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Two years ago, Dr. Chet Richards released Neither Shall the Sword: Conflict in the Years Ahead, a radical treatise on global trends toward  the privatization of military capabilities and the erosion of the efficacy of state armed forces.  If We Can Keep It: A National Security Manifesto for the Next Administration is not a sequel to Neither Shall the Sword but rather a logical extension of that book’s premises upon which Richards builds a stinging critique of American grand strategy and a profligate United States government that Richards argues wins enemies and alienates allies while squandering hundreds of billions of dollars on weapons systems of dubious usefulness against what genuine threats to our security still exist.  It is a provocative thesis that leaves few of the Defense Department’s sacred cows grazing unmolested.

Dr. Richards has a trademark style as a writer: economical clarity of thought. One can agree or disagree with his analysis or dispute his normative preferences but within his parameters, Chet will give his audience an argument that is internally consistent and logically sound, without much in the way of redundancy or wasted words. As a result, If We Can Keep It is about as lean a book as Richards would like the U.S. military to be while giving the reader no shortage of things to think about as he hammers away at conventional wisdom regarding defense policy, national security and the war on terror.

A number of intellectual influences resonate within If We Can Keep It. Unsurprisingly, given Richards’ history as a military thinker, these include the ideas of Colonel John Boyd, Martin van Creveld, Thomas X. Hammes and 4GW Theory advocated by William Lind.  Also present as a strategic subtext is Sun Tzu along with elements of Eastern philosophy and the recent work of British military strategist General Sir Rupert Smith, whose book, The Utility of Force, shares a similar title with one of Richards’ chapters. Finally, Richards is channeling, in his call for a grand strategy of Shi and for America to focus on ” being the best United States that we can be “, a very traditional strand of foreign policy in American history. One that diplomatic historian Walter McDougall has termed “Promised Land” but which may be most accurately described as “Pre-Wilsonian“; not “Isolationist” in the mold of the 1930’s but rather a hardheaded realism with very skeptical view of the efficacy of military intervention beyond purely punitive expeditions against violent ideological networks like al Qaida.

In enunciating this case, Richards argues that the “war on terror” conducted since 9/11 by the Bush administration  does not qualify as a “war” and that “terrorists” is an empty label  slapped on to many types of problems, most of which are best handled by law enforcement and intelligence agencies ( Richards recommends giving the IC the lead and budget for fighting al Qaida, not the DoD); the “war” model is costly in terms of treasure and civil liberty without yielding positive strategic results; While COIN is ” a piece of the puzzle” for fighting “true insurgencies” it is not a strategic magic bullet and COIN is historically ineffectual against “wars of national liberation”; that given the lack of serious external threats from foreign states or justification to intervene abroad militarily in most instances (aside from raids and strikes against violent non-state networks) the American defense establishment can be drastically scaled back to roughly $ 150 billion a year to support a superempowered US Marine Corps with Special Forces and tactical Air power.

(Dr. Richard’s last bit should be enough to kill off most of America’s general officer corps from heart attacks and take a fair number of the House of Representatives with them)

Chet Richards makes a strong argument for the declining utility of military force and the consequent budgetary implications before calling for a radical shift in American foreign and strategic policy. Much of his criticism of the strategic status quo is praiseworthy, bold,  incisive and insightful and could serve as the basis for commonsense discussion of possible reforms. However, Richards’ argument can also be contested; in part from what Richards has said in If We Can Keep It, which will mostly attract the attention from specialists in military affairs, but most importantly from what has been left unsaid. It is the consequences of the latter with which the public and politicians must seriously consider in entertaining the recommendations of Dr. Richards.

In terms of what was “said”, I am dissatisfied with the sections dealing with the differentiation between “true insurgencies” and “wars of national liberation which suffers from some degree of contextual ahistoricality. For example, the Malayan Emergency ( which is listed in tables IV and V as being in both categories) has a result of ” UK declares victory and leaves”. True enough, but in the process of doing so, an ethnic Chinese Communist insurgency with ties to Beijing was crushed and the population reconciled to a legitimate, pro-Western state. That’s a victory, not a declaration. Communist Vietnam may have ” withdrawn” from Cambodia but their puppet ruler, the ex-Khmer Rouge Hun Sen, is still Prime Minister today. That’s a victory, even if Hun Sen’s power has been trimmed back somewhat by a UN brokered parliamentary-constitutional monarchy system.  The case of the Portuguese colonies of Angola and Mozambique have as much to do with the utter collapse of the decrepit, semi-fascist,  Salazar regime in Lisbon a brief Communist coup as the military prowess of the insurgencies.

Reaching for a dogmatic rule, which the 4GW school is currently doing with “foreign COIN is doomed”, is an error because the more heterodox and fractured the military situation in a country happens to be, the more relative the concepts of “foreigner” and “legitimacy” are going to become to the locals. Rather than binary state vs. insurgents scenarios, historical case studies in military complexity like China 1911-1949, the Spanish Civil War, South Vietnam 1949 -1962, Lebanon 1980’s, West Afrca 1990’s and Iraq, Afghanistan, Colombia and Central Africa the 2000’s should be pursued to better understand 4GW and COIN dynamics.

In terms of what has been left “unsaid” in If We Can Keep It, would be the downstream global implications of a radical shift in America’s strategic posture. Richards is no isolationist but his smoothly laconic style belies the magnitude of proposals which entail a top to bottom reevaluation of all of the alliances and military relationships maintained by the United States ( itself not a bad thing) – most likely with the result of terminating most and renegotiating the rest. The extent to which American securrity guarantees originating in the aftermath of WWII, have interdependently facilitated peaceful economic liberalization and integration is a factor ignored in If We Can Keep It and frankly, I’m not sure how we can abruptly or unilaterally exit our security role in the short term without creating a riptide in the global economy.

If We Can Keep It is a fascinating and thought-provoking book as well as an absolutely brutal critique of the numerous shortcomings and strategic mismatches we suffer from as a result of ponderous, Cold War era, legacy bureaucracies and weapons systems and ill-considered foreign interventions. It is also, a pleasure to read. I highly recommend it to any serious student of defense policy, military strategy or foreign affairs.

ADDENDUM – Other Reviews of If We Can Keep It:

William Lind

TDAXP

Interestingly, William Lind, who previously has dismissed 5GW as a premature concept, has returned to the subject to dismiss it once again in the context of superempowered individuals. In regard to the spree of crazed gunmen shooting up schools, Lind wrote:

Is this war? I don’t think so. Some proponents of “Fifth Generation war,” which they define as actions by “superempowered individuals,” may disagree. But these incidents lack an ingredient I think necessary to war’s definition, namely purpose. In Fourth Generation War, the purpose of warlike acts reaches beyond the state and politics, but actions, including massacres of civilians, are still purposeful. They serve an agenda that reaches beyond individual emotions, an agenda others can and do share and fight for. In contrast, the mental and emotional states that motivate lone gunmen are knowable to them alone.

The whole “Fifth Generation” thesis is faulty, in any case. However small the units that fight wars may become, down to the “superempowered individual,” that shrinkage alone is not enough to mark a new generation.

Generational changes are dialectically qualitative changes, and those are rare. Normally, a dialectically qualitative change only occurs after time has brought many dialectically quantitative changes, such as a downward progression in the size of units that can fight. In effect, quantitative changes have to pool behind a generational dam until they form so vast a reservoir that their combined pressure breaks through in a torrent. I expect it will take at least a century for the Fourth Generation to play itself out. A Fifth Generation will not be in sight, except as a mirage, in our lifetimes.

In my view, Lind is partially correct in the sense that actions of superempowered individuals – of whom the school shooters in question, mundanely “empowered” by small arms, are definitely not examples – might not be representative of 5GW or even warfare of any kind. Several commenters have previously raised the possibility of nonviolent, constructive rather than destructive, SEI’s. I can also see SEI’s acting in concert with the objectives (peaceful or otherwise) of national authorities to whom they are loyal; or the advent of technologically upjumped “superempowered soldiers” fighting as part of a larger 3GW action by a state military.

On the other hand, while there is no consensus regarding the nature of 5GW, which would have to be an emergent phenomenon, I can’t buy Lind’s a priori dismissal and assertion of a century of 4GW needing to play out first. Frankly, that’s a figure pulled out of thin air. Why not fifty years? Or five ? Or five centuries? Why would the length between generations suddenly get longer between 4GW and 5GW than between 2GW and 3GW when conventional militaries, states and societies would be trying to adapt to 4GW right now ? Why wouldn’t 4GW and 5GW simply overlap for an extended period of time the way 2GW, 3GW and 4GW military forces have and continue to do so ?
If so, SEI’s, successfully attacking national, regional or global systems ought to at least make the cut for consideration as a form of 5GW.

Lind is on target though, in his discussion of alienation as a psychological factor motivating both 4GW forces and hostile SEI’s.  Characteristically, Lind favors a sociopolitical-moral explanation:

This is not to say that the lone gunman phenomenon, and its increasing frequency, are wholly unrelated to Fourth Generation war. They have some common origins, I think.

At the core of 4GW lies a crisis of legitimacy of the state. A development that contributes to the state’s crisis of legitimacy is the disintegration of community (Gemeinschaft). Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and the rise of the powerful, highly intrusive state, community has increasingly been displaced by society (Gesellschaft), where most relationships between people are merely functional.

That progression has now gone so far that never before in human history have so many people lived isolated lives. I sometimes visualize a conversation between a Modern man and a Medieval man, where the proud Modern says, “You poor man! It must have been terrible living without air conditioning, automobiles, washing machines and hot showers.” The Medieval man replies, “You poor man! It must have been terrible living so alone.”

Isolation and the alienation, anomie and rage that proceed from it fuel both lone gunmen and a broad sense of detachment from the state. Why give loyalty to the state if the society if governs offers nothing but alienation? In turn, alternatives to the state, such as gangs, offer alternatives to isolation as well.

Lind’s analysis here is rooted in a philosophical tradition for which Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind provides a concise overview and one that probably does not resonate with everyone reading here. One alternative would involve a clinical psychological perspective but in the end, I agree that profound isolation, alienation and disconnection from a larger social network would likely be a common denominator in destructive SEI’s, much like school shooters and lone wolf terrorists like Ted Kacyznski.

John Robb offered a rebuttal of to Lind at Global Guerillas:

 however I do disagree strongly with Bill’s definition of a superempowered individual. Superempowerment is a much richer and more complex phenomenon than a mere reduction in scale (down to a single attacker). Instead, superempowerment describes the process by which individuals and small groups are using;

• rapidly improving tools (the doubling rate of Moore’s law applied to technologies accessible to the average individual),
• connectivity to a global community and its resources (how to use those tools from MIT courseware to Jihadi “how to” sites),
• and newly accessible forms of economic activity that transcend state control,

to radically improve their productivity in warfare. This is definitely a qualitative change in the conduct of warfare, although it is still early. It will become transformational as the technologies of self-replication begin to reach their full potential.

Insofar as SEI’s could be 5GW warriors, I’m pretty comfortable with John’s exposition on the characteristics of superempowerment ( a separate issue from motivation).  You can’t be “superempowered” without some kind of a platform(s) to leverage, adaptively and creatively, against the very complex system of advanced Western society that is providing you with your tools of destruction and decent grasp of what targets could best maximize your leverage. My comment would be that the scalar effect is greater than it seems – as the actor scale is reducing down toward a single individual even as the potential effect of the actor is scaling upward in orders of magnitude to initiate national, regional or even global system perturbations. This too represents a qualitative change.

Addendum:

WHO WOULD DECLARE WAR ON THE WORLD?: THE NATURE OF SUPER EMPOWERED INDIVIDUALS

THE SUPER EMPOWERED INDIVIDUAL

Empowered individuals – and super-empowered ones! 

What Should Superempowered Individuals Do?

Night of the Lone Wolves

Super-Empowered Individuals and 5GW: Heads or Tails
 

I just received my review copy of If We Can Keep It: A National Security Manifesto for the Next Administration by Dr. Chet Richards ( thanks Chet!). 

I will tackle this book and write a proper review once the Osinga Roundtable comes to a close but in casually flipping through the pages just now, I can say that it is tightly written and that Dr. Richards was unsparing in asking tough questions about the geopolitical-military subjects that interest many readers here. We’ll have to see if his answers are as radical as those he offered in his previous work. Looks quite good though.

Stay tuned.

Fabius Maximus has hit his stride as a blogger with a highly informative set of posts on wargaming that later expanded to DNI.

War games, the antidote to “Victory disease”

Are war games a competitive edge of conventional forces vs. non-state 4GW foes?

The Achilles’ Heel of military simulations

At DNI:

During Millenium Challenge 2002

It is generally underestimated by the public (and even academics) how powerful games – especially free-play games- can be as a tool for learning; the cognitive potential of a well-constructed and rigorously moderated game is literally immense. ( and when coupled with mass-collaboration, social-networking, MMORPG  technology a level of validity might be realized that the old Prussian Grossgeneralstab or RAND apparatchiks could only have dreamed. Unfortunately, a rigged game becomes a powerfully persuasive lie, so integrity is key if gaming is to guide decision-making in the real world) A few examples:

” The gamers argued that insights arose from immersion in play. In 1956 Joseph Goldstein noted that the war game demonstrated ‘ the organic nature of complex relationships’ that daily transactions obscured.War-gaming gripped its participants, whipping up the convulsions of diplomacy ‘ more forcefully…than could be experienced through lectures or books’.”

” A team from the Social Science Division [ at RAND ] posed a number of questions which they hoped the unfoldig month of gaming would resolve. Chief among them was whether gaming could be used as a forecasting technique ‘ for sharpening our estimates of the probable consequences of policies pursued by various governments’. Would gaming spark “political inventiveness“, and more importantly, how did it compare to conventional policy analysis? Did gaming uncover problems that might otherwise be neglected? And invoking the emerging touchstone of intuition, did the experience impart to policy analysts and researchers “ a heightened sensitivity to problems of political strategy and policy consequences?”

  Sharon Ghamari- Tabrizi, The Worlds of Herman Kahn [ emphasis mine]

Another example:

“What we encountered, though, once our game-called Therapy, as it happens-was finished, were two remarkable things, both of which Colin Powell and Richard Duke might have told us. First, of all the professions, psychiatrists and psychologists tended to do worst at the game; secondly, the synthetic process worked even better in reverse. Playing the game expanded people’s grasp of human nature in general and their particular group’s dynamics. But even more, watching people play revealed a depth of information about them, and about the world at large, that you would ordinarily expect only from months of official therapy“

The quote comes from an article “Wanna Play ?” in Psychology Today. Further insights in the article:

“In fact, the phrase “just a game” is a masterpiece of cognitive dissonance. Games are anything but “just” anything. They cover the gamut of human endeavor and come in every package and medium you can imagine. Last year in the United States alone, 126 million board-style games were sold for $1.14 billion; video and computer games accounted for another $5 billion. It is impossible to calculate how much people benefit from games:

* Games are primers on turn-taking, the basis of all relationships.

* They can solve major crises in industry and teach people not to pilfer pencils from the company storeroom; in fact, companies spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year on them for that.

* They can be training grounds for legendary generals and make the difference between winning and losing wars.

* Finally, and most important, games can reopen doors into the world of pretending and childhood, reminding us of unadulterated fun, sparking creativity

Psychologically speaking, games have a knack for setting us free”

Instead of reading about games, you should be playing one 🙂

As some readers may be aware, the seldom subtle military writer Ralph Peters, launched a bombastic salvo at the authors of the Army-Marine COIN doctrine in the AFJ, crediting the degree of success enjoyed in Iraq by General Petraeus to the extent to which Petraeus has ignored his own strategy: 

“Dishonest doctrine A selective use of history taints the COIN manual”

“….Entrusted with the mission of turning Iraq around, Petraeus turned out to be a marvelously focused and methodical killer, able to set aside the dysfunctional aspects of the doctrine he had signed off on. Given the responsibility of command, he recognized that, when all the frills are stripped away, counterinsurgency warfare is about killing those who need killing, helping those who need help – and knowing the difference between the two (we spent our first four years in Iraq striking out on all three counts). Although Petraeus has, indeed, concentrated many assets on helping those who need help, he grasped that, without providing durable security – which requires killing those who need killing – none of the reconstruction or reconciliation was going to stick. On the ground, Petraeus has supplied the missing kinetic half of the manual.

 The troubling aspect of all this for the Army’s intellectual integrity comes from the neo-Stalinist approach to history a number of the manual’s authors internalized during their pursuit of doctorates on “the best” American campuses. Instead of seeking to analyze the requirements of counterinsurgency warfare rigorously before proceeding to draw impartial conclusions based on a broad array of historical evidence, they took the academic’s path of first setting up their thesis, then citing only examples that supported it.

To wit, the most over-cited bit of nonsense from the manual is the claim that counterinsurgency warfare is only 20 percent military and 80 percent political. No analysis of this indefensible proposition occurred. It was quoted because it suited the pre-formulated argument. Well, the source of that line was Gen. Chang Ting-chen, one of Mao’s less-distinguished subordinates. Had the authors bothered to look at Mao’s writings, they would have read that “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun,” that “whoever wants to seize and retain state power must have a strong army,” and that “only with guns can the whole world be transformed.”

The rest of the article continues in this vein, until no straw man remains standing and Peters emerges from the top of an ancient stone temple and hurls the severed head of LTC John Nagl down some steps to a savage crowd of painted milbloggers. I exaggerate here – but only slightly.

Mao ZeDong is an odd historical choice for Peters to expound upon here, on several levels. First, while Mao is oft-cited in the annals of military history and counterinsurgency theory, the United States military is not in a position in Iraq that is analogous to Mao’s guerillas. Or Mao’s totalitarian dictatorship either. Secondly, Mao never fought the kind of thoroughly decimatory campaigns in the Chinese civil war that Peters clearly envisions – at least not against a formidible military opponent; whenever possible, Mao tried to politically co-opt the toughest warlords allied with the Kuomintang into the CCP. When giving battle, Mao’s forces usually suffered a beating at the hands of first-rate Nationallist armies. If anything, Mao’s military leadership was probably a greater menace to his own Red Army troops than to their Nationalist and Japanese enemies. Thirdly, by contrast, Chiang Kai-shek and the Imperial Japanese Army both undertook truly exterminatory campaigns in China, the former with the help of German advisers, against the Communists; and the latter with their “Loot All, Kill All, Burn All” scorched earth strategy. Unlike Mao, neither the Generalissimo nor the Japanese achieved any lasting success despite employing the most brutal tactics this side of Hitler’s Einsatzgruppen.

Dave Dilegge, Editor-in-Chief of the excellent Small Wars Journal, responded to Peters, refuting his assertions point by point in his post “Peace, Love, COIN?”  at the SWJ Blog. Most of Dave’s rebuttal is beyond the scope of this post but he too takes Peters to task on the Mao citation:

“But I surmise that some of Peters’ annoyance comes from the fact that non-military professionals, in concert with their military counterparts, had a hand in the production of FM 3-24 as he takes exception to the doctrine’s use of the General Chang Ting-chen 20 / 80 percent quotation.

‘To wit, the most over-cited bit of nonsense from the manual is the claim that counterinsurgency warfare is only 20 percent military and 80 percent political.Anyone looking objectively at the situation in Iraq could hardly claim that it’s only 20 percent military and 80 percent diplomatic. Even the State Department doesn’t really believe that one – or they would’ve kept a tighter leash on their private security contractors.Wishful thinking doesn’t defeat insurgencies. Without the will to establish and maintain security for the population, nothing else works.’

Peters misses the mark here by misrepresenting FM 3-24’s intent of presenting the 20 / 80 “rule of thumb” as a metaphoric means of conveying that political factors are primary during COIN.

‘General Chang Ting-chen of Mao Zedong’s central committee once stated that revolutionary war was 80 percent political action and only 20 percent military. Such an assertion is arguable and certainly depends on the insurgency’s stage of development; it does, however, capture the fact that political factors have primacy in COIN. At the beginning of a COIN operation, military actions may appear predominant as security forces conduct operations to secure the populace and kill or capture insurgents; however, political objectives must guide the military’s approach. Commanders must, for example, consider how operations contribute to strengthening the HN government’s legitimacy and achieving U.S. political goals.

This means that political and diplomatic leaders must actively participate throughout the conduct (planning, preparation, execution, and assessment) of COIN operations. The political and military aspects of insurgencies are so bound together as to be inseparable. Most insurgent approaches recognize that fact.Military actions executed without properly assessing their political effects at best result in reduced effectiveness and at worst are counterproductive. Resolving most insurgencies requires a political solution; it is thus imperative that counterinsurgent actions do not hinder achieving that political solution.’

While using the current situation in Iraq as an example Peters conveniently neglects to acknowledge (or does not believe) that we paid dearly for not implementing a strategy of political primacy early in the execution of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Instead, we had a Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) responsible for the non-military elements of national power. The CPA and its Chief Executive L. Paul Bremer were a disaster – inexperienced and political ideologues in critical jobs, disbanding the Iraqi Army, “de-Ba’athification” and the hate-hate relationship between the CPA and the military’s Combined Joint Task Force 7 (later Multi-National Force-Iraq) are but a few examples of what can be called a classic case study in how to create and fuel an insurgency due to political neglect.”

In this section Dave did a nice job demonstrating, unlike Ralph Peters, the vital importance of context, both for scholarly accuracy as well as for the construction of valid historical analogies.

Joining Dilegge in his criticism of Peters was Dr. Chet Richards of Defense & The National Interest . Richards then used that to springboard into a general historical discussion of maximalist vs. minimalist approaches to using force in a COIN scenario:

“Ave Caesar!”

“As delightful as it is to see anybody deflate Ralph Peters (although Peters has trumpeted his “kill them all” tough guy rhetoric for so long that he’s become a parody of himself), it’s disturbing that as astute an observer as Steve Metz has forsworn counterinsurgency and is pining away for tactics based on mass killings and genocide (… that the Roman method is more effective).

Van Creveld makes a strong case in his latest book, The Changing Face of War, that this is true where local governments are fighting local insurgencies (which also covers Peters’ case of the Mau Mau insurgency in Kenya. Even there, however, the British were eventually forced out).

When it comes to suppressing insurgencies that are fighting foreign occupiers, however, nothing has worked very well since about the middle of the 20th century. The Belgians probably hold the modern record for use of the Roman method, killing by some estimates 50% of the local population in the Congo, but were still driven out. The Soviets didn’t hesitate to use it, and where is their empire? We killed several million people in Southeast Asia. Gen Hermann Balck told Boyd that shifting the Schwerpunkt towards Leningrad would probably have worked, but in the end, the excellence of the German Army couldn’t compensate for the fanatical opposition generated by Hitler’s racial policies (van C notes that forces available to Germany for long-term occupation would have amounted to less than 1% of the population of the planned Nazi empire).

As Gen Sir Rupert Smith writes in The Utility of Force, if you’re going to use coercion as your C/I tool, you can never, ever let up. The moral and financial toll this extracts eventually saps the moral foundation – in a democracy, popular support – for continuing the war. OK, it’s true that if you can kill 100% of the inhabitants, the job is easier, but somewhere along the line we have seriously degenerated into fantasy.”

While I am in general agreement with Dilegge and Richards in principle, I think that Chet has selected a particularly poor example to support his argument. The assumptions regarding Nazi occupation policy used by Martin van Creveld  in his counterfactual example in The Changing Face of War (pp 214-219) to criticize fellow historian John Keegan are at best, highly arguable and at worst, wrong. We all like to see the good guys win and root against the Nazis but such a hypothetical argument based on relative demographics would not be accepted as proving that 4GW forces were doomed just because states like India and China have inexhaustible manpower reserves.

Neither the Wehrmacht campaign against Tito’s Communist partisans in Yugoslavia nor SS operations in “the East” represent the whole spectrum of Nazi occupation policies or the advantages the Germans were exploiting or could have exploited. Hitler did not, as far as we are able to discern from records, intend for the Wehrmacht to permanently garrison every state in a postwar German Europe nor did he try to do so even while at war, except in extremis. Autonomous satellites under reliable military and radical right dictatorships, as in Axis Hungary and Romania, suited the Fuhrer perfectly, as did neutral regimes that were intimidated by Nazi might (Sweden, Switzerland) or with ideological affinity for National Socialism ( Spain, Portugal). A  dystopian but functional Nazi “New Order”, leveraging local fifth column fascists and appeasing Nationalists in European countries, would have been no less viable than Stalin’s postwar Soviet bloc, which took several years to crush anticommunist guerilla armies in Ukraine.

None of the above however, suggests that Peters is right; simply that most intelligent counterinsurgent powers, even Roman legions or Nazi Germans, will not entirely rely upon democidal tactics. The British assassinated the dreaded SS intel chief, Reinhard Heydrich not because he was cruel but because “the Hangman” was winning over the Czechs with astute occupation policies. Cartoonish appeals for indiscriminate general slaughter remain unhelpful and unwise for states fighting insurgencies, particular if these states profess to be liberal democracies.