[ by Charles Cameron — on war, life and death, IEDs, Carl Prine, prayer ]
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People in general — Americans, British, Israelis, Iranians, Japanese, people from all over — don’t much like the idea of having an atom split right in their faces. But the problem isn’t necessarily so much the splitting of the atom, a technical feat which can be accomplished safely in, say, the heart of the sun — it’s the splitting of life from body, the work of a split second.
Which can also be accomplished by IED.
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I’ve split these two images, both drawn from the same video one second apart, to give myself the fraying edges of a visceral sense of what that separation of life from body might be about.
See how little the car, bottom left, has advanced between the first image and the second.
The video the two images come from is embedded in Michael Yon‘s tribute to Carl Prine. I’d have embedded the video here myself if I could, but it’s in Vimeo rather than YouTube, and either because I’m incompetent or because Vimeo isn’t set up that way, I couldn’t figure out how to do the embed.
The Marine who sent Yon the video wrote:
This is the type of explosion that our troops are dealing with, not the puny kind we see on television or in the movies. Pass this on… so Americans will now understand what an IED truly is… and what our war veterans are dealing with.
Click on the link in red above if you haven’t already seen the movie nor lived through the event, and get that edge of a visceral sense — like a second-cousin-once-removed of the real thing.
My thoughts and prayers are with Carl Prine and all those battle-scarred in body, mind and soul.
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One second passes between the first screen-grab and the second: time enough to sneeze, but not time enough to respond, “God Bless you”.
Top Billing! Information DisseminationGuest Post Series
Galrahn needs to be commended for organizing this excellent series and also the top-notch contributors who participated, including a sitting Member of Congress. A first-rate blog event!
How different is the ranking of priorities in the Russian COIN compared to the Western pop-centric approach? In what kind of missions and priorities were the main resources invested?
I assume you’re referring to doctrinal approaches here. It’s important to point out that there are still plenty of Western analysts who believe that heavy “enemy-centric” approaches are more effective than the “population-centric” approaches upon which our doctrine is based. Western doctrinal COIN approaches start with and revolve around “security” – for the government as well as the local population, whereas you can see from the chart in my book on page 201 that the Russian approach considers security of the local population a much lower priority. In the Western approach, it is important to start trying to gain the support of the indigenous population through a number of means (security, economic, civil affairs projects, diplomatic, etc), while the Russians initially put these types of activities way at the bottom of their list (although Ramzan Kadyrov has placed a much higher emphasis on those types of activities since he has assumed the presidency). The Russian Main Effort has always been focused on the general Russian population within Russia proper, as opposed to the indigenous peoples of the North Caucasus. And as an enemy-centric approach, they have emphasized killing the enemy over building support for themselves among the local population. All in all, I’d say the Russian and Western priorities are generally very different.
Inclusion does not equate with my endorsement. Frankly, there’s a cocked-up misunderstanding of historical methodology (and the field of military history) and hero-worship of Michel Focault; however, the piece is certainly thought-provoking as it is a critique of 4GW coming way out of left field and worth a read.
….At the beginning of the current system is America’s involvement by proxy in the Greek Civil War. Following an awkward post-war realization that maybe arming every faction fighting against the Nazi occupation was not the wisest run in the long term, the Allied powers (initially the United Kingdom) decided to disarm as many partisans as they could in the immediate outbreak of peace, while shoring up support for the royalist government. Not all partisans were agreeable to being disarmed or towards the ancien regime, and Greece developed a communist insurgency. In 1947, the UK decided they could no longer afford their investment in the Greek government, and in their stead Truman decided to shoulder the task of providing military assistance in their stead. He did this through the American Mission for Aid to Greece “outside and independent of the embassy at Athens and of Ambassador Lincoln MacVeagh.” Inevitably, the Greeks observed that Griswold controlled the resources, so they bypassed the Ambassador and dealt directly with him. The Ambassador’s authority diminished, and a conflict within the Embassy emerged.
….Restraint in foreign engagements, particularly military, is certainly to be prized unless clear US national interests, mechanisms, and follow-through plans are pretty clearly present, and articulated by our national political leaders so necessary to domestic support. However, instead, what we’ve increasingly seen is muddling and disparagement of the very concept of US national interests, substituting outright negativity, conceptual distractions, and refusal to actively engage unless elusive or impossible international consensus is reached, to include Russia and China who aren’t shy about exerting themselves actively in opposition to US or Western interests. In effect, as well, the US and Western Europe have too often abandoned its moral core, as well, to the favor of those who don’t share it or deride or hate it.
….But I digress, the point is that it cuts both ways: You can’t educate good strategists without acculturating them to certain military realities, which I think at present we really aren’t doing very well. How can we trust people to make good strategic evaluations if we don’t equip them with some technical familiarity with the instruments of military power and bolster their sense of judgment with extra lashings of military history? A strategist who doesn’t grasp details, let alone one who is contemptuous of them, is going to be a bad strategist.
….Yet the decision to step down from a position of power—to value family over professional advancement, even for a time—is directly at odds with the prevailing social pressures on career professionals in the United States. One phrase says it all about current attitudes toward work and family, particularly among elites. In Washington, “leaving to spend time with your family” is a euphemism for being fired.
Winning on the street comes in many forms and means different things to different people. Winning in law enforcement encounters can be gaining voluntary compliance through communication and negotiation or it can ebb and flow back and forth through a vast array of outcomes up to and including deadly force. Winning to the cop means one thing while to an adversary winning on his terms is quite another. What about winning in the eyes of the public? How important is public support or decent when we cops use force? What outcomes can we expect during a dynamic encounter, what about in the aftermath, with public support, without it? Does winning at low cost effect our safety and effectiveness in a positive or negative way? Is winning at any cost verses winning at low cost something we should consider more frequently?
We cops know that the use of force is always an option taken as a last resort when we have exhausted all other means and our decision is forced by the actions of the person we are dealing with. Reasonable and necessary force is not something we cops take lightly. Winning in the arena, the places where interaction and efforts are made to resolve dangerous and dynamic encounters, in real time requires a certain breed of person, a person capable of remaining mentally calm. A person who can think both critically and creatively, by critically thinking I mean, the ability to focus and to achieve understanding (real-time situation awareness), evaluates viewpoints, and solves problems; creative thinking is equally important, called fingerspitzenfuhl or the feeling in the tip of one’s fingers or feel for the situation (Napoleon called it a “gut” feeling), we cops call this ability our sixth sense. A person who deals with conflict and violence must also be Intuitive; this enables rapid decision-making without conscious awareness or effort, which is basked in training and experience, a lot of it. Self-awareness, an understanding of one’s own strengths and weaknesses and social skills-the ability, to assess people’s strengths and weaknesses, the use of communication skills, and the art of listening are also part of the strategic game of interaction and weigh heavily in their effects to isolate an adversary and help us to shape and reshape the events in favorable terms….
….The difference, primarily, is that counterinsurgency and counterterrorism thinking have powerfully shaped the way security policymakers look at domestic complex operations challenges. Such a shift goes beyond the simplistic idea of police militarization, as European public security has traditionally featured the expansive use of domestic intelligence and expansive police powers for maintaining order. Though European counterinsurgency and counterterrorism thought has conceptual roots in colonial experiences, the guiding logic behind it can be seen as a liberal response to the same kind of threats that motivated the conservative reaction of the 19th century.
So you can see that at its core, Patterns of Conflict is a concrete example of the process that Boyd described in highly theoretical terms—invoking such arcana as Gödel, Heisenberg, and the Second Law of Thermodynamics—in “Destruction and Creation.” In the starkest of terms, Boyd is telling us that “this stuff works.” By implication here, and explicitly in the Abstract to the Discourse, he’s insisting that you can use it, too.
One word of advice: If you and I shatter the same domain, it is unlikely and in fact undesirable that we would end up with the same set of constituent parts. In other words, shattering a conceptual domain is not analogous to disassembling, say, a car. It follows, then, that we would create different syntheses / snowmobiles. This is good; otherwise we’re just applying some type of formulaic dogma, and one of us is superfluous. Plus, if there’s only one school solution, it doesn’t take a Sun Tzu-class opponent to figure it out. So in Boyd’s framework, there can be no single correct answer, and this includes Boyd’s own example that constitutes Patterns of Conflict.
[ by Charles Cameron — of [almost] no military or intelligence interest, this is a post for computer scientists, historians, scientists, artists, contemplatives and other creatives ]
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I’ve been on a bit of a binge about medieval and renaissance diagrams recently, putting together an anthology of early “semantic networks” for the Sembl game site – but also thinking about the alternate track of art history which would focus on diagrams rather than paintings (I’m thinking of two dimensions here, hence no mention of sculpture) – an alternate history which may have something to teach our richly diagrammatic and data-visual times.
My interest in all this tracks back at least to my early encounter with an essay by the computer scientist Margaret Masterman in Theoria to Theory (1967).
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Yesterday brought me a post from Jason Wells, a scientist and bright all-rounder I follow on Google+, in which he posted an image of the cosmos from the Ptolemaic (pre-Copernical) point of view, which I’ve put at the head of this post.
Jason commented on this diagram:
As pretty as this is, this is not how your universe works.
That is all.
The diagram Jason posted purports to be mathematically and astronomically based: it is, if you like, a quantitative diagram. I don’t happen to think it’s pretty, although the two creatures (angels, goddesses?) up towards the top of the circle may be, and the serpent eating its tail around it is nicely done -– I think it has a rather austere beauty to be honest, but I’m likely to concede to Jason that it isn’t “true” in the sense of being an accurate representation of the (abstract) laws of celestial motion.
But then I also think there’s more to truth than accuracy, useful though that may be – there’s also a qualitative element to truth, and perhaps “beauty” is (among other things) a name for it.
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Yesterday also brought me a news bulletin that ties into that same interest in medieval and renaissance diagrams. From the Vatican Information Service (via Chant Cafe) , we learn that Hildegarde of Bingen (1098 – 1179) is now a saint of the Catholic Church with universal cultus:
Vatican City, 10 May 2012 (VIS) – The Holy Father today received in audience Cardinal Angelo Amato S.D.B., prefect of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints. During the audience he extended the liturgical cult of St. Hildegard of Bingen (1089-1179) to the universal Church, inscribing her in the catalogue of saints.
Consider, then, in contrast to Jason’s mechanistic Ptolemaic diagram, this diagram which today’s fresh-minted saint produced in the late 1140s or early 1150s to illustrate her visionary intuitions of the universe in the first of three books, Scivias:
and these two, from Liber divinorum operum:
and:
These, I take it, are purely qualitative images in contrast to the Ptolemaic diagram — making no propositional claims as to physical or mathematical accuracy, but portraying Hildegarde’s sense of cosmic order. And just as we would not argue whether it is Van Gogh or El Greco who is “right” about the skies in their respective paintings, so I don’t think Hildegarde is worried about which of her diagrams is “right” in its portrayal of the world she lived and prayed in – each one illustrates some aspect of her vision of the world, and one does not necessarily contradict another.
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Here are two descriptions of Hildegarde’s world, which may give us some insight into the diagrams above. For the top one:
For Hildegard of Bingen, twelfth century German Benedictine abbess, the universe is like an egg in the womb of God. Her view of the universe, conditioned as it is by her times and her education, represents her visionary understanding of God’s motherhood of this sphere that we call the universe. Hers is a view that is organic and holistic, coloured neither by Greek philosophy nor Enlightenment rationalism, refreshing and strikingly “true” in its perceptions around the source of created life.
God created the world out of the four elements, to glorify His name. He strengthened the world with the wind. He connected the world to the stars. And he filled the world with all kinds of creatures. He then put human beings throughout the world, giving them great power as stewards of all Creation. Human beings cannot live without the rest of nature, they must care for all natural things.
It’s probably worth mentioning that three of the “four elements” of the ancients are still known to us, though we call them “states” rather than “elements” at this point — the solid, liquid and gaseous states correspond with what the ancients called “earth”, “water” and “air”, respectively — and it has even been suggested that their “fire” corresponds to the fourth state we now term “plasmas” — not my line of business, however, so who knows?
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Hildegarde picked up the word “viriditas” from Gregory the Great and made it peculiarly her own. It means greeness, literally, and freshness by extension — but for Hildegarde’s integral view of all that is, it also carries a theological dimension, Christ being the greening of the world for her:
For Hildegard, viriditas was an attribute of the Divine nature, a reflection of God’s goodness and beauty. It stood for vitality, fertility, fruitfulness and growth; in fact all the things that we now associate with the “greenness” of nature. For us today “greenness” is a sign that the Earth is healthy and flourishing. Similarly, for Hildegard, viriditas was synonymous with physical and spiritual health, with the continuing vivifying force of the Holy Spirit.
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Dr Carmel Bendon Davis, Hildegard of Bingen: Eco-warrior and Superwoman
This greening or freshening is not, for Hildegarde, just a matter of earth and water, of river and forest, it is also infused with fire and air:
I am likewise the fiery life of the substance of divinity. I flame over the beauty of the fields and sparkle in the waters, and I burn in sun, moon, and stars. And with an airy wind that sustains all things with invisible life, I raise them up vitally. For air lives in greenness and flowers, waters flow as if alive, the sun, too, lives in his light, and when the moon comes to her decline she is kindled by his light, as it were to live again… Thus I, the fiery force, am hidden in [the winds], and they take fire from me, just as breath continually moves a man, and as a windy flame exists in fire. All of these live in their essence and are not found in death, because I am life.
Understanding in the soul is like the Veriditas of the branches and the leaves of the tree
It is, in fact, neither exclusively natural nor supernatural, but non-dual.
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Dylan Thomas, being a Welshman and a poet, thus has an insight that bears a family resemblance to Hildegarde’s, but phrases it in a way that leaves the “force” neither personified nor otherwise… and thus with no necessary doctrinal implication:
The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.
For Hildegarde, this “force” is also Christ — for he himself is the “the fiery life of the substance of divinity” — and his coming to earth a greening and freshening of a world until then barren of the love he brought.
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Hildegarde was the abbess in charge of a small flotilla of nuns — but also a mystic, a visionary, philosopher, poet, painter and songstress…
Her song of creation, O Viriditas, bears comparison in spirit with St Francis‘ Canticle of the Sun. She writes to her “green” Christ and his “green” planet:
O greenness of God’s finger
with which God built a vineyard
that shines in heaven
as an established pillar:
You are glorious in God’s preparation.
And o height of the mountain
that will never be dispersed
in the judgment of God,
you nevertheless stand from afar as an exile,
but it is not in the power
of the armed man
to seize you.
You are glorious in God’s preparation.
Glory be to the Father and to the Son
and to the Holy Spirit.
You are glorious in God’s preparation.
And she sets her words to the music of the times:
Indeed, her music is sung even today…
How’s that for a twelfth century statement of what we’d these days call “ecology”?
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But all this risks getting far too ethereal, I have wandered far along my own epicycles from Jason Wells’ point, and methinks I should bring us back down to earth.
Dennis The Constitutional Peasant, in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, meets King Arthur and complains, “What I object to is you automatically treatin’ me like an inferior.” It’s understandable — but so, perhaps, is king Arthur’s response: “Well, I am king.”
Two worldviews clash here — and in the ensuing debate, Arthurian myth meets contemporary politics:
Dennis’ Mother: Well how’d you become king, then?
Arthur: The Lady of the Lake,… [Angel chorus begins singing in background] her arm clad in the purest shimmering samite, held aloft Excalibur from the bosom of the water signifying by Divine Providence that I, Arthur, was to carry Excalibur. [Angel chorus ends] That is why I am your king!
Dennis: Listen. Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.
Arthur: Be quiet!
Dennis: You can’t expect to wield supreme power just ’cause some watery tart threw a sword at you!
Arthur: Shut up!
Dennis: I mean, if I went ’round saying I was an emperor just because some moistened bint had lobbed a scimitar at me, they’d put me away!
Or if some bint told me the universe was a cosmic egg in the womb of God, for that matter — even if Benedict XVI did just add her to the calendar of saints.
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Here you go, courtesy of YouTube:
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Frankly I appreciate both modes of thinking — the mythic and the scientific — and believe we’re in the sort of territory here that Nils Bohr was thinking of when he said:
The opposite of a true statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may be another profound truth.
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