Why graduate studies are important for officers

Forwarded to me by a friend is this recent article in the National Interest 'Beyond the Cloister' by Gen David Petraeus in which he makes the case for why officers ought to take part in civilian graduate studies. In a nutshell, because it:

1. Takes military officers out of their intellectual comfort zones;

2. Provides exposure to diverse and divergent views;

3. Provides specific skills and knowledge on which an officer may draw during his or her career;

4. Assists officers to develop and refine their communications skills;

5. Contributes to critical thinking skills; and,

6. Imparts a degree of intellectual humility.

Music to my ears of course, since I make my living running a masters programme the purpose of which is to provide just such things to people, such as but not exclusively, military officers whose occupational responsibilities tend to preclude taking a year out to live in central London as a residential student. Says Petraeus:

The most powerful tool any soldier carries is not his weapon but his mind. These days, and for the days ahead as far as we can see, what soldiers at all ranks know is liable to be at least as important to their success as what they can physically do. Some key questions before the U.S. military in changing times therefore must be: How do we define the best military education for the U.S. armed forces, and what are the best ways to impart that education? What should be the ideal relationship between soldiering and the schoolhouse?

Excellent question. Indeed I'm writing a paper for a Marine Corps conference on Pedagogy for the Long War just now on this question which perhaps no doubt I'll share with readers of this blog (all two of you). But, as my wry and always on target friend points out, an equally interesting question is whether and to what extent the relationship is two way. If it's such a great idea for warfighters to have experience of academia is it equally useful for academics to have experience of warfighting? I wonder if Petraeus has this somewhere in the back of his mind unconsciously; otherwise why title it 'Beyond the Cloisters' instead of 'Beyond the Barracks' which actually would have made sense?

That said, I reckon that if I walked into a British Army recruiting station as a 38 year old ex-Canadian Forces reservist I'd be quietly directed to the exit for geriatrics and lunatics and rightly so. Still I can't help thinking that if Petraeus really is right in the basic premise expressed in his first sentence that the most powerful weapon is the mind then the future ought to see the targeting for recruitment of the mature if not elderly. The main problem with maturity and wisdom is its strong correlation with physical decrepitude (or in my case more precisely expanding waistline); hence fresh-faced 18 year olds are still on the whole rather better soldierly material than deep-thinking 38 year olds, or 78 year olds for that matter. Yet the march of technological progress will change this; in fact we are already seeing a sort of such a convergence as recruitment ages rise and phsyical requirements diminish. The idea is explored a fair bit in science fiction novels such as Old Man's War by John Scalzi, and (my personal favourite) A Boy and his Tank by Leo Frankowski, both of which deal with protagonists enticed to join the military and to fight by the chance of a second healthy life, if only they can survive the term of service. But it's not so far as I am aware something which the military is thinking about which is odd when you think about it. If you're accustomed already to thinking about the technology of weapons systems and platforms such as aircraft carriers which you expect to last for 50 years or so, why assume (if we really are on the cusp of a Bio-tech revolution) that the current physical parameters will be constant and not variable?

Come back Blair

I just have one question. Why did you not say this when you were still Prime Minister?

In his most outspoken remarks on Islamists, the former Prime Minister warns that Britain is in danger of losing the battle against terrorists unless mainstream society confronts the threat.

Blair's remarks, in which he also attacks some civil liberty campaigners as 'loopy loo', were made in a Channel 4 documentary recorded last Tuesday on the eve of his departure from Downing Street.

'The idea that as a Muslim in this country that you don't have the freedom to express your religion or your views, I mean you've got far more freedom in this country than you do in most Muslim countries,' Blair told Observer columnist Will Hutton, who presents the documentary.

'The reason we are finding it hard to win this battle is that we're not actually fighting it properly. We're not actually standing up to these people and saying, "It's not just your methods that are wrong, your ideas are absurd. Nobody is oppressing you. Your sense of grievance isn't justified."'

Understanding Current Operations in Iraq

David Kilcullen reports from the field on current operations in Iraq in Small Wars Journal.

Also in the same journal a piece by Frank Hoffman on Neo-Coin which is a must read. Hoffman zeroes in on what I think is the key issue in Neo-Coin: the competition for perceptions. (He also quotes me on FM 3-24 which is nice).

As it happens we had a workshop here in the Department of War Studies organized by my colleague Dr John Mackinlay and myself which looked at the new British COIN doctrine which is being drafted. My job was to look at the 'Virtual Battlefield: Redefining Propaganda of the Deed in 2007'. Here's how I started my talk:

Implicit in the title of my talk is the idea that the contemporary operations environment with which the counterinsurgent commander is concerned has two dimensions: the literal, physical field of battle in which bullets fly, bombs explode and blood is shed, sometimes yours, sometimes theirs but most times and in greatest volume by those stuck in the middle; and the virtual, informational realm in which belligerents contend with words and images to manufacture narratives which are more compelling than those of the other side and better at structuring the responses of others to the development of events.

To begin, therefore, I wish to quote approvingly the words of General Rupert Smith in his perceptive work, The Utility of Force:

We now come to the manner in which we fight and operate amongst the people in a wider sense: through the media… Whoever coined the phrase ‘the theatre of operations’ was very prescient. We are conducting operations now as though we are on stage, in an amphitheatre or Roman arena. There are two or more sets of players—both with a producer, the commander, each of whom has his own idea of the script. On the ground, in the actual theatre, they are all on the stage and mixed up with people trying to get to their seats, the stage hands, the ticket collectors and the ice-cream vendors. At the same time they are being viewed by a partially and factional audience, comfortably seated, its attention focused on that part of the auditorium where it is noisiest, watching the events by peering down the drinking straws of their soft-drink packs—for that is the extent of the vision of a camera.

Then I shall make three assertions which I shall endeavour to defend as I go on and in the discussion which follows. The first assertion is that the virtual now dominates the real. ‘Successful’ operations on the ground make no difference if they are not translated into advancements of one’s strategic narrative in the informational realm. This, it seems to me was well illustrated in a recent Los Angeles Times article which described the tour of General Mattis through Marine outposts in Al Anbar province. Mattis was asked by a sergeant ‘How are we supposed to fight a war when people back home say we've already lost?’ Mattis gave the best answer he could under the circumstances to his soldier: believe your own eyes, ignore the press. But at the end of the day this will not cut it. At the end of the coming months when the success or failure of the operation known as 'The Surge' is judged, the morale state of the Marines in Anbar will not count for much if the people at home have been convinced the thing is a lost cause.

I am sure if we put our minds together we could come up with a very long list of recent examples in which perception of events trumps the reality; arguably this has always been the case in military history—if it were I would not be surprised; but the immediacy of the virtual battlefield, its proximity to the centre of gravity in COIN (that being the frontal lobes of the people both in the ‘theatre’, as Rupert Smith describes, and at home as I would argue), and the low level of Western public commitment to these conflicts makes for a large qualitative difference between COIN now in the Information Age and COIN before it.

This leads to the second assertion I would like to make which is that contemporary COIN is an Information Operation with a military annex (among a multitude of other annexes some of which may supersede it).

The third assertion I would like to make is that we are failing at COIN now because we fail to recognize the truth of the above. We act as though Information Operations are the annex whereas the other side treats it with resolute consistency as the main event to which everything else is subordinate with the effect that with relatively few exceptions we concede the virtual battle.

Britain and Iran

The defence minister issued a report a couple of days ago about the capture of UK Marines and sailors a while back. It says, in a nutshell: mistakes were made, but not by anybody particularly. That's it then; nothing to see here move on. Well, no. It's not like this was the first time. Iran captured 6 UK sailors and Marines and forced them to confess to incursion into its territory in June 2004. Now the BBC reports Iran had also earlier tried unsuccessfully to capture an Royal Australian Navy boarding party:

The Australians, though, to quote one military source, "were having none of it". The BBC has been told the Australians re-boarded the vessel they had just searched, aimed their machine guns at the approaching Iranians and warned them to back off, using what was said to be "highly colourful language".

The defence minister clearly wants to be done with the political embarrassment of all this but something is rotten here and needs to be fixed. Why does the Naby keep making thsi same mistake? I agree more and more with Norman Podhoretz on this.

Update: I missed somehow this interview in the Times with General Petraeus which is really worth reading. Here's the interesting part as far as this discussion goes:

Who was behind the kidnapping of five Britons in Baghdad last month and what is being done to free them?

"We think that it is the same network that killed our soldiers in Kerbala in an operation back in January. We killed the head of that network less than a week before the operation that detained those British civilians. It was already planned and carried out by his followers. It is a secret cell of Jaish al-Mahdi (Mahdi Army) not all of which are under control of Moqtadr al-Sadr. That is the assessment at this point."

“They are not rank and file Jaish al-Mahdi. They are trained in Iran, equipped with Iranian (weapons), and advised by Iran. The Iranian involvement here we have found to be much, much more significant that we thought before. They have since about the summer of 2004 played a very, very important role in training in Iran, funding, arming."

"This is lethal stuff, like EFPs (explosively-formed penetrators), mortars, and rockets that are used against Basra Palace (the main British base in Basra). There is also a degree of direction, not in a strategic way but in tactical operations. We captured a wealth of documentation which showed how they account for what they have done, we assume so they can get paid for it, and get additional funding."

The evidence that Iran is backing with arms, training and funds attacks against US and British is frankly overwhelming.

What ever happened to common sense?

Politicians reacted in disbelief to the revelation that for over two hours yesterday, the BBC News website carried a request for people in Iraq to report on troop movements.The request was removed from the website after it sparked furious protests that the corporation was endangering the lives of British servicemen and women. But according to accounts last night, a story on a major operation by US and Iraqi troops against al-Qa'eda somewhere north of Baghdad contained an extraordinary request for information about the movement of troops. Last night the BBC confirmed the wording of the request was: "Are you in Iraq? Have you seen any troop movements? If you have any information you would like to share with the BBC, you can do so using the form below."

I'd put this down to rank stupidity rather than malicious intent but really are there no editors at the BBC with even a fraction of a clue? Is it so hard to see that this sort of information could get troops, British troops, hurt or killed?

Update: John Kelly is my kind of guy! Read

How to move a book on Amazon

I feel utterly compelled to get myself a copy of The Satanic Verses which I see is now number 11 in the Amazon UK rankings of sales 20 years after it was first published, even though I can't for the life of me imagine myself actually reading it. Why? Crap like this, this and this and this.

My Grand Narrative can Beat your Grand Narrative

My good friend Chris Ankersen has the annoying habit of being smarter and better written than me. (Thankfully I am better looking). Here's his take on the Michael Vlahos piece Fall of Modernity which I linked to earlier:

I came lately across a very interesting article which has been making the rounds, partly because it has been referred to by David Kilcullen, the current 'Brad Pitt' of the counterinsurgency world. Its title, 'The Fall of Modernity,' perhaps occludes the strength of its message. It paints a convincing picture that the age of American/Western supremacy is coming to the beginning of its end (compare, according to the article, today with Rome in the 3rd Century AD/CE: Empire is not over, but getting there). This message, and many others associated with an Imperial theme, are not new. Micheal Vlahos, of a Johns Hopkins-based think-tank, does a particularly good job in this rendition, however, and the article is worth reading for the sophisticated-yet-clearly

-explained concepts he introduces: Fall of Modernity.

What is most interesting, though, is that Vlahos implicates the American project in the downfall of the American project. This is not typical conservative thinking; indeed it resonates more with Marxian theory. You know the story: capitalism is capitalism's own worst enemy, and its own contradictions will eventually bring about its dissolution (contradictions such as its production of poor people at the same time that it makes others obscenely wealthy). The result is a rather all-consuming sense that 'it doesn't really matter what we do, because we are locked in our own death spiral'. In his words:

"We declare that “resistance is futile,” yet the opposite is true. The bigger we make the enemy, the bigger they become. Ours is the complicity of backhand legitimization. Whether we admit this or shout the reverse, effectively our war narrative works to set up superpower defeat—even if at first it seems only a drama of defeat played out in the media—because with one stroke, our narrative itself will have become a lie. This is doubly destructive. Not only do we fail myth—what are we? the D-list to the Greatest Generation—but myth is no longer there for us. World War II cannot save us because according to the strictures of our own myth, we are no longer worthy of being saved."

Of course, such 'defeatist' talk is rife amongst the chattering classes, the media, and the academy. But, if we look at one of the sources cited in Vlahos's footnotes, it is not difficult to see from whence Vlahos derives his pessimism. He includes a link to a PowerPoint presentation made by member of the US Joint Staff, which explains the US strategy in the war against terror. It is worth a look, but will not inspire confidence. Seen after reading Vlahos's piece, it will almost seem a caricature, and a bad one at that.

If (and of course we must cling to idea, as Dickens's Scrooge did, that the future is conditional, not predetermined), Vlahos is correct, there are a number of implications. Not the least among them is that perfecting the tactics of the war on terror is akin to re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic (a metaphor which is acceptable, perhaps, due to the passage of 90 years since the catastrophe. A parallel metaphor, say 'remembering to turn the lights off in the World Trade Centre', jangles our sensitivities). It certainly makes the work of those such as Kilcullen and Petreas far more difficult and maybe just a little beside the point.

If the big picture is as badly and as baldly out of whack as Vlahos claims, we need more than fine tuning. But is it possible to generate a new Grand Narrative, one sufficiently big enough to counter the growing one of Alterity, supposedly the source of strength for our current enemies? One pure enough not to be brought to its knees through its own corrosion? One catchy enough to enlighten the masses 'at home and abroad'? Is such a trick possible 'on the fly' and if so, how long does it take and how do we do it? Vlahos, of course, points out that the need to 'beat' the other side with a bigger, better argument is part of the problem. His conclusion seems to point to a very postmodern position: not domination, but co-existance; plurality and indeterminacy, not monopoly and certainty. Not a single, or even an opposing pair of Grand Narratives, but rather many less sure, more fungible claims.

As usual, the question returns to the eternal 'Quid tunc?'

Gaza meltdown

Here's a good article by Martin Indyk in the Washington Post on the takeover of Gaza by Hamas
which goes beyond the obvious: A Two-State Solution Palestinian Style.

Whither Atlanticism?

It is interesting to read back to back these two articles Why we must break with the American crazies by Anatole Kaletsky in The Times and Come together, right now by Margarita Mathiopoulos in the International Herald Tribune. Well, I question Kaletsky's judgment here. Iran's President waxes lyrical about wiping Israel off the map, claims a green aura surrounded him and entranced his audience when he spoke at the UN, and eagerly awaits the arrival of the 13th 'Hidden' Imam, and it's Americans he calls crazy? Riiight.

To be fair he seems to be referring to specific American neo-cons as crazy not Americans in general in which vein he notes the recent piece by Norman Podhoretz The Case for Bombing Iran as being especially nutty. I've held the view for a long time that we should use a range of measures covert and overt (including bombing) against Iran which is not to say I agree entirely with Podhoretz's argument. I think the characterization of the Cold War as WWIII and therefore the current 'Long War' as WWIV is misleading and unhelpful (see Timothy Garton Ash's A long war? No, a long struggle). His claim that Iran puts religious objectives before national interest is not supported by the actual evidence of its relations with neighbouring states (for example its quiet backing of Christian Armenia in its war with Shi'a Muslim Azerbaijan; see the work of Ali Ansari including this Guardian piece Only the US Hawks can save the Iranian president now), and I'm almost certain that this story about the UK government's handling of the recent kidnapping of its sailors by Iran is an urban legend:

But then, as if this show of impotence were not humiliating enough, the British were unable even to mobilize any of that soft power. The European Union, of which they are a member, turned down their request to threaten Iran with a freeze of imports. As for the UN, under whose very auspices they were patrolling the international waters in which the sailors were kidnapped, it once again showed its true colors by refusing even to condemn the Iranians. The most the Security Council could bring itself to do was to express “grave concern.” Meanwhile, a member of the British cabinet was going the Security Council one better. While registering no objection to propaganda pictures of the one woman hostage, who had been forced to shed her uniform and dress for the cameras in Muslim clothing, Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt pronounced it “deplorable” that she should have permitted herself to be photographed with a cigarette in her mouth. “This,” said Hewitt, “sends completely the wrong message to our young people.”

She didn't actually say that. Did she? We aren't that badly governed are we? Still, Podhoretz's argument is not crazy and Kaletsky's characterization of it as such is sloppy and lazy. What does he propose to do differently with Iran? More of the same (which is to say nothing)?

Here's what Mathipoulos says:

We in Europe need to wake up to the reality that we cannot afford a weak America.

Far from enhancing Europe's position in global affairs, America's failures have also been ours, from securing peace in the Middle East to curbing Iran's quest for nuclear weapons.

Conversely, success has come to us when Europe and the United States have acted in close partnership, whether it was winning the Cold War or building a global economy.

I agree.

Defeat: A self-fulfilling prophecy

I happen to be reading a British Army document on counterinsurgency at the moment. It says in one place that

Experience has shown that in any insurgency about 90% of the population do not support either side and generally remain neutral in their affiliations until one side is perceived to be winning.

This makes execellent intuitive sense: you have momentum so long as people think that aligning their wishes with yours is more likely to lead to their fulfillment than aligning them with the other side. In practice establishing common goals is fiendishly difficult particularly when your own strategic narrative is incoherent. Listen to this fascinating interview with Dr David Kilcullen, counterinsurgency advisor to Gen Petraeus, on the issueof winning te battle of competing narratives.

Getting back to the doctrine, it seems to me that the statement does not go far enough. It's not merely the perceptions of those in the theatre of conflict which are vital; the perceptions of one's own domestic base is equally important. AQ understands very well that insurgency and counterinsurgency are Information Operations with a military annex and plans and chooses its battles accordingly; I think we are begining to understand this but there's a long way to go yet. For obvious reasons the military is chary of any talk of the management of the domestic perceptions of the conflict. But the fact is that the real target of AQ's operations is the frontal lobe of the Western voter; that being the case ceding this vital battlefield is strategically suicidal. Clearly soldiers grasp this. On a tour through Marine outposts in Al Anbar province Gen Mattis* was asked by a sergeant

How are we supposed to fight a war when people back home say we've already lost?

Read the article. Mattis gave the best answer he could under the circumstances: believe your own eyes, ignore the press. But at the end of the day, or rather at the end of the coming months when the success or failure of the 'surge' is judged, the morale state of the Marines in Anbar won't count for much if the people at home have been convinced the thing is a lost cause.

*Incidentally, I met him at a conference last week. He was, as a colleague put it, as charming as only a hard-bitten Marine can be.

One other thing, aside from our own Professor Sir Lawrence Freedman whose recent Adelphi paper The Transformation of Strategic Affairs is a must read, the guru of 'strategic narratives' is the Johns Hopkins Professor Michael Vlahos. His article on the bankruptcy of the Long War and GWOT narratives, The Long War, A self-defeating prophecy, is very worthwhile, as is his longer piece in The American Conservative, The Fall of Modernity which begins

We are losing our wars in the Muslim world because our vision of history is at odds with reality. This is a well-established condition of successful societies, a condition that inevitably grows more worrisome with time and continuing success. In fact, what empires have most in common is how their sacred narratives come to rule their strategic behavior—and rule it badly. In America’s case, our war narrative works against us to promote our deepest fear: the end of modernity.

'For it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that...'

If you are not reading Michael Yon's dispatches from Iraq then you are missing something very good. At the moment he is embedded with the Queen's Royal Lancers on the border near Iran. The latest dispatch Death or Glory Part III of IV begins rather depressingly with:

American soldiers think our press is bad to them, but we get off light compared to the Brits. One British soldier told me that when he made a journey of several hours across London, in uniform, not a single person acknowledged him. I said he should go to America where British soldiers are always welcome.

I must admit this observation rings true with me. The British public does not seem to care to be very aware of the remarkable bravery and professionalism of it's citizens in uniform which is, well, it's just appalling. On the other hand I can't remember the last time I saw someone in military uniform where I live or near where I work in Central London. I wonder if there's some cause and effect there?

This site Support our Soldiers seems a worthy way to make your thanks count. Of course the Americans always seem to take these things to the next level. That said, I think Adopt a Sniper is also a worthy effort. I wonder if my vicar will let me put their flyer up? Hmmm...

Wolfowitz resigns. Who is to head the World Bank?

Paul Wolfowitz is to resign as head of the World Bank. Personally, I think it is a stitch up as is described in this Wall Street Journal feature The Wolfowitz Files from a while back. Oh well. So the question is who should be the next head of the World Bank. There is someone qualified who is in between jobs: why Tony Blair should head the WB.

Keep up the good work!

Via a friend who has been feeding me things to post on my poor negelected blog:

Professor Sees Parallels Between Things, Other Things

I've not yet achieved the illustrious rank of Professor so I'm picturing my esteemed colleague Theo Farrell, Professor of War in the Modern World, demonstrating the parallels between things and, ummm, other things with the appropriate hand gestures.

Wikipedia

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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,

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.