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Just picked up a few new reads…..

Brute: The Life of Victor Krulak, U.S. Marine by Robert Coram

Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder

Robert Coram, whom I had the pleasure of meeting at Boyd ’07, has a new biography of the legendary military visionary and Marine Lt. General Victor “Brute” Krulak, reviewed here by Max Boot and here by Tony Perry (Hat tip to Dr. Chet Richards). Having thumbed a few pages, Krulak appears a complicated man – gifted, dauntless and extremely driven but also possessed of a mean streak, edging at times toward petty cruelty.

Bloodlands I intend to read in a “Hitler-Stalin/Nazi-Soviet Comparison” series along with Richard Overy’s The Dictators: Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia, Robert Gellately’s Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe , Richard J. Evans’ The Third Reich at War and Alan Bullock’s classic dual biography Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives.  I’d also recommend, for those with the stomach for historiographic commentary, Robert Conquest’s Reflections on a Ravaged Century and John Lukac’s The Hitler of History

CURRENTLY READING:

Human Face of War by Jim Storr

After reading approxmately a third of The Human Face of War by  Dr. Jim Storr, a retired Lt. Colonel, King’s Regiment and an instructor at the UK Defence Academy, I will say that if you are going to read only one book on modern military thought this year, it should be The Human Face of War. It’s that good.

Aside from a reflexive hostility toward John Boyd’s OODA Loop ( though not, strangely enough, toward the substantive epistemology advocated by Boyd that the diagram represented), Storr’s tome is an epistle of intellectual clarity on military theory that deserves to be widely read.

ADDENDUM:

NDU Press recommends, and I concur, this review of The Human Face of War by Col. Colonel Clinton J. Ancker III. Ancker, like Storr, is an expert on military doctrine, so it is a well-informed review by a professional peer.

At SWJ Blog:

Octavian Manea – Pros and cons on Galula model

In response to the interest raised on the relevance of the Galula model for understanding and dealing with today’s insurgencies, I conducted a brief inquiry with key experts on the topic – Peter Mansoor, Steven Metz, David Betz, and Alex Marshall.

Dr. Peter Mansoor

The Galula model applies in those cases where the population of a country is more concerned about the effectiveness and legitimacy of its government than in its sectarian or ethnic make-up. “Classic” counterinsurgency efforts to improve the legitimacy of a government are then operative. In those cases where sectarian or ethnic identity trumps other factors (e.g., Sri Lanka or Chechnya), then protecting the people will avail the counterinsurgent little in the way of gaining their trust and confidence. In these cases, other strategic or operational approaches need to be considered….

Dr. Steven Metz

To me, the Cold War/Maoist model of insurgency applied in situations where new segments of a society were becoming politically aware or mobilized and thus made demands on the state which it could not fulfill. These demands were both tangible–infrastructure, security, education–and intangible (a sense of identity). That’s why I think it has very little applicability to current insurgencies. Granted current insurgencies attempt to emulate the Maoist strategy because it worked in the past, but I think this will lead to failure.

Dr. David Betz

The work of the French officer David Galula was clearly very influential on the thinking of the authors of FM 3-24 Counterinsurgency. There is certainly a lot to like. For one thing, his book Counterinsurgency Warfare is less than 150 pages long which makes it an easy read-four cups of tea and a Sunday afternoon will get you through it. For another, it’s written in a very aphoristic style which is highly memorable. So if you’re trying to get across to a large number of people a number of ‘best practices’ or paradoxes of COIN then Galula is a very good assigned reading. The truth is though that most COIN best practice would fit on a bumper sticker. In fact the new UK Field Manual on COIN comes with a laminated credit card sized aide memoire on one side of which are printed the principles of COIN and on the other ISAF’s game plan for stabilizing Afghanistan. I’m not criticizing-I think it’s a handy thing; my point is rather that Galula and his interpreters sometimes sound a bit like Kipling’s ‘Just So’ stories. In practice, it’s complicated, as one sees in Galula too if you read his longer, messier, more ambiguous and more rewarding book Pacification in Algeria. Anyway, to get to the point I have three main reservations about Galula…..

Dr. Alex Marshall

My issue with the Maoist Paradigm is really two-fold.

My first reservation, as a historian, is that we lack a definitive English-language study of Maoist insurgency itself beyond some fairly stereotyped notions of a three-stage or five-stage revolutionary process (from political agitation to guerrilla conflict to regular warfare). Galula and Thompson were great generalizers, but one can scarcely call their work proper historical studies-their general view was that Maoist-style insurgencies involved a degree of mass brainwashing for example. We possess some interesting case studies of how Maoist mobilization worked in practice on the ground, in individual villages or Shanghai for example, but there is so much more that could be done. Thus Western writing during the Cold War in general generated a shorthand stereotype, when in reality insurgency practice was often more diverse. The reason was simple I suggest-most successful insurgents aren’t particularly pithy writers (Guevara and Mao were exceptions), most unsuccessful ones are very quickly dead.

My second concern is more overarching however. The majority of discourse on COIN doesn’t take into account the strategic context, remaining locked into the operational level instead…..

Read the whole thing here.

A very productive piece by Manea and the gents above. Galula’s historiographic importance in COIN should be undisputed and his contribution to theory acknowledged and respected. Application of Galula’s framework (or, really, anybody’s) for understanding COIN, in analyzing insurgencies should be used cautiously or lightly until there is enough of an emprical understanding of the structure and motivations of the insurgents and the political deficiencies of the state, to see to what extent the model fits, before the operational assumptions of a military bureaucracy and theater command harden into place.

Lacking the reliable contingency of a superpower patron on an ideological crusade in the 21st century to impose a stamp of identity and tactics on it’s proxies, insurgencies are likely to be as diverse as La Familia is from FARC, the Taliban or the Real IRA.

Magic and Mayhem: The Delusions of American Foreign Policy From Korea to Afghanistan by Derek Leebaert

As I mentioned previously, I enjoyed Derek Leebaert’s earlier Cold War history, The Fifty Year Wound, so I was pleased to be sent a courtesy review copy of his latest work, Magic and Mayhem:The Delusions of American Foreign Policy from Korea to Afghanistan. Leebaert, a professor of government who teaches foreign policy at Georgetown university, does not disapoint; Magic and Mayhem is a lively and highly provocative excoriation of of the dysfunctional political culture of making foreign and national security policy in America.  While I found many fine points of disagreement with Leebaert in Magic and Mayhem, his broad themes constitute a healthy challenge to a dolorous status quo in Washington.

In Leebaert’s view, American foreign policy suffers from being crafted under two related evils: a culture of “magical thinking” and a cadre of professional alarmists, the “Emergency Men” who constitute a kind of self-appointed, adrenalin-addicted, national security ecclesia who exploit the magical thinking of the public and labor under its delusions themselves. It is this dual embrace of ends without a priori examination of means or ways and a lust for action that leads our foreign policy elite to embrace all manner of costumed charlatans with polished English language skills who are allegedly willing and able to be America’s “partner” in dangerous neignorhoods. From South Korean autocrats to African kleptocrats to figures of a more recent vintage. Leebaert writes:

Afghan president Hamid Karzai, with his Western-style technocrats and talk of democracy, was immensely appealing to Washington after the Taliban was ousted.  For more than seven years, reports the Times Dexter Filkins, Karzai was a “White House favorite – a celebrity in a flowing cape and dark grey fez” a dramatic outfit that he had designed himself but that had no origin in Afghani dress…..

….”We thought we had found a miracle man” moaned one diplomat. On closer inspection, the sorcerer proved unconvincing as the opium trade and corruption flourished.

I have always wondered where the hell that cape came from.

Leebaert takes aim at a wide variety of targets. I definitely do not agree with his assessments of everything and everyone who has caught his ire, but it is a list that is breathtaking in expanse; a parade of names and terms that includes, but is not limited to:

George Kennan
Douglas MacArthur
Paul Nitze
Detente
Robert McNamara
McGeorge Bundy
Peter Rodman
Brinkmanship
Donald Rumsfeld
COIN
Richard Holbrooke
Henry Kissinger
The CIA
NSC-68
John McCain
Arms Control
John F. Kennedy
Richard Nixon
Curtis LeMay
Defense intellectuals
Lyndon Johnson
Maxwell Taylor
Dick Cheney
Cyrus Vance
George W. Bush
Neocons
Oliver North
Revolution in military affairs
Richard Perle
Crisis management
MAD theory
Strategic/Security Studies
Walt Rostow
Wiliam Westmoreland
Robert Kennedy
Bernard Lewis
Thomas P.M. Barnett
Lawrence Summers
George Tenet
Robert Kaplan
Samuel Huntington
John Abizaid
Stan McChrystal
Barack Obama
David Ignatius
Thomas Friedman
David Brooks
US Public Diplomacy
Jimmy Carter
Michael O’Hanlon

That, by the way, was not comprehensive.

It would be a much shorter list to cite those statesmen of whom Leebaert approved – men like Henry Stimson, Dean Acheson, Matthew Ridgway, Omar Bradley, George Marshall, Dwight Eisenhower, George Schultz and Ronald Reagan. The book is not flawless. There are minor factual errors. Not every person or doctrine in Magic and Mayhem is considered in depth.  At times, Leebaert comes across as glib or superficial in his criticism, but predominantly, as with the cases of Kissinger or Rumsfeld, his bitter jeremiads are skewering their targets.

Leebaert argues for a considered retreat from policy alarmism and the cult of emergency, and for a reduction of ambitious American policy grandiosity that would flow from recognizing and respecting the agency of other nation’s leaders and peoples. Implicitly, a call not so much for isolationism, as for restraint and a sense of proportion, coupled with a dimunition of status and power for national security “celebrities” and the cottage industry of think tank consultancy for which they stand.

Magic and Mayhem is a book that was written to demystify shibboleths and smash idols.

Via John Hagel, a particularly interesting NYT article on the neroscience of metaphors. I have always considered metaphors and analogies to be a “spark” or a “catalyst” to insight but they appear to be potentially structural organizers or “signal switches” of information processing:

This Is Your Brain on Metaphors

….Symbols, metaphors, analogies, parables, synecdoche, figures of speech: we understand them. We understand that a captain wants more than just hands when he orders all of them on deck. We understand that Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” isn’t really about a cockroach. If we are of a certain theological ilk, we see bread and wine intertwined with body and blood. We grasp that the right piece of cloth can represent a nation and its values, and that setting fire to such a flag is a highly charged act. We can learn that a certain combination of sounds put together by Tchaikovsky represents Napoleon getting his butt kicked just outside Moscow. And that the name “Napoleon,” in this case, represents thousands and thousands of soldiers dying cold and hungry, far from home.

And we even understand that June isn’t literally busting out all over. It would seem that doing this would be hard enough to cause a brainstorm. So where did this facility with symbolism come from? It strikes me that the human brain has evolved a necessary shortcut for doing so, and with some major implications.

….This potential to manipulate behavior by exploiting the brain’s literal-metaphorical confusions about hygiene and health is also shown in a study by Mark Landau and Daniel Sullivan of the University of Kansas and Jeff Greenberg of the University of Arizona. Subjects either did or didn’t read an article about the health risks of airborne bacteria. All then read a history article that used imagery of a nation as a living organism with statements like, “Following the Civil War, the United States underwent a growth spurt.” Those who read about scary bacteria before thinking about the U.S. as an organism were then more likely to express negative views about immigration.

Another example of how the brain links the literal and the metaphorical comes from a study by Lawrence Williams of the University of Colorado and John Bargh of Yale. Volunteers would meet one of the experimenters, believing that they would be starting the experiment shortly. In reality, the experiment began when the experimenter, seemingly struggling with an armful of folders, asks the volunteer to briefly hold their coffee. As the key experimental manipulation, the coffee was either hot or iced. Subjects then read a description of some individual, and those who had held the warmer cup tended to rate the individual as having a warmer personality, with no change in ratings of other attributes.

From this simple associative effect are the conditions from which a “eureka” moment of insight can crystallize, as it did for Archimedes in his bath:

Effect—-> Association —-> Orientation ——> Insight ——> Extrapolation/Generalization

ADDENDUM:

Curtis has commented and expanded the discussion, though his comments seem to go into my akismet spam folder. Should be fixed now:

WOODA = C(OODA) + A(OODA) / 4GW & 5GW

There is the potential not only for insight but also for deception, whether the deceivers are others in our milieu or we ourselves (and our brains) may be deceivers….

True. Metaphors and analogies can crystallize insughts but they can also become powerfully attractive distorions of reality – sort of “anti-models” or  “false models”.

….As a model of what might be called metaphorization, these similarities make sense.  The OODA in all its forms, including the WOODA which includes World, represents a dynamic process of cycling (although perhaps not always uniform and unidirectional cycling) of information.  The focal point of the A-OODA, Observe above, is the abstract locus of observation:  New information received from without comes into contact (abstractly speaking!) with previously built understandings, or Mental Constructs, and relatively newer insights, or Conditional Constructs.  These diverse abstract observations have, to some extent, already prepared the mind for interpretation of new information and, these observations taken as whole create an opportunity for triangulation (of a sort.)  Using Mark Safranski’s terminology, after the information is Associated, it is Oriented through analysis and synthesis, Insights may form the basis of new hypotheses which may either be conditional (re-looped into further observation w/ outside information and previous understandings) or may be accepted as finalized understandings about what one has observed (Extrapolation/Generalization).

Hmmmm…. I have read that “insight” as a neurocognitive event tends to occur in two brain regions, the lateral inferior prefrontal cortex and the anterior cingulate cortex. The associative work of insight correlates with the former region but the “combinatory play” cited by Einstein and referenced , if I recall, by Charles and leading to new hypothesis correlates with the latter.  I am not a neuroscientist, so I am now wondering if insight is a distributed, parallel processing, brain function or if we are really talking about two separate cognitive effects – an “Insight 1” and “Insight 2”?

Anyone who cares to weigh in here, feel free…..

By Charles Cameron 

It has been a while since I posted an entry in my “Games of War and Peace” series, but I just came across a quote in Stephen Ulph’s Towards a Curriculum for the Teaching of Jihadist Ideology that brought back memories…

The epigraph to Ulph’s Introduction quotes from Rosie Cowan and Richard Norton-Taylor’s piece, Britain now No 1 al-Qaida target – anti-terror chiefs from the (UK) Guardian of 19 October 2006, and I’ve added a couple of earlier paragraphs for context:

Even though the police and M15 have disrupted terror plots and groups influenced by al-Qaida, they describe the networks as very resilient.They say there is a frightening number of young men willing to step up and replace those who have been arrested or gone to ground.

“It’s like the old game of Space Invaders,” said one senior counter-terrorism source. “When you clear one screen of potential attackers, another simply appears to take its place.”

I don’t think there’s a deep strategic insight there, the way there may be with Mao and the game of Go, although the question of what drives the continuing recruitment of those young men is an important one.

But I’d like to ask — what other game-related insights do you find of value in understanding contemporary jihadism?