{"id":4231,"date":"2011-08-04T14:44:59","date_gmt":"2011-08-04T14:44:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/zenpundit.com\/?p=4231"},"modified":"2011-08-04T14:44:59","modified_gmt":"2011-08-04T14:44:59","slug":"guest-post-politics-requires-people-a-response-to-war-the-individual-strategy-and-the-state","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/?p=4231","title":{"rendered":"Guest Post: Politics Requires People (a Response to “War, the Individual, Strategy and the State”)"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a>I would like to welcome seydlitz89<\/strong> <\/a>who is guest-posting at ZP,<\/strong> for purposes of rebuttal to my previous post, War, the Individual, Strategy and the State<\/a>. For many readers in this corner of the blogosphere who are interested in strategy, Seydlitz should need no introduction, but for those that do:<\/p>\n

seydlitz89<\/strong> is a former US Marine and Army intelligence officer who served in a civilian capacity in Berlin during the last decade of the Cold War. He was involved as both an intelligence operations specialist and an operations officer in strategic overt humint collection and now blogs<\/a> and posts<\/a> on the internet and can be contacted at seydlitz89 at web.de<\/strong>. He lives with his family in northern Portugal and works in education.\u00a0\u00a0His writings have appeared at Clausewitz.com<\/strong>,\u00a0Defense and the National Interest<\/strong>, Milpub <\/strong>and on three <\/strong>Chicagoboyz Roundtables<\/strong>.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Politics Requires People (a Response to “War, the Individual, Strategy and the State”)<\/strong><\/p>\n

By seydlitz89,\u00a0 <\/strong>3 August 2011<\/strong><\/p>\n

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I would like to first off thank Zen for this opportunity to guest post on his great blog.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I am essentially a small town Southern conservative who is dissatisfied with both US political parties.\u00a0 I search in vain for a conservative politics worth the name.\u00a0 So my politics are out of the way and any potential ideological influences indicated.<\/p>\n

Strategic theory is a means to understand strategic reality (for lack of a better term).\u00a0 There are times when it’s just kind of interesting and times when it can help you literally survive, say if you and your Greek family lived in Smyrna in 1919 and knew that the Greek Army had just landed to fight the Turks<\/a>, and that the Turks would probably win this war and treat the Greeks in Smyrna none too kindly.\u00a0 You would probably think it prudent to leave the city and go someplace safer, like Athens, Cyprus or Crete.\u00a0 Strategic theory is kind of like that, it provides understanding to events and possibly a general direction those events may take, although it is primarily a tool of military historical analysis.\u00a0 That is future prediction is not really part of the deal, but sometimes the relation between the stated political purpose and the military means available, not to mention the character of the enemy provide such a clear indicator of how events are going to turn out, that it becomes clear either figuratively or even literally that it is time to\u00a0“get out of town”, so to speak.<\/p>\n

Strategic theory uses a system of interlocking concepts which comprise for Clausewitzians Clausewitz’s General Theory of war.\u00a0 The General Theory postulates that there exists a system <\/strong>of common attributes to all wars as violent social interactions and that war belongs to a larger body ofhuman relations and actions known as\u00a0“politics”\u00a0\u00a0(all wars belong within the realm of politics, but not all politics is war).\u00a0 While all wars share these characteristics, warfare, as in how to conduct wars, is very much based on the society and level of technology existing at a specific time.\u00a0 War doesn’t change whereas warfare goes through a process of constant change.\u00a0 Clausewitz’s General Theory need only be flexible enough to adequately understand war and act at the same time as a basis for war planning.\u00a0 It need not be perfect and is not expected to be so.\u00a0 Essentially , it need only be better than the next best theory, and so far we Clausewitzians are still waiting for this second-best theory to make its appearance.<\/p>\n

Warfare is thus the specific\u00a0“art of war”\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

for a particular period ofhuman history, but would have to be compatible (following Wylie) with the General Theory.\u00a0 On War<\/strong> presents at the same time Clausewitz’s General Theory and his art of Napoleonic warfare, that is a theory of warfare for his time, which is one of the reasons readers find the book confusing.\u00a0 As new methods of warfare come into practice, new theoretical concepts emerge.\u00a0 It is one of these potential concepts that this particular paper and the discussion which initiated it is all about, that being the superempowered individual.<\/strong><\/p>\n

I do this by describing what is an ideal type<\/a> of the superempowered individual.<\/p>\n

To start I think it first necessary to provide the entire interaction that triggered Zen’s post and in turn this one.\u00a0 The discussion was on one of Charles Cameron’s<\/strong> threads<\/a> concerning the recent act of the Norwegian terrorist Breivik (ABB)\u00a0 To save on space I won’t reproduce the entire interaction here but limit it first to four points that I made:<\/p>\n