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ON WAR

Dan of tdaxp is becoming quite the Boydian commentator lately – ain’t that a PISSR ?

Speaking of the Boydians, an essay at Defense and the National Interest by William S. Lind caught my eye for the following passage:

“The officials said the United States would win any projected conflict across the globe, but the path to victory could be more complicated.

“There is no doubt of what the outcome is going to be,” a top defense official said. “Risk to accomplish the task isn’t even part of the discussion.”

It isn’t, but it certainly should be. The idea that the U.S. military cannot be defeated is disconnected from reality.

Let me put it plainly: the U.S. military can be beaten. Any military in history could be beaten, including the Spanish army of Olivares’s day, which had not lost a battle in a century until it met the French at Rocroi. Sooner or later, we will march to our Rocroi, and probably sooner the way things are going.

Why? Because war is the province of chance. You cannot predict the outcome of a war just by counting up the stuff on either side and seeing who has more. Such “metrics” leave out strategy and stratagem, pre-emption and trickery, generalship and luck. They leave out John Boyd’s all-important mental and moral levels. What better example could we have than the war in Iraq, which the Pentagon was sure was over the day we took Baghdad? Can these people learn nothing? “

Government, by nature if not design, tends to learn nothing and remember everything.

I do not agree with Lind in every respect. The United States has not had a hyperaggressive foreign policy since 1991 but a wildly erratic one bereft of strategic direction, driven by the need to respond to the actions of others. Or worse, to ignore the actions of others based upon short-term political interests and public opinion polls. American hyperactivity has often been paired with a dolorous indolence in the face of obvious dangers.

Lind is dead square right on the folly of leaders who cut themselves off from dissenting views and attempt to manipulate their own information flows. All you accomplish by doing this in the long term is to royally screw-up your own analytical judgement by tampering with the feedback loop.

Treasure your critics, especially the ones who seem to hate you and even when they seem to always be wrong. They are like the slave of the Roman Imperator whispering ” Remember, thou art mortal”.

A HISTORICAL OBSERVATION OF SOME MERIT, THE SOURCE NOTWITHSTANDING

I have to begin by remarking I’m not in the habit of paying much attention to anything Gabriel Kolko has to say. Having once been forced to wade through one too many of his excessively shrill Marxist diatribes in grad school by one of his more uncritical admirers, I’ve done my best ever since to ignore Kolko’s work.

Nevertheless, HNN ran a piece by Kolko this week that had a section that struck me as insightful and worth generalizing:

“The Saigon army commanded by Nguyen van Thieu also was far stronger than their adversaries. At the beginning of 1975 they had over three times as much artillery, twice as many tanks and armored cars, 1400 aircraft and a virtual monopoly of the air. They had a two-to-one superiority of combat troops – roughly 700,000 to 320,000. The Communist leadership in early 1975 expected the war to last as much as a decade longer. I was in South Vietnam at the end of 1973 and in Hanoi all of April 1975 until the last four days of the war, when I was in Hue and Danang in the south. I am certain the Communists were almost as surprised as the Americans that victory was to be theirs so quickly and easily; I told them from late 1973 onward to expect an end to the war by the Saigon regime capsizing without a serious fight – much as the Kuomintang had in China after 1947. As a future Politburo member later confessed, they regarded my prediction as “crazy.” They were completely unprepared to run the entire nation, and their chaotic, inconsistent economic policies since 1975 have shown.

The Americans and Communists alike shared a common myopia regarding wars. What happens in the political, social, and economic spheres are far more decisive than military equations. That was true in China in the late 1940s, in Vietnam in 1975, and it is also the case in Iraq today.

…South Vietnam had always been corrupt since the U.S. arbitrarily created it in 1955 despite the Geneva Accords provision that there should be an election to reunify what was historically and ethnically one nation. Thieu, who was a Catholic in a dominantly Buddhist country, retained the loyalty of his generals and bureaucracy by allowing them to enrich themselves at the expense of the people. The average Vietnamese, whether they were for or against the Communists, had no loyalty whatsoever to the Thieu regime that was robbing them. After 1973, soldiers’ salaries declined with inflation and they began living off the land. The urban middle class was increasingly alienated, the Thieu regime’s popularity fell with it. It admitted there were 32,000 political prisoners in its jails, but other estimates were far higher.”

Corruption eats away at the legitimacy of any state. If you recall your Machiavelli, a man will sooner forgive the Prince the murder of his father than the robbery of his patrimony. Formerly, the totalitarian nature of our adversaries kept their corruption within bounds. As long as Stalinist state terror was operating or the memory of such experiences remained fresh the level of corruption remained petty, small things done, as the Russians used to say, ” na levo” – ” on the left”.

No longer. Corruption destroyed many of the post-colonial African states and is eating away at Russia, Mexico and China to name just a few potential members of the Core who could retreat into Gap status if corruption is not checked. Pundita, has been at pains to explain how Mexico’s corrupt system is harming American interests but Mexico is merely the worst case that happens to be nearby. The Oil-for-Bribes scandal demonstrated that solid members of the Core as well as the UN and EU are are starting to succumb.

A cancer left untreated, grows. We are not immune.

WHITE HOUSE AND CONGRESS EVACUATED- PLANE OFF COURSE

Breaking news…staff and media are leaving in a semi-panic. Fighter jets are up…

UPDATE: All clear signalled.

COMMENT: One of these moments…once in a while…not a bad reminder.

A FOX AND NOT A HEDGEHOG

In the current issue of Foreign Affairs, Brad DeLong has reviewed the new biography of economist John Kenneth Galbraith by Richard Parker and bemoaned the current lack of influence by one of American liberalism’s most productive intellects:

“Lots of ideas in the background of contemporary U.S. political and economic thought are Galbraith’s. His work as an economist was a scattered but comprehensive attempt to think through the consequences of the transition from a nation of small farms and workshops to one of large factories and superstores. In doing so, he took on many of the questions most central to the new U.S. economic landscape: How much can advertising shape demand? In a world of passive shareholders, autonomous managers and engineers, and firm decisions that emerge out of internal bureaucratic contests, just what are the objectives that drive big firms? How does competition work when its principal dimensions are quality and marketing rather than price? And critically, how do the limits of polite discourse allow the system to hold itself together while constraining its flexibility?

For decades, Galbraith’s influence in politics was unmatched by any other economist. The pieces of his advice best remembered are those that went against the “conventional wisdom” (a now ubiquitous phrase that Galbraith coined): strategic bombing did not win World War II; Vietnam was a strategically unimportant quagmire where the United States would do more harm than good; macroeconomic “fine tuning” is likely to blow up in the face of policymakers; the businessman’s capacity for self-delusion is nearly infinite. Galbraith sees the United States as a would-be social democracy that has lost its way, assuming that if only the self-serving declarations of the right could be wiped away, the benefits of a bigger, more activist government would become obvious to everyone. The right-wing claim that the most efficient economy is one in which the gales of perfect competition scour the land is, in Galbraith’s view, nonsense. Modern industrial and post-industrial production is a large-scale process, large-scale processes require planning, and planning requires stability — which means that the gales of the market must be calmed.

This political vision, however, has been in retreat since the early 1980s. Nobody wants to hear about the importance of Big Government, Big Bureaucracy, or Big Labor (which hardly even exists). Galbraith’s economic views have undergone an even more distressing eclipse. Among economists (excluding economic historians), the 70-year-olds have read Galbraith and think he is very important; the 50-year-olds have read Galbraith and know that the 70-year-olds think he is important but are not sure why; and the 30-year-olds have not even read him.”

Unlike Professor DeLong’s grad students, I read Galbraith well before I was thirty and I can attest that the man has a gift for creating concepts of great utility and horizontal application – my favorite being ” countervailing power”. The answer for Galbraith’s lack of relevance today is easy to see.

John Kenneth Galbraith, for all his many intellectual contributions, was fundamentally wrong on the great economic and political question of the twentieth century – which is best for society, freedom or planning ?

Galbraith was on the side of the planners. An elitist philosophy that could not be made to work even during the second wave, industrial revolution, smokestack and lunch pail society of Ortega y Gasset’s ” Mass-Man”, is now a quaint anachronism in the era of globalized markets and virtual products.

Galbraith was a fox and not a hedgehog.

THE STRONG POSSIBILITY EXISTS THAT BEIJING FINDS NORTH KOREA MORE TROUBLESOME THAN WE DO [ DOUBLE UPDATED]

The diligent historians laboring at The Cold War History Project have been busy translating decades of diplomatic material from the archives of the former Eastern bloc satellites on North Korea’s strange and often rocky relationship with the rest of the Communist world. KimIl-Sung, the father of the current dictator proved to have been a major headache for MoscowAn excerpt:

“These documents from North Korea’s former allies give us a record of what constrained the DPRK-—what worked and what did not,” said Kathryn Weathersby, senior associate and coordinator of CWIHP’s Korea Initiative. As U.S. policymakers differ on whether to take a hard or soft approach toward North Korea, this new material brings a level of reality to that debate, she said, “by revealing the evolution of North Korean thinking about the use of military force against South Korea and about the perception of threats to the DPRK…

…The “Stalin formula” had two main tenets. First, North Korea could not decide on its own whether to invade South Korea, but had to consult its allies and await decision from Moscow. Second, North Korea was permitted to defend itself from a U.S. or South Korean attack. The DPRK took full advantage of this latter point, said Weathersby, “a loophole that inadvertently encouraged Kim Sung Il to stage provocations disguised as attacks from the South.”

Thus, in January 1968, North Korea sent 30 commandos disguised as South Korean guerillas to the Blue House in Seoul to kill South Korea’s President Park Chung Hee. Kim Il Sung had hoped this action would incite an uprising in the South and a subsequent request for military aid from the North, thus leading to reunification. But the commandos were captured, all but one were killed, and the failed plot was exposed. To divert attention from this embarrassment, North Korea seized an American intelligence ship, the USS Pueblo, charging U.S. aggression. One crewmember was killed, several wounded, and the 80 surviving crewmembers were taken hostage for 11 months.

In the United States, the Johnson administration assumed the Soviet Union was behind the Pueblo attack and took steps to reinforce its military strength along the Soviet border. The new evidence, however, reveals that North Korea did not consult any of its allies before the attack. “The Soviets were ignorant of the plot but after the Pueblo attack, they used their influence to restrain North Korea and make them take less provocative actions,” said Weathersby. But when Kim sent a note to Moscow asking for reassurance that the Soviet Union would indeed offer assistance should North Korea be attacked, “Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev made it clear to the North Koreans that the Soviets would not get dragged into war with the United States by North Korea—-that the alliance was strictly defensive.”

To relay this message, Brezhnev summoned Kim to Moscow but with remarkable impudence Kim declined to go, sending his defense minister in his place. Nonetheless, despite their anger, “the Soviets had to publicly defend North Korea in part to rebuff what they saw as U.S. arrogance. Privately, though, the Soviets pulled the Koreans back and the situation was calmed,” said Weathersby. “Although North Korea kept pushing the envelope,” she observed, “it still stayed within the ‘Stalin formula.’”

It may be that Pyongyang’s rattling of nuclear sabres causes more of a spike in Maalox consumption at the Chinese Foreign Ministry than at the White House.

UPDATE: TM Lutas examines how DPRK nuke tests might affect Beijing

UPDATE II: Dr. Barnett says that Kim Jong-Il ” must go down”.