Essential Elements of Information for a Culture of Preparedness
We continue to discuss the idea of “team of leaders.” This video well worth your time. Thanks to John Robb at Global Guerrilllas. See hissitefor comments.
But let’s take this one step further into the context of “What kind of war”determination as impacting how we approach “the war” once we have determined “what kind.” Consider the comments from the Blog – Challenge COIN; Perspectives on the evolving U.S. Counterinsurgency and Counterterrorism doctrine. What works, what does not, and what we think we know: “COIN/CT Lessons from drug induced dancing.”
… The main lesson to walk away with is how crucial it was to easily mimic the dance. Were this a difficult dance, the originator would have been nothing more than an observed solo performer. Also the role of the first follower made it acceptable for a few more people to join. Once the first follower’s friends join in, the tipping point is then reached at 1:15. From then on, people join in groups and the originator or “leader” is irrelevant as the movement has a life of his own. Only the music ending stops everyone from dancing, not the “leader.”
Now take that template and apply it to al Qaeda in Iraq. What sort of impact would killing or capturing the leadership have today? This is precisely why the classic insurgency texts emphasized the need to destroy an insurgency at its onset. Otherwise it becomes an integrated part of a society for at least a generation if not longer. So how do we end the al Qaeda-styled movements? Find the music and turn it off…
Los Angeles Times’ Marjorie Miller sought the views of an array of military and human rights lawyers on the legality and legitimacy of targeted killings.
So what kind of war or warfare or confrontation or conflict against non-state actors is war amongst the people? How do you fight, how do you survive, how does a country do both and yet maintain its sense of right and wrong?
Over the jump, key thoughts from the above article.
On the morning of Feb. 19, 1945, an armada of 880 ships with more than 100,000 Marines, Coast Guard units and Navy support personnel sat offshore. More Marines were sent to Iwo Jima than any other battle. Of the 84 Medals of Honor awarded to Marines in World War II, 27 were earned on 36 days of fighting on Iwo Jima, an unsurpassed record in military history… One-third of the Marines killed in World War II died at Iwo Jima. …
“… Reminders that our freedom was bought not in courtrooms, not from podiums, not in classrooms, but in dirt and rocks, water and sand, in Godforsaken places like the beaches of Iwo Jima and the men who paid the price never bought anything again…
They are, indeed, always faithful, eternally Marines. In dress blues, they march in cadence across the skies with the thousands before and after them. The wind plays taps and wings are their epaulets.”
From Thucydides, to Michael Yon today in Iraq and Afghanistan, confrontation, conlict, warfare, wars AND War have been recorded for some 2500 years. We are discussing differences in this series. But Thermopylae to Gettsburg to Midway to Baghdad to mountains of Afghanistan, much remains the same for those who do the fighting. This is the carrier Navy piece – in color.
Hat tip to Jim Dunkle for this one. Sometimes Supply officers do come through.
Making war upon insurgents is messy and slow, like eating soup with a knife.T.E. Lawrence
In a new think piece, one of the best writer/thinkers on line, Mark Safranski at Zenpundit in “The Post-COIN Era is Here; Learning to eat Soup with a Spoon Again”-provides not only more detail on the COIN (”or not”) debate and its significance (real or imaginary), but also gives serious thought to the possible fallout, noting the following:
… to father a doctrine does not mean that you can control how others interpret and make use of it.
COIN is an excellent operational tool, brought back by John Nagl & co. (Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam) from the dark oblivion that Big Army partisans consigned it to cover up their own strategic failures in Vietnam. As good as COIN is though, it is not something akin to magic with which to work policy miracles or to substitute for America not having a cohesive and realistic grand strategy.
We are all COINdinistas now. Instead of being controversial, COIN having a secure place in our operational arsenal of ideas has become the new ”conventional” wisdom; it is past time to look at some of the other serious challenges America has ahead.
Haiti – Essence of Decision – Operation Unified Response
In attempt to establish a framework for discussion of the many facets of the Haiti disaster, and as a precursor to addressing the question – What kind of a community or organization –or indeed, group of organizations – can survive and thrive in unconventional, uncertain and severe crisis environments? - multiple articles from varying perspectives on Operation Unified Response are being posted on DaVinci’s Horse, the Facebook Page.
Note:You do not have to be a Facebook Member to view the page and follow the links to articles.Facebook may present an interim page with requirement to click Continue. To go to DvH , after following a link click the page tab rather than using the back arrow.
Miranda Rights, IEDs, Counter -Terrorism, Weapons of Mass Destruction, “reasonable doubt,” Counter Insurgency, cyber war, Geneva Conventions, enemy combatants, gang warfare and Drug wars, etc., etc, are all elements that must be considered in defining or even just establishing boundary conditions in a search for “what kind of war.” While certainly this series has not answered the question, the intent was to put in one place, discussion of at least some of the non- core World War II, non-core Cold War elements crucial to bounding the problem, leveraging serious writers with multiple perspectives. For ease of reference here are the posts/links with the main author or provider of the core thread in parenthesis:
While the question what kind of war is it remains unanswered, this appears an appropriate place to suspend the series, at least for now, with one final thought from British General Sir Rupert Smith:
… we are living in a world of confrontations and conflicts rather than one of war and peace; one in which the clear categories of security and defence – the basic purposes for which force is used – have merged…
This is no longer industrial war… absolute and clear threats in recognizable groupings, and… stable political contexts for operations… our opponents are formless and their leaders and operatives are outside the structures in which we order the world and society… The threats they pose are not directly to our states or territories but to the security of our people, of other peoples, our assets and way of life… They are of and amongst the people – in the flesh and in the media – and it is there that the fight takes place.
The famous ballad from World War I days -”Over There” – cannot be this century’s hosting one for the boys song of record. For those interested in further reading, the following four books are most highly recommended.
Essential Elements of Information for a Culture of Preparedness
Without strategy the science of war overtakes the art of war
The human decision-making process, Boyd argues, deals with this conundrum through a constant dialectic of creation and destruction of mental patterns and perceptions in response to a changing and complex observed reality. We cannot escape from chaos, rather we are most successful when we embrace it by shattering the rigid mental patterns that have built up and then synthesize the new realities we observe to create a new understanding. Such a process of structuring, dissolving, restructuring, and dissolving again must be repeated endlessly.
This series has attempted to highlight that no matter how well analyzed, no matter the length or the depth of discussion, no matter how well addressed in writing by a Sun Tzu, Carl von Clausewitz, Alfred Thayer Mahan, Winston Churchill, or Sir John Keegan, et al, success in war and warfare, must always be seen in light of “an evolving, open ended, far from equilibrium process of self-organization, emergence, and natural selection.” Those words from John Boyd’s last effort, Essence of Winning and Losing, seem a perfect match with the original question from Napoleonic times. The mismatch of “labels” with events and resultant ill-formed actions as described in these posts by multiple writers and analysts, would seem to signify the importance of answering the question, what kind of war is it, and the crucial need for destruction and creation – analysis with synthesis.
As this series draws to a close, Science, defence and stategy, by Adam Elkus, was recognized and excerpts selected as striking this issue point on. The full article can be found at the website openSecurity.
Adam Elkus is a past PWH contributor as co-author with John Sullivan of the Operational Art for Policing series (EEI#9). He is an analyst specializing in foreign policy and security. His articles have been published in West Point CTC Sentinel, Small Wars Journal, Defense and the National Interest, Foreign Policy in Focus, Red Team Journal, , and other publications. His Blog writing can be found at Rethinking Security and at GroupIntel Network where he hosts the Group Boyd, 4GW Theory, and Criminal Insurgency.
Science, defence and strategy; (excerpt)
by Adam Elkus
War has always been such a tremendously complex undertaking that every force waging it has sought to simplify and standardize. At the same time, this simplification and standardization is usually inimical to the kind of creativity needed to win. Finding a balance between the art and science of war has always been difficult, especially in an era thoroughly dominated by science in all major areas of everyday life.
Essential Elements of Information for a Culture of Preparedness
( From The Counter Terrorism Puzzle; A Guide for Decision Makers, used with permission of the author, Dr. Boaz Ganor, the Associate Dean of the Lauder School of Government, at the Interdisciplinary Center, Herzliya, Israel, and the founder and Executive Director of the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism )
The above graphic placing terrorism in context of war and the definitions below of many of the terms used throughout the “What kind of war” series are intended only as reference, not as anyone’s formal authorized definition. They have been gleaned from multiple sources. Of particular note should be the degree of overlap and ambiguity.
Definitions: Special Operations, Asymmetric Warfare, Terrorism, Guerrilla Warfare, Irregular Warfare, Unconventional Warfare, The Long War, Fourth Generation Warfare, Hybrid Warfare:
Essential Elements of Information for a Culture of Preparedness
There seems to be a trend toward treating events of terrorism as if they were specifically a law-enforcement problem , rather than enemy operations in the context of war and warfare. Both require application of force “but for force to be effective the desired outcome of its use must be understood in such detail that the context is defined as well as the point of application.”(The Utility of Force; The Art of War in the Modern World by General Sir Rupert Smith)
The issue here is not crime or war, the context is rather that war plays out “amongst the people” – not only in the villages of Afghanistan, but as readily in the airports, cities, communities, and courtrooms of all nations. The application of force, -whether by police or military – AND of law are essential.
Essential Elements of Information for a Culture of Preparedness
America has an impressive record of starting wars but a dismal one of ending them well.
Andrew J. Bacevich is professor of history and international relations at Boston University. He is a retired Army Colonel, graduate of West Point, serving in Vietnam in 1970 and 71. In his books [The Limits of Power,The Long War, and The New American Militarism: How Americans are Seduced by War ], he is critical of American foreign policy in the post Cold War era, maintaining the United States has developed an over-reliance on military power, in contrast to diplomacy, to achieve its foreign policy aims. He also asserts that policymakers in particular, and the American people in general, overestimate the usefulness of military force in foreign affairs. Bacevich conceived The New American Militarism not only as “a corrective to what has become the conventional critique of U.S. policies since 9/11 but as a challenge to the orthodox historical context employed to justify those policies.” His new book Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War is due out in the spring.
This article found on The American Conservativewould appear consistent with his past writing and the excerpt is offered as yet another view of “what kind of war.”
No Exit (Excerpt)
by Andrew Bacevich
President Obama’s decision to escalate U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan earned him at most two muted cheers from Washington’s warrior-pundits. Sure, the president had acceded to Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s request for more troops. Already in its ninth year, Operation Enduring Freedom was therefore guaranteed to endure for years to come. The Long War begun on George W. Bush’s watch with expectations of transforming the Greater Middle East gained a new lease on life, its purpose reduced to the generic one of “keeping America safe.”
Yet the Long War’s most ardent supporters found fault with Obama’s words and demeanor. The president had failed to convey the requisite enthusiasm for sending young Americans to fight and die on the far side of the world …
Project White Horse Forum Forum for exchange of ideas augmenting the PWH electronic magazine by publishing discussion threads and articles “between” editions.
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