zenpundit.com

Dr. Thomas PM Barnett                                              Dr. Milt Rosenberg

Go here to listen. They’ve been discussing the Mideast and Israel-Iran nuclear programs.

Sadly, I am still on Book III. I will have a full round up of the work of the advanced kids later tonight. : )

Carl von Clausewitz, On War, Book III: Calculation

Clausewitz devoted Book III of On War to matters of general strategy and he has an important section on the nature of calculation ” Possible Engagements are to be Regarded as Real Ones because of Their Consequences“:

“In both cases results have been produced by the mere possibility of an engagement: the possibility has acquired reality….Even if the whole enterprise leaves us worse off than before, we cannot say that no effects resulted from using troops in this way, by producing the possibility of an engagement; the effects were similar to a lost engagement.

This shows that the destruction of the enemy’s forces and the overthrow of the enemy’s power can be accomplished only as the result of an engagement, no matter whether it really took place or was merely offered but not accepted”A passage rich in implications.

Clausewitz assumes here that opponents would have rough knowledge of each other’s actions and maneuvers. A position held entirely in secret by one side cannot become part of his enemy’s assessment and calculation. This is entirely logical given the small geographic context of the Western-Central European battlefield in the 18th and 19th centuries when field commanders had a shared understanding of warfare and armies had been raised on precision drill since the days of Gustavus Adolphus. It is also logical for the “higher” level of supreme command, the soldier-statesmen like Frederick the Great or Dwight Eisenhower who had to read situations in warfare like geopolitical, multidimensional, chess many moves ahead of their next, actual, move.

Read the rest here.

That week went by quickly.

Top Billing! John Arquilla – NYT – “The Coming Swarm”

Arquilla was ahead of the curve long before most other defense intellectuals. Glad to see him getting ink in the top MSM organ. (Hat tip to John)

Thomas P.M. Barnett in Defense News

Exposition of the role of private sector in Sys Admin.

Selil Blog – University systems at a crossroads: Furloughs and funding of futures and fantasies

A superb post by Sam. A must read.

Information Dissemination – Friendly Advice of the Day

Galrahn knows his stuff. I’d really like to see the Pentagon or the Navy hire him for the same reason I think that Matt Armstrong should have an office at the State Department – they can help get things up to speed in terms of communication and message.

John Robb – JOURNAL: The Notre Dame conference

I should have gone to this one, damned sched!  John Robb meets Martin van Creveld says it all.

HG’s World – Announcing! The Great Powers Junto Club Reading Group

HG99, himself a historian, is modeling the club after Ben Franklin’s original Junto.

Coming Anarchy – The Post-Nuclear Iran World

Ominous.

TDAXP – Building a Table of Contents for “5GW: The Fifth Generation of War?”

The next Nimble book project from this corner of the blogosphere, edited by Dan of tdaxp.

Counterterrorism Blog – Congress Moves to Keep Attention to Bout’s Extradition Process

“Viktor Bout” is a free-lancer like Colonel  Bob Denard was independent of French intelligence.

Eeben Barlow –  Strategy and Tactics of War

A practitioner’s advice.

The Strategist – “I must die. But must I die bawling?”

Umm….that’s Epictetus, not Kotare. : )

That’s it!

Just read this profile of Dr. (Gen.) Shimon Naveh, via Soob via Ubiwar.

….Naveh describes his last and perhaps most important military-academic project, OTRI, as a chronicle of failure. “It was a failure of the group and also my personal failure, but in a far deeper sense it was the IDF’s failure. The IDF has not recovered because it doesn’t have the ability, unless it undergoes a revolution.”Naveh, who established OTRI together with Brigadier General (res.) Dov Tamari, draws on imagery from the world of construction to explain the project. “We wanted to create an intermediate level between the master craftsman, the tiling artisan or the electrician, who is the equivalent of the battalion or brigade commander, and the entrepreneur or the strategist, the counterpart of the high commander, who wants to change the world, but lacks knowledge in construction.”Between the two levels, he continues, is the architect/commander-in-chief, whose role is “to enable the system to understand what the problem is, define it and interpret it through engineers.” In the absence of this link, he maintains, armies find themselves unable to implement their strategic planning by tactical means. “Entrepreneurs and master craftsmen cannot communicate,” he says.Already in his first book, “The Operational Art,” published in 2001 and based on his doctoral dissertation, he described the level of the military architect: “The intermediate level is the great invention of the Russians. [The military architects] occupy the middle, and make it possible for the other fields, from politics to the killers, to understand, plan and learn.”

An interesting and to me well constructed analogy by General Naveh that rings true to me from what I know of the Soviet history. Naveh perfectly describes the peculair adaptive requirements forced on the Red Army by the nature of the Soviet political system, especially as it existed under Stalin from the time of the Great Terror forward ( 1936 -1953). Stalin wiped out much of his senior military leadership of the Red Army during the Yezhovschina in 1937 and decimated the junior officer corps to boot, leaving it thoroughly demoralized and rigidly shackled to political comissars who were, like the military commanders, completely paralyzed with fear ( the Red Navy officer corps was basically exterminated en masse).

When Operation Barbarossa commenced in June, 1941, the dramatic Soviet collapse in the face of the Nazi onslaught was due in part to Stalin’s maniacal insistence that Germany was not going to attack and that assertions to the contrary were evidence of “wrecking” and “provocation” – crimes liable to get one immediately shot. Even a high ranking NKVD official, Dekanazov, whom Stalin made ambassador to Berlin, was personally threatened by Stalin for daring to warn the Soviet dictator about Hitler’s imminent attack.

That being said, Stalin quickly realized during the 1941 retreat that he had debilitated his own army by decapitating it and his own judgment as supreme warlord was no substitute at the front lines for what Naveh terms “operational art”. Stalin the entrepreneur-grand strategist needed competent military architects like Zhukov and Rossokovsky to plug the gap with the craftsmen and Stalin not only promoted and protected them, he tolerated their dissent from his own military judgment and sometimes yielded to their concerns. Very much unlike Hitler who could seldom abide criticism or deviation from his general officers or learn from them. Stalin improved as a war leader from interaction with his generals; Hitler did not and if anything grew worse over time – as did the Wehrmacht’s tactical-strategic disconnect.

The above anecdote represents the rich level of depth behind Naveh’s offhand and seemingly disjointed references. There’s a lot of meat there behind the dots Naveh is connecting but the uninitiated will have to be willing to dig deep. I’m cool toward Naveh’s reliance upon French postmodernism but I admire the breadth of his capability as a horizontal thinker and theorist. However, Naveh needs an “architect” of his own to translate for him and make his complex ideas more readily comprehensible to the mainstream. I will wager that few Majors or Lt. Colonels, be they U.S. Army, IDF or Russian, read much Focault these days.

ADDENDUM:

The SWJ had an interview with Dr. Naveh on his theory of Systematic Operational Design in 2007

Dr. Naveh’s book is In Pursuit of Military Excellence: The Evolution of Operational Theory (Cummings Center Series)

Joint Force Quarterly (via Findarticle) -“Operational art”

Jerusalem Post – “Column One: Halutz’s Stalinist moment“

President Obama’s biggest political headaches in the next four years will come not from Republicans or Rush Limbaugh but the cosmically egocentric and ideologically blinded Boomer  Watergate Baby cadre in the House Democrats.  

A global economic crisis and they seized an opportunity to pass an incoherent host of nickel and dime appropriations on their leftwing wish list along with huge giveaways to special interests that rival anything constructed by Bush-Paulson. They have managed to make an $ 800 billion dollar stimulus bill “non-stimulating”. That takes some doing to waste three quarters of a trillion dollars without anticipating any economic growth, even as spillover benefits, at a time of rising unemployment.

Is everything in this mega-bill bad ? No. Is it reasonable to expect Democrats not to pass some of their agenda items along the way ? No. What we have though is a bill apparently so embarrassing that Speaker Pelosi, who seems to be acting more and more like she is the uncrowned co-president, doesn’t even want her own members to have time to read it, much less Republicans or the general public. It is all dessert and no vegetables and it was the Democrats very first order of business.

The aging Watergate Babies, the Left-wing of the Left-wing of the Democratic Party, now in the drivers seat in the House of Representatives once “rolled” Jimmy Carter and helped destroy his presidency. They did the same to Bill Clinton in his first two years in office. They will hijack Obama’s administration agenda as well, or try to do so.

Given that the result of the first instance was the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 and that of  the second was Newt Gingrich’s 1994 takeover, 2010 is suddenly looking a lot brighter for conservatives if they can manage to get their act together. Their opponents are gearing up for the overrerach of a lifetime.