Hitler, the Good Clausewitzian
I was reading in the introduction to Clausewitz and Modern Strategy, a collection of essays edited by the late great Michael Handel, and I came across an argument offered by Handel about how Germany ignored Clausewitz’s dictum that war is the continuation of political intercourse with the addition of other means. The well trodden part of the argument goes like so:
- Pre-World War I German military officers ignored or belittled Clausewitz’s dictum, resulting in…
- Germany in World War I subordinated politics and strategy to tactics, resulting in…
- German political strategic incompetence, resulting in…
- German defeat in World War I
Handel extends this traditional critique to Hitler, arguing that Hitler buried politics and strategy for purely military considerations, resulting in defeat in World War II as well.
I could quibble with the first part of this traditional story, arguing that Hindenburg and Ludendorff were exercising political control of the world after they assumed dictatorial control in 1917. For example, the decision to annex large chunks of western Russia, an operation that tied down thousands of German troops that could have been better used on the Western Front, was purely political, not military. As Kenny Rogers advises us, you never count your money when you’re sitting at the table. There will be time enough for counting when the dealing’s done. That being said, I’ll refrain and move on to my major objection to Handel’s contention.
Reading Ernest R. May’s Strange Victory and Adam Tooze’s The Wages of Destruction, you get a picture of an intensely politicized German military decision-making process. In May’s account, Hitler refrained from day to day interference in the Polish campaign but as soon as Poland surrendered, Hitler began pressing for an immediate attack in the West against France. The high command of the Wehrmacht was vehemently opposed, rationally calculating that such an attack would be suicidal given France and Great Britain’s qualitative superiority in men and material. May portrays Hitler, a politician, as having a better grasp of the political frailties of Chamberlain and Daladier and their respective publics than his generals. Hitler used to read translations of the front pages of major foreign newspapers at breakfast. This gave him a valuable insight into what the Allied powers were currently thinking. So Hitler prodded and pushed the high command until they produced a plan and then prodded and pushed them until they produced a better plan. After the massive victory over France, Hitler naturally took credit and was even more actively interventionist during later stages of the war.
Tooze portrays the political and economic vision behind Hitler’s entire political career. Hitler saw Germany (and Europe) as being doomed to fall further and further behind in international competition with Britain, France, the Soviet Union, and especially America with their vast captive markets and vast resources. This meant Germany was doomed to strategic and therefore racial oblivion. The only way to reverse this trend, Hitler believed, was to carve a vast new empire out of Eastern Europe with all the precious resources of the Ukraine and the Caucasus that came with it. Since the same coalition that had defeated Germany in World War I, Britain, France, and America, dominated by International Jewry, would stand in the way of Germany’s Ukrainian Manifest Destiny, there was to be war. Hitler’s strategy, therefore was to make Germany economically self-sufficient to prevent the economic strangulation of blockade that ended World War I, to rearm, and to seek peace in the West while he dealt with the Little Entente and Russia in the east. When the British and French intervened, Hitler sought to knock them out of the war before the US fully mobilized its economy for war and made its power come to bear. When he failed to take Britain out with France, Hitler sought to hit their Bolshevik tool in the east. After the beating the Soviets received at the hands of tiny Finland, Hitler and most of his generals though Russia was a house of cards that was ripe for the plucking. When Germany failed to take Russia out of the war quickly, all that was left was playing for time in the hope that fissures would appear in the uneasy alliance between the Western democracies and their brutal Russian ally. In sum, Tooze demonstrates that from beginning to end that German policy was guided by passably coherent politics and strategy.
The problem with Germany’s military performance is not a lack of political involvement in the military decision-making process. The problem was that the policy Hitler pursued was wrong. Though he came remarkably close, Hitler couldn’t go to war with most of the industrialized world and hope to win. This fundamental flaw meant that, irrespective of the degree of political control he exercised over the Wehrmacht, he was doomed to failure barring a miracle and miracles were evidently in short supply in Nazi Germany. A wrong war is a continuation of wrong political intercourse with the addition of other means. Paying heed to Clausewitz in that one regard would have gained Hitler nothing. Only if Hitler had changed his policy would his chances improved. However, if Hitler offered a fundamentally different policy than he never would have gone to war in the first place, he probably never would have become Chancellor, and he might of never had a career in politics at all. The rot starts at the center and radiates outwards.
On Unrestricted Warfare
NerveAgent (who, judging from his profile picture, may be an aerial ninja) over at Visions of Empire has a post up on Unrestricted Warfare, a book by two PLA colonels (Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui) that has exercised much attention among American observers. It has often been cited as evidence of a sinister Eastern conspiracy:
As China’s power increases and the attention of the world’s strategic analysts shifts to Asia, it has become fashionable to attribute to the Chinese a level of conceptual power that they do not actually have. This often manifests itself as rhetoric proclaiming the Chinese to be infinitely superior and subtle strategists that put their clumsy and naive Western counterparts to shame. For example, and with only mild exaggeration: “China is planning global hegemony: they will soon invade Taiwan and proclaim the restored Middle Kingdom. And we Americans are too stupid to realize that this is happening under our noses. Unless we take action now, we are doomed!”
Fear of Chinese power is nothing new, and in centuries past it was referred to as the “yellow peril.” But whereas in the past alarmists used to demean the Chinese as racially inferior and degenerate barbarians who threatened to overrun the world, today they are regarded as intelligent, insidious, and utterly ruthless in their quest to achieve global supremacy. I like to call this phenomenon “reverse ethnocentrism”; regarding a foreign people as superior to ones’ own, at least in the realm of strategy.
So when in the late 1990s two PLA colonels – Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui – authored a treatise on their theory of “unrestricted warfare,” their work was immediately seized upon as proof of the inferiority of Western strategy next to its sublime Eastern rival. However, an actual reading of the document reveals military thinking that is mediocre at best.
A popular English translation showcases perfectly the phenomenon I’m talking about. The book is subtitled as “China’s Master Plan to Destroy America,” and the cover image depicts the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center, insinuating that the Chinese were somehow responsible. Ali Santoli’s introduction also suggests this. In addition to being inflammatory, this is misleading. The US figures prominently as the main adversary, but the document is a piece of military theory, not a “master plan” by any stretch of the imagination. Terrorism is mentioned as a form of “unrestricted warfare,” but the authors are warning of its threat rather than advocating its use.
NerveAgent discusses the slippery definition of war:
…in an attempt to overcome U.S. superiority in the conventional military sphere, the authors hope to exploit new spheres that have been made available by technology and globalization. But for this strategy to work, these new battlespaces must be able to deliver victory. The authors argue that they can.
Methods that are not characterized by the use of the force of arms, nor by the use of military power, nor even by the presence of casualties and bloodshed, are just as likely to facilitate the successful realization of the war’s goals, if not more so … Any war that breaks out tomorrow or further down the road will be characterized by warfare in the broad sense – a cocktail mixture of warfare prosecuted through the force of arms and warfare that is prosecuted by means other than the force of arms. The goal of this kind of warfare will encompass more than merely ‘using means that involve the force of arms to force the enemy to accept one’s own will.’ Rather, the goal should be ‘to use all means whatsoever – means that involve the force of arms, means that involve military power and means that do not involve military power, means that entail casualties and means that do not entail casualties – to force the enemy to serve one’s own interests.’
The preceding passage demonstrates the weakness behind their theory of unrestricted warfare, because to make it work, the authors had to redefine the object of war. Rather than use force to impose one’s will on the enemy, the object is “to force the enemy to serve one’s own interests.” The West has similar concepts, but we understand them within the terms of international politics. In other words, what the West calls politics, the Chinese call war. With this understanding, “unrestricted warfare” loses much of its novelty. Indeed, the authors write with the enthusiasm of someone who has rediscovered the wheel and is attempting to sell it under a new name.
Revealing a very naive ethnocentrism of their own, the authors state that this manner of thinking “is not a strong point of the Americans, who are slaves to technology in their thinking. The Americans invariably halt their thinking at the boundary where technology has not yet reached.” Nonsense. The Americans understand the concepts of “unrestricted warfare” just as the Chinese, but they consider them as tools of international politics in an anarchic world-system. “War” is reserved for organized violence to serve political ends. The absence of war does not mean the absence of conflict; the struggle for power and security is endless, and occurs outside the context of open warfare. But ultimately, violence is the final arbiter of conflict; only by violence is it possible to impose your will on the enemy. The authors acknowledge that conventional military operations may occur simultaneously with operations in the new battlespaces, but the battlefield has lost its role as the final court of war. But this raises a question: if the traditional battlefield no longer offers the possibility of decision, why do the authors argue that it will still coexist with the new battlespaces? How is it not still the decisive sphere?
I’ve tended in the past to argue that war is a broader phenomenon than violence but NerveAgent makes a good point. Being overly liberal with your definition of war may lead to sloppy thinking. The intersection between a strategy of war and a strategy of what I’ve called politics minor i.e.:
Politics minor is a strategy intended to make the other side conform to your desires when doing so is in accord with what they would do if they had the power to resist you and sufficient knowledge of your true intent. Politics minor, also known as politicking or logrolling, is a combination of operational methods like negotiating, wheeling and dealing, debate, alliance forming, and posturing. It’s central characteristic is its peaceable intent and conduct.
is very blurry. If the line is drawn sharply between war and politics with the dividing line the presence of violence (organized or not), a line still has to be drawn between politics major and politics minor because war is a form of politics. Politics major was defined by Christopher Bassford as:
Politics is the highly variable process by which power is distributed in any society: the family, the office, a religious order, a tribe, the state, an empire, a region, an alliance, and the international community. The process of distributing power may be fairly orderly—through consensus, inheritance, election, some time-honored tradition, or it may be chaotic—through assassination, revolution, and warfare.
The seam between war and politics minor may need clearer conceptualization to prevent leaky abstractions. The Chinese, as NerveAgent argues, may not be much help:
Despite all the attention that this book received in the United States, it is a useful example of the weaknesses of Eastern strategic thought, entering into the surreal at times. At one point, the authors suggest using holographic technology to frighten religiously devout soldiers. They also propose that the golden ratio of mathematics and geometry (1.618…) is the key to all victory in war. They admit that they have no idea how this can be practically applied, but insist it should be done anyway. Alas, semi-fantastical notions of bloodless victory through clever stratagems are inherent to the Chinese concept of war.
Cue the Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge’s Taxonomy:
These ambiguities, redundancies, and deficiencies recall those attributed by Dr. Franz Kuhn to a certain Chinese encyclopedia called the Heavenly Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge. In its distant pages it is written that animals are divided into (a) those that belong to the emperor; (b) embalmed ones; (c) those that are trained; (d) suckling pigs; (e) mermaids; (f) fabulous ones; (g) stray dogs; (h) those that are included in this classification; (i) those that tremble as if they were mad; (j) innumerable ones; (k) those drawn with a very fine camel’s-hair brush; (l) etcetera; (m) those that have just broken the flower vase; (n) those that at a distance resemble flies.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb has found his ideas being discovered and rediscovered multiple times during the last four hundred years:
85- The Plot Thickens: La Mothe Le Vayer, c. 1652
Huet’s source. Every time I find a “original thinker” who figured out the skeptical solution to the Black Swan problem, it turns out that he may just be cribbing a predecessor –not maliciously, but we forget to dig to the roots. “Hume’s problem” is certainly not Hume’s. I thought it was Huet’s but now I see another predecessor.
It’s pretty much the same in war, as NerveAgent concludes:
War has always involved marshalling resources that are not military in nature and committing them to the effort to defeat the enemy. The hype over Unrestricted Warfare is similar to that which surrounds its American equivalent, “Fourth generation warfare.” Ultimately, they are both concepts that repackage and restate the eternal truths of war. Unrestricted Warfare is a commendable piece of military theory, but the Chinese will need more than this to displace the U.S. as the world’s preeminent superpower.
A Wylie Boyd
Came across this by accident: if you look through the Bibliography of Patterns of Conflict by John Boyd, you find J.C. Wylie’s Military Strategy listed among the sources. I’d like to see Boyd’s margin notes on that one. A meeting of the two greatest American military theorists of the twentieth century.
Creditanstalt
Creditanstalt was an Austrian bank whose failure in May of 1931 triggered the penultimate crisis of the worst depths of the Great Depression. I wonder if Dubai World is the Global Financial Crisis’s Creditanstalt?
Original Sin
I own most of noted British military historian John Keegan’s books except a few. Keegan has written some indisputable classics of military history like The Face of Battle, The Mask of Command, The Price of Admiralty, and Six Armies in Normandy. However, he’s produced a few howlers like Fields of Battle and The Iraq War (which was so obsequious to Tommy Franks that even I, a supporter of the War in Iraq, was sickened). The worse offender in my eyes, however, is Keegan’s A History of Warfare, his attempt at a magisterial world history of war. I had never heard of Carl von Clausewitz before I read the first chapter of A History of Warfare in the local Barnes and Noble bookstore. My introduction to Clausewitz, therefore, was overwhelmingly negative. When I finally got around to actually reading a good copy of On War, I was therefore shocked by how utterly inaccurate Keegan’s portrayal of Clausewitz was.
The intensity of my disappointment is the root of my Clausewitzian orthodoxy. It’s why I find Martin van Crevald so appalling. Keegan has plausible deniability. Crevald, as the author of The Immortal Clausewitz in Michael Handel’s Clausewitz and Modern Strategy, knows better. Keegan confuses Clausewitz; Crevald libels Clausewitz. His Clausewitz is a strawman that Crevald sets up to knock down at whatever whim Crevald has at a given moment. That’s not a new crime, Liddell Hart was as bad or worse. Crevald, however is the most fashionable. Given the amount of influence Crevald’s (and Liddell Hart’s) distortions have had on new fangled frameworks like 4GW, network centric warfare, and effects based operations, the usefulness of such frameworks is fundamentally flawed.
Back to Keegan. Apparently he has a new book on the American Civil War out. The reviews are not kind, even when written by the genial James M. McPherson. Keegan has lost some of the deftness of touch he had as a young and hungry military historian. The Face of Battle may be the best work of military history of the late twentieth century. However, Keegan, like Niall Ferguson, has not been the same caliber of historian since he became a big shot. His name on the cover of this book is almost as big as the title. It might as well be John Keegan’s Civil War, Featuring John Keegan, Presented by John Keegan.
I feel better now.
CAPTCHAS Suck
The Mighty Curtis Gale Weeks, He Who Has Tasted Internet Death and Laughed, comments:
You and Peter and David appear to be merely reinventing the wheel.
For instance, in 2007, I had already written about the kinds of problems both you and Peter have been discussing, in “X vs X:Boom and the Generations in Conflict“, specifically the question of linear progressions pigeon-holed to specific epics. Although there I also, like later contra-Arherring and some others, proposed, and still maintain, the worth in seeing these generations/grades/whathaveyou in relationship to each other:
“Viewing the generations in a linear representation, in relationship to the Boom as Arherring has done, may offer insights to different styles of fighting which need not emerge solely as a uni-directional development of warfare. We might in fact contemplate particular strategies which have been employed throughout the history of humanity (which generally runs along with the history of warfare) and place these strategies either to the left of the Boom or to the right; are they, then, also “generations” of warfare? The question may be moot, if we are only to consider strategic dynamics as they relate to the Boom, or to kinetics, in the way Arherring has done. However, to postulate a generational model is to suggest a general uni-directional development through which different strategies emerge as a consequence of previous strategies which have been employed. A singular generational model need not be applied to the entire history of warfare in order to box certain styles of fighting into specific epochs, and only those epochs, within the history of humanity; rather, a generational model only need show that a given style of fighting has resulted as a consequence of another — and this will usually occur within a specific epoch, or a small time frame, simply because some overlap of generations, or competitive conflict, must occur in order for one style to develop as a consequence of another.”
In the later post, I made an argument against the sort of thing Peter has done with his “new framework” approach; such approaches, similar to Lind’s — and after all that seems to be his only model, ever — are mere descriptive. This reduces such frameworks to near uselessness. To reduce his offering to absurdity, suppose I could do similarly by delineating the style of dress, uniform, or combat gear broken out for distinct periods of time. This could be done. It might actually describe epochs, at least vis-a-vis the apparel; or, it might actually describe certain niches or styles which have reappeared throughout history. But it’s merely descriptive:
“In point of fact, Lind’s model has often caused dispute, particularly on the fourth tier, that is with regard to the prognostication of 4GW. Useful or not, the first three generations are descriptive of what has already occurred in our modern era and so are “pre-verified”. The fourth generation is a guess of what is to come, which has been partly verified by current conflicts but was left open enough to suggest all future conflicts.
The fact that Lind’s GMW leaves “fourth generation warfare” open to becoming whatever happens in the future — the definition is vague and fluid enough — severely limits the usefulness of GMW. What are we to learn from GMW that will benefit us, whether as a state or as individuals engaged in conflict? By leaving no room for the development of a “fifth generation of warfare” that could defeat a “fourth generation warfare”, we are left no recourse in GMW except the ability to describe: Having described 1GW through 3GW, we come to “4GW” which we can use to tag all future events. What we are to do about those events doesn’t matter and is conspicuously absent from the GMW model.
xGW, on the other hand, would seek to suggest a framework which would allow problem-solving. If we eject the word “generation” from the model and instead use something else, such as “grade” [2], and by so doing eject the most common connotations of “generation”, we can perhaps begin to postulate not merely the styles of conflict as they emerge exterior to us, one after another, but also the relationship of these styles to one another in a useful manner: i.e., we may postulate an interior activity, or a reflective and prospective activity which becomes problem-solving. One force sees its opponent’s activity, assesses itself, and seeks to develop a better method of fighting. For me, this is at heart the greatest strength of xGW.”
And if I may backtrack (which these recent postulations, here and there, seem to be), I would reintroduce from that first link the very same idea, or nearly the same, given by a commenter at one of Peter’s threads: that we may view these G’s as they appear within a specific culture, area, etc., without trying to lump all of human history, the world over, into a singular unidirectional progression:
“For our xGW, we only need to understand the possessive pronoun. Criticisms of the xGW theory that is currently propounded usually take the extreme position of pointing out that Alexander the Great or Julius Caesar or some other historical figure or group also fought in an xGW manner or an x+1GW manner; and since the proponents of current xGW theory are assumed to be referring to the entire history of war when they discuss xGW, a theory which one assumes must fit a single uni-directional evolution of warfare spanning the entire history of humanity, those proponents are speaking gibberish. Well, some are; others concern themselves only with our xGW, limiting the theory to the period since the Peace of Westphalia or in some other way.”
I.e., this effort to create a Descriptive Model ™ that must be able to describe all that has happened in the history of warfare, the world over, may be moot or distracting. What we have to do now is understand our own time (which extends backward somewhat, even to before our particular births, but not back to the dawn of humanity) and try to come to some valuable understanding of our time which we might apply to current needs. If we do see a useful somewhat-generational — taking several meanings of that word – development in our time, using what we see does not require that we also find a way to lump other efforts, from thousands of years ago or from vanished societies, into our vision of our own time.
Also, a final note: this hang-up on terminology seems to me to be pretty silly, even juvenile, and generally self-serving. Peter can only see so far into the definition of “generation” and so he had an apoplexy, like many others accustomed to stopping at “1.” in the dictionary. “Grade” and “gradient” may serve to trip up others, for similar reasons. It is too bad, but suggesting a whole theory is trash merely because a word brings up one particular connotation for one particular person, or several persons, is useless.
To which I attempted to reply over at CGW’s but his CAPTCHA was fighting a never-ending war of attrition with my browser. So I will post my reply here:
@CGW
(BTW, Akisment thought your comment was spam but it has been rescued.)
The problem with xGW is that it has outgrown its current taxonomy. 4GW made sense in its original context because Lind was talking about four generations of war. Hence calling it 4GW makes sense. Though I don’t find 4GW very interesting as a framework, within its original context its chosen taxonomy makes sense.
xGW emerged as an expansion of the original 4GW framework but it has acquired more relevance and, in many ways, transcends the original framework. The tight terminological coupling between xGW and legacy 4GW, however, does xGW a disservice. It merely confuses transient passers-by like Haq, draws the derision of legacy 4GWers, and completely confuses n00bs. It deserves to be freed from 4GW and its trappings.
Peter’s proposed taxonomy is not a significant improvement as it seems too influenced by a temporary 4GW overdose. John Keegan had a taxonomy similar to Peter’s in his deeply flawed A History of Warfare twenty years ago: warrior, mercenary, slave, regular, conscript, and militia. To quote Keegan:
The warrior category is self-explanatory, but I use it to include such groups as the samurai of Japan and the Western knightly class, the nucleus of which may almost always be identified as the remnant of a warrior tribe, alien or native; warrior cults, like the original Muslims and the Sikhs, and self-made warrior polities, like the Zulu or Ashanti, include themselves. Mercenaries are those that sell military service for money—though also for such inducements as grants of land, admission to citizenship (offered by the Roman army and the French Foreign Legion) or preferential treatment. Regulars are mercenaries who already enjoy citizenship or its equivalent but choose military service as a means of subsistence; in affluent states regular service may take on some of the attributes of a profession…[An example of the slave system is the Mamelukes, which Keegan discussed earlier in the book]…The militia principle lays the duty of performing military service upon all fit male citizens; failure or refusal to do duty usually entails loss of citizenship. Conscription is a tax levied upon a male resident’s time at a certain age of life, though to citizens payment of such a tax usually represented as a civic duty; selective conscription, especially if for long periods of service to an unrepresentative government — twenty years was the term in Russia before the emancipation of the serfs — is difficult to differentiate from the slave system.
Not satisfied with that, Keegan organizes his chapters by a chronology based on succeeding technologies of war: stone, flesh (mainly horseflesh), iron, and fire.
Dave Ronfeldt’s TIMN predates anything that’s happened in this circle of the woods with either xGW or 4GW so labeling it a “reinvention” of 4GW or xGW is inaccurate. If you go to the RAND website you can download his original TIMN paper (from 1996). The paper on “melee, massing, maneuver, and swarming” (MMMS) dates from 2000: He couldn’t be “reinventing” anything unless he took copious notes on D5GW, went back in time, and posted his RAND studies as “original” papers. Mr. Rondfeldt is a talented man but he’s not that talented.
I can see your point that using 0…5 can serve as an incentive to pulling yourself up to the next GW in order to improve your GW but I think it’s still too linear. War follows parallel paths; suggesting that the path of adaption follows a model of “Bob is waging 3GW ergo I must wage 4GW to beat his 3GW mojo” does not handle the case of “Bob is waging 0GW, 1GW, and 5GW at the same time, ergo I must use 6GW mixed with 97GW to beat his 0/1/5GW”. Classifying warfare by jumping back and forth along a number line is more a exercise from second grade math than a useful analytic framework. Yes, analysis must act by breaking down a complex spectrum of conflict into discernible wavelengths but saying that “this gradient of war is brought to you by the letters G and W and the number 5″ is not sufficiently clear. Categorizing war by the composition of the belly button lint caused by the presence or absence of a particular style of uniform may actually be more precise than de-generationalized xGW. War operates among parallel paths of belly button lint not linear belly button lint. It transcends the imprint of “innie” and “outie”.
Terminological exactitude is necessary not only for war nerds like us but for the great unwashed. They need a better framework of war that is sufficiently clear enough that they can understand the great matters of war and peace. Moving the American public past “no one wins in war”, “all war is bad except when waged against Nazis”, “no more Vietnams”, “the Good War”, “there is no military solution, only a political solution”, and other such claptrap is not helped by obscurely numbered gradients. I could explain 4GW to grandma but I’d have a hard time explaining xGW.
I aspire to a universal and accessible theory of war. As a military history buff, I see commonalities from Sun-tzu and Thucydides down to Kilcullen, commonalities that can be arranged in a universal framework, commonalities that xGW can throw light on outside of its current Lindish straight jacket, and commonalities that elude the military naifs that populate Washington right now. These commonalities can not only provide explanations relevant to the military historian but relevant to the problems of the current strategic practitioner. If a theory does not provide a (yes) descriptive framework for general understanding a phenomenon, especially when it’s a phenomenon as broadly consequential as war, then it has no practical usefulness except as entertainment for those who find debating the number of angels who can dance on the head of a pin amusing (3/4 of the male Internet population but still…).
xGW could have more usefulness but not as currently constituted.
Dominoes Through the Generations
I’ve been following Kotare’s examination of the Generations of War (4GW) framework over at The Strategist:
- On the bullshit of “generations of war”
- Roots – the origin of “generations of war”
- “We few, we happy few, we band of [1GW] brothers”
- “Cohorts of War” – a general framework
Kotare has gone from a straight up attack on 4GW to a somewhat tentative embrace, even developing his own “cohorts of war” pantomime of 4GW. David Rondfeldt made this comment:
From a different angle, always open for discussion and refinement, here’s an alternative, four-fold view, focused on organization and doctrine, that John Arquilla and I have elaborated before, including before I knew about 4GW:
“Accordingly, the history of warfare is a history of the progressive development of four fundamental forms of engagement: the melee, massing, maneuver, and swarming. Briefly, warfare has evolved from chaotic melees in which every man fought on his own, to the design of massed but often rigidly shaped formations, and then to the adoption of maneuver. Swarming appears at times in this lengthy history, but its major advances as a doctrine will occur in the coming years. Some are now underway.”
If this formulation ever looks interesting, go here to download our old Rand study on “Swarming and the Future of Conflict”:
http://www.rand.org/pubs/documented_briefings/DB311/
Chapter Two (pp. 7-23) is about the evolution of military organization and doctrine: melee, massing, maneuver, and swarming, with reference to the roles of information and information technology in the evolution of these four forms.
What that write-up does not show, except in a passing footnote, is that this formulation derives from a view of social evolution — my pet theory about TIMN — which holds that, across the ages, societies have come up with only four major forms of organization: tribes, hierarchical institutions (as in states and their militaries), markets, and networks. Thus, early tribes are associated with melees, hierarchical institutions with the devekopment of massed formations, the rise of market-oriented societies with the turn to maneuver doctrines, and now the information age with networked swarming.
4GW overlaps with networked swarming.
My comment was growing a bit lengthy so it’s been upgraded to a post:
David Ronfeldt’s TIMN is a much better general framework than the Generations of War framework. Every iteration of the Generation of War framework eventually runs into the problem that the phenomena it describes (line and column, maneuver, etc.) do not manifest themselves linearly throughout history. Someone who wishes to keep using the Generations of War for substantive analysis must then replace their generations with some other categorization that allows each “generation” to appear in parallel with other “generations” or appear before a “generation”, disappear, and then reappear again. Always in motion these generations are. Inevitably, the temptation arises to substitute “gradient”, “gradation”, (my apologies Peter) “cohort”, or some other numerically denominated category for the original “generation”. TIMN, on the other hand, unfolds chronologically from tribe to institution to market to network but all elements of TIMN have manifested themselves in varying degrees since the beginning of human history and they are all manifesting themselves now to varying degrees. F.A. Hayek’s one insightful comment fits in with TIMN:
If we were to apply the unmodified, uncurbed, rules of the micro-cosmos (i.e., of the small band or troop, or of say, our families) to the macro-cosmos (our wider civilization), as our instincts and sentimental yearnings often makes us wish to do, we would destroy it. Yet if we were always to apply the rules of the extended order to our more intimate groupings, we would crush them. So we must learn to live in two sorts of a world at once.
Much of the interesting implications of TIMN comes from the lag between the mental universe our mind inhabits (that of the tribe) and the complex world we inhabit (in order from least to most confusing, institution, market, network). The much smaller lag between Lind’s original four generations is less threatening because it has yet to cause the mental contortions of the lag between tribe, institution, market, and network.
TIMN also intersects with the Adaptive Market Hypothesis:
The primary components of the AMH consist of the following ideas:
- (A1) Individuals act in their own self-interest.
- (A2) Individuals make mistakes.
- (A3) Individuals learn and adapt.
- (A4) Competition drives adaptation and innovation.
- (A5) Natural selection shapes market ecology.
- (A6) Evolution determines market dynamics.
EMH and AMH have a common starting point in A1, but the two paradigms part company in A2 and A3. In efficient markets, investors do not make mistakes, nor is there any learning and adaptation because the market environment is stationary and always in equilibrium. In the AMH framework, mistakes occur frequently, but individuals are capable of learning from mistakes and adapting their behavior accordingly. However, A4 states that adaptation does not occur independently of market forces but is driven by competition, that is, the push for survival. The interactions among various market participants are governed by natural selection—the survival of the richest, in our context—and A5 implies that the current market environment is a product of this selection process. A6 states that the sum total of these components—selfish individuals, competition, adaptation, natural selection, and environmental conditions— is what we observe as market dynamics.
The key insight of AMH is the lag between the speed of biological evolution and the speed of cultural evolution:
The proper response to the question of how individuals determine the point at which their optimizing behavior is satisfactory is this: Such points are determined not analytically, but through trial and error and, of course, natural selection. Individuals make choices based on experience and their best guesses as to what might be optimal, and they learn by receiving positive or negative reinforcement from the outcomes. If they receive no such reinforcement, they do not learn. In this fashion, individuals develop heuristics to solve various economic challenges, and as long as those challenges remain stable, the heuristics eventually will adapt to yield approximately optimal solutions.
If, on the other hand, the environment changes, then it should come as no surprise that the heuristics of the old environment are not necessarily suited to the new. In such cases, we observe behavioral biases—actions that are apparently ill advised in the context in which we observe them. But rather than labeling such behavior irrational, we should recognize that suboptimal behavior is likely when we take heuristics out of their evolutionary context. A more accurate term for such behavior might be “maladaptive.” The flopping of a fish on dry land may seem strange and unproductive, but under water, the same motions propel the fish away from its predators. And the antagonistic effect of human emotional reactions on logical reasoning described earlier is maladaptive for many financial contexts.
A specific example of lag that the AMH paper discusses is the structure of the triune brain:
The starting point is a basic fact about the brain: it is not a homogeneous mass of nerve cells but a collection of specialized components, many of which have been identified with particular functions and types of behavior. For example, the brainstem, which is located at the base of the brain and sits on top of the spinal cord, controls the most basic bodily functions such as breathing and heartbeat and is active even during deep sleep. The limbic system, which comprises several regions in the middle of the brain, is responsible for emotions, instincts, and social behavior such as feeding, fight-or-flight responses, and sexuality. And the cerebral cortex, which is the tangled maze of gray matter that forms the outer layer of the brain, is what allows us to think complex and abstract thoughts and where language and musical abilities, logical reasoning, learning, long-term planning, and sentience reside. These three areas form the triune brain model, proposed by MacLean; he refers to them as the reptilian, mammalian, and hominid brains, respectively. This terminology underscores his hypothesis that the human brain is the outcome of an evolutionary process in which basic survival functions appeared first, more advanced social behavior came second, and uniquely human cognitive abilities emerged most recently (that is, within the past 100,000 years).
My previous post commented:
From this we can postulate three biological OODA loops within the human brain, each one with ever shorter lags in adaptation:
- The reptilian loop
- The mammalian loop
- The hominid loop
If we follow the momentum of AMH and take the logic of evolution into less biologically hardwired human “software”, we can see five OODA loops and the steadily decreasing lag between each:
- The cultural loop
- The political loop
- The strategic loop
- The operational loop
- The tactical loop
Much of the adaptation mismatches that occur in human political communities and individuals can be traced to adaptive lag. A particular loop is optimized for a specific environment and acquires optimizations peculiar to that environment. However, the environment changes and loops with slower lag times adapt at a sometimes glacial pace. Within the “software” portion of the human brain, culture is the slowest to adapt, followed by politics, and strategy. This is not to say rapid adaption in software can’t happen at these higher levels like culture, only that, on average, adaption will be slower than the lowest levels.As the AMH argues, systemic human irrationality is not necessarily globally irrational as it is locally irrational. Many adaptations such as heuristics and cognitive biases make sense in a legacy adaption context but make less sense in a contemporary adaption context. They are rational under the right circumstances but irrational under other circumstances. Similarly, the software stack of adaptation contains rationalities under some contexts but irrationalities under other contexts. The true measure of adaptive capacities is how rapidly irrationalities can be replaced with rationalities. Since some irrationalities are bound up in emotion and power distributions, this isn’t always easy. On the other hand, some adaptions which seem irrational to a “rational” observer and that are done away with turn out to have been rational after all. The end result is a stack of OODA loops that contain a mix of rationality and irrationality and lag behind the adaption curve on average.
TIMN fits this logic very well. The human brain is very optimized for the tribe, the dominant form of human organization for 99.999999% of our shared history. When dealing with inter-familial or inter-personal relations, our brains function reasonably well. When, as Hayek expounded, we take that same tribal mindset and apply it to the more complex “macro-cosmos” of the institution, market, or network, our touch is less sure and our errors are larger. This increasingly veers into Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s “fourth quadrant” where the optimized structures of our brain run into phenomena their less and less able to accurately process. From this quadrant emerges the “black swans” that Nassim Nicholas Taleb has loosed upon the world. You need more than four generations to digest them.
Politics Redux
T. Greer asks:
I am curious as to your definitions of “politics” and “policy.” In the original German Clausewitz did not (or was unable to – I have no experience with the German language) distinguish between the two. Where do you draw the line between the two?
I’ve made quite a few posts on this subject, so I’ll link them for T. Greer’s reference in order of relevance:
- Clausewitz, On War, Book VIII: Politics Can Be Murder
- Assumptions: Politics
- Politics is that Moist, Toxic Cake
- Politics
- The Machiavellians: Principle II
- Three Posts and the Continuity of Strife
The Machiavellians series is also useful background as well as my documented assumptions.
