{"id":2622,"date":"2008-03-04T05:22:18","date_gmt":"2008-03-04T05:22:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/zenpundit.com\/?p=2622"},"modified":"2008-03-04T06:02:31","modified_gmt":"2008-03-04T06:02:31","slug":"book-review-if-we-can-keep-it-by-chet-richards","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/?p=2622","title":{"rendered":"Book Review: If We Can Keep It by Chet Richards"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/a>Two years ago, Dr. Chet Richards<\/strong> <\/a>released Neither Shall the Sword: Conflict in the Years Ahead<\/a><\/em><\/strong>, a radical treatise on global trends toward\u00a0 the privatization of military capabilities and the\u00a0erosion of the efficacy of state armed forces.\u00a0 If We Can Keep It: A National Security Manifesto for the Next Administration<\/a><\/em><\/strong> is not a sequel to Neither Shall the Sword<\/em><\/strong> but rather a logical extension of that \"chet.jpg\"<\/a>book’s premises\u00a0upon which\u00a0Richards\u00a0builds a stinging critique of American grand strategy and\u00a0a profligate United States government that Richards argues\u00a0wins enemies and alienates allies while squandering hundreds of billions of dollars on weapons systems of dubious\u00a0usefulness against what genuine threats to our security still exist.\u00a0 It is a provocative\u00a0thesis that leaves few of the Defense Department’s sacred cows grazing unmolested.<\/p>\n

Dr. Richards has a trademark style\u00a0as a writer: economical clarity of thought. One can agree or disagree with his analysis or dispute his normative preferences but within his parameters, Chet will give\u00a0his audience an argument that is internally consistent and logically sound, without much in the way of redundancy or wasted words. As a result, If We Can Keep It<\/em><\/strong> is about as lean a book as Richards would like the U.S. military to be while giving the reader no shortage of things to think about as he hammers away at conventional wisdom regarding defense policy, national security and the war on terror.<\/p>\n

A number of intellectual influences resonate within If We Can Keep It<\/em><\/strong>. Unsurprisingly,\u00a0given Richards’ history as a military thinker, these include\u00a0the ideas of Colonel John Boyd,\u00a0Martin van Creveld, Thomas X. Hammes<\/strong>\u00a0and 4GW Theory<\/strong> advocated by William Lind.<\/strong>\u00a0 Also present as a strategic subtext is Sun Tzu<\/strong> along with\u00a0elements of Eastern philosophy and the recent work of British military strategist\u00a0General Sir Rupert Smith,<\/strong> whose book, The Utility of Force<\/a><\/em><\/strong>, shares a similar title with one of Richards’ chapters. Finally, Richards is channeling, in his call for a grand strategy of\u00a0Shi <\/em>and for America to focus on ” being the best United States that we can be “, a very traditional strand of foreign policy in American history. One that diplomatic historian Walter McDougall<\/strong> <\/a>has termed “Promised Land<\/a>” but\u00a0which may be most accurately described as “Pre-Wilsonian<\/em>“; not “Isolationist” in the mold of the 1930’s but rather\u00a0a hardheaded realism\u00a0with very skeptical view of the efficacy of military intervention beyond purely punitive expeditions against violent ideological networks like al Qaida.<\/p>\n

In enunciating this case, Richards argues that the “war on terror” conducted since 9\/11 by the Bush administration \u00a0does not qualify as a “war” and that “terrorists” is an empty\u00a0label\u00a0 slapped on to many types of problems, most of which are best handled by law enforcement and intelligence agencies ( Richards recommends giving the IC the lead and budget for fighting al Qaida, not the\u00a0DoD); the “war” model is costly in terms of treasure and civil liberty without yielding positive strategic results;\u00a0While COIN is ” a piece of the puzzle” for fighting\u00a0“true insurgencies”\u00a0it is not a strategic magic bullet and\u00a0COIN is historically\u00a0ineffectual against\u00a0“wars of national liberation”; that given the lack of serious external threats from foreign states or justification to intervene abroad\u00a0militarily in most instances (aside from raids and strikes against violent non-state\u00a0networks) the American defense\u00a0establishment can\u00a0be drastically\u00a0scaled back to roughly $ 150 billion a year\u00a0to support a superempowered US Marine Corps with Special Forces\u00a0and tactical Air power.<\/p>\n

(Dr. Richard’s\u00a0last bit should be enough to kill off most of America’s general officer corps from heart attacks and take a fair number of the House of Representatives with them)<\/p>\n

Chet Richards makes a strong argument for the declining utility of military force and the consequent budgetary\u00a0implications before calling for a radical shift in American foreign and strategic policy. Much of his criticism of the strategic status quo\u00a0is praiseworthy, bold, \u00a0incisive\u00a0and insightful and could serve as the basis for commonsense discussion of possible reforms.\u00a0However,\u00a0Richards’ argument can also be contested; in part from what Richards has said in If We Can Keep It<\/em><\/strong>, which will mostly attract the attention from specialists in military affairs,\u00a0but most importantly from what has been left unsaid. It is the\u00a0consequences of the latter with which the public and politicians must seriously consider in entertaining the recommendations of Dr. Richards.<\/p>\n

In terms of what was “said”, I am dissatisfied with the sections dealing with the differentiation between “true insurgencies” and “wars of national liberation which suffers from some degree of\u00a0contextual ahistoricality. For example, the Malayan Emergency ( which is listed\u00a0in tables IV and V\u00a0as being in both categories) has a result of ” UK declares victory and leaves”. True enough, but in the process of doing so, an ethnic Chinese Communist insurgency with ties to Beijing was crushed and the population reconciled to a legitimate, pro-Western\u00a0state. That’s a victory, not a declaration.\u00a0Communist Vietnam may have ” withdrawn” from Cambodia but their puppet ruler, the ex-Khmer Rouge Hun Sen<\/strong>, is still Prime Minister today. That’s a victory, even if Hun Sen’s power has been trimmed back somewhat by a UN brokered parliamentary-constitutional monarchy system.\u00a0 The case of the Portuguese colonies of Angola and Mozambique have as much to do with the utter collapse of the decrepit, semi-fascist, \u00a0Salazar regime in Lisbon a brief Communist coup as the military prowess of the insurgencies.<\/p>\n

Reaching for a dogmatic rule, which the 4GW school is currently doing with “foreign COIN is doomed”, is an error because the more heterodox and fractured the military situation in a country happens to be, the more\u00a0relative the concepts of “foreigner” and “legitimacy”\u00a0are going to become to the locals. Rather than binary state vs. insurgents scenarios, historical case studies in military complexity like China 1911-1949, the Spanish Civil War, South Vietnam 1949 -1962, Lebanon 1980’s, West Afrca 1990’s and Iraq, Afghanistan, Colombia\u00a0and Central Africa the 2000’s\u00a0should be pursued to better\u00a0understand 4GW\u00a0and COIN\u00a0dynamics.<\/p>\n

In terms of what has been left “unsaid” in If We Can Keep It<\/em><\/strong>, would be the downstream global implications of a radical shift in America’s strategic posture. Richards is no isolationist but his smoothly laconic style belies the magnitude of\u00a0proposals which entail a top to bottom reevaluation of all of the alliances and military relationships maintained by the United States ( itself not a bad thing) – most likely with the result of terminating\u00a0most and renegotiating the rest. The extent to which American securrity guarantees originating in the aftermath of WWII, have interdependently facilitated peaceful economic liberalization and integration\u00a0is a factor ignored in If We Can Keep It<\/em><\/strong> and frankly, I’m not sure how we can abruptly or unilaterally exit our security role in the short term\u00a0without creating a riptide in the global economy.<\/p>\n

If We Can Keep It<\/em><\/strong> is a fascinating and thought-provoking\u00a0book as well as an absolutely\u00a0brutal critique of the numerous shortcomings and strategic mismatches we suffer from as a result of ponderous, Cold War era, legacy\u00a0bureaucracies and weapons systems and ill-considered foreign interventions.\u00a0It is also, a pleasure to read. I highly recommend it to any serious student of defense policy, military strategy or foreign affairs.<\/p>\n

ADDENDUM – Other Reviews of If We Can Keep It<\/em><\/strong>:<\/p>\n

William Lind<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

TDAXP<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Two years ago, Dr. Chet Richards released Neither Shall the Sword: Conflict in the Years Ahead, a radical treatise on global trends toward\u00a0 the privatization of military capabilities and the\u00a0erosion of the efficacy of state armed forces.\u00a0 If We Can Keep It: A National Security Manifesto for the Next Administration is not a sequel to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[360,262,361,133,337,20,126,304,60,87,178,425,78,199,465,39,340,270,131,127,13,18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2622","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-21st-century","category-4gw","category-america","category-book","category-chet-richards","category-coin","category-counterinsurgency","category-defense","category-dni","category-foreign-policy","category-geopolitics","category-government","category-ideas","category-insurgency","category-legitimacy","category-military","category-military-reform","category-national-security","category-security","category-strategy","category-theory","category-war"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2622","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2622"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2622\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2622"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2622"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2622"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}