zenpundit.com

Top Billing! Lexington Green – Abu Musab al-Suri: Theorist of Modern Jihad

A superb post with wonderful links on the theorist of Islamist terrorism, al-Suri who is that movement’s John Arquilla, William Lind and Louis Beam rolled into one. He probably would have made a fine blogger had he not also been – well – a sociopathic nihilist.

Shane Deichman – Dreaming 5GW –  GW Theory Cast Too high

Recently, TDAXP began a reification of the GW theories that Shane joins in, rejecting linearity, sequence or manifestations of GW as descriptive of a strategic level conflict. I’ve never been comfortable with interpreting GW as a linear, historical, theory with ironclad universal predictive qualities ( “Everywhere there is the decline of the State”). I’ve always preferred it as a taxonomy that, as a strategic theory that like “Deterrence”, has useful applications in analysis and scenario planning.

As I have never felt the need to defend the 4GW school as revealed scripture, I see no urgent need to junk the 4GW terminology in favor of a new set of neologisms either. That said, read Shane’s post anyway.

Thomas P.M. Barnett – “The Inevitable Alliance“

The Sino-American geopolitical security relationship is transitional and symbiotic.

Steve DeAngelis – Looking towards the Future with Ray Kurzweil

An excellent review of Kurweillian futurism.

Whirledview – The Foreign Service and the Military and  The Odoms: Father and Son ( both by PHK )

Two posts with subjects of great interest to readers here.

Art Hutchinson – Butterflies for Dummies

Some support for the argument of Nassim Nicholas Taleb in The Black Swan.

William Lind – On War #262: Pyrrhic Victory

A nice commentary on the challenges of 2GW during the First World War and the costs of mechanistic, attritional, warfare.

Complexity and Social Networks Blog – .NetMap

Cool!  And possibly revealing!

That’s it!

I have been tagged by the mighty General of the Hordes. So be it!

Here are the rules:

1. Link to your tagger and post these rules on your blog.
2. Share 7 facts about yourself on your blog, some random, some weird.
3. Tag 7 people at the end of your post by leaving their names as well as links to their blogs.
4. Let them know they are tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.
5. Present an image of martial discord from whatever period or situation you’d like.

Here are the facts:

1. I own an authentic, WWII era Gunto sword as well as a Red Army cavalry sabre, an Indonesian katar, an Arab, possibly Yemeni dagger and a fair number of replicas of various edged weapons. The katar could easily be used to punch through a car door and the sabre, while too heavy for sword fighting, was cast to slash through unarmed crowds. The flat would be an effective bludgeon. Nice guys, those Soviets.

2.  I played golf on and off through my twenties, never playing particularly well despite lessons, dedication and endless buckets emptied at the driving range. Then, in my early-mid thirties I was on a trip to California and played 18 with a borrowed set of clubs that were too long for me on a fairly tough course. I shot an 82 that day and handily beat several much better golfers. I have not played a round of golf since.

3.  I save a great deal of time not caring a whit about professional sports. Most sportswriters and TV commentators come across to me as undersized, ill-informed louts who vastly underestimate how physically talented even the mediocre players are at that level. Or how hard most of them worked to get there. I keep hoping that one of the ex-athlete, color commentators will just go postal someday and strangle one of them on live television. I’d also settle for George Foreman punching out Larry Merchant.

4. I find that sipping excellent liquor, smoking a good cigar and having intelligent company is a high point of civilization.

5. I met my wife on Match.com.

6. My two educational regrets are not opting to study Russian in college and not taking at least a minor in physics. I did not take Russian because I needed a language program that could be done in a year ( I should have just gone straight through to the MA or PhD but that’s a different issue) and my interest in physics did not begin until later.

7.  I’ve wandered through the halls of the Capitol building and enjoyed a Diet Coke outside the office door of Rep. David Obey (D-Wis.).

I herby and irrevocably tag the following unfortunates:

Dan of tdaxp

HistoryGuy99

Jeremy Young

Michael Tanji

Dave Schuler

Tim Stevens

Selil

Skilluminati featured a SSI PDF on drugged out paramilitary fighters by Paul Rexton Kan:

“ DRUG INTOXICATED IRREGULAR FIGHTERS: COMPLICATIONS, DANGERS, AND RESPONSES“

From SS Einsatzgruppen to Bosnian Serb paramilitaries to Indonesian brush gangs, intoxicants have frequently been given to erode irregular fighters’ moral constraints and facilitate atrocities.

My Chicago Boyz fellow blogger, Dan from Madison, posted up on an important book – an economic history of Nazi Germany during WWII by Adam Tooze entitled The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy:

“Book Review – The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy”

….I have just finished up a book by Adam Tooze called The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy. This book is about WW2 from an economic point of view. The book doesn’t really talk about generalship, tank tactics, or anything else military except in economic terms.

This book is simply outstanding. The beginning portions in particular are very dense and will require a basic understanding of economics to comprehend. I had to re-read several portions, especially in the first two hundred pages. Carl, who recommended the book to me, is an expert in economics and admitted to me that he even had to re-read portions. That aside, after you immerse yourself in this book you are in for a real treat and will learn a lot.

Too many times students of WW2 like myself tend to think of things happening in a vacuum. As an example, I knew that the Germans stormed across Europe in 1939 and 1940, but gave very little thought that this massive army didn’t just “appear”. The German economy had to be managed very effectively for them to be competitive on the world stage.

It was fascinating how the German economic minds managed their production in the thirties, all the while trying to escape from under their war reparations. In detail it is discussed how these minds bashed each other on how to manage their currency, trade, and raw materials.

Also interesting are many predictions by those close in Hitler’s circle of people that once the US got into the war on the side of the Allies all was lost. Germany simply could not produce enough of everything for long enough. After reading this book I can say with relative certainty that even if D-Day had failed, eventually the Allies would have prevailed, simply from the numbers involved. Not to mention Berlin would have been nuked, but that is certainly grist for another post.

Albert Speer, who for a time when he enjoyed Hitler’s favor as the Reichsminister for Armaments and War Production, was able to rationalize the crazy-quilt, quasi-planned, neo-autarkic Nazi economy by pushing decentralization (“industrial self-responsibility”) in the face of opposition by ambitious rivals (like Sauckel), corrupt gauleiters, the SS leadership and Nazi radicals. Such was Speer’s organizational abilities and skill at bureaucratic intrigue that Nazi Germany was actually becoming more industrially productive in the face of Allied bombing and invasion – to a point. Eventually, as Speer realized, critical resources such as wolframite, chromium and oil would simply become unavailable and the war machine would have come to a sudden, screeching, halt in late 1945, early 1946 at the latest, regardless of the progress of the Allied armies.

Economic strength and efficiency does not predetermine victory in war but the longer the war, the greater the weight economic power will have on the outcome.

Because Senator Barack Obama once taught Constitutional law at Chicago and he’s read section 4 of the 25th amendment to the Constitution.