Blogs to Watch

[jcustis]

Although it's a little long for it, that would be a great attention gainer for any night attack class...I wonder if 42 CDO had to deal with comparable confusion, yelling, and bullhorns on Mt Harriet.

[bismark17]

That was very interesting. Thanks for posting it!!! I must admit the use of a bullhorn for command and control was rather unique. There didn't seem to be any direction at the NCO level, either. I guess I'm going to have to watch this several times to get a full impression of it.

[SWJED]

By SWC member Sonny at his FX-Based blog - Random (and Very Personal) Observations and Some Tips for Operating in "Developing" Countries.

I admit the title of this post is awkward. The following observations and some tips are based on recent experience (meaning early 1990s to the present day) traveling in what some might still call the Third World, some call "the Gap", and some call "developing countries". The last thing I want to do is lump all this countries into one big pile. Each country (and each region within each country) is unique. I might narrow down my focus to particular areas in the future, but for now (partly due to OPSEC) I want to stay way from mentioning specific countries. My observations are based on "official business" and vacation trips, informal interviews with colleagues and some perspective that comes from growing up outside of the US. For the most part, these are not hard and fast rules and variations apply depending to where you go. These observations apply to areas where there is no actual combat, but where warfare is never far in terms of time and space...

Check it out...

[bismark17]

Great posting! This is really worth your time!!

[SWJED]

New to the SWJ and SWC Blogrolls - Lightning From the Sky

I'm a Captain in the Marine Corps, on my fourth deployment since January of 2003. I've been to Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as a deployment aboard ship to the Persian Gulf. I'm an infantry officer by trade, having just completed a 3-year tour in an infantry battalion. In my current billet, I am a Joint Terminal Attack Controller (JTAC) responsible for requesting and directing close air support in support of friendly ground units...

Good stuff, check it out...

Hat Tip to Rule 308!

[SWJED]

Posted by Colonel Pat Lang (US Army, ret.) at his Sic Semper Tyrannis blog - The Best Defense is...

I wrote this article (with a friend) thirty years ago just after the Indochina War ended. That was a period of depression and re-assessment in the US Army. The strategy known as the "Active Defense" was in fashion as a method of fighting overwhelming Soviet strength in the event of a European war. This envisioned what amounted to a controlled withdrawal under severe pressure and held out no hope of defeating the Soviets as well as the possibility of a "forced" release of nuclear weapons to prevent the loss of all Europe.

I had seen many NVA units destroy themselves attacking American positions and after thinking over the possibilities in Europe I thought that it might be possible to employ available NATO strength in such a way as to defeat the Soviet Army through attrition of mind and body. The way I thought this might be done was to construct a wide belt of field fortifications in West Germany that would serve as a "grid" of "hard points" on which a mobile defense could be based. The concept is described in the article (downloadable above). The piece was published in the "Military Review," the journal of the Command and General Staff College.

I thought of it recently in the context of the recent Hizbullah defense of southern Lebanon and found it on the website of the magazine. The "internets" are a miracle.

"Medley Global Advisors" (MGA) in New York City is publishing an essay by me online today to their clients bringing this line of thought up to date. Anyone who would like to read that should contact MGA at advisors@medleyadvisors.com

As further background on the Lebanon War I recommend the following article suggested by one of our colleagues and commenters.

Pat Lang

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article...0624_1,00.html

[SWJED]

by SWC member Merv Benson - Institutional Ignorance of Warfare on his Prairie Pundit blog.

... One of these years, perhaps Wisconsin really will get around to hiring a professor for the Ambrose-Heseltine chair — but right now, for all intents and purposes, military history in Madison is dead. It’s dead at many other top colleges and universities as well. Where it isn’t dead and buried, it’s either dying or under siege. Although military history remains incredibly popular among students who fill lecture halls to learn about Saratoga and Iwo Jima and among readers who buy piles of books on Gettysburg and D-Day, on campus it’s making a last stand against the shock troops of political correctness. “Pretty soon, it may become virtually impossible to find military-history professors who study war with the aim of understanding why one side won and the other side lost,” says Frederick Kagan, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute who taught at West Point for ten years. That’s bad news not only for those with direct ties to this academic sub-discipline, but also for Americans generally, who may find that their collective understanding of past military operations falls short of what the war-torn present demands.

The very first histories ever written were military histories. Herodotus described the Greek wars with Persia, and Thucydides chronicled the Peloponnesian War. “It will be enough for me,” wrote Thucydides nearly 25 centuries ago, “if these words of mine are judged useful by those who want to understand clearly the events which happened in the past and which (human nature being what it is) will, at some time or other and in much the same ways, be repeated in the future.” The Marine Corps certainly thinks Thucydides is useful: He appears on a recommended-reading list for officers. One of the most important lessons he teaches is that war is an aspect of human existence that can’t be wished away, no matter how hard the lotus-eaters try...

[SWJED]

9 October edition of National Review - Sounding Taps by John Millier. Hat tip to Prairie Pundit.

...Although the keenest students of military history have often been soldiers, the subject isn’t only for them. “I don’t believe it is possible to treat military history as something entirely apart from the general national history,” said Theodore Roosevelt to the American Historical Association in 1912. For most students, that’s how military history was taught — as a key part of a larger narrative. After the Second World War, however, the field boomed as veterans streamed into higher education as both students and professors. A general increase in the size of faculties allowed for new approaches, and the onset of the Cold War kept everybody’s mind focused on the problem of armed conflict.

Then came the Vietnam War and the rise of the tenured radicals. The historians among them saw their field as the academic wing of a “social justice” movement, and they focused their attention on race, sex, and class. “They think you’re supposed to study the kind of social history you want to support, and so women’s history becomes advocacy for ‘women’s rights,’” says Mary Habeck, a military historian at the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in Washington, D.C. “This makes them believe military historians are always advocates of militarism.” Other types of historians also came under attack — especially scholars of diplomatic, intellectual, and maritime history — but perhaps none have suffered so many casualties as the “drums and trumpets” crowd. “Military historians have been hunted into extinction by politically active faculty members who think military history is a subject for right-wing, imperialistic warmongers,” says Robert Bruce, a professor at Sam Houston State University in Texas.

At first glance, military history appears to have maintained beachheads on a lot of campuses. Out of 153 universities that award doctorates in history, 99 of them — almost 65 percent — have at least one professor who claims a research interest in war, according to S. Mike Pavelec, a military historian at Hawaii Pacific University. But this figure masks another problem: Social history has started to infiltrate military history, Trojan Horse–style. Rather than examining battles, leaders, and weapons, it looks at the impact of war upon culture. And so classes that are supposedly about the Second World War blow by the Blitzkrieg, the Bismarck, and the Bulge in order to celebrate the proto-feminism of Rosie the Riveter, condemn the national disgrace of Japanese-American internment, and ask that favorite faculty-lounge head-scratcher: Should the United States have dropped the bomb? “It’s becoming harder and harder to find experts in operational military history,” says Dennis Showalter of Colorado College. “All this social history is like Hamlet without the prince of Denmark.” ...

[selil]

Just have it mentioned you're a veteran and watch tenure evaporate.


Oh, and a suggestion. Tie teaching military history to grant funding...

[Tom Odom]

Interesting that you selected Madison as a case history, Merv. From the Africanist view, Madison was for many years here it was happening in African studies, largely because Crawford Young, the "Dean" of Congo/Zaire related studies was there. I went there to a conference in 1986; I was working on LP #14 on the '64 Congo crisis and the reactions I got ranged fro blase to shocked that I was working on a military history paper invloving "imperialist" interventions in Africa.

Even my alma mater Texas A&M while I was a cadet did not have a military hsitory program. Gratefully Roger Beaumont arrived my senior year and over the next decade or so, A&M started looking at military history. My book as a Class of 1976 Centenial Class member became #100 in the A&M military history series, something was pure circumstance but also meaningful to me.

But before we get too judgemental about civilian academia, the military itself has not done a good job in using military history. The Center for Military History spent decades on the WWII green book series. It did not do an equally good job on either Korea or Vietnam. We (then BG Scales and the Desert Storm Study Group) wrote Certain Victory for 2 basic reasons: A. the Air Force had a project underway and B. CMH was not up to the task. The Military History Institute has been slow to join the 21st century, only recently starting to load documents on the web. The Combat Studies Institute stood up in the early 1980s because senior officers wanted someone to teach and write military history in a meaningful way. It has since undergone too many cuts but perhaps is now coming back with a series of papers that will resurrect its reputation.

Best
Tom

[marct]

Really good post, Merv.

Tom, you mentioned a failure of the military in "selling" military history, and I think you have probably raised a very good point that holds here in Canada as well. I suspect that some of the problem is also related to a general lack of interest in / knowledge of history being taught before university - at least it seems to be that way in Ontario. For example, only one of my students during the summer knew that Canada had over 400,000 troops in World War I.

The anti-military stance, what Merv called the "tenured radicals", has also spilled over into other areas. I am working with one student right now who has an interest in Intelligence analysis (it's part of her day job). Earlier this week, she had to do a presentation in a course on the History of Anthropology where she would take one of the "older" theoretical models and attempt to use it to analyze a current situation. She chose Durkheim's concept of "altruistic suicide" and applied it to studying suicide bombers. Halfway through her presentation, the professor teaching the course stopped her and told her that this was "propaganda". With attitudes like this running rampant, I really have to wonder...

Merv, while I liked your term "tenured radicals", I think that it is past time that the term "radical" itself was taken back from it's currently "occupied" status where it is held under the hegemonic control of krypto-Fascists (yeah, I can sound like a PC academic if I have to). "Radical" derives from the Latin "radix" or "root", and it is more than time enough for us to retrun to that original meaning and examine the roots of human existence. And, for the past 100 centuries, that means that we have to study warfare, religion, economics, technology, politics and the connections between them all. Currently, "radical" seems to be synonymous with "whining about being oppressed while enjoying a tenured position and sipping coctails and discussing either the inevitable revolutuion or the ultimate meaninglessness of life".

While it may be amusing, in a very droll sense, to watch these neo-Thomistic "scholars" argue about how many oppressions can dance on the head of a pin, it is ultimately a betrayal of both the profession of scholarship, of the societies in which we live and, most importantly, it is a betrayal of our species. I refuse to believe that we have spent the past 5+ million years evolving to end up locked in any type of restrictive "theology".

Sorry, I'll just get off my soapbox now...

Marc

[SWJED]

Josh at The Adventures of Chester - Combination Warfare.

One of the hallmarks of maneuver warfare as it has been conceived in the Marine Corps is the use of combined arms. "Combined arms" refers to the use of various weapons systems in concert, such that each reinforces the weaknesses of the other. The doctrinal definition is this:

Combined arms is the full integration of arms in such a way that to counteract one, the enemy must become more vulnerable to another. We pose the enemy not just with a problem, but with a dilemma -- a no-win situation. [from Marine Corps Doctrinal Publication 1, Warfighting]

There's no reason to think that this doctrine couldn't be articulated at the national level as well. Rather than confining it to the realm of military strategy and the use of force, why not include all the elements of national power -- diplomatic, economic, informational, military, etc -- and force them to work in concert toward a common goal? This may be an ideal, but it is one at which the US does not perform so well. The primary reason is the way our foreign policy bureaucracy operates: there is little in the way of the kind of unity of command necessary for an individual decision-maker to muster all elements to work in concert...

Combination warfare, as a title for the collection of powers that constitute the means of the state to fashion its ends, is deceiving, because the use of the term "warfare" could easily be misconstrued to mean a battle of some kind. The same is true of unrestricted warfare. An old-fashioned term, that few use any more, works much better: statecraft. It's better not only because it implies the use of all elements of the state to achieve a goal, but also because "craft" hints that there is much more art than science in the process...

Much more at the link...

[SWJED]

Posted by Mitchell Langbert at the Democracy Project blog - Multicultural World War.

Warren Bonesteel has forward me a link to Baron Bodissey's Gates of Vienna post. Bodissey makes a number of important comments that well fit the concept of fourth generation warfare that William S. Lind and Col Thomas X. Hammes have expounded. Col. Hammes's book The Sling and the Stone is well worth reading in this regard. Bodissey and his associates point out that the war ought NOT to be viewed as one between Islam and the West, but rather ought to be viewed as a multicultural world war involving Western traditionalists, libertarians, conservatives, leftists, elite liberals, Islamic extremists, Castroite Marxists and so on. Bodissey's associates have "opened a discussion group on Yahoo! (so far known only by its number, “910”, although its members like to refer to it as 'VRWC')"...

[SWJED]

Me in the New Islamic State! - Iraq the Model Blog
Al-Qaeda Declares Government, Islamic State - Talisman Gate
The Islamic State in Iraq! - Sooni

Iraq the Model:

... There's no going back thirty years to the days of Saddam an there's no going back a thousand yeas to the days of the Caliphs.

It's over…

We have accepted the rough road and the outcome will not be in the benefit of the criminals. The war is tough, painful and hard but I have no doubt of the outcome that will mean the end for the supporters of tyranny and extremism.

Surrendering is much closer to them than it is to us and history will remember with pride those who sacrificed for the freedom of Iraq.

Maybe I will not live long to see that day but my children will certainly see it.

Sorry whiners, losers and pessimists. I only know to accept a challenge when I face one and I recognize only victory as an end...

Talisman Gate:

... This latest declaration is a measure of the jihadist defeat gradually playing out in Iraq: they are getting increasingly frustrated over the outcome of the Iraqi battlefield turning against them. It is a publicity stunt meant to imply that they are expanding rather than contracting. They are most definitely being beaten back as evidenced by the latest fighting in Mosul and Diyala....

Sooni:

... Al-Qaeda's declaration of an "Islamic State" in Iraq came and went unnoticed by most of Iraqis. One of my friends said when I told him about it "what difference would it make? They've been killing people on daily basis so what makes you think they will stop and start taking care of them and act like a responsible government like they claim to be?"

As an Iraqi I know they can't control this "'State" but they chose an area of influence where they can use their "hit and run" tactics to declare a "State" in, moreover, the declaration sounded more like a challenge to the Iraqi Government and the Coalition forces than a real declaration of a state...

[zenpundit]

Kent's Imperative

Specialty blog on the IC, esp. analysis.

[SWJED]

Mark - thanks - added to the SWJ / SWC blogroll...

[SWJED]

Another very interesting post (as always) from John Robb at Global Guerrillas - Stochastic Tinkerers and Warfare.

I really respect the work of the financier, Nassim Taleb. His ideas on tinkering networks (the same type of networks that brought us the airplane, the personal computer, and much of the software we use today) provides us useful lessons on the utility of open source warfare (for those new to this, here's an article from the New York Times to get your started).

Here's how. Warfare in our current complex environment (as opposed to the last century and earlier) is very similar to the areas of science/finance where stochastic processes dominate. Since stochastic dominance implies a high level of randomness in outcomes, tinkering networks (ie. open source insurgencies) tend to generate substantially higher returns on effort than highly planned activities (ie. nation-building). The reason is that if you can't plan outcomes due to randomness, the optimal approach to success is through parallel development efforts using a wide variety of methods in combination with a network that readily embraces unexpected but very useful innovations. In contrast, highly planned efforts tend to limit the number of methods/paths used and are resistant to errant results due to bureaucratic inertia/bias.

Finally, these tinkering networks can occasionally produce black swans, or radical breakthroughs. In the context of warfare this is either an event or improvement in method that changes the course of the war. Question: are we, or can you ever imagine us being, in the business of producing black swans in warfare?

[carl]

In "The U.S. Army and the Counterinsurgency in the Philippine War" one of Linn's explanations for American success was that each Army unit was able to tailor its efforts to the unique circumstances in which it found itself. Because of difficulties in commucations and transport, the garrisons couldn't be closely supervised by a higher headquarters so they were free to "tinker" their way into doing whatever worked best in their area or on their island.

He was also skeptical that this could happen now because it is too easy for the bosses to keep close tabs on events and to visit.

[Smitten Eagle]

This reminds me of something that Galula mentioned his his Counterinsurgency Warfare. Paraphrasing pages 104-106 of his most recent book, he says the Chinese government would enact programs by first sectoring off areas and implimenting different variations of the program, and then experimentally evaluating the results. Later, the more successful variations would be implimented on a wider and larger scale.

There's nothing new under the sun.

[BMT]

Iraq the Model


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