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The trick to counter a true believer's circular argument is to find inconsistencies in Warden's text itself. That inconsistency is stated in Warden's original article:
I know I'm not going to convert Slap :)
I'm trying to understand the mindset he has (know thine enemy :D) and why he is a "true beleiver" in the controversial ideas?
The controvertial issues raised by Warden's article being:
Why must we
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expunge the words fighting, battle, shape the battlefield, battlespace, and the war fighter from our vocabulary,
in order to:
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relegate the “means” of war to the last thing we think about, and to elevate the “end” to the pedestal of our consideration.
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Regardless of airpower’s potential, it can never realize its real capability so long as it remains bound to an anachronistic view of war with an anachronistic vocabulary.
What is airppower's "true capability"? What is this "new vocabulary"?
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If this is to happen, the operators of airpower must understand, believe, and teach end-game strategy as the foundation of airpower.
How is this relevant if politicians determine the end-game strategy, or a concensus as to what it is cannot be achieved before a requirement to act occurs?
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To succeed, airpower advocates must stop trying to use airpower as a substitute for its military predecessors, connect it directly to strategic end-games, adopt a new vocabulary to match airpower’s promise, and become serious promoters not of machines but of ideas.
What are these ideas?
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Airpower enables us to think about conflict from a future-back,
end-game-first perspective as opposed to one based on the battle obsession
of Clausewitz and his followers. It also opens another very exciting possibility: conflict with little or no unplanned destruction or shedding of blood.
What is it about airpower that will remove the "unknown unknowns" that create "unplanned destruction or shedding of blood". How do we become so cocksure that our plan is going to work?
How can you create a desired end-state and a causally-linked set of events that attain it with a high probability in cases where you are dealing with a complex system (where by definition there is no discernable causal nexus between events.)?
What is it that makes the notion of working back from a single desired end-state and evolving toward maximizing the "goodness" over a range of potential endstates incompatible? Why does one have to "win" over the other? Why can't we use the one that aplys best to a given situation and get the best of both worlds?