SWJ Small Wars Survey 2012

[Compost]

You use the word "failure". That is obviously different from "victory" (or is it ? - a good case can be made for a USAian "failure" at San Juan Hill, etc.)

But, is "failure" different from "defeat" and "disaster" ? Well, "yes" and "no" - and consider the following resources (I have read them):

...... booklist ......

Bill Corson started out with a huge concept - to distinguish "failure" from "defeat" and "disaster"; but then got lost in the immediate situation - the close of the Vietnam War. As Ken says: Wait for 40 years. In any case, we should be looking not only to "victory" and "defeat"; but also to "failure" and (I'd say) "success" (a state less than "victory").

Have read several of the books on your list but not as yet Consequences of Failure by Corson. Here somewhat late is a carefully written reply to your question.

Sun Tzu and Clausewitz were each achievers and renowned military scholars and original thinkers. Like to believe that both would have preferred the cadence of pipes and drums to the stridency of a brass band.

Sun Tzu wrote mainly in the context of military success and failure rather than victory and defeat. That can be seen especially in his frequent mention of threatened and conceivable use of military force as a means to influence the general psyche and preparedness, and the specific planning and actions of an actual or potential adversary. The following interpretation uses more modern language and is based mainly on the views of Clausewitz, Liddell Hart and Wylie.

Military campaigns and armed conflict are said to be politics pursued by other means. Ignoring electoral campaigns and party politics, the politicians in power at any time are generally concerned with the success and failure of their policies. Sun Tzu’ perspective correlates better with those concerns than could any discussion predicated on victories and defeats.

So what is success ? In the simplest case success can be the achievement of a single objective. And that objective might be a negative, as in defensively preventing an adversary from achieving – or deterrently dissuading him from seeking - something that is potentially or actually damaging to one’s own or an allied concern.

Generally it is good practice to objectively plan to achieve success and avoid failure rather than to focus on victory and avoidance of defeat. In other words it is better to think about how to structure or re-structure a contest so as to move it onto favourable ground. Put more simply to get beyond a bound rather than how to get onto it and when there to think about what to do next. That sounds a lot like a Wylie version of Liddell Hart’s indirect approach. And that’s essentially what it is. And also what is commonly needed: an analytic rather than a blunt force approach to problem solving. Hence good practice ....

So what distinguishes the tactical from the operational, and in turn the operational from the strategic level of conflict ? At the tactical level: freedom of action may often be constrained and sometimes demand a short sighted focus on victory at a specific location. At the operational level: freedom of action will sometimes be constrained but it is always appropriate to plan for success rather than victory. At the strategic level: it is necessary to use cumulative and sequential techniques and to carefully pursue success for all politically and militarily determined objectives.

This interpretation is pretentiously brief but it can serve as a skeleton of reasons for always using the terms success and failure in preference to victory and defeat. Am looking forward to reading critical and contrary comments.

[MikeF]

Have read several of the books on your list but not as yet Consequences of Failure by Corson. Here somewhat late is a carefully written reply to your question.

Sun Tzu and Clausewitz were each achievers and renowned military scholars and original thinkers. Like to believe that both would have preferred the cadence of pipes and drums to the stridency of a brass band.

Sun Tzu wrote mainly in the context of military success and failure rather than victory and defeat. That can be seen especially in his frequent mention of threatened and conceivable use of military force as a means to influence the general psyche and preparedness, and the specific planning and actions of an actual or potential adversary. The following interpretation uses more modern language and is based mainly on the views of Clausewitz, Liddell Hart and Wylie.

Military campaigns and armed conflict are said to be politics pursued by other means. Ignoring electoral campaigns and party politics, the politicians in power at any time are generally concerned with the success and failure of their policies. Sun Tzu’ perspective correlates better with those concerns than could any discussion predicated on victories and defeats.

So what is success ? In the simplest case success can be the achievement of a single objective. And that objective might be a negative, as in defensively preventing an adversary from achieving – or deterrently dissuading him from seeking - something that is potentially or actually damaging to one’s own or an allied concern.

Generally it is good practice to objectively plan to achieve success and avoid failure rather than to focus on victory and avoidance of defeat. In other words it is better to think about how to structure or re-structure a contest so as to move it onto favourable ground. Put more simply to get beyond a bound rather than how to get onto it and when there to think about what to do next. That sounds a lot like a Wylie version of Liddell Hart’s indirect approach. And that’s essentially what it is. And also what is commonly needed: an analytic rather than a blunt force approach to problem solving. Hence good practice ....

So what distinguishes the tactical from the operational, and in turn the operational from the strategic level of conflict ? At the tactical level: freedom of action may often be constrained and sometimes demand a short sighted focus on victory at a specific location. At the operational level: freedom of action will sometimes be constrained but it is always appropriate to plan for success rather than victory. At the strategic level: it is necessary to use cumulative and sequential techniques and to carefully pursue success for all politically and militarily determined objectives.

This interpretation is pretentiously brief but it can serve as a skeleton of reasons for always using the terms success and failure in preference to victory and defeat. Am looking forward to reading critical and contrary comments.

Here's two complimentary ideas.

1. We (military) need to operationalize and codify what we did right over the last ten years (Techniques at clearing and pacification top the list).

2. We (Americans) should stop trying to counter colonial insurgencies and start trying to understand revolution as a process not an event.

[AmericanPride]

2. We (Americans) should stop trying to counter colonial insurgencies and start trying to understand revolution as a process not an event.

Revolutionary conflict is a byproduct of the relentless advance of globalizing capital, which erodes traditional political and cultural boundaries. This is driven by the raw and limitless desire for "prosperity", which translates directly into unending resource consumption. Dorronsoro's analysis of the Afghan conflict in Revolution Unending implies that interventions to support globalist-compliant regimes will be a mainstay of future policies. Afghanistan has at least $1 trillion in raw materials and transit access to the Caspian basin's energy resources for resource hungry Pakistan and India, bypassing, China, Iran, and Russia. The Taliban government was an anomaly in the international system; isolated from the modernizing force of globalism due in part to ideology, regional political circumstances, and Afghanistan's civil war. As global consumption increases, the competition will only become more bitter.

[MikeF]

Revolutionary conflict is a byproduct of the relentless advance of globalizing capital, which erodes traditional political and cultural boundaries. This is driven by the raw and limitless desire for "prosperity", which translates directly into unending resource consumption. Dorronsoro's analysis of the Afghan conflict in Revolution Unending implies that interventions to support globalist-compliant regimes will be a mainstay of future policies. Afghanistan has at least $1 trillion in raw materials and transit access to the Caspian basin's energy resources for resource hungry Pakistan and India, bypassing, China, Iran, and Russia. The Taliban government was an anomaly in the international system; isolated from the modernizing force of globalism due in part to ideology, regional political circumstances, and Afghanistan's civil war. As global consumption increases, the competition will only become more bitter.

You don't wrestle with a pig in the mud b/c the pig likes to get dirty

There are better ways

[Stan]

On the other hand, Mike...

If you accept the fact that you will wrestle with a pig and know you are going to get dirty, you are less likely to be surprised.

But, because we naively think we can go to the wrestling match with our rules we are doomed to fail and get really dirty.

Jungle rules apply

You don't wrestle with a pig in the mud b/c the pig likes to get dirty

There are better ways

[MikeF]

On the other hand, Mike...

If you accept the fact that you will wrestle with a pig and know you are going to get dirty, you are less likely to be surprised.

But, because we naively think we can go to the wrestling match with our rules we are doomed to fail and get really dirty.

Jungle rules apply

I think a wise old man quotes this one,

There are very few problems, which cannot be solved by the suitable application of High Explosives

[MikeF]

A preview to my forthcoming contribution to Foreign Policy Magazine next month, 17. True or false: Americans are safer today than when Obama took office.

True, but this is a false choice. Worrying about being safe is simply fear and insecurity. It is time to stop pondering safety and security and start dreaming about living again. When my daughter goes to sleep at night, I don’t ask her what she fears most. I ask her to imagine what she will be doing in twenty years. Will she be the first woman to land on Mars? Will she travel deep into the heart of the Congo researching some undiscovered plant that will provide a cure for cancer? Will she write the next great American novel? This is the type of thinking that we desperately need. These are the type of questions that we must ask our children. It is time for us to overcome the fear and the hurt and the pain from 9/11 and move on with life.

[Dayuhan]

Revolutionary conflict is a byproduct of the relentless advance of globalizing capital, which erodes traditional political and cultural boundaries.

That's an absolute statement and completely unjustifiable. Revolutions emerge for lots of reasons, and people are as likely to revolt because they feel government is keeping them out of the global economy as they are because the government is pushing them into it. Each revolution has to be understood for what it is, and blanket statements about a global cause for revolution are pointless.

It's become fashionable in certain circles to see "revolution" generically as a conservative backlash against imposed change, but historically revolution has more often been a tool people use to achieve change and modernization when governments obstruct it.

[AmericanPride]

Revolutions emerge for lots of reasons

Sure they do. But we're not talking about the liberal/nationalist revolutions of the 19th century or the national wars of liberation in the 20th. We're focused on contemporary revolutionary conflicts for the next, say, 10 - 30 years, and really only those that interest the United States, which narrows the field further. Right now there exists a global regime governed by the "laws" of capitalist relations and dominated by the West who are challenged by the leaders of the developing world. These relationships are largely determined by Western institutions; i.e. the United Nations, World Bank Group, IMF, and so on which augment the West's political, economic, and military power. Islamism is one of the few half-way viable alternatives, though its political and economic foundations are weak because it does not have appeal in any of the great or secondary powers. As a political organizing principle, it challenges the Western conception of power directly, rearranging (or destroying) the relationships established by the West. That is the definition of revolution, whatever concrete event triggers it. You say such a universal understanding of revolution is "pointless". On the contrary, it provides just the context needed for understanding the security implications of global political economy: revolutionary conflict is inevitable and the US must be prepared to engage in it on one side (i.e. anti-Mubarak forces in Egypt) or the other (preserving the status quo in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Kingdoms).

[Fuchs]

I got a comment on my blog; it had this link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HGpXHYtkOS8


Seriously, what's wrong there? How can warmongering, on other occasions also executions and the like, be cheered for? Isn't it about time to reign in here and stop this insanity?
There gotta be some levers for civil society to reign in against such inhuman extremism.

I could make some really, really shameful comparisons to really, really bad governments / political cultures who never managed to produce such a warmongering crowd response in absence of a world war.
This crowd even decided to go pro-warmongering AGAINST the speaker!


In my book, the U.S. should immediately forget (what little it knows) about the rest of the world and clean up the domestic mess ASAP. It really needs a dozens of Baceviches as national pundits RIGHT NOW.

[jmm99]

Herra Majuri Karhu; wait till it gets really partisan ! It's all part of our Quadrennial Freak Show. Surely, you've watched American politics before.

And then we have the leadoff comment to the video:

Half the crowd probably belong to the KKK or decedents from them

Yup, that's the new threat posed to the US by Fox - half live KKK; and half KKK zombies. Three fingers pointing down; one head pointed up.

Thanks for the unintentional humor.

Mike

[Ken White]

Seriously, what's wrong there? How can warmongering, on other occasions also executions and the like, be cheered for? Isn't it about time to reign in here and stop this insanity? There gotta be some levers for civil society to reign in against such inhuman extremism.

Nope, we're Americans, evil to the core...

In my book, the U.S. should immediately forget (what little it knows) about the rest of the world...

You're right about the little but we can agree on the forgetting a lot of that...

and clean up the domestic mess ASAP. It really needs a dozens of Baceviches as national pundits RIGHT NOW.

While I agree on the domestic clean up, for the rest, sheesh, what a thought. Scary, that. Haven't you noticed that part of our problem is that we have way, way too many pundits, people who have no responsibilities but a lot of abstruse opinions...

Fortunately, we're diverse enough that while there's probably someone that listens to each of them, we tend to collectively ignore most of them. As we should because, in the end, they express merely a generally ill informed opinion, nothing more...

To paraphrase the old saying, Europe is Europe and America is America and never the twain shall meet...

Speaking of pundits and twains, old 'uneducated' Mark Twain was a better pundit than most of today's, smarter than most including Doctor Colonel Professor Bacevich...

[Dayuhan]

In my book, the U.S. should immediately forget (what little it knows) about the rest of the world and clean up the domestic mess ASAP.

That's a piece of advice that might be given to Europe as well.

[Dayuhan]

Sure they do. But we're not talking about the liberal/nationalist revolutions of the 19th century or the national wars of liberation in the 20th. We're focused on contemporary revolutionary conflicts for the next, say, 10 - 30 years, and really only those that interest the United States, which narrows the field further.

Unless somebody here has crystal balls, any assessment of what revolutions will be like or which revolutions the US will be concerned with for the next 10-30 years is purely speculative.

Right now there exists a global regime governed by the "laws" of capitalist relations and dominated by the West who are challenged by the leaders of the developing world.

I don't see the capitalist system being challenged by the developing world at all. I see most of the developing world trying to push into the tent and get a piece of the action.

Islamism is one of the few half-way viable alternatives, though its political and economic foundations are weak because it does not have appeal in any of the great or secondary powers. As a political organizing principle, it challenges the Western conception of power directly, rearranging (or destroying) the relationships established by the West. That is the definition of revolution, whatever concrete event triggers it.

Islamism may have revolutionary aspirations, but there's no current evidence to suggest that it can transform those aspirations into significant political action. I wouldn't assume that Islamism will be a dominant cause of revolution or even a dominant US antagonist in the future.

You say such a universal understanding of revolution is "pointless". On the contrary, it provides just the context needed for understanding the security implications of global political economy: revolutionary conflict is inevitable and the US must be prepared to engage in it on one side (i.e. anti-Mubarak forces in Egypt) or the other (preserving the status quo in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Kingdoms).

I'll correct myself and say that attempting to deduce a "universal understanding of revolution" is not just pointless, it's downright counterproductive. Once we assume a "universal understanding", we try to shove events into that box whether or not they fit there, and that can lead to dangerous misinterpretations. Revolutions aren't universal, they are specific, and each has its own causes. The revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, and the current struggle in Syria, had and have nothing to do with global capitalism; they were and are reactions to specific local governance conditions. Future revolutions are likely - though in no way certain - to be the same.

The fewer preconceived notions we have when approaching and attempting to understand a revolution or revolutionary aspirations, the better. Understand it for what it is, based on local knowledge, don't try to cram it into some preconceived box of "universal understanding".

[Ken White]

Unless somebody here has crystal balls, any assessment of what revolutions will be like or which revolutions the US will be concerned with for the next 10-30 years is purely speculative.

Not that, that's totally correct even if many seem to have difficulty grasping the point -- OTOH this:

The fewer preconceived notions we have when approaching and attempting to understand a revolution or revolutionary aspirations, the better. Understand it for what it is, based on local knowledge, don't try to cram it into some preconceived box of "universal understanding".

is too hard for too many; better in their view to have a straitjacket to put on problems so they all look alike and to have a one size fits all hat for a 'problem solver' ..