zenpundit.com

From SWJ Blog:

Where we have been. According to US counterinsurgency doctrine, our soldiers and marines were expected to be “nation-builders.” Afghanistan, however, was the wrong war for that strategy of democratic nation building – for three reasons.

First, a foreign power cannot build a democratic nation, while having no control over that nation’s authoritarian leaders. In 2002, the US and the UN handed full sovereignty to Afghan leaders who proved to be venal and selfish. We conceded all leverage over Afghan leadership. That was a fatal mistake.

Second, a duplicitous Pakistan has maintained a 1500-mile long sanctuary. The recent decision to give Pakistan money only on a transactional basis – do this if you want to be paid – is commendable. It will influence behavior, because Pakistani officials cannot maintain their comfortable life styles without American money.

Third, our benign counterinsurgency strategy did not win the commitment of the people. In Iraq, the Sunni tribes did eventually reject the insurgency. In Afghanistan, the Pashtun tribes have not done so. Most Pashtun villagers survive by being chameleons; they expect the Taliban to return.

By giving away $18 billion over ten years, we created a culture of entitlement. Afghans from President Karzai down to village elders came to expect that we would fight for them and give them money. The US military alone undertook 16,000 economic projects, as if its mission was that of a giant Peace Corps. This money resulted in no change in the war; however, it did weaken the willingness of Afghans to rely upon themselves. When you give something for nothing, you receive nothing in return…

Read the rest here:

Two more for the pile….

Another Bloody Century by Colin Gray

Iraq & the Evolution of American Strategy by Steven Metz

Comments or opinions?

[ by Charles Cameron — index of graphics, first 800 or so pages of the “2083 European Declaration of Independence”, with some analysis ]

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A great deal of work needs to be done on the 2083 European Declaration of Independence, and I thought a useful place to start would be a catalog of images.

The document opens with a graphical title:

— title page —

That’s probably the largest single graphic in the entire work, and it puts the work squarely in the context of the Knights Templar — with e Templar cross and the full name of the order, “Pauperes commilitones Christi Templique Solomonic” or Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon.  The Templars were a Western Christian chivalric order strongly associated with the Crusades — and the topic more recently of much historical, occult and fictional speculation.

The date 2083 is a date SFE (in the Science Fictional Era) as was 1984 before it — but it was almost certainly chosen for its echo of the 1683 Battle of Vienna, which is commonly taken to represent the turning back of the Ottomans by the Habsburgs, and thus the victory of Christendom over Islam.  Two maps show the Umayyad Conquests:

— p 228 —

and the Second Islamic Wave, turned back in Spain and at the gates of Vienna:

— p 243 —

These can fruitfully be contrasted with a map of “tomorrow”:

— p 487 —

it being the author’s contention that France will be the first European country to fall to Islamic dhimmitude.  I suspect much the same is implied in this version of the French tricolore:

— p 781 —

There are some pointed attacks on leftist intellectuals:

— p 33 —

and on media perceived as left-leaning, notably the BBC:

  — p 384

— that’s the Saudi flag mashed up with the BBC logo and star and crescent — and:

  — p 804 —

giving both “ancient” and “modern” variants on the theme…

There are some strange items which I’ll drop in here for a breath of fresh air…

  — p 381 —

which appears to be a commentary on the respective attractions of Venus and Mars, since it’s situated in a commentary on Feminism…

this really is a strangely mythic document… and…

with its reference to “mind control agents” — and those whose minds have been controlled are clearly sheep:

— p 803 —

which may be the right moment to mention that the British, too, come in for a measure of contempt, via a quotation from none other than Osama bin Laden:

  — p 707 —

“When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature they will like the strong horse”.  Perhaps its unsurprising that the author is something of an admirer of bin Laden’s means, if not his ends.

Of course, that’s largely the fault of the Labour party:

But that’s probably enough for one post — in my next, I’ll consider how weak we are, what the jihadist strategy against us is, and how the new Templars hope to turn the tide…

against:

— p 674 —

the worst threats to mankind.

 by J. Scott Shipman

Military Strategy, by Rear Admiral J.C. Wylie, Jr., USN (1911-1993)

This is a very brief review and recommendation for a book that I discovered recently. Admiral Wylie’s short Military Strategy (about 85 pages in the original edition) was published in 1967, but written in the mid-fifties while Wylie was “at sea in a single-screw low-speed amphibious cargo ship.” He remarked these ships were “not demanding  of a captain’s attention as is, for instance, a destroyer.”My copy was published in 1989 by the  Naval Institute Press  as part of their Classics of Seapower series and has an excellent preface by John B. Hattendorf that will give those unfamiliar with Wylie’s life experience a good foundation. This copy also has a postscript written by Wylie “twenty years later” and three related essays published previously in Proceedings magazine.

Given Military Strategy’s brevity, I’ll resist the urge to provide long quotes. Wylie and an associate’s search for articulating the relevance of the navy in the never-ending budget battles brought them in contact with the famed mathematician John von Neumann of Princeton. Wylie used a paraphrase of von Neumann as a starting point: “With respect to strategy as a subject of study, its intellectual framework is not clearly outlined, and its vocabulary is almost nonexistent. These two primary tasks are badly in need of doing…” He sets out to do just that and does a nice job.

Wylie defines strategy as: “A plan of action designed in order to achieve some end; a purpose together with a system of measures for its accomplishment.” He discusses the military mind and strategy, and how often the military focuses on principles to the exclusion of real strategy. Wylie outlines methods of studying strategy that are simple and well thought-out. Wylie makes a compelling case for a general theory of strategy. He says: “A theory is simply an idea designed to account for actuality or to account for what the theorist thinks will come to pass in actuality. It is orderly rationalization of real or presumed patterns of events.” Further, he continually stresses the importance of assumptions being based in reality, and not wishful thinking or the last war/battle.

His chapter on existing theories is worth the price of the book. He provides a type of Cliff’s Notes overview of the four theories he sees as core: the maritime, the air, the continental, and the Maoist. Of the last, he masterfully lifted sections from Mao’s On Guerilla Warfare, Che Guevera on Guerilla Warfare, and Vo Ngugen Giap’s People’s War People’s Army. He observed of the later, “these books are not only theory, the portray a hard reality of contemporary warfare.” To our people in uniform, in particular, unfamiliar with these books, Wylie provides an accessible and informative introduction to the type of war being waged by Islamic jihadists and how they attempt shape the battle field.

He develops a brilliant point that destruction doesn’t necessarily translate into control, and that often destruction is driven more by emotion than strategy.

Wylie goes on to provide a general theory of strategy that, using his words, has “substance and validity, and practicality.” As Seydlitz89 said in a recent comment thread here: “Wylie is amazing.  So many ideas in such a small book!  He misread Clausewitz and overrated Liddell Hart – which are probably connected, but overall?  He comes up with some very basic ideas about strategic theory which are ever sooooo useful.  I’ve re-read his small book several times and always come up with something that either I’d forgotten or that I had missed earlier.  Wylie’s basic approach to theory is as a practitioner, not as an academic, much like Clausewitz before him.”

Indeed, Wylie provides a nice scaffold for any type of strategy, military or business. For me his approach was refreshing in a genre where, more often than not, dogma and ego walk hand-in-hand.  Time and again, he offers that his ideas may be wrong and encourages readers to think and wrestle with the concepts provided. Wylie writes in his postscript: “As far as I know, no one as ever paid attention to it [the book]. I don’t know whether this is because it is so clear and obviously valid that no one needs to, or because it is of no use at all. I suspect it could be the latter, but I really do not know.”

This little book comes with my highest recommendation. If you’re in uniform and just getting started with strategic concepts/thinking, this is an excellent place to start.

Interesting referenced titles:

Military Concepts and Philosophy, Henry E. Eccles 

The Military Intellectuals in Britain, 1918-1939, Robin Higham 

An Introduction to Strategy, General Andre Beaufre 

Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, John von Neumann 

Strategy in Poker, Business and War, John McDonald 

My amigo and SWJ News co-columinst Crispin Burke recently put forth a very interesting and provocative jeremiad “Be honest: Who actually read FM 3-24?” and one of his targets, journalist and Iraq war veteran Carl Prine, has been duly provoked, Prine has responded in great detail yesterday at Line of Departure:

Starbuck is wrong

Starbuck is wrong.

And in his drive to keep getting it wrong, he’s trying to rewrite FM 3-24, the military’s chief doctrinal publication on counterinsurgency.

But that just makes him more wrong.

He’s wrong about me.  He’s wrong about what I believe.  He’s wrong about the literature that informs FM 3-24.  He’s wrong about what the manual says and he’s wrong about what it left out.  He’s wrong about historiography.  He’s wrong about how a caste of top officers and diplomats came to understand “strategy” in the wake of the occupation of Iraq.

Let’s help get him right.  Or, at least, less wrong.  He’s a good man.  We need to turn him and ensure he quits taking shots at me I don’t deserve!

….The problem to anyone who studies Malaya, however, is that since the publication of the memoirs of exiled communist leader Chin Peng a dozen years ago, we now know that the civic, military and political policies under the British “hearts and minds” approach didn’t defeat the revolution.

Instead, the revolt was irreparably broken by brutal operations against the guerrillas, then a most coercive “screwing down the people” phase that dispossessed or killed thousands of Chinese, followed by draconian “population control” measures that, as Peng put it, starved the guerrillas in the bush because they snapped their rat lines and cut off their rice.

The “hearts and minds” initiatives designed to bring medical care, education, social welfare and other aid to the resettled Chinese and woo them to the colonial government’s side from 1952 – 1954 didn’t crack the back of the insurgency, a point now pretty much beyond dispute.

Why?  Because the previous “hearts and minds” claptrap as the cause of pacification in Malaya was contradicted by the Malayan Chinese, most especially those guerrillas who took up arms against the British regime!

You know, the people targeted by a population-centric counterinsurgency.  The people most counter-insurgents in their pop-centric fantasies almost never discuss except as abstractions, the human yarn wefted and warped by their long needles of war.

One finds “Hearts and Minds” prominently mentioned 11 times in Dr John Nagl’s valentine to Templer and colonial Malaya, Eating Soup with a Knife; to Nagl it’s the stuff of police services and economic development and whatnot with the psychology of the people being the center of gravity those reforms are meant to snatch.

And Nagl would like the best burglar of hearts and minds to be a learning, nimble and evolving military-political institution such as the U.S. Army.  It’s no small wonder, then, that Nagl became a dominant voice in FM 3-24 and that many of this thoughts in Eating Soup came to dominate the manual, too.

Or, as the introduction to FM 3-24 echoes soupily, “by focusing on efforts to secure the safety and support of the local populace, and through a concerted effort to truly function as learning organizations, the Army and Marine Corps can defeat their insurgent enemies.”

This is mere euphemism and wasn’t worth the ink that it cost taxpayers to print it.  But it sets the stage for the rest of FM 3-24, which follows a hearts and minds template that Starbuck doesn’t apparently realize is borrowed from mid-century….

Ouch. Note to self: if I ever decide to square off against Carl, I will make sure to do my homework. Read the rest here.

First, I would point out to readers here for whom some of this in both essays is inside baseball, that the tone is less harsh and the substantive distance between Burke and Prine less great in  the comments sections of both blogs than it first appears in reading their posts. It is a healthy, no-holds barred exchange and not a flame war.

Secondly, it is an important exchange, tying together COIN disputes over theory, historiography, empirical evidence, operational and tactical “lessons learned”, strategy, policy (Clausewitzian sense), politics (colloquial sense) and personalities that have raged for five years across military journals, think tanks, the media, the bureaucracy and the blogosphere. In some ways, these essays can serve as a summative of the debate. I say “some ways”, because what is the most important element or effect of America’s romance with COIN will differ markedly depending on whom has the floor. My own beef is not with doing COIN, it is with not doing strategy.

As Crispin and Carl’s vignette about General Creighton Abrams demonstrated, American historians are still having savagely bitter arguments about the war in Vietnam. For that matter, everyone who lived through the era did and still does. It is a wound that never seems to heal and has crippled our politics to this day, even as the veterans of Vietnam now turn to gray.

The 21st century COIN wars have not ripped American society apart down to the soul the way Vietnam did. As with the Korean War, the soldiers and marines in Afghanistan and Iraq fought bravely, at times desperately, to a general and mild approbation back home that sometimes looked a lot like indifference. Even the anti-war protestors mostly made a point of stating they were not against the troops, the venemous public malice of the 1960’s New Left radicals in the 2000’s was a property only of the lunatic fringe.

But COIN itself will be a historical argument without end.