Picked up a copy of the 1940 Small Wars Manual for $10.13. Got to love used book stores.
Reading Structured Analytic Techniques for Intelligence Analysis by Richards J. Heuer Jr. and Randolph H. Pherson. Way over my brain grade, but exhaustive and fascinating.
Anyone involved in any serious forecasting of politics or other social disciplines must have, read, and use this book. Rather than an etherial, academic reflection on why analysis is relevant, or 'what is the role of intelligence analysis', or a mathmatical treatise on Games and Decisions, this is a working reference and practical guide to structured analytical techniques. Although the title specifies "for intelligence analysis", the methodology is applicable to problem sets that are only partially or non-quantifiable, and especially applicable to issues that are ambiguous and where only incomplete information is available.
In many ways, this is the sequel to Psychology of Intelligence Analysis, also by Richard Heuer. Where "Psychology of Intelligence Analysis" focused on analytical biases, with a limited discussion of rigorous approaches to intelligence analysis, "Structured Analytic Techniques" approaches similar issues from a more pragmatic direction. As valuable as the discussion of cognative biases is, the comprehensive set of analystical tools in "Structured Analytic Techniques" does more (when applied) to mitigate many of the biases than mere knowledge of their existance, and the analytical techniques will counteract many biases, even when those biases have not been identified.
Of particular interest is the emphasis on analytical teams and group analysis, both the strengths and weaknesses, and methods for maximizing the strengths and mitigating the weaknesses. (from Amazon reviewer, E.M. Van Court)
Structured Analytic Techniques for Intelligence Analysis - Amazon
Picked up a copy of the 1940 Small Wars Manual for $10.13. Got to love used book stores.
The bear went over the mountain + Other side of the mountain - really educating read
Two tours in Afghanistan: Twenty years and two armies apart - very interesting, however I wish it would be more detailed
PS: Do you guys know links for some good free ebooks? Thanks in advance
The CIA Library - Books and Monographs - includes the 1999 Psychology of Intelligence Analysis, by Richards J. Heuer, Jr. (cited in post above); and the 2005 Curing Analytic Pathologies, by Jeffrey R. Cooper.
Regards
Mike
Just read Untapped: The Scramble for Africa's Oil by John H. Ghazvinian (Apr 14, 2008)
Not as detailed as I would like but a good introduction reading on oil in Africa.
For "leisure":Kilcullens accidental guerilla, who will be my holiday companion
for research: different texts from and about James Burnham and Psyops during the early years of cold war.
Regards
PB
Current Rotation:
Vietnam: Strategy for a Stalemate, F.C. Parker IV
Dynamics of Complex Systems (Studies in Nonlinearity), Yaneer Bar-Yam
Boundaries of Order, Butler Shaffer
Coming Up:
Horse Soldiers, Doug Stanton
Human Action (1st edition), Ludwig von Mises
Francois Jullien's, A Treatise on Efficacy, has been mentioned a few times on SWJ, initially by Dave Maxwell, if I recall correctly. Jullien's, Detour and Access, is also well worth the read for those with an interest in such stuff.
Detour and Access - Strategies of Meaning in China and Greece - AmazonIn what way do we benefit from speaking of things indirectly? How does such a distancing allow us better to discover -- and describe -- people and objects? How does distancing produce an effect? What can we gain from approaching the world obliquely? In other words, how does detour grant access?Thus begins Francois Jullien's investigation into the strategy, subtlety, and production of meaning in ancient and modern Chinese aesthetic and political texts and events. Moving between the rhetorical traditions of ancient Greece and China, Jullien does not attempt a simple comparison of the two civilizations. Instead, he uses the perspective provided by each to gain access into a culture considered by many Westerners to be strange -- "It's all Chinese to me" -- and whose strangeness has been eclipsed through the assumption of its familiarity.
[...]
Indirect speech, Jullien concludes, yields a complex mode of indication, open to multiple perspectives and variations, infinitely adaptable to particular situations and contexts. Concentrating on that which is not said, or which is spoken only through other means, Jullien traces the benefits and costs of this rhetorical strategy in which absolute truth is absent. (from Amazon back cover blurb)
A Treatise on Efficacy - Between Western and Chinese Thinking - Amazon
Transforming Command - because it interests me and I hope it will be as good as The Culture of Military Innovation
The Stress Effect - because I am amazed at some of the decisions currently being taken
Losing Small Wars - pretty much says what we all know, but nice to see it in print in public
and because redundancies are in the offing
A Croft In The Hills
RR
"War is an option of difficulties"
Several months ago I read this book-Is There Anything Good About Men?: How Cultures Flourish by Exploiting Men by Roy F. Baumeister.
It was one of the best books about how men and women are wired up dfferently and how those differences manifest themselves in behavior and how the behavior differences complement each other. Also it helps explain why women act like they do sometimes. This may be a bit of a different suggestion for this site but since half the humans are women it might be of value.
"We fight, get beat, rise, and fight again." Gen. Nathanael Greene
Carl Ratner, Cultural Psychology: A Perspective on Psychological Functioning and Social Reform
Using an explicitly Vygotskyian analysis Ratner explicates an approach to cultural psychology that reverses the erroneous methodological assumptions of “traditional” psychology which isolate and segregate the individual from his or her environment and shows how macro-culture forms a generative force in defining the individual. In doing so macro-culture both empowers and delimits the range of possible human actions. This is not, however, an Althusserian tactic of denying the subject volition but of rather contextualising the notion of individual subjectivity to show the range of what is possible, why and how that changes (through contradictions in cultural norms such as, for instance, freedom and/or equality).
Cultural concepts comprise [for instance] colour categories, which organize colour perception. [The Soviet psychologist] Luria demonstrated this in research in Uzbekistan in 1930. He presented 27 coloured pieces of wool to traditional peasants and modern teachers on large collective farms. He asked them to categorize the wool pieces into five categories of colours that looked similar. The peasants were unable to group 27 colours into five categories. They did not perceive sufficient resemblances among any of the colours to classify them together. They said that “pig’s dung” does not look like “cow’s dung.” The teachers had no difficulty in classifying the 27 colours into five groups of similar colours. They perceived the browns as resembling each other, and so on. Although Luria did not say so, the reason that the two groups perceived the colours differently is that they had different cultural concepts of colour. The peasants construed colour as integrally part of objects, and most of their words for colour were words for objects (e.g., orange). The teachers construed colours as distinctive phenomena in their own right, and most of their colour terms were abstract (e.g., blue). These differences in linguistic codes and cultural concepts led to differences in perception. The peasants perceived the colours as properties of particular objects. Two colours appear similar only if the objects they reside in are functionally related. Colours are not colours in their own right, so perception of colours is a function of how objects go together in life. The objects that bear the colours used in the study did not have any functional relationship in the peasants’ lives. Consequently, the colours appeared to be dissimilar. In contrast, the teachers’ cultural concept and linguistic lexicon for colour abstracted colour from objects and construed it as a distinctive property based on wavelength rather than object. They perceived colours as similar or different on this basis, and were thus able to see resemblances that the peasants did not. Thus, cultural concepts and linguistic terms for colour organized the very sensory appearance of the colours in the experiment. Of course, both groups “saw” the 27 colours that were presented to them. However, they did not see them in the same ways. Their perceptual experiences of the colours were shaped by the cultural concepts and terms.(p.94)
B. M. Linn, The Echo of Battle: The Army’s Way of War
An interesting and perhaps controversial book on many counts Linn examines the role of military intellectuals during a number of key inter-war periods (the war of 1812, the Spanish-American war, WWI, WWII, Vietnam, post-Desert Storm) in drafting the US Army’s “way of war”; “the wars the United States has actually fought are important less for what happened than for what military intellectuals believed they had learned from them after the shooting stopped” (p. 9). These intellectuals are divided into three groups;
1) Managers for whom...
2. Guardians for whom...[...]war is fundamentally an organizational (as opposed to an engineering) problem—the rational coordination of resources, both human and materiel. [...] Should overwhelming resources, superior administration, and detailed planning fail to secure victory, the Managers’ response is to reorganize. Too often, this takes the form of what military personnel cynically term “moving the ravioli around”: drawing elaborate diagrams to rearrange (and “re-acronymize”) the chain of command, the force structure, and the budgetary priorities, while leaving the military institution and its fundamental problems virtually untouched. In the name of reform and modernization, Managers are perpetually engaged in the radical reorganization of administrative structures and tactical units, creating new concepts and buzzwords, and promoting their new, transformed military organization as superior to the one it replaced. Ironically, their reformist zeal is fed by historical lessons, so that an organizational scheme for the army of the future might claim as its inspiration a Roman victory two millennia ago. (p.8-9)
&, 3 Heroes for whom...[...]war is best understood as an engineering project in which the outcome is determined by the correct application of immutable scientific principles. Strategic planning for future warfare is largely a matter of determining the correct national security policy and then totalling up weaponry and manpower and comparing it with that of potential enemies. Taken to extremes, this leads to the belief that the next war is predictable and its outcome predetermined. When conflicts do not turn out as planned, Guardians blame an irrational American society, through its political representatives, for refusing to accept the Guardians’ logical and informed defence policies or for failing to allocate sufficient human resources and materiel. They reproach the army as an institution for not acknowledging their primacy in strategic direction and for pursuing risky military goals. When confronted with a war that fails to meet their pre-existing convictions, their reinterpretation soon discovers that it actually confirmstheir beliefs. (p. 7-8)
In the post-WWII strategic environment...war is simply battle—an extension of combat between individuals on both the physical and the moral plane. The side whose commanders and soldiers exhibit superior courage, strength, discipline, martial skills, honour, and so forth will inevitably secure victory, unless betrayed by other factors. In the face of evidence that charismatic leadership, tactical skill, high morale, and martial experience does not guarantee victory, Heroes blame their enemy for failing to fight honourably and their own civil and military leaders for wanting sufficient will to win. They often accuse American society of lacking the physical and spiritual qualities needed for warfighting. They have a similarly bad opinion of the institutional army. In their view, it is a soulless corporation in which warriors are subordinated to technicians and careerists. In their criticisms of the army, Heroes tend to make no distinction between Guardians and Managers—they throw them all into the same bureaucratic pot. (p. 8)
Post Vietnam war...As with past visions of future warfare, military thinkers once again failed to anticipate either the location of the conflict that broke out in June 1950 in Korea or its nature. Army strategists had been convinced, as were their political superiors, that the primary danger was a Warsaw Pact attack on Western Europe. They had paid little attention to the Far East and even less to peripheral areas. Of the three martial traditions, the Heroes came closest to foreseeing the next war’s reliance on morale, leadership, and military skill. But even their vision of tank battles and paratroop assaults proved only marginally relevant. The Korean War soon became a struggle of attrition; the use of firepower in small battles for hills and ridges was more akin to World War I than to the rapid, decisive operations predicted by military theorists (p. 161).
Linn’s discussion of the doctrinal imbroglio surrounding Depuy (a “Manager”) and FM 100, and its successors, is also revealing (pp.201-210) as is his examination of the NTC, Command and General Staff College and the SAMS programme. Fascinating stuff!Like the Guardians and the Heroes, the Managers had to recast their assumptions. Their analysis taught them that “we did not manage the war in Vietnam efficiently or effectively. In the main, our organizational problems stemmed from the omission of basic management theories and techniques.” Between the all-volunteer force and the doctrine of mutually assured destruction, their earlier industrial concept of war, predicated on mobilizing the nation’s materiel and manpower resources, was no longer relevant. But other aspects of the Manager way of war still applied to the new priorities. With an officer-to-enlisted ratio twice that of World War II—almost one officer for every five soldiers by the mid-1990s—the post-Vietnam army was increasingly committed to bureaucracy, to planning and process, and to measuring and quantifying. As one officer noted, “The leader’s close personal contact with his troops essentially ends at [battalion] command, and the executive managerial ability takes on added importance. The skilfulness with which managerial traits are exhibited will either limit or increase the officer’s potential for future assignments of responsibility within the military organization.” The Managers interpreted war as an immense organizational problem: how to coordinate “assets” (weapons, people) and “force multipliers” (intelligence, training) to achieve “total battlefield dominance.” Significantly, in the mid-1970s a new “Profession of Arms” course emerged at the Command and General Staff College (CGSC). Second only to tactics in course hours, it focused on force structure, training, personnel, communication and writing, and other managerial skills only tangentially related to the practice of war.(p. 200)
J. L. Johnson, K. M. Kartchner & J. A. Larsen, Strategic Culture and Weapons of Mass Destruction: Culturally Based Insights into Comparative National Security Policymaking
The authors have compiled a number of interesting and thought-provoking chapters on both the utility and validity of the concept of strategic culture and its application in analysing the policy of states such as Israel, Syria, Iran, and of non-state transnational organisations like Al-Qaeda.
On the US (Ch. 5 by T. G. Mahnken)...
The combination of the rejection of power politics and discontinuity between policy and strategy has yielded a dichotomy in American strategic culture: although Americans are basically peace loving, when aroused they mobilize the nation’s human and material resources behind in the service of high-intensity operations. Samuel Huntington saw America’s ferocity in war as the flip side of liberal pacifism outside of war. As he put it:
“The American tends to be an extremist on the subject of war: he either embraces war wholeheartedly or rejects it completely. This extremism is required by the nature of the liberal ideology. Since liberalism deprecates the moral validity of the interests of the state in security, war must be either condemned as incompatible with liberal goals or justified as an ideological movement in support of those goals. American thought has not viewed war in the [European] conservative–military sense as an instrument of national policy”.
The United States has thus displayed a strong and long-standing predilection for waging war for unlimited political aims. During the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln and General Ulysses S. Grant fought to utterly defeat the Confederacy. During World War I, General John J. Pershing, the commander of the American Expeditionary Force, favoured a policy of unconditional surrender toward Imperial Germany even as President Woodrow Wilson sought a negotiated end to the conflict. During World War II Franklin D. Roosevelt and his commanders were of one mind that the war must lead to the overthrow of the German, Japanese, and Italian governments that had started the war. [...] Just as Americans have preferred a fight to the finish, so too have they been uncomfortable with wars for limited political aims. In both the Korean and Vietnam wars, American military leaders were cool to the idea of fighting merely to restore or maintain the status quo. Indeed, Douglas MacArthur likened anything short of total victory over communist forces on the Korean peninsula to “appeasement.” Similarly, the standard explanation of American failure in Vietnam—and the one most popular among U.S. military officers—is that the U.S. military would have won the war were it not for civilian interference.(p.72)
On North Korea (Ch. 12 by Joseph S. Bermudez)...
At the time of the U.S. nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, Kim and his fellow guerrillas had been fighting the Japanese for five–ten years. As the reality and the rumours of the events at Hiroshima and Nagasaki spread throughout the world, the nuclear bomb was viewed as the ultimate “doomsday” weapon. This attitude was reinforced by the experiences of those Koreans returning from Japan who had been in Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the time of the bombing. This fear became even more pronounced among Communist guerrilla leaders such as Mao Zedong and Kim Il-sung. By the end of World War II, both Kim Il-sung and a number of soon to be influential Koreans had an uneducated appreciation of, and indirect exposure to, the effects of nuclear, chemical and biological warfare. This awareness shaped their developing views of the world, warfare, and politics. Combined with these early appreciations of WMD, four additional factors during the subsequent Fatherland Liberation War (i.e., Korean War) would help coalesce both Kim Il-Sung’s worldview and form the foundations of the strategic culture then developing within the nation.
1. The U.S. intervention in the Fatherland Liberation War was interpreted by Kim and his contemporaries as the prime reason the war of reunification failed. From this point forward the United States would be viewed as the primary enemy and as a bully “kicking the door in” and interfering in the purely internal affairs of nations of which it did not approve.
2. During the war both the DPRK and People’s Republic of China (PRC) suffered from repeated, and to them, unexplained outbreaks of infectious diseases such as influenza, Dengue fever, and cholera. These outbreaks caused large numbers of civilian and military casualties. While the leadership knew that it was untrue, they fabricated the story that the United States was employing biological, and to a lesser degree chemical, weapons against their units in Korea and against villages within the PRC itself. Furthermore, they claimed that former Japanese soldiers [who had use Biological and chemical warfare against the Chinese during WWII] were cooperating with the United States in perpetrating these attacks. For the uninformed masses of the DPRK it became a bedrock of “truth” and these claims are still repeated.
3. The United States on numerous occasions (the earliest being President Harry S. Truman’s public statements on 30 November, 1950) threatened to employ nuclear weapons against Korean People’s Army (KPA) and “Chinese People’s Volunteers” (CPV) units in Korea, and if necessary against the PRC proper, to end the war.
These threats struck a raw nerve since the leadership of both nations remembered the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and neither the PRC nor DPRK could withstand a nuclear attack or had the capability to respond in kind. In combination with other factors the desired effect was achieved and a truce agreement was reached, thus ending the hostilities.
4. While appreciative of all the support received from the Soviet Union and PRC, Kim expressed disappointment with the Soviet Union’s pressure to sign the Armistice Agreement. This would provide a context for Kim to view future Soviet actions (e.g., the Soviets backing down during the Cuban Missile Crisis, etc.) and fostered the belief that the DPRK must become self-sufficient. (p.191-2)
T. E. Ricks, The Gamble: General Petraeus & the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006-2008
An exemplar of what war reporting should be. I could quote from it but I think I’d end up putting the whole thing on here. Despite the title the book examines the roles of a large number of principals and some who have remained sidelined who shouldn’t have. The detail and insight is better than most books I’ve read and the author doesn’t; do a bad job at being objective either. Just read it if you haven’t already. I you have, read it again!
For a lark, re-reading Michael Moorcock's alternate universe trilogy, A Nomad of the Time Streams. Fascinating if one goes for that sort of thing.
A Nomad of the Time Streams - WikipediaWarlord of the Air
In the first book, Warlord of the Air, Bastable finds himself transported to an alternate late-20th century Earth where the European powers did not stir each other into a World War and in which the mighty airships of a British Empire on which the sun never set are threatened by the rise of new and terrible enemies. These enemies turn out to be the colonized peoples trying to break free, supported by anarchist and socialist Western saboteurs opposing their own imperialist societies, and led by a Chinese general whose country is still nominally under Western control and ravaged by civil war.
<><>
The Land Leviathan
In The Land Leviathan, Bastable visits an alternate 1904 in which most of the Western world has been devastated around the turn of the 20th century by a short, yet terrible war fought with futuristic devices and in which also biological weapons were used. In this alternate world, an Afro-American Black Attila is conquering the remnants of the Western nations, destroyed by the wars. The only remaining stable surviving nations, aside from the African-based Ashanti Empire, are an isolationist Australian-Japanese Federation, which opposes the Ashanti Empire, and the wealthy Marxist Republic of Bantustan. Bantustan is the equivalent of our world's South Africa and is led by its Indian-born president Mahatma Gandhi; having never known apartheid or hostilities between the English and the Boers, it is a wealthy, pacifist nation, in which there is no racial tension.
<><>
The Steel Tsar
In the final book, The Steel Tsar, Bastable witnesses an alternate 1941 where Great Britain and Germany became allies around the turn of the 20th century and thus neither a World War nor the October Revolution took place. In this world's Russian Empire, Bastable encounters the rebel Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili.
(from Wikipedia)
A Nomad of the Time Streams - Amazon
About to finish this excellent 300 pg. book, which is sub-titled 'A Koevoet Tracker's Story of an Insurgency War' by Sisingi Kamongo and Leon Bezuidenhout. Published by Thirty Degrees South 2011, main website in South Africa:http://www.30degreessouth.co.za/ and a UK website:http://www.30degreessouth.co.uk/
Website summary:A fascinating account, probably the only black African account from the South African side. The integration of basic police skills, tracking, fire-power and mobility was awesome, terrible for those on the receiving end - which the author often acknowledges.This is the story of a Kavango tracker who served for six years with Koevoet ‘Crowbar’), the elite South African Police anti-terrorist unit, during the South West African–Angolan bush war of the ’80s. Most white team leaders lasted only two years; the black trackers walked the tracks for years. Sisingi Kamongo tells the story of the 50 or so firefights he was involved in; he survived five anti-personnel mine and POMZ explosions and an RPG rocket on his Casspir APC vehicle; he was wounded three times; he tells of the trackers looking for the shadows on the ground, facing ambush and AP mines at every turn; he tells of the art of tracking ... where dust can tell time.
The UN-sponsored period appears, the bloodiest time when SWAPO decided to send its troops across the border; the author glides over the politics, although he notes the impact on the ground with local information falling away.
Jon C - another book to bring over to the USA on my next visit! Unless you decide your library needs its own copy.
I will cross-post this on the Namibia/SWAfrica COIN thread.
Last edited by davidbfpo; 09-14-2011 at 10:28 AM.
davidbfpo
Peace and War, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1966From Raymond Aron (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Aron).
Little bite dated in the exemples used but still so actual.Inevitably enemies by position and by the incompatibility of their ideologies, the United States and the Soviet Union have a common interest not in ruling together over the world, but in not destroying each other. This book reflects on the problems of attaining peace. Part One deals with theory, the concepts and systems of international relations. Part Two investigates the sociology of peace and war, discussing determinants such as space, resources, and regimes. The history of the global system in the thermonuclear age is discussed in Part Three, and Part Four is concerned with morality, strategy, and the attainment of peace through law. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Currently, I have "Crossroads of Intervention, Insurgency and Counterinsurgency Lessons from Central America" by Todd Greentree. Still in the first half of the book in which he describes how Somoza fell and the impact this had in El Salvador. Interesting stuff, especially how the Carter Administration was seemingly confused about what to do in Central America.
I'm awaiting delivery of my other books, which are in my toughbox in Riyadh along with the rest of my clothes: "The River War" by W. Churchill, a description of the Sudan campaign in the 1880s, "Fiasco" by Thomas Ricks, and I think I have one more in there but can't remember what it is....probably a Star Trek (Vanguard series) book.
The Accidental Guerilla by Kilcullen. Hoping to pick up a free or super cheap copy of "Kill Bin Ladin" by "Thomas Greer".
Just finished Command Culture by Jorg Muth, published by the University of North Texas, ISBN 978-1-57441-303-8. (LINK).
The Author, A partly US educated German military historian, compares US and German professional education from around 1909 until 1939 with a goal of assessing the performance of former students and thus the educational milieu in both Armies during World War II. It also addresses recent US trends in the Afterword.
I think three quotes are appropriate:
" 'It has been stated that no other Army in history has ever known its enemy as well as the American Army knew the German Army when the Americans crossed the Rhine River and began their final offensive.' While the US Army might have known a lot, it understood little." (Jorg Muth)
The other two are attributed by the author to Philip Henry Sheridan, USMA 1853:
"...Every time they have a war in Europe, we adopt the cap of the winning side."
"...an imitation of the Prussian scheme in detail rather than in spirit (would be a mistake)."
Those latter two are at separate points in the book but even in the 1870s. Sheridan was probably not alone in noting that we too slavishly adopted (and continue to adopt...) European models and that did us no favors -- the last is a comment on the old US form over function dichotomy; we cannot see a thing and adapt it correctly to our needs, we have to change it beyond recognition until it no longer works -- then we put a very phony 'Made in the US' stamp on it and adopt it...
The book provides an interesting and in my observation largely valid assessment of the shortfalls of both systems with US emphasis on West Point and the Command and General Staff School -- of which he is not complimentary; he has OTOH good words for the Infantry School (of that period...) and the War Colleges.
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