Hi Bill,

Quote Originally Posted by Bill Moore View Post
Read this article carefully, and it will challenge our doctrinal perceptions of what we think Clausewitz meant by centers of gravity. This will expand the conversation and COGs and EBO considerably. Our current doctrinal definition of COGs is wrong and for the most part worthless.
Good article on the whole. I found his argument on the root of the concept to be pretty much as I had remembered it - basically an analogic use of Newtonian physics. Given Clausewitz's experience and time, I'm not surprised that he used the fairly simple analog of a singular body or interconnected system with a specific centre of gravity (i.e. the Earth-Moon system).

I found his argument about al-Queda's CoG somewhat less persuasive.

For example, al-Qa‘ida cells might operate globally, but they are united by their hatred of apostasy.39 This hatred, not Osama bin Laden, is their CoG. They apparently perceive the United States and its Western values as the enemy CoG (though they do not use the term) in their war against “apostate” Muslim leaders. Decisively defeating al-Qa‘ida will involve neutralizing its CoG, but this will require the use of diplomatic and informational initiatives more than military action.
First of all, I doubt that "hatred of apostacy" is the glue that holds them together. It is certainly our inference drawn from their actions, but I suspect that "love of Islam" is probably more accurate. And before anyone says, "they're the same thing", no, they aren't (and I know you guys wouldn't say they were anyway ). One can "hate" apostates without killing them, and you are likely to find more people who will answer "yes" to the question "do you love God?" than to the question "do you hate apostates?". What al-Queda and certain other groups have done is to remap the meaning of "loving God" into "killing apostates", and Islam is certainly not the first religion that has done so (check out the Albigensian Crusade or the Maccabean Revolt if you want other examples).

Second, the US is not an apostate nation since it has never been Islamic and was never part of the Caliphate. I do agree that the Muslim Brotherhood, which is one of the main ideological sources for al-Queda, aimed at apostates in Egypt (e.g. Nasser) and has recently extended the call to Jihad to include non-Caliphate areas of the world, but there is an inherent weakness in their argument that can easily be exploited - the rest of the world is not "apostate". This extension has already caused serious problems with al-Queda's support base in the Islamic world, since they had not even followed the basic requirements for war with non-apostates/non-believers - the call to convert (hence the recent calls to convert and all will be fine).

Their CoG is the symbolic technology that allows them to map "love or God" into "hatred of the apostate AND non-believer" and, once that technology is smashed, their unity disappears as does their ability to operate at a large scale. Unfortunately, as Echevarria notes, that doesn't mean that they will disappear...

Marc