Recommended Reading to Provoke

Special edition, derived from the always steady stream (at times, geyser) of articles, PDFs and book recs coming through the Warlord Loop:

The Atlantic  Parag Khanna  America’s Non-Grand Strategy

….Grand strategy should be about connecting ends and means on a global scale that transcends administrations and their peculiar obsessions and preoccupations, whether it be Iraq, Afghanistan, or China. It is about more than reacting to immediate events. In the age of globalization, grand strategy must take into account the financial crisis, Middle Eastern instability, Asia’s hunger for commodities, nuclear proliferation, technological disruptions, and trans-regional terrorist networks — all at the same time. Unfortunately, U.S. foreign policy over the last two decades has been characterized more by, to borrow the great historian Arnold Toynbee’s terms, alarmism and reactiveness than the necessary foresight and adaptation. From Afghanistan to Iraq to the Arab Spring, the U.S. has been either over-confident, caught off guard, or behind the curve. In all cases, it still lacks a coherent vision grounded in a realistic grand strategy.

….During the Clinton administration, Henry Kissinger quipped about then-National Security Advisor Sandy Berger, “You can’t expect a trade lawyer to be a grand strategist.” Today again, foreign policy is overseen by lawyers such as Tom Donilon and Hillary Clinton who give advice on specific events and problems but not guidance on the bigger picture. As a result, Obama’s speeches remain mellifluous but no longer really register abroad, other than to frustrate for their lack of clear purpose. As Kissinger wrote, “A statesman’s job is to resolve complexity, not just contemplate it.”

Having been beating the “we don’t  have  a  grand  strategy” drum for some time, I don’t find this to be controversial but opinions vary.

RUSI Anne-Marie Slaughter  The End of Twentieth Century Warfare

….From the vantage point of 2011, however, it is far more likely that historians will see 9/11 as the catalyst for the end of twentieth-century warfare: large-scale, multi-year deployments requiring the conquest, control and long-term stabilisation and reconstruction of foreign territory. The nuclear weapons that ended the Second World War ended great power war. The fall of the Soviet Union ended great power proxy war among current great powers, although Pakistan certainly thinks it is fighting India in the valleys and cities of Afghanistan. The second Iraq war and the war in Afghanistan are ending boots-on-the ground wars of counter-insurgency and regime change. 

The great power wars of the twenty-first century will be fought by special forces: specialised in combat against pirates, terrorists and global criminal networks; in focused search and rescue and search and destroy missions; and in civilian protection units capable of disabling but not destroying an enemy. They will be fought by cyber-warriors, skilled in manipulating unmanned weapons and in deterring and responding to system-wide cyber-attacks. And they will be fought in multilateral coalitions aimed at stopping the wars that criminal governments wage against their own people and bringing individual leaders and their coterie of high-level supporters to justice.

Somewhere…someplace….the head of Colin Gray is exploding. 🙂

The problem here is one of simplifying overstatement, not in getting the trends wrong. Dr. Slaughter is largely correct because currently a) the US lacks a true military peer and is absolutely dominant in a head-on, conventional clash and b) 4GW/irregular warfare is comparatively cheap way to attrit your foe, disrupt their systems and corrupt their OODA Loop.

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