After his skilled moderation of The Clausewitz Roundtable, my friend Lexington Green has announced a new roundtable at Chicago Boyz for Fall of 2009 that will be dedicated to Xenophon’s  The Anabasis of Cyrus.

For those interested in participating in this roundtable, leave a note here in the comments for Lex or over at Chicago Boyz.

Very busy week and we are hosting my nephew this weekend, so this may be short:

Top Billing!  James V. DeLong’s  The Coming of the Fourth American Republic ( hat tip to Barnabus and Pundita)

Probably the most provocative analytical political piece of the past month. Reminds me slightly of an internal version of The Shield of Achilles.

Global Guerillas – PAKISTAN AND OPEN SOURCE WARFARE and JOURNAL: An Open Source Counter-insurgency for Pakistan?

John estimates Pakistan’s chances and finds them to be slim. Good back and forth with Dr. Chet Richards on How afraid should we be? in addition.

MountainRunner– Guest Post: How to win the GWOT – or whatever it’s called today

Matt Armstrong turns over his blog to some former NSC staff members, Mark Pfeifle and Jonathan Thompson.

WIRED – Army Looks to Keep Troops Forever Young

I could use some of this anti-aging elixir this morning! 🙂

Scientific American – How Room Designs Affect Your Work and Mood

The neuroscience implies that the average workspace design for offices and schools promotes a feeling of jet lag and depression. LOL! How true.

Proceeedings – “The Overstated Threat” by Commander John Patch, U.S. Navy (Ret.)

The pirates 15 minutes of fame should be over, according to Patch.

The Jamestown Foundation – Ingushetia is Still Burning

In case you feel a need for an update for the troubles of Russo-Transcaucasian backwater.

 The Annual Edge Question 2009 – “What will change everything?… What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see?”

That’s it!

Ok, things are quiet here because I am overdue on a chapter for Nimble Books on Fifth Generation Warfare, edited by Dan of tdaxp. I am also currently brain dead from work and other responsibilities, so I thought it might be time for something that was both viral and almost completely pointless. 🙂

First, there was Thomas P.M. Barnett:

Then there was Dave Dilegge:

And then there’s me:

I propose a “Tournament of Home Offices” where those tagged must reveal the heart of their tiny blogging empire and in turn, tag 5-7 fellow bloggers to participate in this time-wasting charade, as well as linking back to the person who tagged them originally.  Only one photo counts as an entry but additional pics may be posted. A winning home office is recognized by informal consensus and the winner receives as a prize absolutely nothing. Multiple winners may be possible and, most likely, are expected as the tournament progresses. Spouses are free to enter their blogger without their prior permission in the interest of general mockery.

I hereby tag the following:

Lexington Green

Michael Tanji

Dave Schuler

Shane Deichman

Tom Wade

Dan of tdaxp

Tim Stevens

And now a bonus pic from a bookshelf….

Dr. Chet Richards has a methodical review up at DNI on Antoine Bousquet’s new book The Scientific Way of Warfare: Order and Chaos on the Battlefields of Modernity:

The Scientific Way of Warfare

….Bousquet opens with and ultimately answers the question of “does network-centric warfare (NCW) work?” To reach his conclusion, he proposes four “regimes” in the application of science to modern warfare:

1. Mechanism, whose “key technology” was the clock, whose scientific framework was Newtonian, and whose military format was what we’d call first generation warfare — line, column, conformance, regularity
2. Thermodynamics, characterized by engines, whose framework included entropy, energy, and probability, and whose military paradigm was 2GW (Bousquet does not use the generations of war model)
3. Cybernetics — computers — whose scientific concepts included “negentropy,” negative feedback, homeostasis and whose military model would be modern 2GW, with heavy top-down, real time command and control
4. Chaoplexity, where networks reign, whose framework is built upon the new sciences of non-linearity, complexity, chaos, and self-organization, and where warfare is conducted by decentralized cells, teams, or swarms — what we would call both 3GW and 4GW (p. 30)

Subsequent chapters take the reader on a tour of these ideas in turn, exploring their evolution as scientific patterns and their influence on the warfare of their, and subsequent, eras. So the chapter on mechanistic warfare introduces Vauban, close-order drill, and culminates in Frederick the Great’s Clockwork Army. The next chapter, Thermodynamic Warfare, concludes with Clausewitz, which is a stretch, of course, since the great Prussian died in 1831, some 20 years before the first publications in that discipline. But with liberal interpretation of the massive text of On War, passages can be found that seem like precursors of the Second Law. Bousquet does point out that these interpretations were not made in Clausewitz’s day but were retrofitted by later analysts and generals, including as he also notes, John Boyd.

Read the rest here. Good stuff!

” …he was one of the most extraordinary individuals to have ever walked the earth. He above all others deserves to be called, “the Great’.”

Alexander the Great by Paul Cartledge

Cambridge classicist Paul Cartledge has the rarest of talents among professional historians – the ability to write books that simultaneously appeal to academics and popular audiences alike. Alexander the Great has his trademark “concise depth” that Cartledge also brought to bear in The Spartans and later to Thermopylae: The Battle That Changed the World; there is enough historiographic “meat” for the scholar and the casual student of history or of war will enjoy Cartledge’s depiction of Alexander as a “ruthless pragmatist”, engaging in calculated gestures of epic magnaminity and brutal murder of his closest comrades in arms with equal certitude. One who, despite his mysticism and growing tyranny, had imperial ambitions that “….can symbolize peaceful, multi-ethnic coexistence”.

Cartledge, despite the above quotation, is not an Alexander-worshipper but a realist or a mild skeptic, rejecting hyperbole and hidden agendas in the ancient sources, which he discusses in detail, along with the more extreme portraits painted of Alexander by modern historians, such as “…the titantic and Fuhrer-like Alexander of Fritz Schachmeyer“. Cartledge’s Alexander is a military genius and an inspirational visionary to be sure, but his icy ruthlessness of calculated murder of potential opponents and superannuated followers like Callisthenes or Parmenion is never far away. Cartledge uses the term “purges” several times in the text and it is appropriate; Alexander, with his suspicions aroused, had the same irrevocable instinct for savage reprisal as did Joseph Stalin. Alexander running through Cleitus the Black with a spear in the midst of a banquet, a man who had saved Alexander’s life, or who ordered the destruction of Thebes was the same Alexander who honored the religions and customs of his conquered subjects and tried to build his Overlordship of Asia on a fusion of Pan-Hellenism and ancient Persia:

“Alexander’s importation and integration of oriental troops into the Macedonian army was a crucial and controversial issue. by the end of 328 he had units of Sogdian and bactrian cavalry, so presumably he was drawing also upon the excellent cavalry of western and central Iran. In 327 he recruited more than thirty thousand young Iranians. Since Greek was to be the lingua franca of the new Empire, replacing the use of the Achaemenids use of Aramaic, he arranged for them to be taught the Greek language as well as the demonstrably supeior Macedonian infantry tactics. when they arrived at Susa in 324, he hailed them as ‘ successors’ – to the Macedonian soldiers understandable consternation” [ 204 ]

Cartledge discusses Alexander’s generalship and his abilities as an adaptive military innovator, building on a his father Philip’s original military reforms or improvising when faced with unexpected difficulties at river crossing or in siege warfare. He misses though an opportunity to explain the dreadful effectiveness in Alexander’s hands of the Macedonian phalanx, a more heavily armed, lightly armored, mobile and deadly version of the original Greek Hoplite formation.  While Alexander and his cavalry garnered most of the glory, the ordinary Macedonian phalanx cut through Persian ranks like an implacable meat grinder, mowing down enormous numbers of the enemy and trodding their dead and dying bodies underfoot. Understandably though, this is a biography of Alexander and not a history of his wars but the real scale of the slaughter Alexander inflicted is given far less attention than the skill with which he inflicted it, or his political and religious policies that came in their wake.

Alexander’s religious sentiments and his mysticism, which spilled over in to his political vision for Asia and for himself as a semi-divine ruler are given much consideration by Cartledge, ranging from his at a distance dealings with subject state Athens, to his “contracting” a relationship with the Egyptian god Ammon, to his ideation with Achilles as a model for himself.  There appears to have been something of a feedback loop between Alexander’s military acheivments, which were truly superhuman, and his growing religious superstitions, both of which fed a kind of megalomania according to Cartledge, and led to Alexander’s unsuccessful demand that his Greek and Macedonian soldiers adopt proskynesis in the Persian style. A more or less blasphemous act of hubris ( though not quite absolutely, as Cartledge explains, given the precedent of the deification of Lysander) that led to a break between Alexander and his most loyal followers. This craving for divinity later was expanded posthumously to fabulous extremes in the traditions of the Alexander Romance, where Alexander the Great becomes a symbolic and heavily mythologized figure for dozens of peoples and regimes. Alexander himself began cultivating the myths.

Cartledge has done an excellent job demystifying one of the archetypal figures of Western history, the man whom other would-be world conquerors had to measure themselves against – reportedly, Julius Caesar wept in despair because Alexander’s glory was beyond his reach. He has also brought out the extent to which Alexander saw himself not as a Westerner, or a Hellene, but as a bridge to the East, a synthesizer of civilizations.