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Excellent, excellent stuff today.

Top Billing!  William F. Owen (AFJ) – The War of New Words

This is a much discussed article by SWC stalwart and military consultant, Wilf Owen:

…..Hybrid threats have always existed, but previously we called them “irregulars” or “guerrillas”; both words, in this context, are more than 180 years old. The definition of hybrid threats as “a combination of traditional warfare mixed with terrorism and insurgency” accurately describes irregulars and guerrillas, both of which can be part of either an insurgency or a wider conflict. Yes, guerrillas have changed over time. So have regular forces. Armies of 1825 looked very different from those of 1925 or 1975, yet all were regular forces. Do we need a new word for regular or “conventional” forces? “Hermaphrodite” perhaps?

The most common attempt to redefine the activities of irregular forces and guerrillas has been the using the word “asymmetric,” predicated on trying to describe a dissimilar employment of ways and means that was apparently new. Yet history does not support this thesis, nor does it usefully inform thinking about the future.

The use of the word “hybrid” implies that there is some new phenomenon that requires new codification. If you want to testify before Congress that the U.S. armed forces must have the ability to confront and defeat guerrillas and irregulars, then that advice has been valid for 200 years. Why is it different today?

Those who use the word “hybrid” also tend to use the word “complex” when describing contemporary warfare. This raises the question: When was warfare ever simple? Contemporary warfare is no more complex than historical warfare.

It may be that there is a generation of serving soldiers who do not understand war and warfare as well as past generations, but that is not to say that war today is more complex. The Internet does not make warfare more complex. TV coverage does not make war more complex. Public opinion does not make war more complex. If the root of the argument is that society is becoming more complex, therefore warfare will be more complex, then 20 years from now it will become supercomplex or hypercomplex. Obviously, this is rubbish.

Wilf is an arch-Clausewitzian and he is taking his SWJ amigo Frank Hoffman to task here, along with the 4GW school, EBO advocates, Network-centric Warfare, the COINdinistas, Martin van Creveld, John Boyd, John Robb and pretty much every military theorist since maybe von Moltke the Elder. I enjoy Wilf’s commentary and he has at times, been kind enough to contribute to my projects or engage me in debate. While I can say that I have learned from his insights, on some matters he’s completely wrongheaded and we are never going to agree. Wilf is, however, a great read.

John Robb –  IS THE US DoD LOCKED IN AN IVORY TOWER?

The other reason, and this explains the innovation gap, is that most commercial innovation requires an ability to: synthesize strands of complex analysis that span multiple fields of endeavor, plow through ambiguous or messy data in real-time without pause, and flexibly respond to rapidly changing events.  In short, everything a PhD is trained NOT to do, at risk of professional suicide.

Yes. In fairness, I will add some caveats to John’s point. First, his argument applies most to PhD’s on the tenure track in universities or university-like settings. Secondly, there are brilliant PhD’s out there who are fantastic synthesizers and original thinkers. They just happen to drive most of their more orthodox colleagues nuts or be the notorious “black sheep” of the institution ( and they are markers for “X” number of similar iconoclasts driven out of programs or positions).

Proceedings – Col. TX Hammes, Maj. William McCallister, Col. John Collins – Afghanistan: Connecting Assumptions and Strategy

Thomas P.M. Barnett – The New Rules: Why America’s War on Drugs Will Wane and Remember, Hirohito was the bad guy, not Harry

Bruce Kesler – The Nuclear Strategy To Neuter The US

The Obama administration policy on nukes is driven by a dangerous idealism that, if carried to the logical conclusion desired by anti-nuclear activists, breaks open the Pandora’s Box of great power war that was sealed shut in the nuclear fires of 1945.

John Hagel – Pursuing Passion

Eide Neurolearning Blog – Lazy Thinkers and Dysrationalia

Network Weaving – The Power of Network Weaving

ZIA – Network Formation and Collective Action

Intelfusion – This is what fuels RF and PRC Cyber Operations

SWJ Blog – Bing West –  Afghanistan Trip Report

 ….I’d like to share a few thoughts. By way of context, let me state my frame of reference. As a former assistant secretary of defense for international security, I am familiar with Washington dynamics; but I believe COIN is decided at the small unit level, not in national capitals. I was 18 months in Vietnam, have written five books on COIN and made 20 trips to Iraq and Afghanistan. This was my third Afghanistan visit in quick succession (April-May, June-July and October). My observations are based on forty to fifty shuras and patrols – several on extended missions – that included numerous small-arms engagements and fire missions. I talked with about 500 Marines and Afghan security forces of all ranks. The observations here are derived from that sample

West is also the author of The Strongest Tribe: War, Politics, and the Endgame in Iraq.

Groupintel – Adam Elkus – Hype, Social Media, and Networked Social Movements

Adam is spot on here. Twitter v. North Korea….would not be a good ending.

Haft of the Spear – On Leaping and Looking

The voice of experience.

That’s it!

Charles Cameron has been guest blogging here on radical Islamism and his last post was a preliminary look at the powerpoint presentation of Major. Nidal Malik Hasan, the shooter in the Ft. Hood massacre.  Charles promised a follow-up here but his next “post” that he submitted was a scholarly, 10,000 word, magnum opus!  We quickly decided that SWJ was a better venue for a doc of such a magnitude and Dave Dilegge took care of the rest.

I’ve read the paper twice. It’s a tour de force.

The Hasan Slide Presentation

Download the full article: The Hasan Slide Presentation (PDF)

There is no place as private as the interior of a human skull: the mind remains inviolate.

Words can reveal some of what goes on inside us, actions can speak some of our intents and passions forcefully, at times explosively. And yet there is no place more secret — and what a hint, a phrase, a gesture, a speech or an explosion cannot reveal, what even the best forensic examination can only label a probability, is the complex interweaving of thoughts half thought, doubts entertained, emotions pushing on through, and clashing, building at times to a perfect storm perhaps, with all doubts and constraints cast aside and the emotions unleashed in a blind and defining moment.

Major Nidal Malik Hasan MD MPH, a psychiatrist in the U.S. Army, has now been charged with multiple specifications of premeditated murder in the mass shooting at Fort Hood, under Article 188 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

Assuming that Major Hasan was in fact the shooter at Fort Hood and that, as alleged, he shouted “Allahu Akbar” during the event, the main question of fact and interpretation now would be whether Hasan was more an introvert under pressure whose “break” took the jihadist cry “Allahu Akbar” as its outlet, or a patient and long-standing lone wolf jihadist of the sort abu Musab al-Suri calls for (Jim Lacey, A Terrorist’s Call to Global Jihad, p. 19), or a wannabe with failed or actual al Qaeda connections, or an al Qaeda or related “soldier” under orders.

This analysis attempts to provide some leads in that inquiry, by a careful reading of the only substantial documentation we have from Major Hasan himself, which may throw light on his trajectory.

Frank Woodruff Buckles, the last American veteran of WWI and a Japanese POW in WWII, was previously featured here in March, 2008. Mr. Buckles is now 108 years old and going strong, and in honor of Veteran’s Day, I am re-running that post. 

Thank you to all of America’s veterans!

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I meant to note this at the time of publication but America now has only one surviving veteran of the First World War, Frank Buckles, age 107:

Now there is only one. When Harry Richard Lucas died recently, Frank Buckles was left as the only American soldier who can recount his personal experience in World War I. He is the last surviving American World War I veteran. The Great War, as it was once known, is receding into ancient history, an era as distant from us today as the Civil War or the American Revolution.But every war lingers, long after the last soldier has died. Generations hence, the ghosts still speak to us, even if we no longer acknowledge the voices. Look no further than our current travails in the Middle East, in large measure a result of the political consequences of World War I, which created the political boundaries of those tribal regions. And in an echo of the current presidential debate, Americans in 1917 were passionately divided about being drawn into a European conflict we had little direct stake in, arguably less than we have in Iraq today.

When Mr. Buckles went ” Over There” the nation was still more agrarian than urban and both the Civil War and Slavery remained within living memory, neither the electric light nor running water were taken for granted and motion pictures were silent. The changes that Frank Buckles has seen in his lifetime surpass that of most 500 year periods in history.

WWI had been overshadowed for decades by the sheer enormity of it’s larger and more lethal sequel, the Second World War but historians are coming to see the Great War as a watershed in modern history, the tipping point at which the twentieth century went unpredictably, horribly, wrong. John Keegan elegantly writes of the war, despite having been “curiously civilized”, cutting down a generation like stalks of wheat and twisting the survivors, turning them against the liberal and rational civilization of the Enlightenment. The war’s unprecedented slaughter desensitized Europeans to violence and cultivated widespread disillusionment with the traditional order, leaving a spiritual and political vacumn that would be filled by the malevolent dynamism of Fascism and Communism.

For practical purposes, that “Lost Generation” is now gone and the “Greatest Generation” that had to fight WWII and “finish the job” is going fast. Let’s hope the hard lessons they learned do not pass from memory along with them.

Charles Cameron, an expert on forensic theology, is doing a series of guest posts here on Islamist extremism. His prior posts can be found here, here and here:

Breaking News on the Mystery of Maj. Hasan’s Powerpoint

by Charles Cameron 

I am in the middle of writing up an extended, contextualized commentary on the 50-slide PowerPoint presentation that Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan made to his colleagues at Walter Reed Army Medical Center as a senior-year psychiatric resident in June 2007, but wanted to make one data point available to other analysts right away.

In the final bullet point of slide 11 he writes in quotes, “It’s getting harder and harder for Muslims in the service to morally justify being in a military that seems constantly engaged against fellow Muslims.”

This last phrase is a direct quotation from a statement made by Jeff Hammad, a Muslim in the Marines, reported by the SF Chronicle religion writer Don Lattin in an article in SFGate, the Chronicle website, titled “Muslims in the military walk fine line: War tensions put pressure on rising minority“. A quick search suggests that this is the original source for this particular phrase, which Hasan’s own use of quote marks suggests he was drawing from some source other than himself, although this saying of Hammad’s was also quoted from Lattin’s article in a 2006 Maxwell AFB Research Report by Timothy E. Stenmark, “Language, Cultural Awareness, and the Fourth Generation Warrior“.

The rest of Don Lattin’s article, and the contents of Stenmark’s paper, should therefore be subject to careful scrutiny.

Jeff Hammad’s opening comment in Lattin’s article: “The military has a tendency to demonize the enemy, and Muslims are on the receiving end of that hostility.”

ADDENDUM:

Zen here. Charles alerted me that readers can view the Hasan PPT presentation over at The Washington Post website. No embed option, sorry.

Herodotus, the “Father of History” has received some new props in terms of his reliability from archaeologists digging in Egypt.

Vanished Persian Army Said Found in Desert

The remains of a mighty Persian army said to have drowned in the sands of the western Egyptian desert 2,500 years ago might have been finally located, solving one of archaeology’s biggest outstanding mysteries, according to Italian researchers.

Bronze weapons, a silver bracelet, an earring and hundreds of human bones found in the vast desolate wilderness of the Sahara desert have raised hopes of finally finding the lost army of Persian King Cambyses II. The 50,000 warriors were said to be buried by a cataclysmic sandstorm in 525 B.C.

….”We have found the first archaeological evidence of a story reported by the Greek historian Herodotus,” Dario Del Bufalo, a member of the expedition from the University of Lecce, told Discovery News.

According to Herodotus (484-425 B.C.), Cambyses, the son of Cyrus the Great, sent 50,000 soldiers from Thebes to attack the Oasis of Siwa and destroy the oracle at the Temple of Amun after the priests there refused to legitimize his claim to Egypt.After walking for seven days in the desert, the army got to an “oasis,” which historians believe was El-Kharga. After they left, they were never seen again.

“A wind arose from the south, strong and deadly, bringing with it vast columns of whirling sand, which entirely covered up the troops and caused them wholly to disappear,” wrote Herodotus.

A century after Herodotus wrote his account, Alexander the Great made his own pilgrimage to the oracle of Amun, and in 332 B.C. he won the oracle’s confirmation that he was the divine son of Zeus, the Greek god equated with Amun.The tale of Cambyses’ lost army, however, faded into antiquity. As no trace of the hapless warriors was ever found, scholars began to dismiss the story as a fanciful tale.

Herodotus was long disparaged by historians as an entertaining and unreliable mythologizer, who instead upheld his younger and envious rival Thucydides as the model of ancient historical purity and accuracy. The empirical basis for this position is eroding fast and while Thucydides has his own greatness that can never be denied, the shadow he long cast over Herodotus has waned.