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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

“If you build it, they will come…”

A start-up called Creative Weblogging  is attempting to build a stable of  business/finance/tech bloggers from scratch by paying unknowns a modest but not unattractive sum ($ 84 -140/ month) for steady posting.  In fact, they offer a “Pro Blogger Compensation Package” of sorts:

Pro Blogger Compensation Package:

• Monthly compensation: $84-140 (US) – paid via PayPal or Moneybookers
• 3-5 posts per week are required, min. of 70 words each.
• Traffic bonuses for aggressively growing traffic are available.
• Access to our vibrant community discussion group with 80+ bloggers, where you can share tips and network.
• We take care of all the technology with an advanced blogging platform.
• We also provide marketing support.
• Virtual shares program: blog with us for a year and you can earn virtual shares in the company.

Hmmmm…..Do “virtual shares” pay real dividends? 

Kind of interesting. Where Newsvine tried relying upon an ego-driven reputation management economy to gain free content, these folks are betting on actually sharing some of the wealth with creators will assemble a social network that can be commoditized.  As most bloggers produce inane drivel, especially when they are new to the game, the payment is far more than the labor is worth – until they find a blogger who can pull in hundreds of thousands of hits a week. Four of five of them should pay the bills for all the failures.

Presumably their business model is some kind of targeted RSS feed subscription marketing to justify ad revenues and later by hyping products by raising their status in the attention economy, assuming the network ever commands that kind of traffic leverage. I suspect the company retains intellectual property rights to what their bloggers write but I could be wrong. Bears watching as an experiment in the evolution of Web 2.0.

( Hat tip to Complexity and Social Networks Blog)

Friends of Zenpundit are an enterprising crew:

Shane Deichman has launched a new business entity, EMC2 and has joined a thinker who has been featured here, Dr. Yaneer Bar-Yam, at The New England Complex Systems Institute. Having talked a little science with Shane, where he swiftly blasts out of my humble layman’s orbit, I think this will be a fantastic fit for his expertise in particle physics. AND, if this is not enough…there’s a new Deichman on the way !

Dr. Daniel Nexon has finished his book, one that should be read by anyone interested in 4GW and the emergence of the Westphalian society of states,  Religious Conflict, International Change, and the Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe,.

Dan of tdaxp has wed his true love and found time, somewhere, to redesign his blog with a sharp new look, abandoning the crappy, subpar, Blogspirit platform in the process.

Jesus! I feel lazy in comparison…..

One of my most thoughtful blogfriends, Dave Schuler, is worried about the downstream cultural effects of a creeping cognitive reliance on visual media:. A selection from different posts on the subject by Dave:

“I Can Read a Passage in a Book 20 Times and It Doesn’t Click”

More On Visualcy

The Visual Imagery Society

The old methods of handbook and lecture don’t work anymore-the new crop of trainers can’t learn that way. They need visual training-simulations and hands-on. The performance of the new trainees was characterized in the feature as “improving”. No word on whether it’s come up to the standard of their old-fashioned literate predecessors

Not only are the arguments not subject to logical refutation, logical refutation may not be comprehended by those for whom visualcy is the primary communication modality.

What I find most concerning about this trend is that developments in government paralleled the transition from oral to literate societies. Divine and semi-divine chiefs and monarchs were replaced by representative government. Is bureaucracy the analogue in government of visual imagery as a dominant communication modality? Chaos? Autocracy? The only notable developments I’ve seen over the last couple of decades are an increasing tendency in the Western democracies towards bureaucracy as the operative form of government and a greater tendency to follow charismatic chiefs, the societal modality that John W. Campbell characterized as “barbarism”.

I’ll conclude this speculation with questions rather than answers.

• Is visual imagery overtaking the written word as the dominant form of communication, especially for communicating new knowledge?
• If so, what are the cognitive implications of the change?
• What are the social and political implications of the change in cognitive behavior?

As it happens, I have another thoughtful blogfriend, Dave Davison, who is a foursquare enthusiast for emergent visualcy technology. Davison was, if I recall correctly, involved in the development of some of the ambient devices on which Schuler opined.  A few representative posts from Davison:

MuralCasting – Improving ROA (Return on attention) -corrected 2.8.08

Logic + Emotion: Developing an Experience Strategy in 4 Parts

Too many ripples in the pond?

The problem with “visualcy”, as I interpret Schuler’s posts, is if it were to become a successor and replacement for the Western culture of  “literacy” that stretches back, with sporadic interruptions, to classical Greece. Visualcy, in the hands ( or eyes) of someone who has never learned to think logically or coherently in a textual format, is a dangerous thing as it powerfully lulls them into a false sense of comprehension. Visualcy, used by someone with the requisite analytical cognitive skills, would be a powerful tool for efficient data compression, synthesis and communication. From personal experience, I can attest that well constructed visual models can be a gateway to understanding for some of my students.

The underlying problem to this discussion is that too large a segment of our population never become truly literate as they pass through our public education system – they are disjointed “scanners” of words rather than readers who habitually fall prey to the maxim of “Garbage in, Garbage out”. What non-emotionally driven thinking they attempt based on information from a  text is often from significant misunderstanding; and if they do not have the good fortune to have teachers who can engage them with mathematics, they might never pick up logical reasoning at all.  Math instruction, I am convinced, despite my own struggles with that subject, is one of the “thin blue lines” holding our civilization together.

What to do ? The attractiveness of visual imagery would appear to be a neurological constant of our brain structure and the potential of visual analytics as field can hardly be ignored so our fallback must be attention to fundamentals. Education has to be a process that ends for the great majority in minds that are trained to think critically and creatively. We are maxing out our legislative strategies on societal and institutional accountability here and will have to contemplate greater emphasis on student and parental responsibility for the education of children than we have so far been willing to countenance.

I think I’m over the worst of my recent time crunch. In any event, I thought I’d put some effort into the blog tonight. Times like this, I wish Zenpundit was a group blog.