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I am seconding Younghusband in recommending the post up at The Strategist as well as the subsequent discussion:

“Who and Where are Today’s Military Thinkers”

Quentin recently asked if there are people in western militaries who are “thinking outside the square” about strategy and warfare.

It’s a good question and one that I don’t have a ready answer for. Over the last 200 years there have been a number of great thinkers, like Carl von Clausewitz, Alfred Mahan, T E Lawrence (pictured), Basil Liddell Hart, J F C Fuller, and John Boyd. They developed general theories about war or thought deeply about the nature and shape of future warfare.

There were also military officers who operationalized radical ideas and thinking. They include Erwin Rommel and Heinz Guderian, the German pioneers of armoured warfare, along with Orde Wingate and David Stirling, the Brits who trail-blazed the use of special forces in WW2.

These thinkers thought deeply about their subjects. Their ideas were backed by experience, or they tested and refined their ideas in the field. They tended to be outsiders and were often regarded by the military establishment as odd, unorthodox, even dangerous. Some, like Fuller and Guderian, gravitated towards experimental military areas. To paraphrase Boyd, they tended to ‘do something not be someone’. 

What about today? Who are the thinkers in western militaries? In the US, John Nagl comes to mind for his work on counterinsurgency. As Zenpundit and Armchair Generalist point out, Nagl recently left the army for a job with a think tank. The British have Sir Rupert Smith, who wrote The Utility of Force after he retired from the British forces.

Other than these people, I’m struggling. Any nominations? Or are we more likely to find today’s military thinkers in universities and think tanks (e.g., Martin van Creveld and Willam Lind), in aid agencies and private military companies, in IT companies, or, heaven forbid, in the blogosphere?

Join in the discussion here.

John Boyd used to preach that “Machines don’t fight wars, people do and they use their minds!”. Which is of course true but sometimes they use their minds to make new machines or use old ones in a novel way. So, as a counterbalance to the frequent discussions here of 4GW, COIN and the mental and moral levels of war, how about some computer wizardry as a change of pace? LOL!

About the Technology in Wartime Conference

“This conference will explore how computer technology is used during war — both for the purposes of combat/defense, as well as for human rights interventions into war-torn regions. Topics will include high tech weapons systems, cyberwarfare, autonomous aircraft, mobile robots, internet surveillance, anonymous communication, and privacy-enhancing technologies that aid human rights workers documenting conditions in war-torn countries and help soldiers communicate their experiences in blogs and e-mail.

Our goal will be to consider the ethical implications of wartime technologies and how these technologies are likely to affect civilization in years to come. Ultimately we want to engage a pressing question of our time: What should socially-responsible computer professionals do in a time of high tech warfare?

The proceedings will be broadcast live on the Web, and the presentations collected in book form online, released under a CC license, and made available to the public and policy makers looking for expert opinions on wartime technology issues during the election year”

Joi Ito is one of the sponsors and the list of confirmed speakers includes Noah Schachtman of WIRED and Bruce Schneier . They could use a few more warriors in their geek and academic heavy mix but it looks like it’s shaping up to be an excellent conference.

Hat tip to Charles Cameron.

Abu Muqawama – “LTC John Nagl to retire”

Thomas P.M. Barnett – “Flunk the SysAdmin, lose the Leviathan”

The Washington Monthly -“The Army’s Other Crisis: Why the best and brightest young officers are leaving”

I enjoyed reading and was impressed by LTC John Nagl’s Learning How To Eat Soup With A Knife and I heartily recommend it. I have no doubt that he has been given a better offer – probably a much better offer financially and one more in line with his demonstrated abilities – than rolling the dice and sticking with a career in the “up or out” U.S. Army.  I’m also certain that Col. Nagl will be contributing to the war of ideas long after he ceases to be a uniformed part of the war and that Nagl probably made the best decision possible for himself and his family. Anyone who believes that a post-Iraq U.S. Army won’t restructure itself by downsizing it’s most talented warfighters in favor of career desk jockeys simply wasn’t paying attention during the 1990’s.

As the links demonstrate, Nagl is merely the well-known face of an ominous trend. When an institution – be it military, educational, corporate, civic, religious – reaches a point where it is merely a farm team that regularly sends it’s best and it’s brightest elsewhere then it is an institution on it’s way out. There is something worse than “breaking the Army”; broken armies get rebuilt because restoring them to health is a national priority. No, the real danger for the U.S. military is an Army that “embraces mediocrity” because if mediocrity becomes entrenched it will not be removed by anything shy of a near-total housecleaning of the general officers. Can you see America’s “no-accountability” Boomer elite doing that ? Or even recognizing if it needed to be done?

I can’t.

ADDENDUM:

Fabius Maximus -“Recommended reading: transforming the Army, the hard way” and “The Army is losing good people. That is only a symptom of a more serious problem.”

Intel Dump -“John Nagl has left the building”

SWJ Blog – “Nagl to Leave Army”

Kings of War – “High-Profile Officer Nagl to Leave Army, Join Think Tank”

Neptunus Lex -“Brain drain?”

Armchair Generalist – “Nagl Leaving the Army“

A brief excerpt from the comment from blogfriend Charles Cameron:

“The warfare of the Aztecs, the berserkers seeking Valhalla, and most significantly today, the Islamists seeking martyrdom – these are not “rational actors” in a sense that tweaking our Prisoners Dilemma tables will not address.

To know them, we must think not merely our of the box but out of boxes, take not just the road less traveled but a path so overgrown a machete is required to cut it, and no one can say whether it was a path before, or is new found land, a haunt of owls or badgers, or an habitation of ghosts… a trackless track as zen might call it, crossing the Cartesian rift between brain and mind, passing between real and imaginal, fact and myth, story and history as easily as we might pass between Colorado and Wyoming.”

That resonated with me earlier today when I read a blurb in the current issue of The Atlantic Monthly ( who appear to owe Ralph Peters some kind of credit for their   cover story) regarding the disproportionate number of engineers in the ranks of Islamist terrorists, which led me to google these fine papers, posts and theads:

The Engineers of Jihad (PDF) by Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog-  The original paper

Soob -“Engineers of Jihad ” – Excellent analysis by Subadei’s co-blogger Munz

The Small Wars Council – “Engineers of Jihad” 

Foreign Policy – subscription required ( sorry, cheapskates)

RichardDawkins.net –  Worthless, normatively speaking but contains mocking speculation for comic relief

Belgravia Dispatch – illustrates the 4GW angle

Most MENA nations have very limited systems of public and private education and literacy rates are far lower than state figures generally admit. In some instances, Arab states may have illiteracy rates reaching into the 40th percentile.  The well educated, multilingual and scientifically trained are a definite elite in the Arab-Islamic world diverging socially and psychologically from a majority who speak only colloquial Arabic or an ethnic minority language and  (possibly broken) colloquial Arabic.  See Dave Schuler’s comments on Diglossia. Moreover censorship, repression and the boundaries of permissible social, political and cultural discourse vary significantly from Tangier to Bahrain.

In this climate, an engineering education creates a mind capable of rigorously rigid – one might say predisposed to doctrinaire – logical thinking in terms of process with an artificially circumscribed mental palette of content. Narrow vision and a powerful intellect will yield different answers to problems than will a panoramic vision and a powerful intellect. Islamism would serve to reinforce the tendency toward rigidity while ramping up the emotional intensity of the response to frustrating obstacles to solving problems.

Could the “Cartesian rift” or dichotomy of which Charles writes be healed by greater access to liberal education in the Mideast? Ideally, yes, as both a world of possibilities would open up alongside a propensity to question received authority that liberal education brings. On the other hand, the report by Gambetta and Hertog puts humanities majors as disporortionately represented among secular, leftist, terrorists so liberal ed may simply stir the domestic pot in the Mideast  because most societies there remain, to a degree, repressive tyrannies in terms of politics.

I’m pleased to offer a different perspective here from blogfriend Charles Cameron of Hipbone Games who blogs at Forensic Theology. Charles has a deep academic background in comparative theological studies and he is offering insight into the mindset of millenarian religious radicals and what their motivations might mean for the concept of nuclear deterrence.  Cameron seeks to address an aspect that is, surprisingly, seldom highlighted properly in the media despite the U.S. having been at war with Islamist terrorists since 2001. The number of voices who have also tried to do so – Gilles Kepel, Olivier Roy, Tim Furnish and Michael Scheuer – have focused exclusively on radical Salafist and Mahdist Islamism while Cameron puts these in context  with all eschatological religious extremists, mythic archetypes and other primal currents of human culture.

Charles Cameron’s post is really an 18 page paper of considerable intellectual depth and subtlety and I offer it here to readers with a strong endorsement for your careful consideration.

“Religious and apocalyptic background to nuclear policy making”

“I read about Cheryl Rofer’s invitation to the blogosphere of 18 December, suggesting that we should form a “blog-tank” on nuclear policy, on my blog-friend Zenpundit’s blog. My purpose here is to offer as background to that ongoing discussion of nuclear policy, some reminders from the spheres of religion and mythology.

It is my purpose here to suggest that the actions, plans and motives of those who are subject to religious drivers, and in particular drivers of an apocalyptic or “end times” nature, are, by reason of their seeming irrationality and fringe quality, often overlooked by those whose specialties revolve around such things as centrifuges and the enrichment of uranium, short-range missiles and their forward deployment, and so forth – and that a theological understanding of the place of nuclear weapons in the eschatological thinking of radical religionists of a variety of stripes is one of the key desiderata in an effort to come to grips with the realities of proliferation and peace”.

Read the rest here (PDF)