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TESTING A WIDGET

This is from searchCrystal – in beta version presently. Readers – give it a spin and ( if you have time)sound off in the comments. I’m going to play around with it a bit myself.

THE TRIBAL COIN OF THE REALM

[ed. note – entry corrected, my apologies to Colonel McCallister and thanks to Dave for the clarification]

Dave Dilegge, editor of The Small Wars Journal has an excellent post up at The SWJ Blog entitled “COIN in a Tribal Society“, relaying the contents of an email from Colonel William (Mac) McCallister (USA Ret.), currently an adivser with II MEF in Iraq. A very rich bibilographic entry, McCallister hits hard at the point of our general failure to communicate our words and deeds in a culturally relevant and comprehensible frame:

“The design and execution of a counterinsurgency campaign in tribal society must reflect the opponent’s cultural realities, his social norms and conventions of war and peacemaking. The fight in Anbar province is a “clash of martial cultures” and reflects two divergent concepts of victory and defeat and “rules of play”. The conventions of war and peace for both sides are based on unique historical and social experience and are expressed in each side’s stylized way of fighting and peacemaking. The central tenet in the design and execution of counterinsurgency operations is that it must take into consideration an opponent’s cultural realities so as to effectively communicate intent.

The study of the “tribal terrain” is a challenge. The reason – comprehensive research materials on Iraqi tribal organization, tribal diplomacy, and the art of tribal war and peacemaking are sparse. The majority of reading materials therefore are general and regional in nature and require “reading between the lines” to gain an appreciation for tribal organizing principles, cultural operating codes, and the tribal art of war and peace. The material is intended to assist the student of the tribal art of war and peace in developing an analytic structure for assessing personal experiences, observations and unit after action reports. The ultimate objective is to assist the warfighter in assessing the effectiveness of counterinsurgency tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs) and cultural criteria to determine why certain approaches succeed or fail.”

I will go one better; the United States government has not come to grips with the need to craft our diplomatic and strategic inititives with a multi-tiered and interactively complex set of audiences in mind. Too often, our leaders are playing primarily to the domestic American audience and then secondarily – and arguably a very distant second – a narrow and westernized foreign elite.

Radical transparency created by the internet and information technologies are breaking down the ability to compartmentalize messages and signals – the amplitude is higher and “broadcasting” can now take place far down the chain with strategic corporals in dusty villages instead of UN ambassadors across polished tables. The rules of the game are changing and we must change with it.

ADDENDUM:

Colonel W. Patrick Lang “ How to Work With Tribesmen” (PDF)

David Ronfeldt -“In Search of How Societies Work: Tribes, the First and Forever Form“(PDF)

ON THE FRONTIERS OF WEB 2.0

PC World magazine has named their ” 25 Websites to Watch” ( hat tip to Mrs. Zenpundit) though how many will still exist in 2 years is an open question. Some of these, I have immediate use for; others, I’m not sure how anyone outside of an undergraduate munching cheetos in a dorm room will have the time. I suggest you read the article, as my opinion on tech matters is of negligible weight.

Here are the sites they have chosen by category and see for yourselves. Epistles from the tecno-geek blog set, on the merits of any of these sites, are welcomed.

Mashups, Maps, and More:

Popfly, Yahoo Pipes, BuzzDash, Wayfaring, CircleUp .

Organizers, Searchers and Optimizers:

Pageflakes, Spock, Swivel, Clipmarks, OpenDNS .

Real Estate, Bookmarks and Blogs:

Trulia, PopURLs, Groowy, BlogBackupOnline, Ma.gnolia .

Five ways to Create and Share:

Yodio, Meebo Rooms, Squidoo, SpashCast, Eyespot .

Sites for Collaborative Work and Play:

Approver, Pbwiki, MyPunchBowl, Picnik, Quintura .

DID NIXON INTEND TO WIN THE VIETNAM WAR?

I was perusing historian David Kaiser’s blog History Unfolding, when I came across a remarkable claim regarding Richard Nixon, based in part on Robert Dallek’s new book, Nixon and Kissinger:Partners in Power:

“Nixon and Kissinger, to begin with, came into office determined to win the Vietnam War. In an odd parallel to the current Administration—which decided that 9/11 totally discredited the Middle East policies of the last forty years—they evidently believed that the whole experience of the Johnson Administration had nothing whatever to teach them. Nixon, who saw himself far superior both to his two immediate predecessors and to any successor on the horizon, was convinced that Johnson had failed to win the war only because of a lack of will, the quality on which he prided himself the most. One omission from Nixon and Kissinger (which is more of a biographical study than a policy history) is any discussion of NSSM-1, a massive study of Vietnam which Kissinger commissioned upon taking office. It concluded that nothing the US had done had significantly weakened the enemy’s ability to fight, and that no agency of the US government could foresee the day when the South Vietnamese alone could deal with the enemy. A bold and rational leader must have concluded that the United States had to scale down its objectives to end the war, but Nixon did not. He and Kissinger spent about a year vainly trying to get the Soviet Union to end the war by pressuring the North Vietnamese, and then (as Nixon publicly admitted) tried to gain an advantage with the kind of “decisive” action which, Nixon thought, Johnson had avoided—the invasion of Cambodia. Meanwhile, political and military considerations (the latter involving the state of the armed forces) impelled Nixon to withdraw troops, but he continued to believe that he could make the North give in to our terms—an independent, non-Communist South Vietnam—by unleashing an all-out bombing attack whenever he chose. And historian Jeffrey Kimball was right: Nixon was determined not to make peace without giving such a campaign a chance, as eventually, in December 1972, he did—at the cost of 15 American B-52s, and without in the least improving the terms that Kissinger had already negotiated.”

For readers who are unfamiliar, Dr. Kaiser is a historian of the Vietnam War era, with special expertise in the Kennedy administration. I have not read the Dallek book yet, though I certainly intend to now ( I did anyway but David’s post has advanced it well up my reading list) as the assertion conflicts sharply with what has previously been known about Nixon’s strategic thinking at the time.

Nixon was one of the first major political figures to (gingerly to be sure) try to put South Vietnam into the context of it’s actual geopolitical value to the United States, which was small, in a major speech at Bohemian Grove and then in a Foreign Affairs article ” Asia after Vietnam”. Much of the discourse Nixon used about the war among his intimates involved his administration’s ( or America’s) “credibility” or “toughness” in the eyes of Communist adversaries in Hanoi, Beijing and Moscow. Having read innumerable documents and memoirs I’m hard-pressed to believe that Nixon ever thought the Vietnam War was ” winnable” and not an albatross that was hindering him from accomplishing his larger strategic goals, especially the China opening. Nixon desperately wanted to avoid outright defeat in Vietnam, certainly, and to use his handling of the war to send signals elsewhere but throwing his administration, heart and soul into winning the war was never on the table.

Nevertheless, Dallek has new material, according to Kaiser, for a new argument. It needs to be scrutinized objectively to see how or if Dallek broadens our understanding of the war and of Richard Nixon’s administration. This is how historical truth advances, one document, one argument, one book at a time.

I look forward to reading it.

KOMSOMOL WITHOUT THE COMMUNISM

Recruiting for the next “rent-a-riot” to disrupt anti-Putin demonstrations. Man, are they just going through the motions here. Sad.

Hat tip to Dr. Von.