Category Archives: Strategery

Weapons Still Don’t Make War

by dptrombly Posted on August 10, 2012

Colin S. Gray notably claimed that “weapons don’t make war.” Gray did not mean that no relationship existed between weapons, policy, and strategy, but that as instruments, weapons only have meaning in the context of policy and strategy. While this idea seems intuitive enough, it is easily muddled; particularly when weapons appear to provide technical solutions, policymakers and strategists may be tempted to abdicate their duties by substituting a weapon for a policy or strategy.

One significant part of the problem is that analysts and advocates alike can be tempted to impute weapons with certain political, strategic, and moral considerations that do not derive from some inherent aspect of the weapon itself. This problem is rampant in commentary on drones. Even in the most cogent critiques, analysts often imbue drones themselves, rather than they ways they are wielded, with a sinister quality that has little do with drones as drones, and more to do with drones as a stand-off strike platform being deployed in a targeted killing campaign.

Imbuing drones with strategic or political qualities they do not actually possess distorts discussion of the targeted killing campaign. Firstly, it feeds into a false narrative that targeted killing is easy and cheap, when in fact it involves massive amounts of hardware and personnel. Witness the casual calls by some commentators for the U.S. to simply put Assad on a drone “kill list,” as if Syria’s significant air defenses would not pose any problem for drones which have never had to brave the hostile firepower of a state-equipped military. Secondly, it needlessly injects irrational fears and erroneous thinking into all discussion of drones. Few Americans worry about the fact that military-grade assets such as helicopters and light aircraft have been frequent fixtures of American law enforcement, and even fewer think these would ever be deployed against Americans they way they are against enemies in a war zone. Yet such logical leaps pervade drone commentary, inserting a bizarre suspicion into the discussion of all unmanned systems, despite the fact that military operating concepts for unmanned systems treat them primarily as an additional, useful tool to fill already established operating parameters and military missions.

Murtaza Hussain’s recent article in Salon serves as a good example of this common sort of drone analysis. Hussain rightly recognizes that unmanned aerial systems (UAS) follow in the footsteps of millenia of human innovations in the quest to find a way to kill hostile humans more effectively with less harm to oneself, but still insists that drone warfare is “particularly insidious,” for three primary reasons.

First, Hussain argues, drones inherently undermine the Geneva Convention, specifically, Article 41 of Protocol I, which prohibits killing of those “hors de combat.” Since a potential drone target cannot surrender to an unmanned aerial system, there is no choice but to kill them.

Is this an inherent quality of a drone? There is no opportunity to surrender to a sniper whose location is unknown to his target, and who may not be in a position to take his target prisoner anyway. There is no opportunity to surrender to a mortar bombardment. There is certainly no opportunity to surrender to a Tomahawk Land Attack Missile, or the precision-guided bomb of a B-2 stealth bomber. The inability to surrender to a drone is not a problem unique to drones, or even particularly insidious, but a context, in some cases, of the way we may choose to employ a stand-off weapon, and not one that is all that morally or legally questionable. –

Rule 47. Attacking persons who are recognized as hors de combat is prohibited. A person hors de combat is:

(a) anyone who is in the power of an adverse party;
(b) anyone who is defenceless because of unconsciousness, shipwreck, wounds or sickness; or
(c) anyone who clearly expresses an intention to surrender;

provided he or she abstains from any hostile act and does not attempt to escape.

‘Hors de combat’ status is determined not by the type of weapon, but by the military circumstances. For example, in the controversy over an American attack helicopter killing Iraqis who appeared to be surrendering, it may not have been possible to establish clearly that they were. Throwing up one’s hands but then getting back in a vehicle and traveling is not surrender, since retreating or fleeing is distinct from surrender under international law. Virtually no signatory of the Geneva Convention believes there is an unmitigated legal obligation to accept surrender in circumstances where receiving surrender is militarily impossible or would impose significant risks to personnel granting quarter.

The issue with drone strikes is not that unmanned systems carry them out (any stand-off weapon would face this problem), but that, outside the use of drones as close air-support in Afghanistan, drones are being deployed with only minimal special operations and covert personnel on the ground. That is, it is the nature of the conflict-a series of covert, clandestine, and stand-off strikes outside the context of a major conventional ground deployment-that causes these issues. And, indeed, looking in the larger context of the targeted killing program and the types of organizations they target, the much bigger - and more blatant - issue is the relentless violation of Article 41, which prohibits combatants to engage in perfidy, and which contributes to the next problem Hussain outlines.

As Hussain correctly notes, much reporting about the drone program indicates that their massively increased precision compared to other weapons systems is not particularly useful if the U.S. fails to discriminate between combatants and non-combatants for want of adequate intelligence. The problem of which Hussain speaks is one of any force confronting an enemy which flirts with violations of international humanitarian and customary prohibitions against perfidy. This Any veteran of Iraq or Afghanistan could explain that identifying legitimate combatants and targets is difficult even with troops on the ground. The moral issue at stake here - killing a potential noncombatant because their behavior may indicate hostile attempts at perfidy - has very little to do with the platform itself. If anything, drone operations, which occur in concert with manned Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) aircraft, prolonged surveillance, and ground-based covert or clandestine units, provide more opportunity for discrimination than simply lobbing TLAMs or JDAMs would (or conduct ascribed even to men with boots on the ground after curfew in purported “free fire zones” or “Indian Country” in Vietnam). It is not a problem with the so-called drone war, even less drones.

I say so-called drone war because that term fundamentally replaces context and analysis of the war with the weapon most publicly associated with it, significantly contributing to my issue with Hussain’s third point, which is that drones are insidious for enabling a “no cost” form of warfare. As one of this blog’s guest posters has pointed out for Foreign Policy, while drones may be cheaper than using other types of weapons for the same mission, that does not make the mission cheap. The argument that drones make war more likely, or let it persist for longer, does not hold up to any serious scrutiny.

The notion that somehow drones created low-risk, low-scrutiny warfare lacks historical or contemporary perspective. If there were no unmanned systems, casualties would still be low, and a massive targeted killing campaign could still be affordable, albeit with a slightly different execution. Open-ended authorizations of force for clandestine programs pre-date drones and do not require them. It’s not even as if drones allowed such secret wars to employ aircraft, either - the notion of a secret CIA air force precedes drones by decades.

That these campaigns are “low risk” has less to do with drones and more to do with the fact that the governments of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia are all basically acquiescent, tacitly or overtly, with Americans killing suspected terrorists or insurgents inside their borders, and that the targeted insurgents lack the military equipment or tactical acumen to inflict serious casualties on such a force. This targeted-killing program, employing a wide variety of air, land, and sea-based, manned and unmanned, overt and covert assets, is enabled by the unrelenting U.S. desire to kill terrorists and an open-ended legal authorization or acquiescence from Congress and the public. When Hussain argues:

Thus to a degree unprecedented in history the advent of drone warfare has given the government a free hand to wage wars without public constraint and with minimal oversight

he is doubly incorrect. The “nature” of the targeted killing program is inherent in the targeted killing, not drones or even “drone warfare,” since high-value targeted killing campaigns can take place with anything capable of lobbing a warhead to a forehead. And furthermore, the kind of conflicts we are seeing now are, by any empirical metric, not unprecedented in their lack of public oversight, their duration, or material constraints, regardless of platforms.

Another common fallacy of the sort of thinking that ascribes strategic or moral values to weapons or weapons systems is that of “lightly” or “defensively” arming foreign irregular groups, particularly in Syria. Critics who oppose arming Syria’s rebels rightly note that arms do not inherently constrain the purposes of human beings using them, and fear that adding more weapons to a major civil war could lead to post-conflict arms trafficking and their use in less-than-desirable activities, such as terrorist attacks, reprisal killings, continued internal violence, and attacks against the arming powers’ own interests.

The problem with linking arms provisions with defense of safe zones or protection of civilians is that there are no weapons systems that cannot be used to violate these intentions. Particularly with weapons that individuals or small groups can transport and operate on their own, speaking of an “offensive” or “defensive” weapon is foolish. A man-portable surface-to-air missile is defensive when it shoots down a helicopter strafing a rebel position, but it is offensive when its users encamp outside an airfield and use it to shoot down a landing transport or airliner.

The behavior of armed factions in Syria will be determined by their interests and the strategic context in which they seek to achieve them. Weapons are only part of that strategic context, and they are not a driving or controlling factor. For example, one justification analysts such as Anne-Marie Slaughter and others have long used for arming the Syrian rebels is that this would enable the creation of “safe zones,” but safe zones may not be the best military or political strategy for the rebels. If they believe taking those weapons and waging a continued guerrilla campaign that focuses on exhausting the regime as the goal, and considers the protection of civilians a secondary priority, then providing nominally “defensive” weaponry enables an offensive campaign.

When Slaughter and many others argue for providing “anti-tank, countersniper and portable antiaircraft weapons,” they are banking on several things. First, that whoever signs pledges to behave defensively actually means it and won’t manipulate foreign backers for their own interests. Second, that whoever signs the pledge has effective command and control down to the front lines where the weapons get used. Finally, that in the post-ceasefire or post-Assad stage, those weapons will not be used contrary to the desires of the rebels’ foreign patron. Characterizing the weapons as “defensive” or “light” does not eliminate any of these problems.

Consequently, arguments for arming the rebels often imbue the weapons with the intentions of the policy proponent. Take the following example. In this article, the author makes the case for providing RPG-7s and other light anti-armor weapons to the Syrian rebels, because they pose a low risk for post-conflict violence or a low degree of threat to the American counterpart to Syria’s tanks - the M1 Abrams. This is a perfect example of ascribing implicit political and strategic characteristics to a weapon rather than the context of its use: provide RPG-7s for destroying tanks, and dismiss it as a threat because post-conflict violence is less likely to involve tanks, and the weapon in question does not seem dangerous to American tanks.

It could not be more misleading. RPG-7s can do serious harm to virtually every other vehicle in the American land arsenal, and not only that, they have done serious harm to American aircraft, such as the Black Hawk helicopters in Mogadishu or, more recently, Extortion 17. RPG-7s have very short arming ranges, which make them particularly useful for urban combat, and they have more than enough firepower to destroy cars and armored personnel carriers, or to attack targets inside buildings. The number of terrorist attacks involving RPG-7s likely numbers in the tens of thousands. Simply because rebels received them to kill Syrian government tanks hardly means they cannot make use of them in a post-conflict environment. Nor, under the criteria of the safe zone advocates, would they necessarily make safe zones feasible. They hardly solve the issue of Syrian artillery, and anyone familiar with the insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan can explain how RPGs, along with improvised explosive devices, mortars, snipers, and other weapons systems, can enable tactics to further a guerrilla movement or terrorism.

It is not only when discussing the arming of rebels that weapons are used as totems for broader discussions of policy. In Libya, Syria, and many other conflicts, the use of air power is often seen as a signal that a government’s suppression of a rebellion is reaching some sort of policy-relevant turning point. Aerial defections receive nearly as much attention as political defections. But why should that be? Air power may be used for indiscriminate bombings, but few regimes rely on their air power for conducting such operations. Nor is the air force the critical element of regime military strength. Indeed it is their artillery, as Brett Friedman explains, that provides the backbone of their killing power in operations for reducing cities. Pro-regime paramilitaries operate without much in the way of heavy weapons, let alone airpower, yet we frequently hear - from the highest levels of government - that it is helicopters that will “escalate the conflict quite dramatically.” What does this actually mean?

The primary effect of helicopters appears to be psychological. The greatest amount of violence will come from more mundane weapons, and the story of Syrian air power is hardly the bellwether of the Syrian civil war. Overly focusing on Syrian air power not only distracts from the more important drivers and dynamics of conflict, it also distorts discussion of potential policy solutions.

Calls for “no fly zones” over Syria play into a problem that is at least relatively easy for Western powers to solve - taking the Syrian air force out of operation - but will likely not produce meaningful strategic or political results. If the object of an intervention in Syria is to prevent the government’s reduction of urban centers or end the violence, merely targeting Syrian air power is not a particularly effective way of doing so, since such actions would not immediately or effectively impede the action of the more critical Syrian ground forces. If a certain type of intervention is unlikely to be efficacious in actually achieving our overall aims in a conflict, that is important to know. Focusing on a weapon system rather than the strategic context and outcomes impedes that process significantly.

Gray’s statement holds true. Weapons still do not make war. They are wielded and directed by humans against those of an opposing force or forces, in the midst of a host of mitigating factors, to achieve strategic aims. When Gray made his argument, he was challenging the notion of “strategic weapons” - weapons which have much more credible claims to transformative power or unique political or strategic quality than any of those discussed here - but even they are ultimately still devices whose meaning for politics, policy, and strategy derives from that broader ensemble of factors. Understanding what weapons systems are capable of is absolutely important for determining what kinds of strategies and policies are feasible, but they must be viewed as instruments subordinate to established ends. While weapons may appear easier to grasp than the complexities of warfare and the even more multifaceted issue of war, they should not take a lead role in coloring our analysis of policy.

Posted in Military, Small Arms, Strategery | 1 Comment

We’ve got drones and SOF teams. Who should we go after?

by caidid Posted on May 22, 2012

‘We’ve got drones and SOF teams. Who should we go after?’

This is how the target selection process sounds to me when I read about it. My semi-secret fear is that this might be quite close to how this process actually works. The Global War on Terror, the shadow war, the overseas contingency operation - whatever you want to call it, I’ve long worried that its reach and the place of importance it is given are out of proportion to any threat posed by Al Qaeda or any similar group, and I’ve long feared that the way we go about ‘countering’ terrorism may in fact cause more problems than it solves, possibly by orders of magnitude. I am no insider. I don’t see the process. I would like to think that more care is put into these decisions than it seems from the outside. But from here, from the outside, it seems like no matter how many times - through decades of experience - we see the second and third order effects, the collateral damage, the side effects of our actions, the people making the decisions are not really concerning themselves with taking time to consider how the benefits balance out against the potential unintended consequences and long-term effects. And it’s not just about doing things we maybe shouldn’t be doing; it’s also about failing to do things we maybe should be doing.

Then when I read an article like this one by Kimberly Dozier (and I strongly recommend reading that), it reads very cart-before-horse to me, like ‘Who are we going after with these drones and SOF guys?’ and not ‘This AQ leader is a terrible threat. What are we going to do about that?’ I’m not saying that we shouldn’t have contingency plans in place for how to deal with potential real threats to U.S. security, but it seems like more than that. I fear that maybe we use these tactics just because we can, that because we have drones and incredibly skilled and versatile SOF teams and such, we just look for people to use them on. That scares me because it implies a casual attitude toward the many forms of potential collateral damage, scant consideration of long term effects (and therefore the absence of a robust long term guiding strategy), meaning finally, an approach to national security that is not actually optimized to keep our nation secure.

The drones aren’t the issue any more than any other tool or tactic is - they are a tool, and can be a very valuable one - but if we’re looking around for people to kill with them rather than using them only in service of a true strategy or to counter a clear threat that has arisen, then we’re doing it wrong, and if we’re doing it wrong - and this is true even if you are concerned only with American interests and are fully indifferent to the collateral damage done to and within local populations in the areas of operation - we risk having to pay a harsh price in five years, or ten, or twenty, when the right things we didn’t do and the collateral effects of the things we did do comes back to haunt us.

But please tell me I’m wrong. I’ll feel a lot better if I am.

Bonus reading: h/t to Rob Caruso for linking up three great recommendations for current reading on operations (which yes, very much do consist of more than just drones): “Offshoring CT: Towards a Dissection” - Dan Trombly for Abu Muqawama; “The Vickers Doctrine” - Robert Caruso at Rocky Shoals; and “U.S. Foreign Policy and Contested Sovereignty” - Micah Zenko for CFR. All good reads that bear on various aspects of this subject, none quite addresses the question of what kind of big-picture, long-term strategy guides these operations, although Caruso comes closest to getting into this in that his (very interesting) post offers guidance on structure and prioritization in operations going forward.

Posted in Military, Strategery, Terrorism, Uncategorized, War | 6 Comments

French Exit

by Jonathan Rue Posted on January 26, 2012

This afternoon, the Pentagon will put some more meat on the bones of its recently released strategic guidance. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff GEN Martin Dempsey will release the DoD FY13 budget request and unveil the specific programs that will not survive approximately $487 billion in budget cuts. Shortly thereafter, we’ll probably get something similar to Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee Buck McKeon’s statement in response to the strategic guidance:

This is a lead from behind strategy for a left-behind America. The President has packaged our retreat from the world in the guise of a new strategy to mask his divestment of our military and national defense. This strategy ensures American decline in exchange for more failed domestic programs. In order to justify massive cuts to our military, he has revoked the guarantee that America will support our allies, defend our interests, and defy our opponents. The President must understand that the world has always had, and will always have a leader. As America steps back, someone else will step forward. (Emphasis mine.)

Former George W. Bush DoD comptroller and current Mitt Romney foreign policy adviser Dov Zakheim had this to say in response to the State of the Union:

He claimed that our alliances were stronger than ever, but glossed over the fact that there is deep unease in Europe over the administration’s much ballyhooed “pivot” to Asia. As for that pivot, to which the president did refer, it currently amounts to the redeployment, on a rotating basis, of a grand total of 2,500 Marines to Australia.

[BREAK]

The president said very little about his defense budget cuts. He did not explain how America would retain all its commitments worldwide with a shrunken force that his own secretary of defense has lamented. He did not, of course, note that defense is paying for half the deficit reduction while its budget constitutes a fifth of all federal spending each year, when off-budget entitlements are counted, as they should be. (Emphasis mine.)

These statements reflect the almost axiomatic idea that the United States of America can and should continue to organize, train, and equip a military that provides security for everyone, everywhere. This is not a partisan concept; this has been central to defense policy since the early days of the Cold War and hasn’t budged since. In the post-Cold War era, conservatives of various stripes have championed the use of American military power for outright imperialism while liberals have championed its use under the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine. American involvement in Libya in early 2011 demonstrated that the two sides had very different notions of how American involvement played out, but not about involvement itself. Of course we should get involved; that’s what we do.

I want to explore a prominent theme in McKeon’s statement and the larger GOP establishment view on the role and size of America’s military: the idea that commitments made sixty years ago cannot and should not be reevaluated.

Let’s take Europe as an example. Today, roughly twenty years after the end of the Cold War, there are 41,000 American soldiers permanently stationed on the European continent (this figure does not even include personnel from the other three services). As a result of the strategic review and the budget cuts, two Brigade Combat Teams — roughly 10,000 soldiers — are set to withdraw from Europe and may be cut entirely as the army shrinks below 500,000 active duty soldiers. Aside from the Charlie Foxtrot known as the single currency, the European continent is remarkably stable and the threat of conventional war between major states is very low. On the other hand, Asia is emerging as a region where the United States has greater interests and the threat of conflict is higher (how much higher is very much up for debate and I offer no assessment here). Would it not be more prudent to either re-position those forces to another theater? Or, if that theatre is not conducive to hosting large numbers of ground forces, would it not be more prudent to station those troops on United States territory? As an aside, the 41,000 army soldiers in Europe and their 100,000 dependents aren’t stimulating the American economy by spending their disposable income in Germany and Italy.

The point is that defense strategy can’t be frozen in time and it can’t be promulgated and then left alone. Strategy is an iterative process that requires adjustments and tweaks as realities change. The international system and United States fiscal realities are not static. Why then would defense policy remain static? I understand that the United States made a commitment to the defense of Europe during the Cold War, but is that still a valid and necessary requirement? If so, is the permanent basing of 41,000 soldiers in Europe necessary to meeting that requirement? Might say, the designating the XVIII Airborne Corps and II Marine Expeditionary Force, both of which are based on the East Coast and quick reaction forces (of sorts), responsible for operations in Europe? This commitment has underwritten Europe’s security and enabled European governments to vastly scale back their own defense spending. Since the end of the Cold War, what tangible security benefits has this commitment made to the security of American citizens?

We can no longer pretend to be able to afford to be the global guarantor of security while our own society becomes increasingly fragmented. With that realization should come the painful but necessary reexamination of our strategic priorities. If everything is a priority, then nothing is a priority. Commitments made sixty years ago may no longer serve our needs, and those commitments cannot be held untouchable in budgetary or strategic debates. We just can’t afford it.

UPDATE: You can see Rep. McKeon’s response to the announcement here.

Posted in Military, NATO, Strategery | Leave a comment

Future Foe Scenarios

by Jonathan Rue Posted on January 6, 2012

I was all set to offer up my own thoughts on the results of DoD’s strategic review, but came across something that I fear will be proven correct.

Overall, the new strategy is still one of champagne tastes on a beer budget. It requires the U.S. military to be capable of too many missions and to do too many things. While it proposes being more judicious in our choices of where, when and how to intervene abroad, no administration has demonstrated any self-discipline in this area. We have 100 U.S. soldiers in Uganda. If we cannot even see our way clear to leaving the Lord’s Resistance Army unmolested, where won’t we go and who won’t we fight?

I didn’t agree with much else Dan Goure wrote in the post from which the above paragraph was taken, but it was worth reading for that.

As my friend Gulliver notes in his excellent review of the review, this “strategy” doesn’t appear to set any priorities. I fear that I’ll be lumped in with the libertarian set, or worse, Ron Paul, but this so-called strategy and the idea of significantly reducing the growth of the Department of Defense is meaningless unless we’re prepared to revisit our assumptions on the utility of military force. Moreover, we have to rethink what constitutes “vital American interests” when considering military action. I propose we drop the ‘vital’ from that cliché - it assumes interests are automatically at stake, which is not a valid assumption, and frames the choice as one of vital interests or just interests. Instead, we should be thinking in terms of interests or no interests. Intervening in, say, Libya is either in our interest or it isn’t.

The strategic review is meaningless because as Goure notes, no administration has demonstrated any self-discipline in choosing where, when, and how to intervene abroad. I see no evidence that this will change in the future. The War Powers Resolution was meant to provide a check, but if the current Congress is the norm, then the President will be able to do whatever he/she wants. So, although this review is supposedly setting out a roadmap for a leaner military and a smaller Department of Defense, force is still likely to be a growth industry.

Posted in Strategery, War | 1 Comment

Have We Seen the End of Major Armed Conflicts?

by Daveed Gartenstein-Ross Posted on January 3, 2012

During my radio interview today on Jon Justice’s show, Jon asked an interesting question. “Are we in a place in history right now,” he said, “where we won’t see a conflict on a massive scale because of how developed the nations are? Any type of major event would bring so many factions into it that we almost couldn’t get out. I just can’t envision us getting into another World War-type scenario.”

It was an interesting question — and a fair one that will certainly be asked again in an era of declining defense budgets — but I had to answer with a rather emphatic no. For a bit of historical perspective, about 100 years ago prominent European liberals thought that war had become increasingly unlikely because the intertwining of European economies made warfare prohibitively expensive. This argument was made most prominently by eventual Nobel Peace Prize winner Norman Angell in his 1910 book The Great Illusion. The First World War, of course, disproved this rather optimistic assessment of the future of armed conflict. But in another way, Angell was right: World War I was prohibitively expensive, a war in which it can be said that there were no real victors.

Today, we can rather confidently predict that another major conflict would be incredibly costly to whomever takes part. Certainly the U.S. will be quite reticent to commit its forces to another major conflict anytime soon, given the astronomical costs of the Iraq war, and the massive debts that the country has occurred. I think this reticence is justified: that is one reason that I opposed from the very outset the U.S. military intervention in Libya (a foreign policy decision that increasingly appears to have had significant negative unintended consequences). But one resounding lesson of the past hundred years is that unpredictable things will happen when it comes to armed conflict.

Most recently, very few strategic thinkers envisioned an event like 9/11 in advance; and indeed, these attacks heralded the rise of violent non-state actors as a strategic challenge, even to the world’s most powerful country. As I have argued, violent non-state actors are likely to pose an increasing rather than diminishing challenge over the course of the coming decade. And the fact that violent non-state actors are a significant force provides an answer to Norman Angell’s basic argument, as it might be applied today: though major conflicts are likely to be terrible for nation-states economically, non-state actors’ interests are not tied to those of the countries in which they find themselves. They won’t be deterred by the same strategic factors that might deter nation-states. As I argued in my latest book, the economic costs of conflict can in fact work to violent non-state actors’ benefit: one of al Qaeda’s key strategic goals over the past decade was to grind the U.S. down economically, and the jihadi group was quite successful in doing so.

Moreover, even outside the sphere of non-state actors, history rarely proceeds in predictable patterns. Multiple developments could suddenly usher in large-scale armed conflict: tensions fueled by resource scarcity, the escalation of civil wars or non-state violence into full-blown state-to-state fighting, a surprise attack on the global supply of oil, the rise of expansionist ideological parties in any number of vital countries, even a miscalculated nuclear launch in South Asia or elsewhere.

The unpredictability of armed conflict is one reason that, when it comes to current debates about counter-insurgency, I’m skeptical of the idea that the singular lesson of our recent experience is that we should never again put ourselves in a position where we are fighting against an insurgency. Surely, the position that we should be extremely hesitant to do so is reasonable, worthy of discussion; so too is the position that our current military posture is not worth its costs. But, at the end of the day, is never getting involved in another counter-insurgency situation our choice alone? Or not getting involved in another large-scale armed conflict?

Posted in Strategery, Terrorism, War | 10 Comments

Changes Are No Good

by Jonathan Rue Posted on October 31, 2011

I finally got around to reading Stephen Walt’s latest essay “The End of the American Era” from the current issue of The National Interest over the weekend. Walt joins the growing chorus of academics calling for an American grand strategy that’s more offshore balancing and less primacy. Rather than offer my own long-winded diatribe on the merits of offshore balancing, I want to throw a couple questions out there for discussion.

In his opening paragraph, Walt offers up the conventional wisdom on the merits of primacy during a bygone era:

The United States has been the dominant world power since 1945, and U.S. leaders have long sought to preserve that privileged position. They understood, as did most Americans, that primacy brought important benefits. It made other states less likely to threaten America or its vital interests directly. By dampening great-power competition and giving Washington the capacity to shape regional balances of power, primacy contributed to a more tranquil international environment. That tranquility fostered global prosperity; investors and traders operate with greater confidence when there is less danger of war. Primacy also gave the United States the ability to work for positive ends: promoting human rights and slowing the spread of weapons of mass destruction. It may be lonely at the top, but Americans have found the view compelling.

I asked myself the following questions after reading this paragraph:

1. Does primacy actually foster a more tranquil global environment?

2. Given that primacy nests so well within American exceptionalism, will it be possible to abandon this endeavor? In other words, can Americans accept the idea of not being on top?

What do you think?

Posted in Military, Strategery, War | 4 Comments

Shades of Gray

by Jonathan Rue Posted on October 17, 2011

A couple weeks ago I highlighted a solid paper produced by the New America Foundation regarding a new approach for securing rather than controlling the commons. I both praised and critiqued the paper, though the former certainly overshadowed the latter. Bryan McGrath, over at the excellent maritime strategy blog Information Dissemination, wrote a thoughtful criticism of his own, mostly of the paper, but also of my praise for it. McGrath’s response to both the paper and my posts was good, but in the process he slew some offshore balancing strawmen, and that didn’t sit right with me.

Rather than embark on a point-by-point rebuttal, I’m going to focus on his conclusion that offshore balancing is useless (neo)isolationism, which is representative of the most common arguments against offshore balancing. Like most who are opposed to offshore balancing, McGrath reduces a complex strategic concept to its most simplistic – and therefore absurdist – form without allowing for the inherently wide range of possible implementations.

McGrath’s overall argument is that Lalwani and Shifrinon’s paper is:

[j]ust another example of a neo-isolationist strand of offshore balancing which combines loathing of “free-riders” with conjured-up “insecurity” posed by our own powerful naval force presence-without seeing the obvious potential for real (rather than conjured) insecurity flowing from abandoned “free-riders” arming themselves with new vigor. They make nice noises about the maintenance of “sufficient” combat power to protect our interests, without any real proposal on how to maintain such a force against further budget axes—sure to fall when the American people and their representatives wake up to the expensive luxury that is ships operating off San Diego, Guam and Diego Garcia-not deterring anyone nor reassuring anyone.

McGrath mistakenly links offshore balancing to (neo)isolationism. That’s not entirely surprising; the very name implies it to a degree. Given the fact that Robert Pape is the head cheerleader, with some help from the Cato Institute, offshore balancing is always going to be linked with (neo)isolationist thinkers. Because of this association, offshore balancing is generally understood in a literal sense: rather than forward deploy troops in various regions around the world, the argument goes, we should just park the US Navy over the horizon so it can intervene when necessary.

But this is a distorted and overly simplified view of offshore balancing. Moreover, this view is only one possible operational component of the larger offshore balancing strategy.

Offshore balancing is actually part of a realist strategic worldview, not a (neo)isolationist one. The basic idea is that one country uses friends and allies to check the rise of (potentially) hostile powers (see John Mearsheimer’s The Tragedy of Great Power Politics for the Full Monty). Rather than committing your own military resources to preventing another power from challenging you, you let friends and allies shoulder that burden. The end results is that a country such as China is too busy worrying about India, Japan, and other countries to challenge the U.S. directly.

This isn’t a novel idea: the U.S. has engaged in offshore balancing at numerous times in history. Support for Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq War, the Lend-Lease Act of 1941, and support for the mujahedeen in Afghanistan are just a few examples. Now, I understand that the response to this might be that in none of those instances did offshore balancing work: we ended up fighting World War II, Saddam Hussein became our enemy anyway, and, well, we all know how Afghanistan turned out. But I want to point out that if you assume that U.S. national debt is already a crushing problem and that entitlements are not going away, given the woeful state of the U.S. economy, the inevitable conclusion is that the U.S. Department of Defense cannot continue simultaneously acting as the Japanese, Saudi Arabian, and Western European Departments of Defense too. Offshore balancing must be part and parcel of any U.S. national security strategy going forward because we can’t afford to guarantee everybody’s security by ourselves. Somebody else has to step up to the plate.

The problem with offshore balancing is how to operationalize it. Lalwani and Shifrinson ran headfirst into this problem. They focused on the maritime commons and removed it from a strategic context which, as McGrath notes is problematic. I will be the first to admit that operationalizing it is tricky, and to be frank, I don’t exactly know how to do it. Luckily, that’s not my job… yet.

Regardless, removing the U.S. security blanket does not imply—as McGrath and other offshore balancing opponents would have us believe—that the U.S. would necessarily abandon our friends and allies, allowing those regions to descend into Hobbesian anarchy. The U.S. would obviously have to manage any transition from global primacy to security provider of last resort. We could still provide security for various countries while those countries reinforced their conventional military defenses, thus mitigating an arms purchase free for all. We would presumably do this regardless to make sure that the U.S. was the country providing those arms.

Most importantly, it is not necessary for various smaller powers to reach parity with stronger regional powers. For example, our East Asian allies do not need the ability to fight a major conventional war with China; they simply need the ability to prevent any possible Chinese military action from becoming a fait accompli by delaying the Chinese military long enough for the U.S. Navy to sail to the rescue (with Uncle Sam’s Misguided Children, of course). And of course, we should assume that the U.S. will continue to provide a nuclear umbrella for our friends and allies in order to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons.

The point is that the redeployment of military forces from East Asia to Hawaii or Guam does not necessarily imply the total abandonment of that region. There is a middle ground between the extremes of acting as Japan’s Department of Defense, providing100% of their security, and abandoning them in totality.

Which leads me to my next point—the state of the debate.

By linking offshore balancing to (neo)isolationism, McGrath commits what Patrick Porter calls an isolationist heresy. Porter writes:

Isolationism has become an inflated concept wielded to close down debate. This is due to the narrowness of the strategic debate in Washington. A diarchy of liberal internationalists and muscular nationalist hawks places all other ideas under the shadow of a Wilsonian tradition, in which the U.S. has no choice to secure itself but to dominate and convert the world… Both major parties have marginalized contrary visions. Those who argue for a withdrawal from global primacy are only to be found on the political fringes of American conservatism and progressivism. In such a narrow political intellectual market, the richness of competing traditions of American statecraft is reduced to caricature… The word ‘isolationist’ has also been emptied of meaning and become a rhetorical device to stifle and delegitimize dissent.

McGrath’s argument inadvertently falls into this reductionist trap. By (mistakenly) reducing a complicated strategy like offshore balancing to simple (neo)isolationism, McGrath and others are able to paint their opponents as naïve, prop up the isolationist strawman, then knock it down. McGrath repeatedly puts quotations around “free rider” and “insecurity” as if to imply that these concepts only exist in the minds of those realists who dare propose a scaled back approach to America’s role in the world. In fact, free riding and insecurity are very real byproducts of a global primacy, power projection force posture. Full stop. That’s not up for debate. What is up for debate is whether we accept these byproducts as the cost of doing business. That’s a debate in which I’m willing to engage.

Perhaps it’s unsurprising that the toxic domestic political climate has skulked into the realm of foreign policy in the form of ideological simplicity. Tax. Spend. Cut. Three words dominate political discourse in a stark duality without a middle ground. Our foreign policy debates shouldn’t be similarly reduced to black or white affairs. We don’t have to choose between total isolationism and global primacy. There is a middle ground, and we desperately need to find it, sooner rather than later.

Update: Be sure to read Tom Wright’s insightful comments below. He makes some salient points that are a must read for this debate.

Posted in Strategery, War | 7 Comments

Defending Defense in 2011, Partying Like It’s 1999

by Jonathan Rue Posted on September 27, 2011

Okay, so I really didn’t want to make my second post about strategy because, while I enjoy thinking and writing about it, I don’t want to make strategy my shtick. Think of me as Sean Connery stepping away from playing James Bond after Diamonds Are Forever, except, unlike Connery, I can’t wait long enough to create the demand to see Never Say Never Again.

Whatever, I’m back, talking about strategy, or more accurately, lack thereof. I blame the people who are actually paid to think strategically. If they’re gonna keep throwing softballs, I’m gonna keep hitting homeruns. Or long singles. I’ll let you be the judge.

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Yesterday, the Republican staff of the House Armed Services Committee (HASC) released a report prepared for the Chairman, Rep. Buck McKeon, of their assessment of the impacts of DoD budget cuts. The Republican staff’s working assumption is that the Super Committee will be unable to reach a deal and that full sequestration will be implemented. If that happens, DoD’s FY13 base budget, which is currently pegged at $596 billion, will be reduced by 18% to $491 billion. Over FY13–FY21, cuts would total slightly over $1 trillion. As my good friend Jasonnotes, this is a worst-case scenario. (Jason’s entire post is worth your time. Read it.)

Since Jason did a great job of taking down the “we might have to draft your kids” meme, I’m going to focus on the other two bullet points highlighted in the Executive Summary: Destroying Jobs and Stalling the Economy and Vital Missions at Risk. At least, that’s what I was going to do when I started writing this Monday evening. Instead, I spent 1300 words on the title of the executive summary. On Wednesday I’ll hit the bullet points, I promise.

In the interest of fairness, I suppose a caveat would be appropriate here. This is a political document, not a strategic one. The Republican staff produced it; presumably, the minority staff did not contribute to this report or its conclusions. HASC is not charged with making strategy. That falls to the National Security Council and, as it pertains to DoD, the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy. This is a partisan document that’ll be used to justify minimal, if any, cuts to the DoD budget. Nothing more, nothing less. Still, it displays a stunning lack of strategic thought for the nation’s welfare and common defense.

Let’s start with the title of the Executive Summary: Future Cuts Transform a Superpower into a Regional Power. HASC Republicans must have missed the memo that explained why the U.S. isn’t a superpower. Did you get that memo? For those who didn’t, it was issued by the Bush administration in 2003 when they sent the military to war without putting the country on a war footing. Compounding this problem was the decision to lower taxes. Wall Street issued an addendum to the memo – something about peddling mortgages to people who can’t afford houses and a footnote about some absolutely insane ways of securitizing assets, by which I mean debt. That memo was titled The Baby Boomers Are Driving this Country Off a Cliff. But I digress.

Now, I can already hear the masses vehemently disagreeing with the notion that the U.S. is not a superpower. Allow me to add some nuance. Clearly, the U.S. remains a superpower on a military level. On an economic or political level, not so much. A lot of this has less to do with the U.S. than it does the transformation of the international system.

Joe Nye’s most recent book, The Future of Power, does a great job of defining this transformation as well as the nature of power. He sums it up by noting that “the problem for all states in the twenty-first century is that there are more and more things outside the control of even the most powerful states.” Even casual observers of the international system can see this. Larger states have ceded relative power to these new players, particularly when one considers power to be more than just military might.

So what is power? The dictionary, at least the one Nye consulted, says that power “is the capacity to do things and in social situations to affect others to get the outcomes we want.” That sounds as good a definition as any to me. Nye digs deeper, noting that “power conversion—getting from resources to behavioral outcomes—is a crucial intervening variable.” This definition, combined with Nye’s concept of power conversion, is important because it places the emphasis on outcomes, not just resources. That’s the point, right? Getting what we want, not simply consuming resources.

This is important because most discussions about DoD budget cuts tend to neglect the basic fact that a nation derives its power from more than just the military, and that if our military strength comes at the expense of shoring up the economy, we aren’t actually increasing our power [or something]. The U.S. has traditionally been the most powerful when our economy was strongest. A strong economy allows for a strong military, while a weak economy doesn’t, unless those charged with governing are prepared to borrow yet more money to pay for it. Or cut entitlements. Or cut all funding for every Federal agency not named DoD.

Les Gelb believes that the U.S. hasn’t adjusted to twenty-first century realities (h/t Gulliver for reminding me about this article). Gelb writes:

Most nations today beat their foreign policy drums largely to economic rhythms, but less so the United States. Most nations define their interests largely in economic terms and deal mostly in economic power, but less so the United States. Most nations have adjusted their national security strategies to focus on economic security, but less so the United States. Washington still principally thinks of its security in traditional military terms and responds to threats with military means. The main challenge for Washington, then, is to recompose its foreign policy with an economic theme, while countering threats in new and creative ways. The goal is to redefine “security” to harmonize with twenty-first-century realities.

The most ferocious fight will be over how to rejuvenate the U.S. economy. Everyone agrees that it must be fixed, lest the nation face further decline and more dangers. But few agree on how. The basic must-do list is lengthy, unforgiving, and depressingly obvious: improve public schools to sustain democracy and restore global competitiveness; upgrade the physical infrastructure critical to economic efficiency and homeland security; reduce public debt, the interest on which is devouring revenue; stimulate the economy to create jobs; and promote new sources of energy and freer trade to increase jobs, lower foreign debt, and reduce dependence on Middle Eastern oil.

Even as politicians and experts do their war dances on these do-or-die domestic issues, they will grapple over foreign policy, as they should. The United States is less and less able to translate its economic strength into influence abroad, even though it will remain for some time the world’s largest economy. Why this gap between U.S. power and results? In part, it is because many problems internal to states today are beyond all external ministrations. It is also because U.S. power has been squandered and employed inefficiently. Having overlooked profound changes in the world, U.S. leaders have done little to modernize their national security strategy. Present U.S. strategy offers too little bang for its buck because there is not enough buck in the strategy. A new way of thinking about U.S. interests and power must aim for a foreign policy fitted to a world in which economic concerns typically — but not always — outweigh traditional military imperatives.

Like I said, this is a political document, not a strategic one. I get that, really I do. Republicans are trying to maintain their hold on being the party strong on defense. This is an increasingly difficult task given Tea Party influence on the freshmen class of Congress who are bucking the party line, willing to cut the sacrosanct DoD budget in order to get overall Federal spending under control. Republicans are suffering a bit of an identity crisis.

But this entire report is rooted in the twentieth century; it does not take into account the economic realities of the twenty-first. HASC Republicans need to recognize this new environment and understand that national strength is not drawn exclusively from DoD. Since fidelity to the Constitution is trendy now, one would think that Republicans might realize that when the framers wrote the Constitution, they didn’t envision projecting power or commanding the commons as a superpower. After all, even a regional power can “provide for the common defense,” right?

Posted in Strategery, The Acronym Game! | Leave a comment

Strategy, Math. Whatever.

by Jonathan Rue Posted on September 19, 2011

I was a little unnerved when Diana asked me if I’d write for her blog [ed note: I'm creepy!]. As I told her, since leaving graduate school and joining the Marines I haven’t written much, certainly nothing of an academic or analytical nature (rumor has it the military likes PowerPoint and discourages long-form analysis). This is doubly ironic since my first post-military job is at a think tank where I’m currently researching (and hopefully writing about) Persian Gulf militaries. Regardless, after a four year sabbatical from writing much of anything, minus the occasional dispatch from Iraq, here goes nothing. Be gentle in the comments section.

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Last week, the House Armed Services Committee held the second in a series of hearings entitled The Future of National Defense and the U.S. Military Ten Years After 9/11. The common refrain from the witnesses of these two hearings has echoed the comments of former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates: Strategy before math. Unfortunately, to date, there has been little strategy, both on Capitol Hill and in the White House.

Sameer Lalwani and Joshua Shifrinson, PhD candidates at MIT, go a long way toward filling this strategic void with their paper published by the New America Foundation, Whither the Commons? Choosing Security Over Control. Simply put, it’s excellent. To my knowledge it’s the first solid attempt at a credible alternative strategy for how the U.S. can maintain security in an austere budget environment. Basically, Lalwani and Shifrinson have offered up a first draft for DoD and its ongoing “roles and missions review.” Let’s be honest, if DoD absorbs the amount of budget cuts that are being bandied about, it will be unable to do everything we have asked of it over the last twenty years. A fundamental change in strategy will be necessary.

Anyway, onto their argument.

According to Lalwani and Shifrinson, “‘command of the commons’—the ability to project military power and engage in trade at times and places of its choosing while denying the same privileges to others… is a critical feature of American grand strategy.” Today, command of the commons translates into the ability whereby “the United States can credibly threaten to deny other states access to the commons in a crisis and can defeat another state’s efforts to deny the U.S. access to the commons in wartime.”

Since the end of the Cold War, the U.S. has pursued command of the commons through an approach commonly referred to as “primacy.” This approach requires the United States to retain the preponderance of military power and deter potential challengers from even emerging; basically, doing whatever necessary to maintain the status quo. Lalwani and Shifrinson label the current U.S. approach to command of the commons as “control the commons—preventing the emergence of plausible threats to U.S. command by state and non-state actors alike, well ahead of their actual manifestation.” The problem with this strategy is that it’s, uh, expensive.

The paper’s thesis is that the U.S. can retain command of the commons with a less costly and more appropriate approach, one that the authors term “security of the commons.” This idea is worth quoting at length:

Under a security of the commons approach, the United States would maintain sufficient command of the commons to defeat military threats to U.S. interests and ensure the provision of global public goods such as trade and commerce. But it would recognize that America’s current commitments and force capabilities far exceed what is necessary to achieve these goals. The United States therefore can scale down the reach of its international activities and force presence without jeopardizing the key objectives of the command of the commons. It can do so because the United States faces unequivocal challenges to its command of the commons. Moreover, by pursuing a security of the commons approach, it can actually increase U.S. national security while lowering its cost. This is the case because under the current control approach, the U.S. tendency to over-provide the military forces to retain command can trigger “spirals of insecurity” and breed the very challenges to command of the commons it seeks to prevent. By contrast a security of the commons approach offers the possibility that by doing less, the United States can encourage other regional powers to do more in protecting the commons, thereby discouraging free-riding. Yet, at the same time, the United States would retain more than ample military capability to defend the commons should a credible threat emerge by scaling up in critical regions, thus acting as a security guarantor of last resort.

Seems like a solid alternative strategy to me. But, wait, that’s not even the best part!

Lalwani and Shifrinson’s critique of the control approach is devastating. It’s the verbal equivalent of the bin Laden raid. In five paragraphs, they kick open to the door to the American primacy argument and put two in its head, one in its chest, and, for good measure, empty the clip into its cold lifeless body. American primacy is thus whisked away and dumped unceremoniously into the ocean. The way it should be. (As a point of reference, if this critique is the equivalent of the bin Laden raid, then surely Daveed Gartenstein-Ross’ critique of Robert Pape’s latest book is a 20KT nuclear bomb.)

The U.S. should exercise control over the commons at all times. This equates security and openness of the commons with American monopoly of the international system. At the same time, the emergence of increasingly powerful states seeking to influence the commons is viewed with deep suspicions. Despite the rhetoric of multilateralism, influence over the commons is only accorded to allies under the aegis of American leadership.

Check. It is fiscally unsustainable to continue performing this mission. Well, unless the Army and Air Force are prepared to take one for the team and give budgetary priority to the Navy. Or unless Americans are willing to sacrifice their entitlements. Yeah, I didn’t think so. Also, we’ve bought into a system where we always have to be the leader because we think the international system would devolve into anarchy without us. When we’re not leading with toughness and seriousness, the sky falls. Wait, what was that? Sky falling? Oh, never mind, it was just Tripoli.

U.S. command also provides a global public good that is perpetually vulnerable to ready disruption. In this view, the United States acts as ‘steward’ for the international community in providing access to the commons. As such, efforts to limit U.S. command by reducing its ready access to certain maritime regions is taken as a challenge to the openness of the commons and threat to the international economic system.

Check. This view neglects the fact that countries like China and Iran have a vested interest in maintaining open sea lines of communication for their own benefit. Why would Iran close the Strait of Hormuz, thereby shutting down its only outlet to the global economic system? How does the regime benefit from preventing its main export, oil, from reaching the market? The first person who can offer a credible explanation where Iran initiates hostilities by closing the Strait of Hormuz—in other words, not as a response to hostile actions undertaken by the United States or one of our regional partners—wins a free beer. Busch Light.

As a result, it is imperative to forestall potential challenges to the commons. Because any expansion of the contested zones is treated as an undesirable challenge to American leadership, control over the commons places a premium on early identification of potential challenges—even those that have yet to clearly emerge.

Check. Everyone is a threat. Every state action that the U.S. disagrees with is an assault on America’s toughness and seriousness. Got it. The problem is that in practice, the United States goes around swatting every little housefly with a carrier battle group. Some flies, while annoying, are not worth the effort. Take Iran for instance. Iran is an annoyance and its nuclear program is a cause for great concern and warrants vigilance, but Iran is not a military threat to the United States. Yeah, I said it. Here are the Coors Light cold, hard facts on Iran: Iran’s military is neither trained nor equipped to project meaningful power outside its borders. Iran does not have modern tanks or armored vehicles. Iran’s artillery consists largely of towed systems pre-dating the Iran-Iraq War. Iran lacks a long-range strike capability. Iran’s navy is not classified as blue-water. Even if it possessed these capabilities, Iran does not have the logistics support in place to sustain operations. Iran’s equipment, due to sanctions, suffers maintenance and readiness shortfalls. Iran spends $10 billion annually on defense, roughly equivalent to what DoD spends on toner and paper. Still, the American political class persists in treating Iran as some sort of great power, elevating it from the middle rate power that it is to a state that is on the cusp of challenging U.S. supremacy. We’ve forward deployed substantial military assets to contain a military that contains itself.

And finally, the coup de grace:

This… is a particularly costly strategy because it conflates efforts by other states to preserve their sovereignty and protect their interests with outright challenges to the commons. Moreover, by equating openness of the commons with unambiguous American leadership, the strategy actually causes other powers such as China and India to fear the possibility that the United States will one day decide to deny them access to the commons.

The United States has a reinforced Brigade Combat Team in South Korea, a carrier battle group in Japan, long-range strike on Guam, a Marine Expeditionary Unit on Okinawa, and I don’t know how many short-range fighter/attack aircraft in the region. If you’re China, why wouldn’t you feel threatened by this force posture? Why wouldn’t you start developing weapons meant to deny U.S. access and freedom of maneuver? If my name is Hu Jintao, I’m spending money hand over fist on SA-20s, submarines, and anti-ship cruise missiles, anything that will create an anti-access / area denial capability.

On the whole, this argument jibes largely with my own thinking on the subject. It is impossible to provide security for everyone, everywhere, at all times. We simply cannot afford it, at least, not unless the U.S. federal government is prepared to spend money only on entitlements and defense. More importantly, this strategy of control is unnecessary. Even the states that we view as threats (Iran) or possible challengers (China) have vested interests in the current system. China in particular owes its rapid economic growth to participation in the current global economic system. Thus, why should the United States provide access to the commons for it, thus reducing China’s cost of doing business? If and when China begins to alter its force posture in a way that undermines our security and/or impedes the free flow of commerce to U.S. detriment, then as the authors point out, regional states will bandwagon against it. If they don’t, the U.S. can do what it does best: MOAR WAR! And none of this counterinsurgency crap. I’m talking Air-Sea Battle, high intensity operations. Shock and Awe II: East Pacific. EA SportsÒ: It’s in the game.

Look, I’m not saying that the U.S. should not have a robust military and that it shouldn’t look with suspicion upon states like China and Iran. And neither are Lalwani and Shifrinson. Contrary to what certain politicians might say, we’re not isolationists. At least I’m not; I can’t speak for Lalwani and Shifrinson. I’m simply saying that I believe we can maintain a qualitative military edge over these countries and maintain security and freedom of the commons in a smarter, more efficient manner that takes new fiscal realities into account.

One further thought. This paper is a great example of the utility of political science to the policymaking community. It has a very strong academic foundation with an equally strong theoretical construct, but it also has immense value and applicability to events that occur in the real world. Academics who feel the ivory tower should remain above the fray of politics ought to read this paper and start making themselves more relevant to international politics. Like, today.

So, go read this important paper. Tomorrow, or whenever I finish editing, I’ll post some critiques because contrary to what you’ve just read, the paper fell short in a couple areas. It was, however, a significant challenge to the prevailing orthodoxy, and at the end of the day, that’s more than enough for me.

Posted in Military, Strategery | 11 Comments