zenpundit.com

Over at SWJ Blog.

Cartel v. Cartel: Mexico’s Criminal Insurgency

The government’s strategy, essentially a ‘war of attrition’ is failing. The result of heavy-handed military action is the increasing ‘fractilization’ of the conflict, higher levels of violence, and increasing discontent by the general public and elites. Though the war has largely vanished from the mainstream American press after last summer’s panic over the prospect of Mexico as a ‘failed state,’ the violence continues and risks of cross-border spillover remain.

A good piece.

I am still sticking with my thought experiment on Mexico, which is looking increasingly plausible.

The Forty Years War: The Rise and Fall of the Neocons, from Nixon to Obama by Len Colodny and Tom Shachtman

I mentioned this book previously, expressing some serious skepticism of the authors’ core argument of a struggle between President Richard Nixon and the Neocons. Nevertheless, I ordered a copy and found The Forty Years War to be an absorbing read; for those with an interest in the administration of Richard Nixon, the history of the late Cold War period or the politics of American foreign policy, this book is a must read. I have a good working knowledge from my own research of primary and secondary source material related to Richard Nixon and his battle to re-shape American foreign policy and national strategy; yet I can say that and Colodny and Shachtman, working with newly transcribed archival material, demonstrated that we still have much to learn about the inner workings of the Nixon administration.

The authors have three important themes in The Forty Years War:

1. The intellectual legacy of militarist- moral idealism of Fritz G.A. Kraemer, the German-born Defense Department geopolitical theorist who was a mentor, adviser or ally to a glittering constellation of policy makers including Henry Kissinger, Alexander Haig, James Schlesinger, Fred Ikle, Andrew Marshall, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld and others. Shachtman and Colodny call Kraemer:

“….the unacknowledged godfather of the George W. Bush administration’s ways of relating the United States to the rest of the world – more so than the philosophies of the university of Chicago’s Leo Strauss or those Trotskyites turned conservatives who founded the neocon movement”

2. That there has been a “forty years war” for the control over U.S. foreign policy not between Left and Right or Hawks and Doves but between foreign policy “Pragmatists” in the mold of Richard Nixon and “Neocons” or more broadly (and accurately in my view), “Hardliners” adhering to the rigid moralism and supreme confidence in military supremacy of Fritz Kraemer.

3. That Watergate, contrary to the orthodox historiography (argued by historians like Stanley I. Kutler and Robert Dallek), was exploited and aggravated by Kraemerites and proto-Neocons, especially General Al Haig, specifically to bring down Richard Nixon in an attempt to smash detente and institute more aggressive U.S. posture in the Cold War. Haig emerges as a central villain in the Watergate conspiracy in The Forty Years War and Nixon’s ability to inspire disloyalty in his closest aides is breathtaking.

While illuminating and deeply provocative, The Forty Years War is a quirky book, almost two different books with the first half devoted to the Nixon era and the second half sailing from Gerald Ford to Barack Obama. In a sense, this is unavoidable because it is the Nixon administration docs that are being rapidly declassified and subsequent administrations will not be releasing similar material for years or decades. Equal depth of treatment for every administration would also have swelled the number of pages to a staggeringly unmanageable size for authors and readers alike.

I am also not comfortable with the authors’ casual use of the label “Neocon” to describe a range of policy makers on the right, some of whom are not at all neoconservatives in a tight or ideological sense of the term. Toward the end of The Forty Years War, Colodny and Shachtman draw more nuanced distinctions that I think, is a more precise rendering of the positions of various figures in Republican administrations or Congress.

The Forty Years War is a book that deserves to have a much higher public profile as Colodny and Shachtman are marshalling new evidence to challenge conventional interpretations of late Cold War political history and foreign policy.

Strongly recommended.

I am reposting Lex’s post in full. Basically, Illinois needs a thorough housecleaning of both parties – it’s a cataclysmic mess here.

Adam Andrzejewski

Adam Andrzejewski is the only person running for the Republican nomination for Governor of Illinois who presents any hope of turning around the dire decline we are facing.

I had the pleasure of meeting Adam recently, and he confirmed the positive impression I got from his website. He is very smart, aware of the gravity of the problems facing Illinois, and has some concrete plans to change the way business is done here.

I was most impressed with his proposals to take on the culture of corruption that has made the once-great State of Illinois a national and even global joke.

Take a look at the issues pages on Adam’s site. Then compare the specifics he offers with, for example, the nonexistent proposals on Jim Ryan’s site, or the comparatively vague proposals of the long-time insider, and purported front-runner, Andy McKenna.

The insiders in both parties are so tightly wound in Illinois that they are referred to as “The Combine.” The GOP serves as nothing more than the junior partners in a combined Machine, and appears to have no principled differences whatsoever from the Democrats.

Adam’s candidacy presents a chance to move toward a genuine two-party political process in Illinois, and to start getting the financial mess under control.

Let me also address the cynical response that he “can’t win.” There is a large field, turnout will probably not be huge, and it won’t take much for one of the GOP candidates to pull ahead. So, vote for the best guy.

Plus, as Lech Walesa – an Adam supporter – put it: “Nobody gave us a chance to win over the communists. Nobody. And we proved them wrong.” The Combine can also be beaten.

Please take a look at Adam’s site if you are an Illinois voter.

Very cool! I am the proud recipient of a winning non-member post award from The Watcher’s Council:

Rock Stars and Pariahs

…..There are many trains of thought on this issue and it is one of the challenges that we must consider in light of the changing political landscape of the United States and the nature of the enemy jihadist that doesn’t share the same values as Americans. For a counterinsurgency strategy to succeed we need to get serious about that reality and consider it within the scope of a global jihad. This requires an understanding that we are not simply faced with local insurgency. Our strategy needs to be adjusted within that context in Afghanistan and Iraq. Otherwise we will continue to suffer the unnecessary loss of American life and civilian casualties without realizing the long term goal of winning the war against terror on all fronts.

Here is the full list of contending bloggers in the member and non-member divisions:

Winning Council Submissions

• First place with 1 2/3 points! – Mere Rhetoric – Wonderful: Iraqis Permanently Scratch Out Ancient Hebrew Inscription Biblical Prophet’s Tomb
• Second place with 1 1/3 points – with 2 points! – American Digest – Obama: Working the Enemies List
• Second place with 1 1/3 points – Bookworm Room – Obama’s Self Love
• Third place with 1 points – (T*) – Joshuapundit – Lexington And Concord Revisited – The Brown Upset and What It Means
• Third place with 1 points – (T*) – The Razor – Obama Vs. The People
• Fourth place with 2/3 points – (T*) – Soccer Dad – Profile of an international first responder
• Fourth place with 2/3 points – (T*) – Right Truth – The London Conference on Afghanistan and Yemen – Look who’s coming to dinner!

Winning Non-Council Submissions

• First place with 3 points! – Zenpundit – The Post-COIN Era is Here
• Second place with 2 1/3 points – Victor Davis Hanson – Let Me Be Perfectly Not Clear
• Third place with 1 points – Bob McCarty Writes – Terror, Travesty and Tales of Suppressed Evidence
• Fourth place with 2/3 points – (T*) – Founding Bloggers – A Challenge For Pro-Life Conservatives
• Fourth place with 2/3 points – (T*) – Commentary Contentions – From Disgusting to Odd
• Fifth place with 1/3 points – (T*) – Gateway Pundit – Heartless Progressives Send Message to Tim Tebow: We Wish You Were Never Born
• Fifth place with 1/3 points – (T*) – Andrew Klavan – Inglorious Malarkey
• Fifth place with 1/3 points – (T*) – The Truth According to Mark – The Republicans’ Dilemma

Thank you to The Watcher’s Council and to Dave Schuler for nominating me!

Top Billing! Adam Elkus – Do Ideas Matter? A Clausewitzian Case Study

This article is, in my opinion, Adam’s finest work as a writer and strategic thinker. It even merited an enthusiastic and deserved “Excellent article. We need more like this!” comment from arch-clausewitzian defense consultant Wilf Owen.  Elkus asks sophisticated questions of competing interpretations of CvC and applies the understanding to analyze the cognitive culture of the defense community. Highly recommended.

The leaked Quadrennial Defense Review Report merits a look.

Metamodern – The importance of seeing what isn’t there

This is also a stellar post IMHO:

….Absence-detection boosts the growth of shared human knowledge in at least three ways:

Development of knowledge: Generally, for shared knowledge to grow, someone must invest effort to develop a novel idea into something more substantial (resulting in a blog post, a doctoral dissertation, or whatever). A potential knowledge-creator may need some degree of confidence that the expected result doesn’t already exist. Better absence-detection can help build that confidence – or drop it to zero and abort a costly duplication.

Validation of knowledge: For shared knowledge to grow, something that looks like knowledge must gain enough credibility to be treated as knowledge. Some knowledge is born with credibility, inherited from a credible source, yet new knowledge, supported by evidence, can be discredited by arguments backed by nothing but noise. A crucial form of evidence for a proposition is sometimes the absence of credible evidence against it.

Destruction of anti-knowledge: Shared knowledge can also grow through removal of of anti-knowledge, for example, by discrediting false ideas that had displaced or discredited true ones. Mirroring validation, a crucial form of evidence against the credibility of a proposition is sometimes the absence of credible evidence for it.

Charles Cameron at SmartMobs – A most remarkable conversation

….Ayman al-Zawahiri, for instance, has twice quoted Will McCants and Jarret Brachman’s Stealing al-Qaida’s Playbook report for the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, once in a video and once in his book, The Exoneration. Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi too has cited material from the CTC, comparing it favorably to that of his challengers within the jihadist environment…

Jeff Carr – Don’t be a Cyberista. We can’t afford it.

….You may have heard the term “Fashionista”; i.e., people devoted to the creations of a select group of fashion designers and who only wear their designs. I have adapted the term to reflect what I’m seeing happen in Washington DC as well as in major U.S. corporations. Decision makers are being swayed by whatever novel term, concept, or strategy is popular at the moment. Right now that term is APT (Advanced Persistant Threat). Tomorrow it will be something else. And the politician, policy maker, General, and C-level executive who makes an information security decision based solely on what’s hot at the moment is the cyber equivalent of a slave to fashion – a “Cyberista”.

Abu Muqawama – Quants and COIN

A little quantitative analysis goes a long way 😉

So the quants, not content with mucking up the financial world, have turned their attention to the dynamics of irregular war. I may be a PECOTA guy when it comes to baseball, but I am wary of many quantitative efforts made to “explain” the dynamics of war. Strategic studies scholars I admire like Steve Biddle show the utility of quantitative analysis in their own work, and Steve in particular makes a strong case for why policy papers and academic research backed up by quantitative analysis have more of an impact than do papers based on strictly qualitative or theoretical work. But I think the pressure PhD students and junior professors in political science and international relations feel to check the three magic boxes — qualitative, quantitative and theoretical — when writing their dissertations and papers has contributed to the growing irrelevance of their fields in policy discussions. You shouldn’t need two semesters of statistics to understand a policy paper on strategy or military operations. Acquisitions or budgeting, fine, but neither this book nor this book nor this book nor this book — all enduring classics in the field of strategic studies — rely on quantitative analysis

Speaking of quants…..

Registan.net (Joshua Foust, Drew Conway, Thomas Zeitzoff) – A comment on `Common ecology quantifies human insurgency’

….In reality, this ecological model can only be considered one of several competing theories to describe the dataset. BGDSJ try to preempt such criticis by saying, “any competing theory would also need to replicate the results.” But creating a model to fit one’s data is an inversion of the scientific process, reducing the study to mere deduction. When respected newspapers write stories claiming ten percent of all Chechens live in South Waziristan, we must seriously question just how one goes about creating a useful model of behavior based on media accounts.

That was a very elegant bitch-slap, by blogospheric standards. Nice.

Dr. Von – Some Posts on STEM: Early Childhood, Part I, Where are we with STEM Education?,  How to Fix STEM Education , Summary of STEM Posts

STEM stands for “Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics”. Von is a physicist, researcher, teacher, school board member and author of 70 published papers on particle physics and methodology of science education. He is writing here on the state of science in pre-K through postsecondary in the United States, where schools discourage inquiry and real science in favor of rote memorization, where science is not being sidelined entirely by NCLB mania ( as an aside, the dowstream effect of NCLB will be the steep decline of America’s edge in technological innovation and science research, starting in about 15 years when our science-lite, making AYP memorizers begin to matriculate. I guess we will try to keep importing foreign talent rather than developing our own)

The first item to put out there is a necessary change that is needed as far as what our pre-school children are capable of with regards to science. An article from Education Week deals with this, and a new curriculum designed for those 3-4 year olds. Keep in mind, if you have kids or young siblings, think about how they learn. They are scientists! They actively investigate everything. They experiment. They go through trial and error, learn from mistakes, and actually try to predict what will happen as they ‘play’ with new toys. They are natural curious about everything, and over time make connections between different items and experiences. They learn language through intense observation and build off of what others do. Through group play, they teach and learn from each other. Is this not what we want from our high school graduates?! Is this not how successful research programs behave and operate?

As is stated by a researcher in this article,

” “Most teachers will have a science area in their classroom, … and if you look on plans, you would see something listed as science but, in reality, there would be some shells, some magnets, and maybe a pumpkin, or a book about animals in winter,” said Nancy Clark-Chiarelli, a principal research scientist at the Education Development Center, a research group based in Newton, Mass. “But those items are not conceptually related, and they don’t promote children’s independent exploration of them.” ”

 

That’s it.