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Commodore….errr….what’shisnameagain???

As a rule, I generally do not write about US Navy affairs because it is not an area of expertise for me and I think Galrahn covers that territory admirably well without my poor help. Every so often though, an item from our sea-roving friends catches my eye that I am qualified to speak about and today is one of those days.

Teaching naval history has become an inconvenience to those entrusted with training our nation’s future captains and admirals because they need to get the budgetarily “sexy” topic of “cyber warfare” into the US Naval Academy curriculum. Yes, that’s right. Because someday, in the midst of battle, the combatant commander of PACOM will be furiously barking out HTML code at the bridge of the Eisenhower, above the cries of wounded men.

Gentlemen, gentlemen….in matters of education, fundamentals come before esoterica!

I strongly recommend this post by LCDR Benjamin “BJ” Armstrong, historian, pilot and Navy officer who tackled this subject with an enviable grace and eloquence at the USNI blog:

HH104, WWATMD…

….More than policy or naval strategy, Mahan believed in teaching officers the best ways to approach the challenges of command.  He saw his job as a Naval War College plankowner in those terms, about teaching command, and to do so he turned to history.  But, it wasn’t just senior officers who needed grounding in our naval past.  He wrote in his very first published article, winning third place in “Proceedings” annual essay contest, that history was also a key foundation for learning at the Naval Academy.

When he said that history “lies at the foundation,” it wasn’t just a convenient turn of phrase.  He believed that before subjects like gunnery, engineering, or even cyber-warfare, could be taught a Midshipman needed to know why he was learning them.  Why did any of it matter?  The best way to show a student why hitting the target in gunnery class was important was to teach him the history that showed what happened when crews weren’t drilled properly.  Perhaps he would teach the Midshipman about Captain James Lawrence sailing Chesapeake out of Boston harbor with a green and undrilled crew in 1813 to face HMS Shannon, a short time later uttering his final command, “Don’t give up the ship” just before he succumbed to his wounds and the British boarding party swarmed aboard in victory.  Maybe the Midshipman would recognize the words…from the battle flag bearing the phrase in Memorial Hall that was flown at the Battle of Lake Erie.  Mahan felt that once a Midshipman understood the importance of mastering the craft, of studying their trade, a subject like weapons systems engineering would become important even to the lowly humanities major.

The second part of Mahan’s statement is also important, “all sound military conclusions and practices.”  In our age of checklist leadership and officers educated as engineers there is a desire to approach leadership challenges as equations where certain inputs are guaranteed to give you the desired results.  But Mahan doesn’t say all “correct” military conclusions and practices, he says “sound.”

Mahan recognized that both naval strategy (conclusions) and combat leadership (practices) were art, not science.  In his book “Naval Strategy: Compared and Contrasted with the Principles and Practice of Military Operations on Land,” published in 1911, Mahan compared naval officers to artists.  He wrote that artists had to learn certain techniques, mediums and certain skills, but that wasn’t what made their artwork great.  In the end “art, out of materials which it finds about, creates new forms in endless variety,” artists take those foundation basics and then mix and match them based on inspiration and experience to create a masterpiece.  History helps us understand that frequently there are no right answers to military questions of strategy or leadership.  There are only “sound conclusions,” which are drawn from understanding basics and history.  Demonstrating this great truth to Midshipman early in their education, say as a Plebe before they have taken three years worth of engineering classes that teach them there is always an equation and a correct answer, is much more valuable than having them learn it after years of service.

Bravo!

This decison is wrong on so many levels it amounts to pedagogical malpractice. It should be reversed.

What kind of mind do we want our Navy officers to have in the moment of decision?  An admiral in command of a carrier task force has more destructive power at his disposal than any man on earth except for the ruler of Russia and the President of the United States. At a crisis point, it is too late to roll back the clock to gain the benefit of a career of professional reading, discussion and reflection on the lessons of naval warfare, strategy and statesmanship. EE courses are good things, and demonstrably useful, but they do not inculcate the same habits of mind as does the learning of history.

Historically, the US Navy was the plenipotentiary service of the United States with it’s admirals and commodores assuming extremely sensitive diplomatic or even proconsular duties alongside their responsibilities of military command. The careers of Farragut, Perry, Dewey, Leahy, King, Nimitz and others of lesser rank attest to how naval command has always been deeply entwined in American history with statesmanship and keen political insight. The 21st century will be no different.

The lessons of history are a sword and shield.

[ by Charles Cameron ]

Sayyid Imam al-Sharif, popularly known as Dr Fadl, wrote two of the key works of jihadist ideology, The Essential Guide for Preparation and the thousand-page Compendium of the Pursuit of Divine Knowledge, in the late 1980s — thereby providing his friend from student days, Ayman al-Zawahiri, with powerful scholarly backing for the doctrines of militant jihad and takfirism. Lawrence Wright refers to Fadl as an “Al-Qaeda mastermind” in a detailed 2008 New Yorker analysis.

Dr Fadl was imprisoned without trial in the Yemen shortly after 9/11, but it was after he had been transferred to an Egyptian prison in 2004 that he wrote Rationalizing Jihad, the first volume of his “retractions” — a work so powerful in its attack on his own earlier jihadist doctrine that al-Zawahiri felt obliged to respond with a two-hundred page letter of rebuttal. A second volume from Dr. Fadl followed more recently.

Here’s the point: as far as we (the “open source reading” public) know, Dr Fadl remains in Tora Istikbal prison in Egypt, and thus far it has been possible for Al-Qaida and others to argue that his “retractions” were the result of coercion.

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In recent days, however, Egypt has been in considerable flux.

There were reports before the fall of Mubarak of prisoners being liberated or escaping from prison — either as part of the revolution, or alternatively to supply Mubarak with groups of paid thugs who could attack the demonstrators. More recently, the freeing of political prisoners has been one of the demands the demonstrators have made of the military, and it is here that Robert Fisk’s report in The Independent today fits in:

As for the freeing of political prisoners, the military has remained suspiciously silent. Is this because there are prisoners who know too much about the army’s involvement in the previous regime? Or because escaped and newly liberated prisoners are returning to Cairo and Alexandria from desert camps with terrible stories of torture and executions by – so they say – military personnel. An Egyptian army officer known to ‘The Independent’ insisted yesterday that the desert prisons were run by military intelligence units who worked for the interior ministry – not for the ministry of defence.

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Every major act on the world stage has consequences that ripple out in unexpected directions.

If Dr Fadl regains his liberty, the question arises whether he will claim his critiques of jihadist dictrine were obtained by force, and effectively retract his retractions – or whether he will stand by them, as I somehow expect he might — still declaring, this time as a free man, that “There is nothing that invokes the anger of God and His wrath like the unwarranted spilling of blood and wrecking of property,” and “There is nothing in the Sharia about killing Jews and the Nazarenes, referred to by some as the Crusaders. They are the neighbors of the Muslims … and being kind to one’s neighbors is a religious duty.”

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I haven’t seen any discussion of this question in the western press, and it was only a tweeted nudge from Leah Farrall on January 31 that set me thinking about Dr Fadl, and the questions that his possible release from prison might raise.

Is he free? Will he be freed? If he is, what will he say?

Whichever tack he takes, his statements will have impact.

And as Leah points out, there are parallels between Dr Fadl’s critique of al-Qaeda and that of Abu Walid al-Masri — which just gives me further reason to be interested in what we might hear next from either one.

The Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire by Edward Luttwak

A quarter century in the making, eminent and controversial strategist Dr. Edward Luttwak has produced a tour de force work of scholarship that illuminates the little known (to laymen)  military and diplomatic vision of the Byzantine Empire while making a case for adopting some of Byzantium’s strategic posture to adapt to the challenges of today. A book intended to provoke as much as inform the reader, Luttwak’s epilogue, “Conclusion:Grand Strategy and the Byzantine ‘Operational Code”, which synthesizes the best elements of leading schools of strategic thought, is so good that it merits a separate printing of it’s own.

Luttwak’s central idea is that the Hellenic and holy Orthodox Byzantines, who forever saw themselves as “the Romans”, abandoned the grand strategic posture of the Roman Empire whose mighty legions were optimized to smash heavy infantry into the enemy, seeking not just a decisive victory, but the total destruction of the enemy. Facing a sophisticated peer rival in Persia and the endless steppes that vomited up unending waves of invading Huns, Avars, Pechnegs, Slavs, Bulghars, Bulgars, Turks and Mongols, eventually menaced by an ideologically motivated Islamic enemy, the Byzantines sought to conserve their strength by avoiding decisive battle.

As the position of the Empire meant that one destroyed enemy might be replaced by a worse successor, the Byzantines crafted a grand strategy that maximized stratregic alternatives to wars of attrition that the small, highly trained, well-armed, tactically versatile and irreplaceably expensive Byzantine army could ill afford. Diplomacy, espionage, bribery, assassination, recruitment of foreign proxies, strategic raiding, naval supremacy, manuver warfare and cunning strategems were all employed in preference to engaging in decisive battle. Today’s enemy might be tomorrow’s ally was a foremost consideration for the Byzantines, who took great care to lay down hard-won military wisdom in handbooks and manuals like The Strategikon or  De Re Strategica.

Strengths and Weaknesses:

Where you sit in reading The Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire is likely to determine where you stand on it. 

Luttwak has written a very interesting book about a historical subfield in which he himself is not an expert but has infused it with distillations of professional insight regarding strategy and warfare that no Byzantinist scholar and only very few military historians could have brought to bear. And importantly, never have tried to do so. Luttwak’s commentary on each of the surviving Byzantine military manuals, some only recently translated, for example, while repetitive for a lay reader is an important service for students of war and military strategy.

The empire lasted an exceedingly long period of time, as the Byzantines themselves reckoned it, from the 8th century BC to 1453 when the last Emperor Constantine died heroically fighting the final onslaught of the Ottoman Turks a mere 39 years before Christopher Columbus discovered the New World.  Luttwak is not a historian and makes no attempt to approach the subject as a historian would – something that might require multiple volumes or a very superficial treatment – and makes selections from Byzantine history to illustrate thematic points regarding strategy or, as with the digressions on the composite recurve bow and training of mounted archers, the complex relationship between technology, economics, military tactics and strategy.  To the reader interested in strategy and military history, Luttwak’s approach is efficient and sensible; for those interested in a comprehensive understanding of the Byzantines it makes for a highly idiosyncratic reading.

Nor does Luttwak make any pretense of bowing to rhetorical academic conventions. He does not soften his language anywhere, referring for example to the later wars between the Empire and Arab potentates as “jihad” and “crusade” and draws clear connections between the wars of Byzantium and the wars today with al Qaida, the Taliban and Iraq or the continuity between old  Persia and Ahmadinejad’s Iran. Luttwak freely injects modern terminology into archaic subjects and generally writes as he pleases, meandering whenever details of a topic interest him. His endnotes though, are a rich source of further commentary and observations and the bibliography runs for an additional seventeen pages.

Strongly recommended.

Only Some Dare Call it “Insurgency”

A “must read” article by Dr. Robert J. Bunker at SWJ Blog:

The Mexican Cartel Debate: As Viewed Through Five Divergent Fields of Security Studies

….What is clear is that complex post-modern threats-such as those posed by the Mexican cartels and, for that matter, Al Qaeda and its affiliate network- do not fit into neat categories and well-defined security fields. What is needed is for a U.S. governmental „honest broker? or supra-security organization to come into the Mexican cartel debate and leverage the five fields of security studies highlighted in this essay into a broader networked effort. This effort must further be tied into issues pertaining to the trans-operational environments involving U.S. engagement with Mexican cartels and their affiliates. We can no longer afford the luxury of watching numerous fields of study and security response organizations-each with their own form of „extreme specialization?- independently going about their activities in a totally uncoordinated manner. Instead, attention should be directed at creating a hemispheric strategy for the Americas, possibly even global in scale, to directly challenge the rise of the Mexican cartels and their mercenary and gang affiliates along the entire threat continuum highlighted in this essay.

That the narco-cartels originally had illicit economic motivations and lack Maoist ambitions is apparently a very large obstacle for some orthodox counterinsurgency experts to wrap their heads around – despite the fact that if a group with a political identity were beheading rivals, assassinating police chiefs, kidnapping mayors, using propaganda of word and deed, setting off car bombs and fighting the Army, they’d call it “insurgency”.

While the USG is not supposed to call the narco-cartel war an “insurgency“, we appear to be starting to treat it as one.
 

Charles has crossposted here his own contribution to the Ronald Reagan Roundtable at Chicago Boyz.

Doc Madhu, a.k.a “Onparkstreet” also had a post up last week:

Ronald Reagan Roundtable: The past is a different country. Except that it’s not.

….After the First Lady’s talk, while in conversation with someone or other, I remember saying that, “I would NOT shake the President’s hand” if I met him in person. The young man speaking to me was incredulous. “You wouldn’t shake the President’s hand?”

I can’t remember now why I was so adamant. I wasn’t political as a teen and my hard-working immigrant parents rarely mentioned politics at home. By what form of cultural osmosis had I absorbed the idea that President Reagan was a bad and terrible man? By the osmosis of growing up in a college town surrounded by the children of faculty and life-long Story County Democrats. If you click on the Ames Historical Society link above, you will find an Ames Tribune photograph of a demonstration against President Reagan’s policies held during the First Lady’s visit. “Cheese for the POOR and champaigne for the RICH” reads one sign.

In the college town environments of my youth and early adulthood, Republicans were universally understood to be cold-hearted stupid warmongers. There was no, “I don’t like his policies but I like him personally” stuff. By what process of misremembering and selective editing have we smoothed over the roughest edges of that era, the nasty snide anti-Reagan jokes, the huge anti-Reagan missile protests in Europe, the near universal disdain of the man and the movement among intellectuals? A certain percentage of said intellectuals admired their own personal starry-eyed vision of the Soviet Union and that’s the truth.

You want to know how bad the disdain was in some corners of our society? When President Reagan was shot, my junior high classroom erupted into spontaneous applause. To the credit of the teacher, she became immediately and visibly distressed and told us to stop. She was shocked. I am shocked to remember it. We were nice kids growing up in a middle-class Midwestern college town, dreamily innocent in some ways, and primarily concerned with getting good grades and impressing that cute boy or girl. Yet, our first instinct at that moment was to clap. I remember being surprised at first, then smiling in confusion, then noting that the teacher was upset so that our reaction must be very wrong. How had we preteens thought such horrible behavior appropriate? What must we have heard, day in and day out, for that to be our response? How bizarre. How remarkable. How shameful.

Ha! I have a similar memory.

I was in Jr. High school at the time, and in Social Studies class, when President Reagan was shot and, most unusually, a TV was rolled in by the instructor, so we could watch the news reports. One of the class fools, a minor bully, stood up and laughed very loudly and brazenly said something to the effect that he hoped Reagan was dead. The class started to laugh but it turned to shock in a heartbeat because the teacher, a  bantam rooster sort of guy in thick spectacles, had sprung from his chair and unceremoniously knocked the kid flat on this behind with something that was less than a slap but a lot more than a shove.

He had our attention.

Today, if he had done that, the teacher would be fired and sued, if not hauled away in handcuffs, but my school was in a blue colar community in the era when male teachers, especially coaches and assistant principals, were still known and expected to occasionally use a hand to straighten out boys who were acting like punks. It was less true of classroom teachers of academic subjects but it happened. We just never saw it happen so fast!

We were also surprised because our teacher, an ardent liberal, had never hidden his political disdain for Ronald Reagan and everything he stood for in his lectures, offhand comments or jokes. Most of the teachers had the same attitude. But our instructor launched into an impassioned speech about how the POTUS, whomever he was or what we thought of him, represented all the people of the United States and that his assassination would be an attack on not just the president, but on America. That we had certain obligations and duties as citizens of the United States at a time like this, and showing respect to the President of the United States was one of them.

He went on to describein detail  how he felt and how people had behaved when President Kennedy was killed and contrasted it with our behavior, telling us he was ashamed and embarrassed for us that we did not know any better. When he was finished, a loud silence reigned supreme.

A teachable moment.