter‘s (1912-2007) military intelligence study, Pearl Harbor; Warning and Decision (1962), is required reading for most entry level Intelligence professionals, yet there is little evidence that her cautionary classic has had a lasting impact on Intelligence praxis. The proliferation of Intelligence agencies since Mrs. Wohlstetter‘s day may have increased the ambient noise within the IC by orders of magnitude. If spending is a measure of complexity, the Intelligence budget has trebled in less than a decade. The IC now employs nearly a quarter million souls at a cost of 75 billion dollars per annum. The Director on National Intelligence (DNI) claims that ten thousand analysts are working the terror problem alone. Indeed, terrorism has become a cash cow for academics, think tanks, and government agencies

Historyguy99 – Piper Bill Millin, 51st Highand Division, RIP

For those who don’t know, Bill Millin was the personal piper of Brigadier Simon Fraser, 15th Lord Lovat who led the 1st Special Service Brigade ashore at Sword Beach on D-Day. Lovat ordered Millin to pipe the troops as they stormed the beaches in defiance of an order banning the playing of the pipes. Millin continued to play and marched back and forth along the beach piping as his comrades fell around him. His bravery stunned the Germans, who later claimed that they spared him because they thought him mad

CTOvision –  The Devil is in the Details: Seven Tests to Apply to any Cyber Conflict Concept

Bob Gourley on old and new thoughts about cyber conflict.

Joseph Fouche – Worth Reading: Richelieu and Olivares

Excellent historical review/essay.

The Jamestown Foundation – Hawks vs. Doves: Beijing Debates “Core Interests” and Sino-U.S. Relations

Congratulations to Dr. Barnett for the new additions to his family!

Two items worthy of attention before I move on to other posts:

Adam Elkus and John Sullivan –  Strategy and insurgency: an evolution in thinking?

….As state-building is increasingly questioned, COIN is likely to return to its roots in small-scale foreign internal defense (FID) missions, the more narrow concept of “countering irregulars,” gathering intelligence for strikes, and “flying” police squads like the kind employed by British irregular warfare pioneer Orde Wingate in the 1930s. Since counterinsurgency is largely a military activity carried out by military forces, the principal emphasis in past COIN operations has been countering irregular forces with military force.  Even in the operations of police in a COIN role in countering criminal insurgency the ultimate goal is, as Clausewitz noted, forcing the adversary to accept the state’s political will. Confusion about COIN occurs because of the political role of COIN in American strategy, not necessarily the history of COIN doctrine itself. 

Well said.

I have to wonder if our national allergy to grappling honestly with the political dimensions military operations ( or for that matter, the political dimensions of any kind of governmental policy, foreign or domestic) will improve when the Boomers and their obsession with Vietnam and the Sixties pass from the scene with retirement and death? Will Gen X mirror the hard eyed pragmatism of Eisenhower and Truman’s generation when they start coming in to power positions in about ten years or will they follow the political correctness/culture wars myopia of the Boomers?

Dr. Robert J. Bunker – The Ugly Truth: Insurgencies are Brutal

Speaking of Vietnam….. 

….The crux of the problem is that democracies loathe being involved in insurgencies. They are nasty, brutish, and have a bad habit of being very drawn out. Afghanistan is now the longest U.S. ‘war’ on record if we can call it such. Both blood and treasure are often expended for no perceivable reason and, at times, no clear cut distinction exists between the good guys and the bad guys when loyalty can be bought and paid for in hard cash. Accountability can be non-existent and despotic and corrupt regimes gleefully siphon off U.S. aid to enrich themselves, their families, and their cronies. Hamid Karzai is in some ways a Ngo Dinh Diem or Nguyen Van Thieu redux. Memories of Vietnam are never far from the surface when insurgency becomes the topic of table discussion. In fact, Vietnam is an excellent touchstone with regard to the sheer brutality surrounding an insurgency. Richard Schultz published a 1978 work on terrorism, insurgency warfare, and the Viet Cong. Key statistical information on targeted killings, kidnappings, and the brutality of the conflict in Vietnam is as follows:

• Between 1958 and 1965, approximately 36,800 kidnappings and 9,700 assassinations occurred in South Vietnam
• …during 1957 (the year given most frequently for the serious expansion of the NLF insurgency) a total of 472 officials were assassinated. This figure doubled during 1958-1959 and during the early 1960’s. The NLF eliminated on the average of fifteen GVN officials a week
• In May 1961, Kennedy sent a “Special message to Congress” in which he attributed NLF success to “guerillas striking at night, assassins striking alone-assassins who have taken the lives of over 4000 civil officers in the last 12 months…by subversives and saboteurs and insurrectionists, who in some cases control whole areas inside of independent nations.”1