zenpundit.com

Via Shlok, cutting edge thinker, strategist and amigo  John Robb has launched a new site, add it to your daily “must read” list or blogroll:

Resilient Communities

What Resilient Communities .com does

How do you take control of your life in an increasingly unstable world?

1. Decide.  Right now, your success is akin a cork on an increasingly turbulent ocean.  Change that. Make the decision to take control of your future.  This decision requires a change in mindset and perspective.
2. Act.  Take steps to actively reduce your dependencies and gain degrees of freedom.  Learn how to produce what you need at a level that meets or exceeds what you currently buy.  Learn how to make an income either locally or online in a way that has meaning and substance.
3. Align.  Network with other people that want control and meaning in their lives too.  Learn how to build or join online networks with the people who have the expertise to help you become resilient and/or share similar goals.  Learn how to raise capital from that community to fund projects — or — how to build the online network required to design and build useful new products or services.
4. Community.  Build, join, or move to a local community that’s dedicated to building a resilient future.  A community that isn’t dependent on a global system run amok or vulnerable to disruptions.  A community that you can trust.  A community that rewards your contribution with reciprocal loyalty.  Learn how to form a community that’s worth living in and how to propel that community into a stable, bountiful future.

The goal of this site is to help you with every step along that path.

All In: The Education of General David Petraeus by Paula Broadwell, with Vernon Loeb

The official biography of CIA Director General David Petraeus, by Harvard researcher Paula Broadwell, has long been anticipated in the .mil/COIN/NatSec/Foreign Policy communities and blogosphere.  I can hear pencils scrawling furiously away in the margins even as I type this post. 🙂

Broadwell,  herself a reserve Army officer, West Pointer, Harvard grad, doctoral student at King’s College War Studies Department , and by all accounts, an impressive up and coming individual,  had very extensive access to her subject – allegedly, far more than the official Army historian assigned to General Petraeus’ last command. Given the subject is General Petraeus, the precarious state of American policy in Afghanistan and 2012 as a circus of political excess, All In will be one of the few “must read” books this year.

And, I must commend Miss Mrs. Broadwell highly here, she will be donating 20 % of her net proceeds to help wounded veterans.

That said, in terms of reaction to this book, there will be blood.

Reviews of All In will afford the opportunity to tear the scabs off of the well-worn COINdinista/COINtra debate and rub salt in the exposed wounds – I for one am especially looking forward to reading future back to back reviews by Carl Prine and Thomas Ricks and Abu Muqawama vs. Colonel Gian Gentile. In the mainstream press, the opportunity for newspaper columnists to get in gratuitous potshots against figures like Presidents Bush and Obama, Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, Robert Gates, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Stan McChrystal and numerous others or grind partisan axes will be too tempting to resist, regardless of how relevant these remarks are to Broadwell’s biography of Petraeus. The looming specter of draconian cuts to defense budgets will also add to the rancor of the discussion of the book within the defense community.

Somewhere in that debate will be the book Broadwell actually wrote and within the book, perhaps, we will come to see David Petraeus. Or not.

Get your popcorn ready!

Right now, I am deep into reading the superb George Kennan biography by eminent diplomatic historian John Lewis Gaddis but All In is definitely next on my list.

And it will be reviewed.

A short and cranky diatribe.

Adam Elkus and his amigo Dan Trombly of Slouching Towards Colombia have been busy  poking holes into the ill-considered and/or poorly reasoned strategic conceptions of victory-free but credible influence. Dan gets very close to something important, something worth contemplating for the welfare of our Republic:

…..Rather than a world where normal victory and political decision through force of arms give way to a world of credible influence, I see this concept ushering in a world where America’s objectives remain expansive – seeking to create social and political change – but where “twentieth century” warfare continues as usual, obscured by multilateral efforts and prosecuted as much as possible by local forces. Because the objectives are essentially unchanged – overthrow of criminal regimes, integration of societies into a dynamic liberal international order, protection of civilians – one of my real fears about the Defense Strategic Guidance is that, confronted with conflicts and challenges to our interests, and with a paradigm of military aims just as expansive as before, we will slouch inevitably towards unsustainable ways of war. Already, the new objectives of civilian protection are blurring into the old objectives of democracy promotion and liberalization – just look at the title of the new State Department Office of Civilian Security, Democracy, and Human Rights.

When a statesman selects Ends that have no rational relationship to available Ways and Means we might take that as a sign of possible incompetence as a strategist.

While that’s not good it is at least normal – most politicians in a democratic society are on average, poor strategists but pretty good intuitive tacticians. After all, acquiring and keeping political power for long periods of time requires more than luck and a large checkbook. While there are always some buffoons decorating the halls of Congress, as individuals, Members of Congress are usually pretty shrewd and a minority are exceptional people.

If the Ends selected are fantastically broad open-ended, undefined or, worse, undefinable, convoluted and insensible in their context, we are left with two even less savory conclusions:

First, that the statesman has a fundamental political immaturity and narcissism the leads them to articulate their emotively generated whims as policy objectives without regard to empirical reality. Sort of a wishcraft of state that substitutes rhetorical expressions and sloganeering for thought and analysis. We see this effect on a much larger scale in the ideological atmosphere of totalitarian regimes where 2+2= 5 and only Right-deviationist mathematician, counterrevolutionary wreckers would dare suggest the answer is 4. Geopolitical goals that are created by political fantasists – like the creation of a modern, liberal democratic state in Afghanistan in a few years time – can be appended with “And a Pony!” and still be just as likely to come to pass.

American statesmen seem to be particularly predisposed to this condition in foreign affairs (and arguably, in fiscal affairs as well). Perhaps this is an intellectual legacy of Wilsonian excess but the problem was not acute until the past decade and a half, which indicates that the driving force may be, in part, generational. Men and women born into a time of record-breaking standards of living have reached the apex of power and they are no more inclined to act with restraint, responsibility or realism now than they did in ’68.

The second conclusion is that the Ends are purposefully incoherent and recklessly broad because the real strategic objective is not in our relations with country X, but for the statesman to wrest for their faction as large a grant of unaccountable power as possible.

A follow up to Part I.

How does a society, as opposed to individuals, develop a capacity for “strategic thinking” ?

While war is an obvious answer, it is not an advisable first resort. First of all, although war teaches hard lessons about strategy, the costs of losing a war are high. Secondly, the costs of winning a war can be high. Thirdly, few people, relatively speaking to the number involved, have any direct input into genuinely strategic decisions during wartime; most will either gain tactical experience or be relegated to support functions. At best, wars seem to create a cohort of excellent tactical leaders with the potential to, someday, mature into strategic leaders or strategists. At worst, from a war, the wrong lessons may be drawn and institutionalized to create a future disaster.

What conditions produce strategic thinkers for a state? A brief example from American history:

Here are some of the US leadership of WWII, the postwar “Wise Men” and their Cold War successors, collaborators, thinkers and military chiefs:

Franklin Roosevelt, Henry Stimson, Joseph Grew, Dean Acheson, Douglas MacArthur, Charles E. Bohlen, George F. Kennan, Paul Nitze, George C. Marshall , Harry S. Truman, Robert A. Lovett, Dwight D. Eisenhower  , John J. McCloy , W. Averell Harriman, William Donovan, James F. Byrnes, Chester Nimitz,  John Foster Dulles,  James Forrestal, Vannevar Bush,  Allen Dulles, Ernest King, Albert Wohlstetter, Dean Rusk, Hyman Rickover, Herman Kahn, Robert McNamara,  Bernard Brodie, Fritz G. A. Kraemer, McGeorge Bundy, Richard Nixon, Thomas Schelling, Henry Kissinger

Some commonalities that these individuals shared, sometimes in pluralities and others in large majorities:

Above average to very high IQ
Middle class to high socioeconomic status
Eastern Establishment
Fraternal organizations
Male
Protestant
Episcopalian
Ivy League education
Law 
Politics
Military service
Diplomacy
Wall St.
Harvard
Yale
Princeton
Columbia
Harvard Law
Military Academy
University of Chicago
Berkeley
Skull & Bones
Scroll & Key
WWI
WWII
RAND
Executive Branch
Nuclear weapons/arms control/power

This list could be expanded or reduced on a number of grounds. For example, the list is composed of men primarily because almost no women, with very few exceptions, even from elite backgrounds, had an opportunity during the first 2/3 of the 20th century to contribute to strategic decisions or policy making. We could also include other characteristics, but what we have is sufficient for some broad generalizations.

• First, these men generally engaged in careers that featured complex activities that stressed and rewarded incisive analysis of factual scenarios, assessment of risk and potential benefits, intuitive judgment and organizational abilities – law, politics, the stock market, diplomacy and corporate leadership. A minority of the list had formal training in advanced mathematics.
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• Secondly, the men all had the social wherewithal and ambition to gain entry into educational and social institutions that were by definition, highly exclusive on more than a strictly meritocratic basis. For many from higher SES families, this presented no significant barrier but for the “outsiders” like Kennan, Nixon or Rickover, it was a formidable obstacle to overcome. In either case, there were social mores or even commonly held prejudices to which they had to adapt in order to “fit in”. Despite this demonstration of social intelligence, most members of our list were not  professional politicians (but those that were made an impact on American history much greater than that of an “average” president).
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• Thirdly, the presence of such overlapping experiential commonalities, while not creating a formal “strategic community” was probably sufficient to impart a strategic mentalité as to how the world really worked, red in tooth in claw, as well as implicit ideological assumptions as how the world ought to work, if perfected. This meant that strategic debates about American national security could take place within the framework of commonly held assumptions and reference points. While certain individuals might be disliked (MacArthur, Truman, Nixon) or regarded warily, with little trust (Nixon, FDR, Kahn) their strategic arguments were nevertheless widely understood within the elite and could be assessed on their merits – an excellent environment for building an elite consensus and continuity on matters of policy and strategy. This condition may be a political prerequisite for a democratic state’s formulation and adoption of a successful grand strategy.

If we wonder why the United States has been so ineffective at strategy in recent years, maybe we should look at how our current (and most importantly, future) elite’s formative experiences have sharply diverged from their strategically gifted WWII-Cold War predecessors.

George F. Kennan: An American Life by John Lewis Gaddis

Zero History by William Gibson 

Just picked these up.

Zero History will have to wait until I read Spook Country, which sits on my shelf. Gibson is good; along with Steven Pressfield he is one of the few living writers of fiction that I will take the time to read.

The Kennan bio is a long awaited and much talked about book about the prickly and difficult father of Containment.  Gaddis, an eminent diplomatic historian and a conservative in a field that still tilts leftward and where many of his peers count opposition to the Vietnam War as the formative political experience of their lives, has probably written the most important book of his career as Kennan’s official biographer.

Will review in the future.