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Some politics of foreign policy and war… 

An implicit theme of the “no drama” Obama administration is “You can trust Democrats with National Security“.

Until, of course, there is a roll call. Funding the Obama administration’s strategic policies in Afghanistan and Iraq are going to have to pass with Republican and Blue Dog Democrat votes as the graying, liberal,  Boomer Democrats in Congress relive ( for the 1000th vote) the one time they waved an anti-war sign on the quad back in ’69 after toking up a doobie in the dorm hall, and vote in a bloc against the leader of their party. Good. I hope they make an enormous media production out of it featuring the most extreme crazies in their caucus making abrasive, tone-deaf, comments on national television.

In 2010, the GOP ( if they have any political sense – a long shot at this juncture) may be running campaign commercials on how their Republican members stood solidly with the president against al Qaida when their Democratic counterparts did not.

Blog Them Out of the Stone Age

This blog, run by military historian Dr. Mark Grimsley, is one I should have added to the blogroll a long time ago. From perusing Blog Them Out of the Stone Age, there are points of agreement and disagreement that I’d have with Grimsley, but his overall aim to put military history in a broader context or understanding is an effor worthy of enthususiastic support. Historical knowledge is useless unless it is widely disseminated.

Check out a few sample posts below:

The Culture of War

….This is Martin Van Creveld’s eighteenth book, and like most of its predecessors it combines the insightful with the provocative with the merely exasperating.  Van Creveld is both a gifted military historian and a world class gadfly, and he often gives the impression that he cherishes the latter reputation more than the former.  This impression is more unavoidable than ever in The Culture of War, which, the author informs us, he has written with the desire to put “any number of assorted ‘-ists’ – such as relativists, deconstructionists,  deconstructivists, post-modernists, the more maudlin kind of pacifists, and feminists firmly in their place.”  (xv)   These “bleeding hearts,” he imagines, scorn the notion of a culture of war.  He also wishes to confront the “neo-realists” who collapse warfare into a supposedly rational instrument of policy – and this is in fact the most interesting aspect of the book – but his swipes at the academic left are so frequent and tiresome that they threaten the integrity of the book.

A Plain Violation of Civilian Control? – Part Trois

….To a particularly tendentious question that was in effect an invitation to criticize the Obama administration, McChrystal replied, “I won’t even touch that.”

At no point in the Q&A did anyone mention Vice President Biden or allude directly to the Biden option.  Many of the questions dealt with such things as the possible role/response of Iran, the legitimacy of the Afghan election, the element of the Taliban that was most dangerous (the questioner told McChrystal what he  regarded as the most dangerous element, then asked if McChrystal agreed), how one might best cut off the flow of Taliban recruits (“jobs,” McChrystal replied), etc.

Having watched the whole Q&A, I was impressed by the general’s poise, his articulateness, his praise for the efforts of the coalition forces, and his repeated endorsement of the Obama administration’s strategy review process.

A Douglas MacArthur type McChrystal decidedly is not.

General McChrystal Versus Vicki Carr

….Modern communications have tempted some presidents to micromanage.  During the disastrous Desert One rescue mission in 1980, Jimmy Carter famously (and problematically) dealt directly with COL Charles Beckwith, the commander on the scene. But the ultimate micro-manager was also the first to have easy access to ground commanders:  President Abraham Lincoln, thanks to the telegraph.  Lincoln constantly bypassed his secretary of war and general in chief to deal directly with army commanders.  Although some historians seem to believe that everything Lincoln did was correct by definition, Lincoln’s interventions were often to ill effect.

In any event, Obama already knows what McChrystal thinks.  At this point McChrystal, in effect, needs to know what Obama thinks.  That is to say, the president needs to give McChrystal a clearly defined national security objective that is the prerequisite for any coherent military strategy.

Amen to that last part.

Ah, I am over a month late on a promised follow up post!

Back in early June, I composed a hyper-ambitious Summer Reading list that I wanted to plough through on those hazy, lazy, dog day afternoons. Here was my list:

THE SUMMER READING LIST:

Military History and Strategy

Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century – PW Singer (Finish, currently reading)
The Anabasis of Cyrus (Agora) – Xenophon
The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One – David Kilcullen
The Scientific Way of Warfare: Order and Chaos on the Battlefields of Modernity – Antoine Bousquet
The Culture of War – Martin van Creveld
Certain to Win –Chet Richards

Science, Futurism, Networks, Economics and Technology

How the Mind Works – Steven Pinker
Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets – Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software – Steven Johnson
The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology – Ray Kurzweil
The Hyperlinked Society: Questioning Connections in the Digital Age (The New Media World)– Lokman Tsui

Biography

Ho Chi Minh: A Life – William J. Duiker

Philosophy and Intellectual History

The Open Society and Its Enemies, Vol. 1: The Spell of Plato
The Open Society and Its Enemies, Vol. 2: Hegel and Marx – Karl Popper
The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason – Charles Freeman

Fiction

Pattern Recognition – William Gibson
On the Road (Penguin Classics) – Jack Kerouac

Pretty impressive, eh? It would be more so if I had actually done it. While I have all of these books on my shelf, I did not get to most of them and was frequently sidetracked by books that were never on the list in the first place. Here’s what I actually read this summer between Memorial Day and Labor Day:

The Books I Really Read Last Summer:

Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software – Steven Johnson

Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century – PW Singer

The Bloody White Baron: The Extraordinary Story of the Russian Nobleman Who Became the Last Khan of Mongolia by James Palmer

This Is for the Mara Salvatrucha: Inside the MS-13, America’s Most Violent Gang by Samuel Logan

 Horse Soldiers: The Extraordinary Story of a Band of US Soldiers Who Rode to Victory in Afghanistan by Doug Stanton

The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles by Steven Pressfield

The Anabasis of Cyrus (Agora) by Xenophon. Translator,  Wayne Ambler

How Rome Fell: Death of a Superpower by Adrian Goldsworthy

The Books I Partially Read Last Summer but Have Yet to Finish:

The Culture of War – Martin van Creveld

 Certain to Win –Chet Richards

The Conquest of Gaul  by Julius Caesar on Kindle

Why didn’t I stick to my reading list ? Looking back, there’s a number of reasons.

Foremost would be a lack of discipline on my part to put in several hours plugging away, each day, without fail. While I can legitimately say that professional and family commitments were not inconsequential last summer, I’m sure if I counted up the time I frittered away online reading blogs, social media sites, PDFs, etc. it most likely exceeded the clock hours spent reading books.

A second reason was review copies. When a publisher or PR firm sends me a review copy, I feel an obligation to read the book in a timely fashion. The authors count on that during the roll-out phase and most recipients of review copies never bother to write two words. I tend to write reviews only for the books I feel confident recommending to ZP readers; I’m not a professional critic nor do I get paid to blog, so I’m not going to waste my limited blogging time slamming an author or nitpicking unless his views come across as nutty or dangerous. Review copies that are not at a level to merit a positive review ( I probably get sent 3 books for every review that you see posted here, and I refuse to accept books outside my core areas of interest. I also get embargoed drafts still in the writing process but cannot, for legal reasons, blog about them) are read and then are shelved or given away.

The final reason probably comes down to age. It’s much harder now to read four or five hours at a stretch; whether that is because the internet is re-wiring my brain, as Nick Carr argues, or that the hectic pace and noisy environment of my life lacks any such extended blocs of quiet time that I enjoyed at age 20, I’m not sure.  Regardless, for me, books are now read in brief snatches of time these days, with an uninterrupted hour of book reading being uncommon, unless it is done after everyone else in the house is asleep. Over time, that means reading fewer books.

A shame.

LOL!  Evidently, the Nobel Committee fears the GOP will do well in the mid term elections. Or something.

Jimmy Carter called it a “bold statement“. Carter was probably thinking “Jesus, it took me twenty five years of building houses for the poor, monitoring elections, freeing prisoners and a Mideast peace treaty to get this kind of respect. WTF?”.

Nice.

Shlok posts up on the future of war in response to Lexington’s Green’s prospective speaking engagement:

The History and Future of Warfare

…..The history of warfare looks something like this cycle that repeats itself within the governance market – between an insurgent governance platform and the dominant platform of the time. Victory is gauged by market-share of each platform.

1. Tribe vs. Tribe
2. Tribe vs. State
3. State vs State
   1. Marked by the invention of the nuke.
4. Network vs State
   1. Where we are now. Networks are essentially information empowered tribes.
5. Network vs. Network
   1. When the nation-state collapses into its component resilient communities and combats the networks that won.
   2. Insurgencies and private military corporations act as governance platforms.
6. Small-Scale Networks vs Network
   1. Advanced information flows decreases mass requirements and increases decentralization.
   2. Trend continues until post-human age.
7. Small-Scale Network vs Small-Scale Network
8. Individual vs. Small-Scale Network
9. Individual vs. Individual
10. Post-human vs. Individual
    1. When the difference between man and machine is negligible.
11. ? vs Post-Human

*Acceleration really takes off when the network barrier is broken.

I like the flow in the outline. Potential countervailing trends to Shlok’s model? Here’s a couple:

• Aggressive migration/refugees-in-arms – think Hutu militiamen fleeing to the Congo from Tutsi rebels, but scaled up for a failing great or regional power.
• Rogue nuclear events will cause a countervailing, centralizing, “circling the wagons” effect that will temporarily strengthen states and allow them to “take off the gloves” against networked opponents.