A new low

Nine Britons have been arrested in connection with an alleged plot to kidnap and behead a British soldier who had served in Afghanistan live on the internet, West Midlands Police said this afternoon. As someone who studies contemporary security issues for a living I am not surprised at this development. As Herfried Munkler wrote in his book New Wars,

War ‘smoulders on’, ‘spreads out’, ‘extends over’ and so on… War as the subject of events will not stop at the frontiers of Europe and North America but will sooner or later move beyond them.[1]

In other words, if it works elsewhere sooner or later it'll be tried here. Still, I'm shocked by this appalling thing. And angry, which of course is the point... It's getting increasingly harder to keep one's head, literally and metaphorically.

UPDATE: 'MI5, police and SAS practise for a 'Beslan' siege'

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[1] Herfried Munkler, The New Wars (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005), pp. 31-34.

Iraq Plan B

Here's a good article by Senator Richard Lugar on Plan B for Iraq 'Beyond Baghdad'. I think it's worth listening to Lugar on security matters. The Cooperative Threat Reduction Program which he created with Democratic Senator Sam Nunn was just about the smartest security initiative undertaken by any country after the Cold War. I think he is right in characterizing the 'surge' in Iraq this way:

We need to recast the geo-strategic reference points of our Iraq policy. Some commentators have compared the Bush plan to a "Hail Mary" pass in football -- a desperate heave deep down the field by a losing team at the end of the game. Actually, a far better analogy for the Bush plan is a draw play on third down with 20 yards to go in the first quarter. The play does have a chance of working if everything goes perfectly, but it is more likely to gain a few yards and set up a punt on the next down, after which the game can be continued under more favorable circumstances.

Translation: it probably won't work but it may leave us set up for a better game afterward. Clearly this is a positive spin. I have great respect for the sentiments expressed by the troops in the report below. But my gut feeling is that the counterinsurgency in Iraq is irrecoverable with the 'surge' which is in reality more like a dribble--too little, too late. So, what to do after? Lugar's assessment is similar to my own:

...we need to plan for a potent redeployment of U.S. forces in the region to defend oil assets, target terrorist enclaves, deter adventurism by Iran and provide a buffer against regional sectarian conflict. In the best case, we could supplement bases in the Middle East with troops stationed outside urban areas in Iraq. Such a redeployment would allow us to continue training Iraqi troops and delivering economic assistance, but it would not require us to interpose ourselves between Iraqi sectarian factions.

Where I tend to part company with Lugar is with the idea of continuing training of troops and economic assistance. When we stop interposing ourselves between Iraqi sectarian factions the country will descend (deeper) into civil war. Which raises the question which troops are we going to train? To whom are we going to provide economic assistance? The Shi'ites or the Sunnis? Staying out of that fight is a good idea.

The strong often lose

Lately I have been trying to working through why raw combat power is such a poor indicator of the likelihood of strategic success nowadays. I've just submitted an article; if it's accepted I'll bang on about it at length. The gist of it is captured by something Sir Michael Howard has argued recently: that warfighting and nation-building are not distinct and different things as we in the West have tended to conceive them. This leads us to strategic defeat because in reality ‘the two blend into one another and the conduct of each determines the success of the other.’ We do the war-fighting part quite well; what we don't do so well is establish the conditions in which the other side is inclined to accept defeat, which is to say the political objectives we have set (indeed there's a good case to be made for both Vietnam and Iraq that we entered the war with no political objective in the first place). So the war smoulders on until we get tired, or bored, and decide to go home. I was interested then to come across this article 'Twisting Arms Isn't as Easy as Dropping Bombs' which discusses the research of political scientist Patricia Sullivan who has looked at all post-World War II conflicts between the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council and weaker nations.

What she found is interesting: 'Although the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Russia and China were militarily superior to their opponents in every one of the 122 conflicts that Sullivan studied, these powerful countries failed to win an astonishing 39 percent of their wars against weaker opponents... For all the talk of "shock and awe" before the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, Sullivan's research shows that military power alone is not a useful predictor of victory. Sullivan found that powerful nations tend to win wars when all they seek is an opponent's submission, but tend to lose when victory requires an opponent's cooperation.'

Extraordinary story

Why this is not the top news story today I cannot fathom. Absolutely astounding. Respect.

Gen Petraeus PhD Thesis

Further to my previous post about Gen Petraeus and in the tradition of previous posts on interesting-things-you-can-find-by-using-bibliographic-databases-of-the-library here is the PhD dissertation of the general: THE AMERICAN MILITARY AND THE LESSONS OF VIETNAM: A STUDY OF MILITARY INFLUENCE AND THE USE OF FORCE IN THE POST-VIETNAM ERA

It's interesting reading in its own right made all the more interesting for where Petraeus is now. He was certainly ably advised: Richard Ullman, Stephen Walt, Barry Posen, and G. John Ikenberry are noted in the acknowledgments.

British general speaks about Iraq

Here's an interesting article by Lieutenant General Graeme Lamb CMG DSO OBE, Deputy Commanding General for the Multi-National Force-Iraq . I'm not very optimistic about Iraq. The general is, guardedly :

...from what I have seen, it is my strong conviction that, as bad as the situation may sometimes appear, there is still good reason to be optimistic for Iraq’s future.

I'm skeptical. Food for thought.