Oliver Kamm, Stephen Pollard, whom I read regularly and admire, and many others, including Wikipedia itself have weighed in recently with criticism of Wikipedia. Previously I have written approvingly of Wikipedia and I remain generally positive about it. The only thing that I would change in that earlier post would be to emphasize more strongly that Wikipedia is not about to overtake Britannica or any other encyclopedia any time soon, if ever. The point remains, however, that it is always a bad idea to cite encyclopedias which are superb starting points for research but not enough on their own.
I think that the critics are missing some important points, however. The most important in my mind being the fact that like it or not Wikipedia, or something like it, is not going away so long as we have the Internet. Collaborative knowledge-building via the Web is here to stay. Whether or not it displaces established encyclopedias remains to be seen--I doubt it will, as I said above. Therefore critics are pissing against the wind which is a good way to get your trousers wet but bothers the wind not at all.
Pollard says that Wikipedia is inaccurate on every topic he knows something about. Yet he declines to correct any of it, even the entry on himself which contains glaring errors. Which is sort of a problem. If elites can't be bothered to input even minimally, then they haven't got much of a platform for complaining about it. There's an interesting discussion/debate on wikipedia on languagelabunleashed. Just over halfway through one of the discussants says 'it is incumbent upon us to engage with Wikipedia and a mistake to step behind and let it pass.' I have to agree.
I recall immediately after the 7/7 bombings occurred here in London Professor Michael Clarke called an emergency meeting of the War Studies Department staff to compare notes on what had happened as, naturally enough, journalists in large numbers began to call looking for commentary and analysis. (My moment of surreality came when asked urgently by a BBC reporter over the phone what I thought was happening while I was scanning the BBC website trying to figure out what I thought was happening.) After the meeting I looked at the Wikipedia entry on '7 July 2005 London bombings' in the first few hours afterwards was by far the best and most comprehensive account available.
In short, Wikipedia is not an encyclopedia although it has some value as one, and it's not a news source although it had an edge as a collector of links over traditional sources in that instance (and presumably others), it's something else which by and large I think is significant and useful and bound to get more so. On the other hand, one thing that bothers me is the tendency I have noticed recently for Google searches on all sorts of topics to return Wikipedia entries as the first hit. What's up with that? Given that is happening, however, it makes it all the more important that those who want to lead and inform debate get more involved in this sort of social media instead of just bitching about it and hoping it will go away.
Thursday, April 26, 2007
Tuesday, April 24, 2007
Stop coming to work and save the planet
As I'm working at home today and have spent the morning happily and productively teaching on-line, marking and clearing up some administration this proposal makes perfect sense to me:
The Institute of Directors is calling for flexible hours and more home working to help tackle global warming.For what it's worth I think the Cult of Global Warming is increasingly, well, cult-like, and therefore my desire to work from the comfort of my sofa has nothing to do with 'saving the planet' and everything to do with the facts that: a) I get more done, and b) it doesn't require me to contribute a penny to the bulging coffers of First Great Western, undoubtedly the worst rail company in Britain.
Monday, April 23, 2007
Boris Yeltsin dies at 76
At the risk of turning this blog into a series of none-too-positive notes on the passing of various figures Boris Yeltsin has died. I frequently wonder whether Russia's chances for real democratic change were ever very good. There is an awful inertia in Russia's political history towards autocracy and the reification of the power of the state over the individual which suggests the chances were always iffy. But what chances there were squelched by this drunken vandalous buffoon of a president whose historic contributions include precipitately dismantling the USSR to obtain primacy of 'democratic' power in his own corner of it, bombing his own parliament in October 1993 when it challenged him and subsequently rewriting the Constitution which enshrined the president as Tsar-in-all-but-name, selling off the choicest assets of the state at fire-sale price to the bare-knuckled 'entrepreneurs' we now refer to as the 'Oligarchs' while impoverishing everyone else, launching, and then bungling, and then eschewing any responsibility, for the Chechen war which goes on still, and finally anointing as his successor Vladimir Putin, who while a man whose sobriety is a welcome contrast has as his major achievement the imposition of a veneer of competence to a basically kleptocratic authoritarian Russia headed slowly but inexorably from the ash-heap of history to the ash-heap beneath the ash-heap of history.
Thursday, April 12, 2007
Kurt Vonnegut dies: 'So it goes'
Kurt Vonnegut has died. I remember being impressed by Vonnegut, particularly his 'searing' anti-war novel Slaughterhouse Five, because my teachers were so wholeheartedly of the belief that it was to be impressed by and I was eager to please. It took me a while to screw up the courage to tell my High School English teacher that I thought the book was full of empty aphorisms, incomprehensible and dull (well, I paraphrase, what I probably said was 'this sucks. I'm getting a lot more out of this Conan book', literary criticism not being my forte. I think Catch 22 by Joseph Heller, a colleague of Vonnegut, was a much better satire of World War 2. But the all time best satirical book on war was Jaroslav Hasek's Good Soldier Svejk.
Sunday, April 08, 2007
BBC!
Every Briton who owns a TV is required to pay a licence fee of £127 per year. It's a legal mugging that enrages me more and more. Wonder why? This says it all.
Wednesday, April 04, 2007
Sun Tzu's Art of War
Yesterday I was part of a panel discussion on Sun Tzu's classic The Art of War on BBC Radio 3's excellent programme Night Waves. I'm told it will air on the Thursday after Easter if you'd like to listen. It should be available on-line as well. I haven't heard it so I hope I don't sound too daft. But I had a lot of fun doing it. Night Waves is rather like a very good seminar.
I hadn't actually thought much systematically about Sun Tzu before I went on so I wrote a little essay (as one does) on it. I think I said a few of these things, but sadly I think I write more clearly than I speak.
Sun Tzu’s Relevance to Contemporary Warfare
Talking points for BBC R3 ‘Nightwaves’
Dr David J. Betz
Department of War Studies,
King’s College London
3 April 2007
The importance of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War to contemporary military operational matters rests on three famous and well-known quotes. This is not to say that there is not much else in the work of great worth, but one can be tolerably certain that most strategists nowadays will be well familiar with three maxims particularly.
The first,
This quote is often repeated approvingly in military circles because it captures the essence of the currently very popular idea that in modern warfare information is the ‘force multiplier’ par excellence. If you take two opponents equal in every way in terms of numbers, quality of equipment, and tactical technique, except one is equipped with profoundly superior and more accurate information, or ‘dominant batttlespace knowledge’, to use the jargon, then you may expect that side to win handily. This is, for instance, in part how the lopsided outcome of the 1991 Gulf War and the March-April 2003 ‘main combat operations’ phase of the Iraq War have been explained: the blundering military ineptitude of Saddam Hussein merely heightened the lopsidedness of what was an entirely predictable outcome.
Essentially, this first maxim fits very well with the until-very-recently quite popular in military-analytical circles idea that we are in the midst of a ‘Revolution in Military Affairs’. Just as our economic, political and social systems are being transformed by the advent of the Information Age so too are our military forces being transformed. This concept has lost some of its luster in the wake of the Iraq War where the relatively small and light, fast-moving and hard-hitting US and UK forces which so adroitly caused the collapse of the regime of Saddam Hussein found themselves with feet of clay in the aftermath. Nonetheless, it is still current in policy and drives thinking on military procurement decisions in most Western countries (and China). The gist of the Revolution in Military Affairs concerns three key factors or enabling technologies:
• Precision guided weapons which allow attacks to be conducted highly precisely and selectively;
• Advanced sensors which are integral to the generation of a sophisticated, accurate and near real time awareness of all militarily significant movements on the battlefield; and,
• Advanced communications which permit the dissemination of this knowledge throughout one’s own force with the effect that it develops a common situational awareness.
Together, it is argued, these three things give advanced military forces immense advantages over less advanced ones. To illustrate: Imagine a chess game in which one player can see all the pieces while the other can see only his own—and not always even that much reliably. In such a situation you would expect that the side with a better view would win every time, even if it deployed fewer and less individually effective pieces. That is the thrust of the Revolution in Military Affairs: it’s the ultimate hilltop observation post; armed forces can get lighter and less numerous without sacrificing the ability to generate raw combat power if they possess a distinct knowledge advantage over their opponents. It should be obvious why those who advocate this position now find what Sun Tzu said more than 20 centuries ago about knowing oneself and one’s enemy highly congenial.
Of course this line of argument has lost much rhetorical force since April 2003 when the conflict in Iraq shifted into an unconventional mode in which the other side ceased to move and fight in a manner which ‘advanced sensors’ could discern as militarily significant. Insurgents blend into the landscape both geographic and human and in this sort of situation numbers—‘boots on the ground’—still count for a great deal. Stand-off firepower is a superb tool for killing people and breaking things at low cost to oneself, but it’s not much use in securing an area of operations and returning a semblance of civil life to an area which combat operations have disrupted. Unfortunately, for the US and UK it is this which will determine victory in the war in Iraq because the winning of battles does not, ipso facto, mean the achievement of one’s desired political outcome.
One might expect that Sun Tzu had lost a measure of appeal as a result of this. In fact, that is not the case because his appeal and special relevance has other dimensions which can be seen in his second oft-quoted maxim:
To understand why Sun Tzu wrote this one needs to understand the environment in which he was writing which was a time of constant strife between the various Chinese kingdoms. In his time the enemy of the day could be the ally tomorrow and the enemy again the day after. Defeat was never final and the constant shifting of alliances made it vital that one carefully preserved one’s forces and did not gamble them on a single throw of the dice—because there was never a single throw! Moreover, force had to be applied in a much calibrated way, enough to achieve one’s aim without unduly inflaming the desire for revenge on the part of the defeated or too much fear and envy on the part of onlooking other powers. History, contrary to the old adage, never repeats itself; but it does show recurrent patterns and in a certain sense Sun Tzu’s time shows commonality with our own.
The zeitgeist of our time, at least in the West, is to a greater or lesser degree characterized by a sensitivity to casualties, both our own and the enemy’s, and an eagerness to avoid the disruption of ‘normal’ affairs on which our prosperity rests and which combat, particularly major combat, inevitably entails. This makes Sun Tzu for us an appealing prism through which to look at and conceptualize contemporary warfare. Certainly, most strategists would now take the view that the ‘Long War’ against ‘Islamic Fascism’ with which we are now faced is not going to be won purely, or even principally, by military means. Sun Tzu speaks to that part of ourselves which sees fighting and killing the ‘enemy’ (itself an ambiguous concept now) as insufficient on its own and in fact in some ways when crudely applied somewhat counter-productive.
There is a tendency here to draw a contrast between Sun Tzu and the 19th century Prussian Carl von Clausewitz on this point, not surprisingly because Clausewitz famously wrote that,
The most efficacious way to do this, Clausewitz suggested, was to destroy the enemy’s army, to disarm him and remove his ability to resist. Traditionally, ‘Clausewitzeans’ have shown great concern with ‘decisive battle’, a single engagement in which the maximum force is brought to bear in order to bring the war to a conclusion and thereby achieve the aim for which it was fought. On its own this proscription is problematic. In its raw state it rings home less truly than does Sun Tzu’s admonition. I’d hasten to add, however, that this should not be taken as an excuse to throw aside Clausewitz or to criticize ‘Clausewitzeans’ because in fact Clausewitz’s meaning is more complex and his intentions more nuanced. The ‘headline’ understanding of Clausewitz is, however, superficially cruder than the ‘headline’ understanding of Sun Tzu. In fact, speaking as a scholar of warfare I would argue strongly that Clausewitz’s On War is the canonical work with Sun Tzu’s Art of War as an increasingly useful companion. The contrasts and putative juxtapositions are more apparent than real.
There are in comparison to other fields such as economics or politics precious few ‘philosophers’ of war. Politics has Plato, Hobbes, Locke and so on. Economics has Smith and Marx and Friedman. War has just Clausewitz and to a lesser extent Sun Tzu (maybe Machiavelli crosses over too). In other words, the field is not large. Amid the multitude of tactical manuals and quasi-philosophical ruminations of famous generals from Vegetius to Napoleon only Sun Tzu and Clausewitz stand out for the attempt to understand war as a whole phenomenon. This explains why they have such a prominent place in military education where they are both much talked about, albeit less frequently read. Sun Tzu obviously has much influence on contemporary Chinese military thought. The Art of War was also highly admired in Russia, having been translated into Russian and put to use by the Imperial General staff by the 1860s. While the recognition of Sun Tzu’s merit came later in the West the enthusiasm for him has been no less. His third famous maxim is particularly important here,
Sun Tzu could fairly be described as the originator of the ‘Indirect Approach’ in warfare, a notion popularized and expanded by the British strategist Basil Liddell-Hart, which has since become what we now refer to as ‘manoeuvre warfare’ which is essentially the doctrinal orthodoxy of all the major military powers today.
Sun Tzu is also highly relevant to ‘small wars’ (ie., ‘unconventional wars’). Indeed, one of his most influential translators was the US Marine Brigadier General, and student of Oxford University, Samuel B. Griffiths who was a leading figure in the ‘Small Wars’ community of the Marine Corps (and therefore, since the US Army has habitually eschewed such forms of warfare, could be described as a leading figure in American thought on small wars). Among Griffith’s other translations was Mao Zedong’s classic book On Guerrilla Warfare which, unsurprisingly, is also steeped in Sun Tzu’s thinking. Indeed, Mao is reputed to have memorized The Art of War. One could argue that the manner in which Mao fought and won the Chinese civil war constitutes the prototype of modern insurgency of which the current ‘Global Insurgency’, emblemized if not led, by Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda is an evolved descendant. In other words, it would not at all shock me to learn that on the shelves of his cave in Waziristan or wherever else he might be that Osama bin Laden has a well thumbed copy of Sun Tzu’s Art of War.
I hadn't actually thought much systematically about Sun Tzu before I went on so I wrote a little essay (as one does) on it. I think I said a few of these things, but sadly I think I write more clearly than I speak.
Sun Tzu’s Relevance to Contemporary Warfare
Talking points for BBC R3 ‘Nightwaves’
Dr David J. Betz
Department of War Studies,
King’s College London
3 April 2007
The importance of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War to contemporary military operational matters rests on three famous and well-known quotes. This is not to say that there is not much else in the work of great worth, but one can be tolerably certain that most strategists nowadays will be well familiar with three maxims particularly.
The first,
If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.
The Art of War, Chapter III
This quote is often repeated approvingly in military circles because it captures the essence of the currently very popular idea that in modern warfare information is the ‘force multiplier’ par excellence. If you take two opponents equal in every way in terms of numbers, quality of equipment, and tactical technique, except one is equipped with profoundly superior and more accurate information, or ‘dominant batttlespace knowledge’, to use the jargon, then you may expect that side to win handily. This is, for instance, in part how the lopsided outcome of the 1991 Gulf War and the March-April 2003 ‘main combat operations’ phase of the Iraq War have been explained: the blundering military ineptitude of Saddam Hussein merely heightened the lopsidedness of what was an entirely predictable outcome.
Essentially, this first maxim fits very well with the until-very-recently quite popular in military-analytical circles idea that we are in the midst of a ‘Revolution in Military Affairs’. Just as our economic, political and social systems are being transformed by the advent of the Information Age so too are our military forces being transformed. This concept has lost some of its luster in the wake of the Iraq War where the relatively small and light, fast-moving and hard-hitting US and UK forces which so adroitly caused the collapse of the regime of Saddam Hussein found themselves with feet of clay in the aftermath. Nonetheless, it is still current in policy and drives thinking on military procurement decisions in most Western countries (and China). The gist of the Revolution in Military Affairs concerns three key factors or enabling technologies:
• Precision guided weapons which allow attacks to be conducted highly precisely and selectively;
• Advanced sensors which are integral to the generation of a sophisticated, accurate and near real time awareness of all militarily significant movements on the battlefield; and,
• Advanced communications which permit the dissemination of this knowledge throughout one’s own force with the effect that it develops a common situational awareness.
Together, it is argued, these three things give advanced military forces immense advantages over less advanced ones. To illustrate: Imagine a chess game in which one player can see all the pieces while the other can see only his own—and not always even that much reliably. In such a situation you would expect that the side with a better view would win every time, even if it deployed fewer and less individually effective pieces. That is the thrust of the Revolution in Military Affairs: it’s the ultimate hilltop observation post; armed forces can get lighter and less numerous without sacrificing the ability to generate raw combat power if they possess a distinct knowledge advantage over their opponents. It should be obvious why those who advocate this position now find what Sun Tzu said more than 20 centuries ago about knowing oneself and one’s enemy highly congenial.
Of course this line of argument has lost much rhetorical force since April 2003 when the conflict in Iraq shifted into an unconventional mode in which the other side ceased to move and fight in a manner which ‘advanced sensors’ could discern as militarily significant. Insurgents blend into the landscape both geographic and human and in this sort of situation numbers—‘boots on the ground’—still count for a great deal. Stand-off firepower is a superb tool for killing people and breaking things at low cost to oneself, but it’s not much use in securing an area of operations and returning a semblance of civil life to an area which combat operations have disrupted. Unfortunately, for the US and UK it is this which will determine victory in the war in Iraq because the winning of battles does not, ipso facto, mean the achievement of one’s desired political outcome.
One might expect that Sun Tzu had lost a measure of appeal as a result of this. In fact, that is not the case because his appeal and special relevance has other dimensions which can be seen in his second oft-quoted maxim:
Hence to fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting.
The Art of War, Chapter III
To understand why Sun Tzu wrote this one needs to understand the environment in which he was writing which was a time of constant strife between the various Chinese kingdoms. In his time the enemy of the day could be the ally tomorrow and the enemy again the day after. Defeat was never final and the constant shifting of alliances made it vital that one carefully preserved one’s forces and did not gamble them on a single throw of the dice—because there was never a single throw! Moreover, force had to be applied in a much calibrated way, enough to achieve one’s aim without unduly inflaming the desire for revenge on the part of the defeated or too much fear and envy on the part of onlooking other powers. History, contrary to the old adage, never repeats itself; but it does show recurrent patterns and in a certain sense Sun Tzu’s time shows commonality with our own.
The zeitgeist of our time, at least in the West, is to a greater or lesser degree characterized by a sensitivity to casualties, both our own and the enemy’s, and an eagerness to avoid the disruption of ‘normal’ affairs on which our prosperity rests and which combat, particularly major combat, inevitably entails. This makes Sun Tzu for us an appealing prism through which to look at and conceptualize contemporary warfare. Certainly, most strategists would now take the view that the ‘Long War’ against ‘Islamic Fascism’ with which we are now faced is not going to be won purely, or even principally, by military means. Sun Tzu speaks to that part of ourselves which sees fighting and killing the ‘enemy’ (itself an ambiguous concept now) as insufficient on its own and in fact in some ways when crudely applied somewhat counter-productive.
There is a tendency here to draw a contrast between Sun Tzu and the 19th century Prussian Carl von Clausewitz on this point, not surprisingly because Clausewitz famously wrote that,
War therefore is an act of violence intended to compel our opponent to fulfill our will.
On War, Book I, Chapter I
The most efficacious way to do this, Clausewitz suggested, was to destroy the enemy’s army, to disarm him and remove his ability to resist. Traditionally, ‘Clausewitzeans’ have shown great concern with ‘decisive battle’, a single engagement in which the maximum force is brought to bear in order to bring the war to a conclusion and thereby achieve the aim for which it was fought. On its own this proscription is problematic. In its raw state it rings home less truly than does Sun Tzu’s admonition. I’d hasten to add, however, that this should not be taken as an excuse to throw aside Clausewitz or to criticize ‘Clausewitzeans’ because in fact Clausewitz’s meaning is more complex and his intentions more nuanced. The ‘headline’ understanding of Clausewitz is, however, superficially cruder than the ‘headline’ understanding of Sun Tzu. In fact, speaking as a scholar of warfare I would argue strongly that Clausewitz’s On War is the canonical work with Sun Tzu’s Art of War as an increasingly useful companion. The contrasts and putative juxtapositions are more apparent than real.
There are in comparison to other fields such as economics or politics precious few ‘philosophers’ of war. Politics has Plato, Hobbes, Locke and so on. Economics has Smith and Marx and Friedman. War has just Clausewitz and to a lesser extent Sun Tzu (maybe Machiavelli crosses over too). In other words, the field is not large. Amid the multitude of tactical manuals and quasi-philosophical ruminations of famous generals from Vegetius to Napoleon only Sun Tzu and Clausewitz stand out for the attempt to understand war as a whole phenomenon. This explains why they have such a prominent place in military education where they are both much talked about, albeit less frequently read. Sun Tzu obviously has much influence on contemporary Chinese military thought. The Art of War was also highly admired in Russia, having been translated into Russian and put to use by the Imperial General staff by the 1860s. While the recognition of Sun Tzu’s merit came later in the West the enthusiasm for him has been no less. His third famous maxim is particularly important here,
In all fighting, the direct method may be used for joining battle, but indirect methods will be needed in order to secure victory.
The Art of War, Chapter V
Sun Tzu could fairly be described as the originator of the ‘Indirect Approach’ in warfare, a notion popularized and expanded by the British strategist Basil Liddell-Hart, which has since become what we now refer to as ‘manoeuvre warfare’ which is essentially the doctrinal orthodoxy of all the major military powers today.
Sun Tzu is also highly relevant to ‘small wars’ (ie., ‘unconventional wars’). Indeed, one of his most influential translators was the US Marine Brigadier General, and student of Oxford University, Samuel B. Griffiths who was a leading figure in the ‘Small Wars’ community of the Marine Corps (and therefore, since the US Army has habitually eschewed such forms of warfare, could be described as a leading figure in American thought on small wars). Among Griffith’s other translations was Mao Zedong’s classic book On Guerrilla Warfare which, unsurprisingly, is also steeped in Sun Tzu’s thinking. Indeed, Mao is reputed to have memorized The Art of War. One could argue that the manner in which Mao fought and won the Chinese civil war constitutes the prototype of modern insurgency of which the current ‘Global Insurgency’, emblemized if not led, by Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda is an evolved descendant. In other words, it would not at all shock me to learn that on the shelves of his cave in Waziristan or wherever else he might be that Osama bin Laden has a well thumbed copy of Sun Tzu’s Art of War.
Iran to Release Sailors, Marines
LONDON: President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran said Wednesday that he would immediately release 15 British sailors and marines who have been held captive in Iran since March 23.
Diplomacy is best defined as the art of building a ladder for the other guy to climb down. I was not hopeful that it would turn out thus so I really must tip my hat to British diplomacy here. Great ladder building.Ahmadinejad said at a news conference in Tehran that he was giving the British military personnel amnesty and a pardon.
"I announce their freedom and their return to their people," he said. "They will be free after our meeting. They will go to the airport and will join their families."
The Iranian president said the decision to release the prisoners was not part of a swap with Iranian prisoners in Iraq.
"Our government has pardoned them, it is a gift from our people" he said.
A gift! Thanks Captain Blackbeard Let's get these guys back on HMS Cornwall as soon as possible doing their jobs which I rather hope will involve a rather more proactive approach to Iran in the very near future.
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