Indirect and Direct components to strategy for the Long War

[marct]

Hi Rob,

I think you bring up some important points that must be considered in regards to devising ends.

Thanks . One of the things that your posts in many of the recent threads has done is to make me think more heavily about the concept of "convention" (as in "conventional warfare", "Geneva convention", etc.). It has struck me that one of the key endstates we are aiming for is the acceptance, at an international level, of a series of political conventions that can be generally accepted rather than imposed. I'm still working that one through, but I have a feeling that if we want and state of lack of general conflict in the open warfare sense, that will be one of the keys.

I've been thinking some lately about the effects of globalization. I'd agree with the point many have made about globalization having been a process that has been around for awhile, and one in which its influence has been pushed or retarded at times by events such as war, pestilence, commercial interests, etc. I think when we see it at its high marks is when multiple factors come into play - technology, politics, economics, culture, etc. When these factors converge in different ways it creates instability.

Yeah - I tracked about 300 years of that in my dissertation looking at the interplay between technology, technique, and social forms. What I was looking at was a fairly simple question of what constellation of factors encouraged the development of bureaucratic organizations and what led to their downfall. From what I could see, it seemed to be tied into a number of different factors, but the one, crucial one was the maturation curve on productive and communicative technologies and its effects on the most satisficing format for resource distribution inside a society.

State governments responsible for maintaining some form of order have a hard time keeping up - the commercial, public and private capabilities have out paced the capabilities of many governments to keep up. This is perhaps (and I'm intellectually wandering here) because their political systems were never able to accommodate such rapid change. Even in our system, arguably a pretty flexible and accommodating one by most standards, capability gaps might be emerging, and certainly capacity gaps are emerging just based on the sheer volume and public access we build into our own systems as part of our culture and political system.

I think that is a key observation, Rob. All of our present political systems, at least the ones based on state power, are predicated on the concept of scarcity. But what happens when production outstrips demand? First, there is a distribution question (Marx's classic mistake that Polanyi got right). Is there a "mature" distribution system available to get the produced goods and services to where the demand is. We can already see some of the effects when the answer is yes in the service / information industry (think call centres in India and China, along with data processing, data input, etc.). If the answer is no, then you still have local scarcities and overabundances that produce a differential that allows for a classic market exchange economy to boom.

The second observation is more political. When you have an abundance of resources and a fairly good distribution system then, in order for the classic economy to boom, you need to either open up new markets (think NAFTA, GATT, etc.) or you need to create artificial markets (e.g. monopolies and oligopolies - think about the prescription drug situation in the US) or you need to destroy some of the production to drive up prices (think about the slew of litigation regarding patent infringements, etc.). BTW, this is assuming that the "classic economy" is based on fairly short term maximizing strategies.

On the political level, we tend to find "private" corporations acting as strong lobbyists to the political elites. You can see that in Washington today, but the same thing happened in the UK in the 1820's and 30's with the development of long distance steamboats (Headrick's The Tools of Empire does a great job of tracking this). Inevitably, "national interest" leads to an intertwining of corporate and political interests that ends up on a war footing (think about the Opium Wars with China).

Still on the political level, we start to see some of the problems with "lag" showing up. The Brits did a really great job of dealing with their political problems in the early industrial revolution by, in part, co-opting the "best" of the rising industrialists into their class system with all the political power that implied in the 19th century. At the same time, they widened the franchise and allowed pretty much anyone to run for parliament, which co-opted most of the potential revolutionaries or, at least, established a good system for forcing them "out of the water" in COIN terms.

In the US, your political system developed in an agrarian society with a fairly long transit time (it's why you have that wonky College of Electors system). At the time, it made perfect sense but, with the rise of railroads and the telegraph, it actually became technologically redundant. The rise of the party system, and especially its hardening into two supra-parties, made sense in the post WW I system with broadcast communications technologies. Nowadays, when interactive technologies are the norm, it just makes for a bad French bedroom farce as we see politician after politician falling to scandals. BTW, we have the same problem in parliamentary democracies but, because of the way they tend to be structured, it is more likely that you will have more than two parties which allows for the system to survive even as parties are destroyed and new ones are generated (the Social Credit Party and the Bloc Quebecoise in Canada are examples of that).

In many ways, the political systems lead to not only the capability gap you point to but, also, a credibility gap. In many ways, democracies (and republics ), are purposefully inefficient. I suspect that parliamentary democracies are less efficient than republics as a governmental form. In part, this is because the systems were designed that way on purpose - to limit the power of the State in reference to the population; certainly that was the case in the Anglo-culture complex. Our ancestors didn't want an "efficient" government, because and "efficient" government would be able to dominate and control the populace, so our trade-off was inefficiency for individual freedom in some areas.

I think your point about International "buy-in" is also important and brings up a kind of paradox that strategists must work through. On the one hand, the means being allocated toward FP ends must be translated into something that accommodates domestic concern in our system (or it must be of such a scale that flys below the radar), on the other given the nature of Friedman's and other's "inter-conectedness", the ends must also make some accommodation for the needs and concerns of partners. This I think is a tough balance, and may well explain why identifying vital interests, and devising political ends with regard to grand strategy is so tough.

I totally agree with that! It is much easier for a nation to say "I want this - give it to me or else!" than to say something like "How can we [multiple nations] build a system that allows all of us to get at least some of what we want?". It's one of the reasons why it is so simple to start a revitalization or apocalyptic movement - it's simpler to destroy than create (call that the Principle of Social Entropy ).

I'll come back to this later, but need to go for morning run.

Personally, I'm for more coffee - have fun on your run!

Marc