zenpundit.com

[ by Charles Cameron — equal opportunity destruction — church and mosque ]
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These two images are taken from the remarkable slideshow accompanying HuffPo’s article, King Of Jordan Abdullah II: Sectarian Violence Could Destroy Muslim World. Highly recommended.

[ by Charles Cameron — the weather of the world? — three otherwise unrelated tweets and a December 2013 prediction ]
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I think it's time to revisit the colonization of space. This planet is starting to feel like a loss.

— J.M. Berger (@intelwire) August 17, 2013

When we peer into the fog of the deep future do we see human extinction or a future among the stars? http://t.co/zHrX44aKf7 #aeonclassic

— El Cid Barett (@ElCidBarett) August 19, 2013

I tried saying something optimistic but what came out was: "The disaster is half full."

— Teju Cole (@tejucole) August 19, 2013

Sources:

JM Berger

El Cid

Teju Cole

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Meanwhile, some people are going whole hog:

Source:

Sovereign Society

[by Lynn C. Rees]

Der erste, der großartigste, der entschiedenste Akt des Urteils nun, welchen der Staatsmann und Feldherr ausübt, ist der, daß er den Krieg, welchen er unternimmt, in dieser Beziehung richtig erkenne, ihn nicht für etwas nehme oder zu etwas machen wolle, was er der Natur der Verhältnisse nach nicht sein kann.

– Carl von Clausewitz
Vom Krieg, Erstes Buch, Über die Natur des Krieges

Does the measure of victory depend on the original intent of a war’s founders? Or is picking winners and losers subject to constantly shifting goal posts since war, once embarked, is a living thing?

War is a three-way tug of envy, opportunity, and design. Design sees war as a tool. Envy sees it as an emotionally-satisfying reckoning. Opportunity happens. Yet they slime together nonetheless, a brood of vipers.

The tugs of war are fueled by politics, the constant and ongoing division of relative strength. Envy, that fear that others in your face have more power than you, fuels politics. And the cure for envy?

1. Design how to knock the other guy down six pegs or so.
2. Look for opportunities to use the design to acquire a more satisfying political shift.

War is a controlled burn. You can design how and what it will burn, even down to the last dried blade of grass if you wish. But, once lit, fire is an agent unto itself. Sudden wind may gust, sudden rain may fall, sudden tinder may emerge, or the unplanned may wander into the target zone. Even then, fire may keep within the original planned course. But there’s always the threat that it will jump its firebreaks and go where it wills.

In plausibility, the original burn plan is only just a little lower than a fairytale for children. And that’s before the fire’s lit. Afterward, the original burn plan is merely tinder for political struggle, documenting how many fathered victory or how few fathered defeat. Contestants only care about a war’s original intent if they are weaponizing history to club the driver from the commanding heights of the backseat. Otherwise, everyone believes in living war if they’re the poor sucker driving.

There is no original intent in foxholes. War Year I and its discontents may be irrelevant to the concerns of War Year VI. Concerns of politics always change. While it’s convenient to see war and politics as distinct, inconveniently they’re no: they’re one writhing brood of vipers and vipers all the way down. Any boundary between politics and war is arbitrary, nominal, porous, and futile.

Strategy is a postwar massage of ad hoc reconciliations of means, motive, and opportunity into one politically useful fable. Outside that questionable exercise, who mourns original intent? It’s a dead letter. War is a living imperative. The first, the greatest, and most decisive question that politicians in and out of uniform must ask of war is what have you done for me lately?

[by Mark Safranski a.k.a. “zen“]

Top Billing! Infinity Journal Volume 3, Issue 2 

IJ requires free registration but has a consistently high level of articles, for example “Strategic Culture: More Problems than Prospects” by Antulio J. Echevarria:

The concept of strategic culture has grown more popular of late than its problematic origins and dubious attempts at application warrant. Once described as having undergone three generational shifts, the concept is now in at least its fourth generation, and is no better for any of them. Over the span of more than four decades, the theory’s diachronic and synchronic tensions have resisted resolution. The concept fails, in other words, to account for change over time as well as commonality in time. It attempts to privilege continuity over change in the former sense, and uniqueness over similarity in the latter sense. Its empirical base, moreover, has not gone beyond broad generalizations that do little more than reaffirm national and cultural stereotypes. The idea of strategic culture is, therefore, in need of another more critical examination. Such a re-examination can only lead to the conclusion that, on the whole, the concept’s problems far outweigh its prospects. No doubt this condition will continue to attract scholarly interest in the hopes of resolving these tensions. However, for policymakers and strategists, the concept is best avoided, at least for another generation or two. There are enough tautologies involved in formulating policy and strategy already. It is not clear that the credibility of the process can withstand another one. […] 

William Lind –  John Boyd’s Art of War 

….Boyd had a reservoir of comments he repeated regularly, one of which was, “A lot of people in Washington talk about strategy. Most of them can spell the word, but that’s all they know of it.” The establishment’s insistence on an offensive grand strategy, where we attempt to force secular liberal democracy down the throats of every people on earth, is a major reason for our involvement and defeat in Fourth Generation conflicts. A defensive grand strategy, which is what this country followed successfully through most of its history, would permit us to fold our enemies back on themselves, something Boyd recommended. With us out of the picture, their internal fissures, such as those between Sunni and Shiites in the Islamic world, would become their focus. But as usual, Boyd was right: virtually no one in Washington can understand the advantages of a defensive grand strategy.

Being involved in every conflict on earth is useful if the real game is boosting the Pentagon’s budget rather than serving our national interests. Here too Boyd had a favorite line. He often said, “It is not true the Pentagon has no strategy. It has a strategy, and once you understand what that strategy is, everything the Pentagon does makes sense. The strategy is, don’t interrupt the money flow, add to it.”

Information Dissemination (Galrahn) – 21st Century Mahan 

….21st Century Mahan is a very clever book. The book combines five articles written by AT Mahan for periodicals specifically for public audiences, thus presenting AT Mahan in a way that is more approachable by those like me who can get annoyed by his difficult to read classical writing style. All five articles are very well written, but they are also relevant to the discussions surrounding the US Navy today. Benjamin Armstrong is a Lieutenant Commander in the US Navy today, so the author intentionally draws no conclusions from Mahan’s work and applies them to current events. And yet, because of the presentation and delivery within the book, the reader can’t help but think about Mahan in a 21st century context applicable today. I am not sure if that was how LCDR Armstrong intended to write the book, or how the USNI editors helped arrange the book, but it is very clever and works well.

I really enjoyed the book. It helped that I had never read any of the five AT Mahan essay’s covered in the book, and it also helped that I enjoyed each of the essay’s. In particular the way the chapter involving Naval Administration and Warfare, Some General Principles came together early in the book was so well done I had to read it again with my yellow marker I was so impressed. To give one a sense of just how much easier this book is to read on Alfred Thayer Mahan than most works of AT Mahan, my 18 year old daughter actually finished the book when I asked her to read it just for an opinion. I assure you, if this was a typical Mahan book, she would not have made it past chapter 2.

If you are looking for a book with a strong authors opinion that draws conclusions for you in applying AT Mahan to the 21st century, this is not the right book for you. This book asks readers to draw their own conclusions. That detail actually defines the style of the book better than any other detail of the book, because the author doesn’t tell the reader what to think, rather asks the reader to think for themselves.

Washington’s Blog – NSA Whistleblowers: NSA Collects ‘Word for Word’ Every Domestic Communication 

JUDY WOODRUFF:   Both of you know what the government says is that we’re collecting this — we’re collecting the number of phone calls that are made, the e-mails, but we’re not listening to them.

WILLIAM BINNEY: Well, I don’t believe that for a minute. OK?

I mean, that’s why they had to build Bluffdale, that facility in Utah with that massive amount of storage that could store all these recordings and all the data being passed along the fiberoptic networks of the world. I mean, you could store 100 years of the world’s communications here. That’s for content storage. That’s not for metadata.

Metadata if you were doing it and putting it into the systems we built, you could do it in a 12-by-20-foot room for the world. That’s all the space you need. You don’t need 100,000 square feet of space that they have at Bluffdale to do that. You need that kind of storage for content.

Joshua Foust –The Miranda Detention: Troubling from all Sides

….So, this is complicated. The UK authorities were correct to question David Miranda, but they were stupid, wrong, and abusive to have held him for so long — and in doing so, they ruined any possible legitimacy their questions might have held. It was a needless own-goal.

More immediately, too, the instinctive reaction of far too many journalists to shriek about their own spouses being targeted is going to have a downside. Few journalists would treat their spouses as authority-bait the way Greenwald did this past weekend, and few would tell other reporters, for a profile, that they used their spouses to help them avoid intelligence agencies. Glenn Greenwald is a very smart man — he knew what he was doing. While we should all condemn the British authorities for holding Miranda for so long, we should also keep in mind exactly why he might have been singled out — and there a whole new set of complications and questions emerge.

There’s also a bit of historical literacy we should perhaps add to the discussion. Histrionics aside, most governments, and many more unsavory groups, treat secrecy very seriously — sometimes with deadly seriousness. Regardless of the rightness or wrongness of his decision to help pilfer and distribute the treasured secrets of several governments, to do so openly, with such braggadocio, is not only arrogant it is misguided. This is not a game, especially to the governments being exposed, and casually involving a spouse to take a hit when he won’t risk it is a bizarre and troubling decision.

Chuck Spinney – An American Sun Tzu – John Boyd

Dr. Chet Richards – Spinney and Lind 

BLACKFIVE celebrates National Airborne Day ( it was a perfectly good airplane….)

Dr. Steve Metz – Strategic Horizons: The Revolution in American Security Policy 

War on the Rocks – ( COL David Maxwell) UNCONVENTIONAL WARFARE DOES NOT BELONG TO SPECIAL FORCES and (Jason Fritz) COUNTERINSURGENCY IS NOT THE PROBLEM 

Small Wars Journal – The Roots of Military Doctrine: Change and Continuity in Understanding the Practice of Warfare,  Cartel Car Bombings in Mexico and ( Kyle Fonay) On Guerrilla Warfare: Two Takes, Mao vs. Guevara 

Feral Jundi –Executive Protection: So Who Does Warren Buffet Use For Security? 

Eeben Barlow – THE DANGERS FACING REVOLUTIONARY GOVERNMENTS 

RECOMMENDED VIEWING:

[ by Charles Cameron — always glad to see good will on both sides of a widening chasm ]
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In these days when Egyptian churches have been repeatedly attacked and burned by Ikhwan supporters, it is good to remember that there is love as well as enmity at work… Putting that in Johannine terms (John 1.5, RSV): The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

The captions that go along with these two images read, respectively:

above, Muslim men protecting a Catholic Church in Egypt during mass. Beautiful.

below, Christians pray inside one of the charred churches. Their papers read: “My extremist brother, I came to pray for you.”