Elkus on “The Strategic Raid”
Adam Elkus has an excellent piece that looks at the COIN vs. Raiding debate in Defense Concepts and, while analyzing that, IMHO correctly diagnoses the origin of our policy troubles.
Taking the Offensive: The Utility and Limitations of Raiding (PDF)
What can broadly be considered raiding strategy deserves consideration as an alternative to global counterinsurgency. However, its utility is limited and must be bounded within a broader review of American grand strategy. This paper addresses the utility and limitations of raiding and punitive expeditions. Both raiding and global counterinsurgency are valuable approaches in pursuit of strategic goals but should not be elevated to the centerpiece of national security policy–especially in light of underdetermined grand strategy.
….Even if we could develop a metric for the requisite amount of force to be employed, we would still encounter objections to raiding based on an awareness of political affairs and bureaucratic infighting. Defense pundits discussing proposed strategies seem to implicitly assume that the United States is a state with strong executive planning organs and a political culture capable of digesting sophisticated strategies; a kind of 21st century version of Moltke’s Prussia. Instead, we live in a political culture more aptly chronicled by the creators of South Park.
May 17th, 2010 at 1:02 am
This is a superb article. Adam apparently finished his article too early to cite to Joseph Fouche’s Headless Chicken post: http://chicagoboyz.net/archives/12875.html It is brilliant satire, and makes much the same point Adam is making: You can’t do grand strategy unless you make deep, existential choices about who and what you are and what kind of world you want to live in. If you don’t want to face those questions, you end up just tinkering on a jerry-built machine and rumbling off in some direction set by happenstance and intermittent course corrections. Usually, the interplay of different interest groups yields some kind of coherent zig zag, as Walter Russell Mead shows in his book Special Providence. http://www.amazon.com/dp/0415935369/?tag=badosaep I am concerned that our elite is now so much of a monoculture that we are not getting good thinking, but instead a bunch of ill-conceived groupthink and inertial movement. Mead makes that same point, inter alia, in this recent post. Tom Barnett, to his credit, announces clearly who and what he thinks we are, then ties that to a set of policies. You can disagree at any point, but the inner logic is coherent given the initial premises. I see no competing intellectual program which matches this. I would like to make one up of my own, if I had time! This new book may be pertinent, especially on the topic of aerial control over the Gap. http://press.princeton.edu/titles/9007.html One of thousands in the teeming swarm of books I’d like to read.I have read two of Prof. Headrick’s other books, Technology and Empire and The Tentacles of Progress, both of which are good. http://faculty.roosevelt.edu/Headrick/
May 17th, 2010 at 4:13 am
"It is brilliant satire, and makes much the same point Adam is making: You can’t do grand strategy unless you make deep, existential choices about who and what you are and what kind of world you want to live in. If you don’t want to face those questions, you end up just tinkering on a jerry-built machine and rumbling off in some direction set by happenstance and intermittent course corrections"
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Yep.
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Making such choices tears the functional class unity of the elite apart – their bases want to live in very different Americas and the moderate middle are repelled by the extreme prescriptions of either base. I don’t want to live in a ’68’er, PC racialist, grafter, nanny-state. I don’t want to live in Pat Robertson’s anti-science, magical universe, theocratic America either. So the elite try to ride the tiger of their respective ideologues and useful idiots while keeping themselves, their friends and their children on top.