That would be opinion attack number oneOriginally Posted by William F. Owen
No speako Italiano, Venico, et Milano
Danny Devito Redux
That would be opinion attack number one
No speako Italiano, Venico, et Milano
Danny Devito Redux
Smart Power is what again?
First off welcome to the council, now put up your dukes
I occassionally agree with Wilf against my better judgment and this is one of those times. Smart power is a concept that basically states we should do things smartly instead of being stupid. I agree, but I hope that isn't new.
As for employing all the elements of national power, when haven't we? I can't think of any conflict where we only employed one so called tool?
I thought our tax dollars paid SEALs to lift big weights, swim long distances, and blow things up, now you're confusing me with this smart power stuff....
Good point Tom. I am forgetting my manners....That would be opinion attack number one
SEAL Chap. Welcome to the council. When did normal everyday diplomacy become "smart power"?
Infinity Journal "I don't care if this works in practice. I want to see it work in theory!"
- The job of the British Army out here is to kill or capture Communist Terrorists in Malaya.
- If we can double the ratio of kills per contact, we will soon put an end to the shooting in Malaya.
Sir Gerald Templer, foreword to the "Conduct of Anti-Terrorist Operations in Malaya," 1958 Edition
This is great! An outpouring of love and affection to really make me feel at home.Good point Tom. I am forgetting my manners....
SEAL Chap. Welcome to the council. When did normal everyday diplomacy become "smart power"?Please forgive my delayed re-entry - I'm en route Afghanistan and access is limited.
As I mentioned at the start, what I'm talking about will raise some hackles about touchy-feely or wishful idealism. Unfortunately, we'll also always have an element of miscommunication in play, and I have to constantly check my message first to reduce the amount I inadvertently create.
Several of you are indisputably spot on, stating that effectively balancing diplomacy and force (or "soft" and "hard") are ancient pillars of international influence and don't benefit from a new catchphrase. I want to publicly announce that I'm not educated or qualified to discuss that level beyond casual speculation.
Where I confused the matter is in emphasizing that international aspect, compared to my actual focus on the inter-personal. I'm borrowing from Nye, Nossel and Clinton because their macro expression structurally reflects my micro view.
JMM, you really got closest to what I should have said, with your reference to Saul Alinsky (my first hearing of him - I'll look him up), and where my point gets still more specific than his "political struggle" is that I'm looking down at a still lower level.
Picture the soccer balls and medicines distributed to little smiling Iraqi kids, with their smiling parents looking on. Picture in contrast a personal security detachment roaring through Baghdad, terrifying those same kids and tearing the rearview mirrors off their parents' cars. Each scenario creates a powerful impression among observers. We need to more persistently measure our message, conscious and otherwise, and work to make un-ugly Americanism a natural state.
Do we have to move aggressively in threat situations? Absolutely. Do we (Sgt Smith, or Cpt Jones) frequently overdo this aggression to a lesser or greater degree for a variety of personal or unit reasons? I say yes. This is the crux.
I've spent more years away from my wife and children than I've lived with them. I've sat in the sand and the mud of a dozen nations, sharing meals from a communal pot, and enjoyed the five-star accommodations of a dozen more. I watched the Islamic fundamentalist attacks of 9/11 live over satellite television, while living overseas with Islamic special forces on an extended training mission.
This personal contact with regular people across the globe makes it painfully clear that government-to-government relations are sometimes in perfect disharmony with the actual will of those citizens. I'm not trying to manipulate the will of states and heads of states, here...merely pointing out that like any great leader, if we recognize unique human talents and interests, we can co-opt the willing energy of human resources worldwide. We can leverage these individually to reduce conflict and better protect those in need.
I know this discussion will stretch on, and I am very grateful to all of you who have chimed in with support or, especially, challenge. My primary tool will have to be anecdotal evidence, because our sharing about a little boy with a melted face in Uzbekistan, or an older, retarded child sprawled pathetically in a baby carriage by his begging grandmother, can tear through an academic exercise and focus the heart of each good man or woman on a solvable problem.
For me, it's exactly about those innocent children on every continent, their needless suffering at the apathetic whim of state-to-state maneuvering, and their mind-blowing potential if offered appropriate opportunity. If only one of them is released to share his God-given talents with the world because of my efforts...my life will make a lot of sense.
One more thing - should I move to a new string and stop clogging up this H&F bin? I'm not familiar with the protocols.
Last edited by J. Robert DuBois; 10-14-2009 at 06:02 PM.
Well a guy who watched 9/11 overseas in an islamic republic cannot be that bad. I heard about it around September 15 and could watch it on TV in December my self.
So sorry to have been sarcastic.
I would 200% agree with that and not only for USA.Picture the soccer balls and medicines distributed to little smiling Iraqi kids, with their smiling parents looking on. Picture in contrast a personal security detachment roaring through Baghdad, terrifying those same kids and tearing the rearview mirrors off their parents' cars. Each scenario creates a powerful impression among observers. We need to more persistently measure our message, conscious and otherwise, and work to make un-ugly Americanism a natural state.
But I will also warn you about the effect of a soldier distributing soccer balls and medecine to population and believing this has no bad effects.
I, myself, believe in the none mixing of activities between military and civilian action in war zones. Does not mean that civilian action cannot support a military objective. But I believe that military trying to carry civilian actions in war zones is as bad as civilians trying to conduct military operations. Each of us have his area of expertise and sometime it can be melte but keeping the apparences of separation does help both sides.
M-A,
Thank you for your insight. I agree that healthy boundaries between civil and military actors are very important. If professional soldiers become distracted by playing with children, then no one's keeping watch while the bad men approach and everyone loses.
I think an important question is whether we have anything at all precisely resembling a "war zone" between OIF and OEF. In both Iraq, where I spent thirteen months over 2008-2009, and Afghanistan, where I am settling in for a spell, there are no battle lines - only geographic and societal blobs that are less bad and more bad from our various perspectives.
Within those blobs, there are hundreds of thousands of human beings who are in no way involved in taking up arms against "our" side. Each one of them requires some food, some clean water, some adequate shelter...and yet there are others who are actively engaged in killing as many outsiders as possible.
With this scenario in place, the situation obviously demands that we maintain both military and development units in the theater. A simple abandonment of the population's needs will inevitably result in increased hostility toward us. That's the practical application of my "Applied Smart Power" - it is in my own best interest to look out for the interests of those around me. If altruism seems a little too ambiguous, we at least have self interest to fall back on.
What should also be obvious, but isn't effectively put into practice, is the desperate need for unified coordination of all elements with some stake in the game, not just military commanders and civilian chiefs running independent operations according to their very capable, but un-coordinated judgment. Such ops almost always have some detrimental overlap to the best interests of other efforts.
How to tell you that I do agree.What should also be obvious, but isn't effectively put into practice, is the desperate need for unified coordination of all elements with some stake in the game, not just military commanders and civilian chiefs running independent operations according to their very capable, but un-coordinated judgment. Such ops almost always have some detrimental overlap to the best interests of other efforts.
The funniest in the story is that I am one of those relief workers and my personal life looks just like yours: mud and dirty places in forgotten war zones with less than few weeks at home with my family... THhs just to point out that relief workers and militay have most of the time the same ####ty family life at the end. Therefore boundaries are even thiner than we think.
What you are pointing out is exactly what I would like to see/to be. The main problem is that there is a feeling of being absorbed by the humanitarian community from the military and a feeling of being absorbed by the military by the humanitarian community. Which I believe both true and an opportunity for both.
The real question is who stays in command. And the main blocage does not come from the military but from the humanitarian community. It is "stupid" because humanitarian agencies are having political goals and agenda and are bound to political civilian leaders. But the romantic understanding of humanitarism being independant is still strong while the practical implementation of humanitarism is 200% political. And that is why I stand on a moral approach of war.
I also believe that the fact that humanitarism is based on moral values is somehow scary for soldiers or military bodies. But war is a deep desagreement settled through violence between respectable gents. Or should be. starting from there, humanitarism is just making there to remind the boundaries of respectability (humanity?) and patch the disagreement of that way of settling issues.
Well, looking at history shows that the frontline and clearly define war zone is a myth. I never worked in a place where you have A war zone and A nonwar zone. The only example to tell I am wrong that comes streight to my mind is the WWI. But wars are no more conducted that way.I think an important question is whether we have anything at all precisely resembling a "war zone" between OIF and OEF. In both Iraq, where I spent thirteen months over 2008-2009, and Afghanistan, where I am settling in for a spell, there are no battle lines - only geographic and societal blobs that are less bad and more bad from our various perspectives.
In somehow, we are all rediscovering the weel and it is mostly because the capacity of relief societies to enter in the very heart of the war has increased. What happend in Swat Valley show also that we are trying to go reverse. But unfortunatly, it is impossible to empty a whole country from its population. And should not be done. That is why, according to me, soldiers have to benefit from the increase of humanitarian laws and concerns. But most look at it as more limits.
Good luck in Afghanistan.
Saul Alinsky
Some quick refs. His Wiki. His Playboy interview (just before he died in 1972). His last book, Rules for Radicals.
Ms Clinton (when she was Ms Rodham in 1969) wrote her senior thesis on Alinsky and his methodology. Her conclusion was that ground-up organizing was too slow - and opted for the larger governmental approach.
While Alinsky was a Marxist, his methodology has value (but is not The Bible) in any type of ground-up organizing, even for those of, say, a center-right political bent (e.g., JMM). So, also a lot of Lenin, Mao and Giap re: the Political Struggle and the Military Struggle, which have to be on the same page in order to reach an acceptable (note, I said acceptable) end state.
There must be dozens of existing threads here at SWC which address the concepts of "Smart Power" at its basic level (down to the people and villages). And, COL Jones has yet to chime in on the subject.
Best to all
Mike
I've taken a somewhat different approach... 30 years with the sand and mud (ok, more dust and mud) of a single less developed and conflict-ridden country. Some differences in perspective perhaps. Regarding this one...
... it sounds wonderful, as non-specific motherhood statements generally do. The devil, as always, is in the details. In any given case, our determination of "the right tool, or combination of tools" is likely to be driven primarily by the prejudices and interests of the individuals and institutions making the determination. All too often these determinations are reached with grossly insufficient understanding of the complex interplay of factions, interests, competitions, and infinite detail that prevails in the environments we seek to influence. Above all we suffer from an apparently overpowering urge to see what we want to see and believe those who tell us what we want to hear. As a result, Americans are often stupidest when we seek to be smart."We must use what has been called smart power – the full range of tools at our disposal - diplomatic, economic, military, political, legal, and cultural - picking the right tool, or combination of tools, for each situation. With smart power, diplomacy will be the vanguard of foreign policy."
Wilf's "me shoot-um heap big many bad guy" approach may sound a bit neanderthal, but it has at least the virtue of knowing what it seeks to accomplish, and how.
It's very easy to sling words like "smart power" around... actually using power intelligently, in the sort of environment where we need to do that, is a whole lot more difficult.
Wow. Ten years of carefully crafted military thought reduce to a bumper sticker. I must be good!
It's actually more "If you put them down, and they stay down, stop shooting, so as the others will back off." - but yeah. Force gets you stuff, if you want it for reasons force justifies.
Infinity Journal "I don't care if this works in practice. I want to see it work in theory!"
- The job of the British Army out here is to kill or capture Communist Terrorists in Malaya.
- If we can double the ratio of kills per contact, we will soon put an end to the shooting in Malaya.
Sir Gerald Templer, foreword to the "Conduct of Anti-Terrorist Operations in Malaya," 1958 Edition
Hey, it's the 21st century... if you can't say it in 140 characters or less, it's not really there at all.
Personally, I'd say there's some stuff force can get you and some stuff it can't get you, and more often than not it's just one part of what you need to do to get what you want, assuming that what you want is gettable - or even desirable - in the first place.
Now I have to work on getting that onto a bumper sticker.
Wow
Posted by Dayuhan,This statement is brilliant! I always shocked at the number of folks in the beltway that now advocate so called smart or soft power. This implies that prior to this outstanding idea we were advocates of stupid power?All too often these determinations are reached with grossly insufficient understanding of the complex interplay of factions, interests, competitions, and infinite detail that prevails in the environments we seek to influence. Above all we suffer from an apparently overpowering urge to see what we want to see and believe those who tell us what we want to hear. As a result, Americans are often stupidest when we seek to be smart.
Perhaps I'm being too harsh, but it seems to me that our ego causes considerable problems. In military units you hear our leadership state we're better than we ever were, "we" (read I) fixed the broken army of the Vietnam era, etc. Yet a more careful reading of history may reveal that the Army we had in Vietnam (prior to the large anti-war movement that undermined our force) was superior in many ways to the Army we have today.
Furthermore do we have more less power today as a nation (and as the West in general) than we did during the Cold War?
Diplomacy is now defined by a perverse set of political correct rules that have little to do with reality or our national interests. One simple case in point the West's reaction to Sri Lanka's victory over the Tamil separatist movement, which they won with military power. Now the West is questioning if their methods were perhaps too harsh? Of course it is much more humane to drag a conflict out for years, because militarily decisive solutions are obviously not smart or soft, just effective (at times).
Information is an area where we should excel, but for reasons unknown we disbanded the highly effectively Voice of America program, and we have developed a bureaucratic process for approvals of messages that have in effect left our forces (across the spectrum, diplomatic, military, etc.) paralyzed in this fight. Messages approved in the beltway are so watered down or altered they have lost all credibility or have completely missed the intent in the first place.
Military power should need no further explanation, we can't effectively use it to deny safehaven to the enemy, or to wage a war of attrition even if we desired to (in addition to using other methods that some now call soft power, funny how much more effective soft power can be when you carry a big stick). In fairness there are good reasons in many cases (not all) that the military is constrained, but it is a fallacy in my opinion to simply assume that a more aggressive application of military power can't be effective in some situations.
Economic power has eroded because we have seemed to lost the art of applying it effectively. This warrants a separate post, but we also need to understand we're no longer the only competitor, and one thing that has changed (based on my limited knowledge of history), this is the first time that a non-state actor (except for perhaps the Catholic Church) has had this much economic power based on donations from the Sunni community at large and funds from organized crime.
More later, gotta run....
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