Project White Horse Forum

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 his site for comments.

But let’s take this one step further into the context of  “What kind of war”  determination as impacting how we [...]

See Targeted for death -  the killing of Hamas’ Mahmoud Mabhouh.  (See  background report on the operation itself)
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 [...]

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 [...]

Someone who changed history….

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 [...]

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”) [...]

 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 [...]

 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 [...]

 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 [...]

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 [...]

 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 [...]

Essential Elements of Information for a Culture of Preparedness
 To say “warfare is changing” is banal, obvious and thus irrelevant. When did warfare ever not evolve? The acts of Sept. 11 changed nothing in the Thucydidean and Clausewitzian nature of war, or even its modern practice. America’s choice of response did change U.S. foreign policy and [...]

 Essential Elements of Information for a Culture of Preparedness
 … familiar arguments about what can and should be done to reduce America’s vulnerabilities are again filling the airwaves, editorial pages and blogosphere. Several of these arguments are based on assumptions that guided the U.S. response to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks — and unfortunately, they are [...]