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ZENPUNDIT OF CHICAGO BOYZ

At the gracious invitation of Jonathan, I have become one of the co-bloggers at the highly respected Chicago Boyz. It is an honor to be included in such thoughtful and erudite company and I look forward to a long and enjoyable relationship with my new cohorts, including Lexington Green, who has already proven most cordial to me in the offline world.

Primarily, I will be cross-posting select items from Zenpundit but I will also be making periodic original contributions to Chicago Boyz as I find my ” groove” there – and I will try hard to refrain from wandering into abstruse military theory from the 5GW dimension ( I’ll save that for here).

My maiden post is entitled “On History“. An excerpt:

“…Linear paradigms in history, while offering a tidy, chronological sequence that is familiar to anyone who, as a child, was required to draw a timeline in school, present their own analytical problems. On an ideological level, the view of history as unidirectional “progress” tends to breed a spirit of determinism that inclines the historian to ignore contrary evidence. Much has been made about leftist MESA scholars in academia who were blind to the rise of Islamism before 9/11; much the same could be said of conservative scholars in the West who ignored the potential barbarism of Fascism and National Socialism. It is possible for history to move backwards, metaphorically speaking. Or backwards and forwards at the same time, as in the case of the Nazis, who championed both atavistic racialism and modern technology.”

Read the rest here.

Again, I’d like to thank Jonathan for the warm welcome and for gibing me another place to hang my hat.

DOWNGRADING “THE UNTHINKABLE” TO “THINKABLE”

John Robb at Global Guerillas had a post up entitled ” The Lost Generation of Warfare” in which he remarks on the stance of the 4GW Theory school toward nuclear warfare:

“The Lost Generation

As per the framework, states that used the most recent form of warfare could reliably defeat those states that still clung to the previous generation. This continued to hold true until the final thrust at the end of WW2 at Hiroshima and Nagasaki proved that nuclear warfare was the new salient generation. Lind and his cohorts ignore this generation of warfare, since with its advent the generational advancement of inter-state warfare breaks down. The technologies of this “lost” generation of warfare quickly progressed to MIRVed (multiple independent re-entry vehicles) ICBMs (intercontinental ballistic missiles) that could mobilize for global war in minutes, maneuver to enemy rear areas in fractions of an hour, and unleash firepower that could destroy the entire urban infrastructure of a state. At that point, the trends of interstate warfare reached their logical conclusion in their negation. The well founded fear of this form of warfare made hot war between the great powers unthinkable. “

As I remarked in John’s comment section, Martin van Creveld discussed nuclear war in several of his books but Robb is probably right that so important a subject merits it’s own generation in the 4GW taxonomy. The amount of nuclear war planning and gaming by the militaries of ” the nuclear club” states, to say nothing of the fiscal expenditures and infrastructure, would be strong evidence.

Moreover, the large body of nuclear deterrence theory literature created by theorists, planners, officials and foreign policy experts like Wohlstetter, Kahn, Kissinger, Brodie and so on ought to be reviewed, particularly for their more outlier speculations. As we move into an era of proliferation, “micro-atomic” and specialized nuclear arms, “uncertain” proliferators (do thay have it? Will it work ? To what extent) and non-state actors, the old calculus of massive nuclear arsenals held by two superpowers upon which deterrence is based comes undone.

The unthinkable edges ever closer to thinkable.

ONE OF THOSE EVENINGS

I sit down in front of my computer. I have a drink ( a rum and diet coke). I have some snacks. I have scribbled ideas on post-it notes scattered all over. I start writing a post I’ve been mulling over for a while. The writing flows….in bad directions….aaaghhh…that’s NOT what I meant to say….where the hell’s the link ? Save to draft ! Save to draft !

Imbibe rum and coke. Go read a book.

RECOMMENDED READING

This should be a good edition. Let the sparks fly:

From Dr. Carl Conetta of The Project on Defense Alternatives, a new article “Resolving Iraq” which lays out what I would term the ” withdraw now” position on Iraq of the more Democratic side of the national security and defense communities. A summary can be found here. I am pairing this one with:

From LTC David Kilcullen, special adviser to the State Department, “Don’t confuse the “Surge” with the Strategy” at the SWJ Blog. Colonel Kilcullen describes the change as
“The new strategy reflects counterinsurgency best practice as demonstrated over dozens of campaigns in the last several decades“. This post can also be discussed at The Small Wars Council.

Matt at MountainRunner has a post that should be of interest to many readers here (including Tom, Steve, John, Critt and Dave) – “Visualizing connectivity, civilization, readers of this blog“. A picture is worth 1000 words in this instance.

Speaking of Dave, at Thoughts Illustrated he has an example of “Amazode” a very cool ” book networking visualization” app. Try entering some of your favorite books into the search.

Updating the series on Evolutionary Cognitivism by Dan of tdaxp:

Selection and Cognition, Epigenetics and Diversity, Children and Diversity, The Implicit and the Explicit, Man among men , More than Genes, Bibliography

eerie at Aqoul reviews Hernando De Soto’s The Mystery of Capital. eerie is getting quite good at scouting out good reading material for my book pile.

The latest Hugh Hewitt-Thomas Barnett transcript can be found here.

At Secrecy News they have a copy up (roughly 400 page PDF) of the Defense Science Board’s unclassified “Educing Information:Interrogation Science and Art“. This was the report I received last week and it has some good material for those interested in the intelligence side of things.

“Difference and Friction” at the consistently excellent Edge Perspective with John Hagel.

That’s it.

TESTING

Is it working?