The Committee of Public Safety

Mackinder's Heartland

Halford J. Mackinder famously suggested that the following mantra should be whispered in the ear of every Western statesmen attending the Paris peace conference in 1919:

Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland.
Who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island.
Who rules the World-Island commands the World.

One reason Mackinder argued that possession of the “Heartland” or “pivot area” would be decisive in world politics was that the Arctic ice cap insulated the Heartland from intervention from a dominant naval power. Since they couldn’t get through the ice, the naval power would have to try and fight its way into the Heartland through the broad depths of the inner and possibly the outer crescent. The naval power would face the nearly insurmountable problem of fighting through the Heartland powers land forces which, Mackinder argued, were now almost as mobile as sea forces due to advances in land transport like railroads and automobiles. This inability to penetrate the Heartland would hold the dominant naval power at bay while the Heartland power summoned all of the resources of continental Eurasia to build a navy capable of finishing off the dominant naval power.

While other developments such as ICBMs and nuclear submarines may have rendered Mackinder’s Heartland thesis moot, the melting of the Arctic ice cap many forecasters claim will happen in the decades to come may be the final nail in the coffin. If the sea north of the Heartland is open sea (with inconvenient ice floes acting as occasional navigational hazards), then the ice Mackinder counted on to shield the Heartland from the sea is no longer a defensive asset. The coasts and rivers of Siberia and northern Russia would be open to the great navies of the world. Russia, the current holder of much of the Mackinder’s Heartland, is already making noise and mighty Canada is responding:

The Canadian government on Friday reaffirmed its Arctic claims, saying it will defend its northern territories and waters after Russia earlier announced plans to militarize the North.

“Canada is an Arctic power,” Catherine Loubier, a spokeswoman for Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon, said in an email to AFP.

“The government is engaged in protecting the security of Canada and in exercising its sovereignty in the North, including Canadian waters,” she said.

Loubier pointed to the planned acquisition of Arctic patrol vessels, construction of a deep water port and eavesdropping network in the region, annual military exercises and boosting the number Inuit Arctic rangers keeping on eye on goings-on along its northern frontier.

Canada, a deadly white knife pointed at the jugular of the mighty Russian bear.

Even the beauty queens are crooks

Zenpundit posted a fantastic look at Mexico’s Cartel War: A Mexican Standoff with Reality. He begins with a chilling look at a future that could be coming soon to a neighborhood near you:

WASHINGTON, DC -  Flanked by the embattled President of Mexico, Felipe Calderon and the Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano, a weary looking President Barack Obama used a press conference to angrily denounce as “Alarmist and inflammatory” a recent report issued by the conservative Heritage Foundation that declared the massive chain of UN administered Mexican Refugee camps in Arizona, New Mexico and Texas as ”a bottomless well for narco-insurgency” and “a threat to the territorial integrity of the United States”. The camps, home to at least 2.5 million Mexican nationals, are dominated by the “Zetas Confederales”, a loose and ultraviolent umbrella militia aligned with the feuding Mexican drug cartels that now control upwards of 80 % of Mexico.

President Obama’s political fortunes have been reeling recently in the wake of high profile incidents that include the kidnapping of his Special Envoy for Transborder Issues, former New Mexico governor Bill Richardson, and the car bombing assassination of popular California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger that killed 353 people in Sacramento last month. Both events have been tied directly to factions of Zetas “hardliners” who operate with impunity on both sides of the US-Mexican border. President Obama used the conference to point to the “clear and hold” COIN strategy that has recently restored order and even a degree of tourism to Las Vegas, once the scene of bloody street battles between Zetas, local street gangs and  right-wing American paramilitary groups, as a sign of the success for his administration.  Democratic leaders on Capitol Hill remain skeptical and say that it is likely that President Obama will face a primary challenge next year from Senator Jim Webb (D- Va), a former Secretary of the Navy in the Reagan administration, who called the president’s COIN strategy “The right course of action” but ” Two years too late”….

Read the whole thing. It’s an emphatic exclamation point on the excellent commentary on Mexico’s deteriorating situation offered by other blogs such as Soob.

What measures may be taken either now or in the future to fight the cartel war? Some random musings:

• Arming the population with appropriate weaponry and organizing them, under the imprimatur of the state, into neighborhood watches. A “Concerned Citizen” solution. They may even man checkpoints.
• Arming the police with sub-machine guns and helicopters so they aren’t outgunned by the cartels. Increasing manpower and rooting out corruption would also be important steps.
• Formation of paramilitary formations to better fill the gap between civil and military formations, like Italy’s carbininieri.
• Better cooperation between federal, state, and local law enforcement.
• COIN tactics by the military, generally seen as loyal to civilian rule, relatively free of corruption, and an effective military institution.
• Hardening of important buildings such as courthouses, governmental offices, police headquarters, and important monuments with jersey barriers and other urban barriers and fortifications.
• Walling off neighborhoods to protect them from cartelistas and deny the insurgents the succor of the population.
• Using bioinformatics to track people caught up in the nets of law enforcement so repeat offenders can be kept from a catch and release scenario.
• Selective internment of supporting populations in strategic hamlets.
• Separating hardcore insurgents from “accidental guerrillas” to keep them from infecting other imprisoned populations.
• Control of the commons, the vast spaces between cities that are the transit corridors for insurgent logistics.
• Control the border region.
• Purge the corrupt, incestuous elite that siphon off the broader society’s resources for their own myopic, short-term profit taking.

And that’s just in America.

Howard Bloom, in his book, The Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind, argues that the engine driving the Universe is the continuous interaction between attraction and repulsion.

Attraction and Repulsion

Whether this is truly the motive force of the Universe is irrelevant. Picturing the universe as a dance between attraction and repulsion is an excellent compression algorithm: it can make the music of the spheres fit inside the narrow confines of the human skull. That’s a tight fit.

World's Tightest Fit

When the dance of attraction and repulsion takes place inside the human head, it’s a battle between compression algorithms. Attraction seeks to compact the Universe information into the smallest possible space. This sometimes results in seemingly useless but ultimately important bits of the Universe being tossed out in order to make it fit. Repulsion seeks to include as many important bits of the Universe as possible, meaning that sometimes useless bits are included in the grand sweep. This leaves varying levels of compression between the two poles of attraction and repulsion, some hyper compact and some barely compressed at all.

Some compressed, some not

The brain uses fundamental symbols to represent common patterns within a compressed Universe. These function as a kind of gooey shorthand for the fundamental patterns of the universe, enabling the broad thematic components of the Universal narrative to easily fit in a tiny skull. This is the realm of culture, where the fundamental desires of humanity are lodged. Cultural repulsion is called diversity and cultural attraction is called conformity. All cultural compression is stored in a state that lies somewhere along a spectrum stretching between these two poles.

Spectrum of Diversity and Conformity

Culture is a tug of war between diversity generators and conformity enforcers. Diversity generators seek to maximize what desires are included to cover all cultural contingencies. Conformity enforces seek to limit which desires are included to achieve efficient compression. One seeks to maximize the range of choices. One seeks to restrict them. The crucial factor that determines the balance between the range of diversity and the restriction is power. Power is the realm of politics.

Politics is the division of power between cultural desires. It is the intergroup tournament in which winners and their desires are exalted and losers and their desires debased. With greater diversity comes a wider range of competitors and a wider distribution of power. With greater conformity there are fewer competitors and fewer divisions of power. The most diverse shade of politics is anarchy where power is dispersed widely between competitors and diversity is at its peak. The shade of politics with the most conformity is autocracy where power is concentrated in a few competitors and conformity pushes to the limits of maximum compression. An intermediate form of politics between these two extremes is a republic, where power is divided between competitors but a imposed balance of power produces conformity.

Politics and its discontents

Strategy determines if a desired political division of power will come about. Strategy reconciles the current quality and quantity the political power a competitor has with the quantity and quality of its cultural desires. A successful strategic reconciliation:

1. Pursues an achievable desire with
2. An appropriate concentration that
3. Successfully alters a prevailing division of power in favor of
4. A competitor in the ongoing intergroup tournament.

This is determined by luck and skill at seizing passing opportunity. Strategy is largely about the successful correlation of power to desire, correctly matched to time, place, and circumstance. This requires a compression that falls somewhere between violence, the absolute concentration of power, and influence, the fleeting mist of dispersed power.

Influence and Violence

• influence: a strategy that is intended to shape knowledge of us and our political desires.
• violence: a strategy that is intended to physically deny anyone of the power to resist our political desires.

This admixture of these two strategies can be found in more specific strategies along the strategic spectrum.

More strategies

Peace is widely dispersed power, all influence and no violence in its pure form.

Peace (and PONIES!!!)

Economics is largely influence with a touch more violence. Government is equal parts violence and influence. Central planning is mostly violence with a touch of influence and war is violence with very little influence in its purest form.

War (and no ponies)

Operations, the arrangement of power and desires in time and place in accordance with strategic design, follows a similar pattern of ranging from repulsion to attraction and from influence to violence.

Operational spectrum

Tactics presents even more variations between repulsion and attraction.

Getting to the end of the rainbow is fun and exciting.

A friend of mine in high school produced a typewritten list of what claimed to be every possible plot combination imaginable. I went looking for it thinking something like that might be interesting as a basic schema for creating narratives for influence strategies. The simplest basic plot is dramatic structure:

Or three plots:

1. “’Type A, happy ending’”
2. “’Type B, unhappy ending’”;
3. “’Type C,’ the literary plot,

Or seven:

1. [wo]man vs. nature
2. [wo]man vs. man
3. [wo]man vs. the environment
4. [wo]man vs. machines/technology
5. [wo]man vs. the supernatural
6. [wo]man vs. self
7. [wo]man vs. god/religion

Or twenty:

1. Quest
2. Adventure
3. Pursuit
4. Rescue
5. Escape
6. Revenge
7. The Riddle
8. Rivalry
9. Underdog
10. Temptation
11. Metamorphosis
12. Transformation
13. Maturation
14. Love
15. Forbidden Love
16. Sacrifice
17. Discovery
18. Wretched Excess
19. Ascension
20. Descension

The closest I’ve come to my friend’s original is 36 plots:

1. Supplication (in which the Supplicant must beg something from Power in authority)
2. Deliverance
3. Crime Pursued by Vengeance
4. Vengeance taken for kindred upon kindred
5. Pursuit
6. Disaster
7. Falling Prey to Cruelty of Misfortune
8. Revolt
9. Daring Enterprise
10. Abduction
11. The Enigma (temptation or a riddle)
12. Obtaining
13. Enmity of Kinsmen
14. Rivalry of Kinsmen
15. Murderous Adultery
16. Madness
17. Fatal Imprudence
18. Involuntary Crimes of Love (example: discovery that one has married one’s mother, sister, etc.)
19. Slaying of a Kinsman Unrecognized
20. Self-Sacrificing for an Ideal
21. Self-Sacrifice for Kindred
22. All Sacrificed for Passion
23. Necessity of Sacrificing Loved Ones
24. Rivalry of Superior and Inferior
25. Adultery
26. Crimes of Love
27. Discovery of the Dishonor of a Loved One
28. Obstacles to Love
29. An Enemy Loved
30. Ambition
31. Conflict with a God
32. Mistaken Jealousy
33. Erroneous Judgement
34. Remorse
35. Recovery of a Lost One
36. Loss of Loved Ones.

(Curiously there are a famous group of 36 Strategems purporting to come from ancient China. Must be a fortuitous number.)

[cross-posted on ChicagoBoyz]

Of what worth is the unfinished scribblings of an out of favor subject of the feeblest autocracy in the whole Concert of Europe, a middling officer who was lightly regarded in his own time and lightly regarded by most of his immediate successors?

Everything and nothing.

Clausewitz stands alone, the only epochal thinker on war. He is the Newton and Darwin of war, all in one, but he lacks successors. Where he went, no one has followed or passed him by. He said let their be light and there was light, but of a peculiarly refracted sort. Even the most incisive of Clausewitz’s Prussian students, the elder Moltke, missed the whole war is the continuation of political intercourse by other means thing and insisted upon political outcomes that derived from purely military considerations. When war broke out, the politicians should take some time off and let the soldiers run things. Once they have achieved victory, then the politicians can take the hand off and run with the ball. Moltke, tired of Bismarck’s interference in what he saw as his domain, insisted on Alsace-Lorraine as a military buffer against the Third Republic and ended up waving a permanent red flag in front of the Gallic bull.

Clausewitz is also a parochial figure of his own time, with his own country to defend, his own axe to grind, his own issues, and his own petty grievances. Two stars shine in his firmament: Frederick II and Buonaparte. While Clausewitz often strikes observers as a worshipper of Buonaparte, to whom Clausewitz refers as the “God of War”, I would peg him as a devotee of the Frederican cult. Given Clausewitz’s strong bias towards defense (compare Books VI and VII), his numerous references to Frederick’s exploits during the War of the Austrian Succession and the Seven Years’ War, and his belief that war was the continuation of political intercourse with the addition of other means, his large though not uncritical admiration for Old Fritz becomes clear. Frederick represented the ultimate subordination of war to the political: Frederick’s mind put his political interests ahead of his military pursuits. Policy and strategy, since one thought followed another, were in perfect agreement. Frederick was the ultimate practitioner of the strategic defensive: he knew his limits and adhered to them with an iron will. Clausewitz, like many contemporary Prussians, was looking for a system that would produce a Frederick when it could only produce a succession of second-class Frederick Williams. His commander-in-chief participating in cabinet meetings was the best analogue he could find to the absence.

This Clausewitz also had fights to start with otherwise forgotten figures like von Bulow and more influential thinkers like Jomini. Jomini’s cut-and-paste military how to manuals must have made Clausewitz foam at the mouth. Here was the Tony Robbins of military self-help, with his impressive gigs as aide-de-camp to Marshal Ney, personal advisor to Buonaparte, and various positions as a commanding general in French and Russian service. Jomini was a trite axiom spewing military entreprenuer, selling his How to Win a War in 10 steps to the highest bidder. As a Swiss patriot (who never returned to Switzerland), he was a citizen of the world. Contrast this with war nerd Carl von Clausewitz. Though appreciated by such giants of the German army as Scharnhorst and Gneisenau and happily married (far above his station) to Countess Marie von Bruhl, Clausewitz was out of favor with king and court and spent most of the postwar era in a prestigious but empty and responsibility free position as head of the War Academy. Clausewitz yearned to be a man of affairs like Jomini but he didn’t have a sound-bite personality (or writing style) so he was passed over for men whose names are now long forgotten. So he had to settle for a try at posthumous immortality instead. Curiously, despite a ill-timed death, he is now the most important Prussian of the early nineteeth century, his insight rivalled only by Blucher’s hatred of Buonaparte as the Prussian state emotion that most shaped the world we live in.

So there are two Clausewitzes (or Clausewitzi?): There is the universal Clausewitz, the Clausewitz that tells us that war is the continuation of politics by other means, the Clausewitz that explains why defense is the stronger form of war, the Clausewitz of friction, the culminating point of victory, the remarkable trinity, the Clausewitz of Book I and VIII. Then there is the historical Clausewitz, the Clausewitz that abhors cordon warfare, that hides behind fortresses, that hates encirclement and surprise, that lived in a world little different from 100 years before, a world that ran at the speed of a good horse, where states were unchallenged, battles could be fought within eyesight of the commanding general, and disease carried off most of the casualties, the Clausewitz of Book VI. The historical Clausewitz was more appreciated by his immediate successors. They loved the “Mahdi of Mass”. It is only in our own time that the universal Clausewitz has emerged.

The universal Clausewitz can be the Clausewitz of his supporters, who argue that he created a treasure for all time, or his detractors, who see only a relic of the past when states were states and attrition was attrition. It is my hope that the universal Clausewitz will emerge triumphant. Clausewitzian war is fought by all human communities, not by states alone. Clausewitz was more than the prophet of the decisive battle who shouted, “If it doesn’t attrit, you must acquit”. Clausewitz will remain relevant for all time, or at least until the killer robots take over.

I’d like to thank all of the participants in this roundtable. I’ve received many a new insight and many a new addition to my personal reading list. Re-reading Clausewitz has opened new lines of inquiry and thought. The old dog will have a few new tricks in him yet.

The Division of Power

[cross-posted on ChicagoBoyz]

The German word politik, as used by Clausewitz, can mean both politics and policy. The two words were used interchangeably by Michael Howard and Peter Paret in translating On War depending upon how they interpreted Clausewitz’s meaning in a particular passage. This can serve to remind us that both policy and politics play a role in launching and waging war. While much of On War deals with policy, the rational planning of how to use x resources to achieve y goals, much of Book VIII deals with politics. What is politics? James Burnham ponders this in The Machiavellians:

What are we talking about when we talk politics? Many, to judge by what they write, seem to think we are talking about man’s search for the ideally good society, or his mutual organization for the maximum social welfare, or his natural aspiration for peace and harmony, or something equally removed from the world as it is and has been. Machiavelli understood politics as primarily the study of the struggles for power among men. By so marking its field, we are assured that there is being discussed something that exists, not something spun out of idealist’s dreams, or nightmares. If our interest is in man as he is on this earth, so far as we can learn from the facts of history and experience, we must conclude that he has no natural aspiration for peace or harmony, he does not form states in order to achieve an ideally good society, nor does he accept mutual organization is to secure the maximum social welfare. But men, and groups of men, do, by various means, struggle among themselves for relative increases in power and privilege. In the course of these struggles and as part of them, governments are established and overthrown, laws passed and violated, wars fought and won and lost. A definition is arbitrary, true enough, but Machiavelli’s implied definition of the field of politics as the struggle for power is at least insurance against nonsense.

Max Weber echoed Burnham’s definition even earlier in Politics as a Vocation:

‘Politics’ for us means striving to share power or striving to influence the distribution of power, either among states or among groups within a state.

Christopher Bassford places the definition of politics as the division of power between socially determined ends in a specifically Clausewitzian context in Clausewitz in the Twenty-First Century:

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.

War is not a departure from this fundamental nature of politics, it is a logical continuation. As Clausewitz observes:

It is, of course, well-known that the only source of war is politics – the intercourse of governments and peoples; but it is apt to be assumed that war suspends that intercourse and replaces it by a wholly different condition, ruled by no law but its own.

We maintain, on the contrary, that war is simply a continuation of political intercourse, with the addition of other means. We deliberately use the phrase “with the addition of other means” because we also want to make clear that war in itself does not suspend political intercourse or change it into something entirely different. In essentials that intercourse continues irrespective of the means it employs.

Political intercourse, concerned primarily with the division of power both within and without a human community, does not suspend itself during war. This means that the petty details of politics, buying political support, the compromising of principles, the catering to special interests, the rhetorical excesses, whoring, horse-trading, half-truths, distorted world views, all the evils of Babylon, will shape war more profoundly than devotees of rational decision making would like or even acknowledge. Bruce Bueno de Mesquita argues that most foreign policy decisions are primarily shaped by domestic politics as political leaders seek developments abroad that will satisfy their domestic constituencies and enable them to both gain and hold on to power. War is no different. Politics may not stoop to determining “the posting of guards or the employment of patrols” (though LBJ may beg to differ). It usually has other sordid details to oversee. But the very atmosphere the flames of war feed on emanates from the machinations of politics. It is politics, driven by narrow and parochial concerns, tossed and turned as it is by the shifting fortunes of war, that will determine the outcome of war. Clausewitz puts this kindly, putting the ideal first (with my substitutions):

It can be taken as agreed that the aim of [politics] is to unify and reconcile all aspects of internal administration as well as spiritual values, and whatever else the moral philosophy may care to add.

Then comes the first qualification:

[Politics], of course, is nothing in itself; it is only the trustee for all these interests against other states.

He acknowledges the imperfections but sticks to the main assertion:

That it can err, subserve the ambitions, private interests, and vanity of those in power is neither here nor there. In no sense can war ever be regarded as the preceptor of [politics], and here we can only treat [politics] as representative of all interests of the community.

Politics, for all of its flaws, determines the course of war. This isn’t to say that participants in the political process, inasmuch as such participation is allowed, shouldn’t seek the best policy for their community. However, they shouldn’t seek fault in the instrument, war, alone, though the critical eye may see flaws in the instrument as well. They should seek to remedy faults in the real source: politics:

No major proposal required for war can be worked out in ignorance of political factors; and when people talk, as they often do, about harmful political influence on the management of war, they are not really saying what they mean. Their quarrel should be with the policy itself, not with its influence. If the policy is right – that is, successful – any intentional effect it has on the conduct of the war can only be to the good. If it has the opposite effect the policy itself is wrong.

When the current power configuration of a community is summed up by the political process at a given point in time, that summation will be what dictates the direction war will take. If the military instrument rebels against the hands of its masters and takes over the political process, that is not an unnatural assertion of the power of war over politics. It’s the replacement of one set of politicians with another set, only this time they are garbed for war instead of peace.

Clausewitz rejected technical explanations for changes in the art of war because of his belief in the primacy of politics over war. He argued that shifts in the nature of politics had more to do with the descent of Europe into total war than advances in technology and tactical technique:

Clearly the tremendous effects of the French Revolution abroad were caused not so much by new military methods and concepts as by radical changes in policies and administration, by the new character of government, altered conditions of the French people, and the like. That other governments did not understand these changes, that they wished to oppose new and overwhelming forces with customary means: all these were political errors. Would a purely military view of war have enabled anyone to detect these faults and cure them? It would not. Even if there really had existed a thoughtful strategist capable of deducing the whole range of consequences from the nature of the hostile elements, and on the strength of these of prophesying their ultimate effects, it would have been quite impossible to act on his speculations.

The bad news is that the solution to the changing faces of warfare may have to emerge through the narrow bandwidth of the intelligence of those who are usually the last to realize the world has changed: politicians:

Not until the statesmen had at last perceived that the nature of the forces that had emerged in France, and had grasped that new political conditions now obtained in France, could they foresee the broad effect all this would have on war; and only in that way could they appreciate the scale of the means that would have to be employed, and how best to apply them.

That the monarchies of Europe only solved the problem of the Corsican Ogre and his Merry Frenchmen after twenty years of policy failure is only stronger evidence of the primacy of politics in war:

It follows that the transformation of the art of war resulted from the transformation of politics. So far from suggesting that the two could be disassociated from each other, these changes are a strong proof of their indissoluble connection.

The success and failure of war and strategy can occur without the direct influence of politics. However, they are in orbit around the planet Politics and its gravitational sway will eventually decide if local success or failure translate into global success or failure. The muddled and confused strategies of contemporary conflicts are the product of a muddled and confused politics; they reflect the contortions and pretense of contemporary society as accurately as a mirror held up to the face. Only a better political outcome will result in a better strategic outcome. Though the two constitute a feedback loop that causes strategy to shape politics and politics to shape strategy, the impact of politics is inevitably stronger. As Clausewitz concludes his last section on war as an instrument of politics (with my replacements):

Once again: war is an instrument of [politics]. It must necessarily bear the character of [politics] and measure by its standards. The conduct of war, in its great outlines, is therefore [politics] itself, which takes up the sword in place of the pen, but does not on that account cease to think according to its own laws.

If so much of war is spent struggling in the squalor of mud advancing or retreating from an unimpressive dot on a map at the caprice of persons far away, it is because it is a representative sample of politics as a whole. Politics, at its core, is a struggle in the mud between writhing swine grubbing desperately in the muck for the fetid slop of power.

Like father, like son.

[Cross posted on ChicagoBoyz]

Book VII can be summarized as, “Offense is hard. Defense is strong. Culminating point of victory. Move along.” DEFENSE! DEFENSE! Clausewitz cheers. Offense. offense. Clausewitz grudgingly mutters. I lost count of the number of times Clausewitz says, in effect, “I could say something really insightful about offense here but I already said it about defense in Book VI. Go re-read Book VI. Now.” Take this bronx cheer for example:

It is thus defense itself that weakens attack. Far from this being idle sophistry, we consider it to be the greatest disadvantage of the attack that one is eventually left in a most awkward defensive position.

That’s right. The most damning thing about offense is that it’s poor defense. Turns the old adage about the best defense being a good offense on its head. If we follow John Sumida’s argument, this is the main thesis of On War: defense rules; offense is lame.

However, there are a few interesting nuggets here and there in the otherwise sparse landscape of Book VII. The one that stuck was Clausewitz’s discussion of waging offense for “the sake of trophies, or possibly simply of honor, and at times merely to satisfy a general’s ambition”:

Anyone who doubts this occurs do not know military history. Most of the offensive battles in the French campaigns during the age of Louis XIV were of this type. It is more important to note, however, that these considerations are not without weight, mere quirks of vanity: they have a very definite bearing on the peace and hence they lead fairly straight to the goal. Military honor and the renown of an army and its generals are factors that operate invisibly, but they constantly permeate all military activity.

This was one of the three motivations that Thucydides claimed condemns men to war: fear, honor, and interest. Honor is a signal. When it is violated, it signals that its holder might be vulnerable to further violations. In this sense, honor is a form of credit. If you have it, you can draw on it while waging war in pursuit of the goals of politics you wish to realize when peace comes, as Clausewitz points out. If you lose it, your leverage in war and peace will degrade rapidly.

Honor was everything in the Archaic Greek society Homer portrayed. While the poor bloody infantry was slogging it out off camera, Achilles, Agamemnon, Hector, Odysseus, Aeneas, Ajax, and other aristocrats were hogging the spotlight in single combat. Battles would turn on the outcome of the clash of champions. The winner had honor and his side gained in honor and, not to be underestimated, morale. The effect of Achilles’ rage after the death of Patroclus in raising the sagging morale of the Acheans and deflating the Trojans after it seemed they were on the verge of driving the Greeks into the sea rings true. Sudden swings in morale are the crucial events that decide the outcome of battle. Du Picq pointed out that most casualties in a rout occur when one side gives and retreats. The backsides of the retreating army are exposed to enemy action. Men turn and run, fling away their equipment, order disintegrates, and the mob lurking inside every army is set free. Much depends upon unit pride and cohesion, one of the primary justifications for the pursuit of honor. Standards like the eagles of Rome and the unit pennants of American units are honor incarnate. They are a visible manifestation of pride and cohesion. This made them a prize that a unit would die to defend and the enemy would kill to win as a trophy. There’s more than bluster behind the apocryphal phrase, “the Guard dies, it does not surrender.”

Sometimes seemingly senseless acts of violence must be committed in order to re-establish credibility and maintain honor. However, senselessness is in the eye of the beholder. When the fundamental language of fear and honor is the one language that transcends all cultural bounds, what doesn’t make sense to the higher mind may make great sense to the innermost reaches of the animal mind. Credit may be re-established and honor restored. However, it’s best not to lose it to begin with. There may not be a bailout or lender of last resort when the dogs of war run free.

People With Arms

[cross-posted at ChicagoBoyz]

Clausewitz served a dynasty renowned for enlightened manpower management (“Dogs! Do you want to live forever?”) and cutting edge political agitation (“My people and I have come to an agreement which satisfied us both. They are to say what they please, and I am to do what I please.”). However, this passage from On War may have given even the avant-garde Hohenzollerns pause:

The system of requisitioning, and the enormous growth of armies resulting from it and from universal conscription, the employment of militia – all of those run in the same direction when viewed from the standpoint of the older, narrower military system and that also leads to the calling out of the home guard and arming the people.

The innovations first mentioned were the natural, inevitable consequences of the breaking down of barriers. They added so immensely to the strength of the side that first employed them that the opponent was carried along and had to follow suite. That will also hold true of the people’s war. Any nation that uses it intelligently will, as a rule, gain some superiority over those who disdain its use…

[...]

By its very nature, such scattered resistance will not lend itself to major actions, closely compressed in time and space. It’s effect is like that of the process of evaporation: it depends upon how much surface is exposed. The greater the surface and the area of contact between it and the enemy forces, the thinner the later have to spread, the greater the effect of the general uprising. Like smoldering embers, it consumes the basic foundations of the enemy forces. Since it needs to time to be effective, a state of tension will develop while the two elements interact. This tension will either gradually relax, if the insurgency is suppressed in some places and slowly burns itself out in others, or else it will build up to a crisis: a general conflagration closes in on the enemy, driving him out of the country before he is faced with total destruction…To be realistic, one must therefore think of a general insurrection within the framework of a war conducted by the regular army, and coordinated in one all-encompassing plan.

Clausewitz’s temerity, remarkable for an era where Prussia danced to the tune of the Concert of Europe, was echoed by Thomas Jefferson, a minor Clausewitz contemporary who was the political leader of the reactionary agrarian Republicans in the peripheral United States of America:

Uncertain as we must ever be of the particular point in our circumference where an enemy may choose to invade us, the only force which can be ready at every point and competent to oppose them, is the body of neighboring citizens…On these, collected from the parts most convenient, in numbers proportioned to the invading foe, it is best to rely, not only to meet the first attack, but if it threatens to be permanent, to maintain the defence until regulars may be engaged to relieve them.

While the prevailing wind of legitimist Europe was in the direction of disarming the population, the United States, at least on paper, was dedicated to the proposition that every citizen should possess a military grade firearm and military training:

That each and every free able-bodied white male citizen of the respective States, resident therein, who is or shall be of age of eighteen years, and under the age of forty-five years (except as is herein after excepted) shall severally and respectively be enrolled in the militia, by the Captain or Commanding Officer of the company, within whose bounds such citizen shall reside, and that within twelve months after the passing of this Act. And it shall at all time hereafter be the duty of every such Captain or Commanding Officer of a company, to enroll every such citizen as aforesaid, and also those who shall, from time to time, arrive at the age of 18 years, or being at the age of 18 years, and under the age of 45 years (except as before excepted) shall come to reside within his bounds; and shall without delay notify such citizen of the said enrollment, by the proper non-commissioned Officer of the company, by whom such notice may be proved. That every citizen, so enrolled and notified, shall, within six months thereafter, provide himself with a good musket or firelock, a sufficient bayonet and belt, two spare flints, and a knapsack, a pouch, with a box therein, to contain not less than twenty four cartridges, suited to the bore of his musket or firelock, each cartridge to contain a proper quantity of powder and ball; or with a good rifle, knapsack, shot-pouch, and powder-horn, twenty balls suited to the bore of his rifle, and a quarter of a pound of powder; and shall appear so armed, accoutred and provided, when called out to exercise or into service, except, that when called out on company days to exercise only, he may appear without a knapsack…after five years from the passing of this Act, all muskets from arming the militia as is herein required, shall be of bores sufficient for balls of the eighteenth part of a pound…

[...]

X. And be it further enacted, That it shall be the duty of the brigade inspector, to attend the regimental and battalion meeting of the militia composing their several brigades, during the time of their being under arms, to inspect their arms, ammunition and accoutrements; superintend their exercise and maneuvres…

Chapter 26 of Book VI is one of the most contemporary passages in On War. In anticipating a battlefield that was broader and deeper than the narrow front of the Buonapartist battlefield, Clausewitz anticipated a battlefield that could extend over miles and miles until it could extend from the English channel to the Swiss border or from Leningrad to the Caucasus. He anticipated a battle that could extend into all three dimensions and encompass every man, woman, and child of each combatant nation. He anticipated unrestricted warfare:

The expansion of the domain of warfare is a necessary consequence of the ever-expanding scope of human activity, and the two are intertwined. Mankind’s understanding of this phenomenon has always lagged behind the phenomenon itself…up to now most people involved in warfare considered all the non-military domains where they were as being accessories to serve military needs. The narrowness of their field of vision and their way of thinking restricted the development of the battlefield and changes in strategy and tactics to within one domain. From…the massive bombing of Dresden and the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, inflicting countless civilian casualties in the pursuit of absolute military victory; to the strategic propositions of “massive retaliation” and “mutually assured destruction;” none of these [ideas about war] broke this mold.

It is now time to correct this mistaken trend. The great fusion of technologies is impelling the domains of politics, economics, the military, culture, diplomacy, and religion to overlap each other. The connection points are ready, and the trend towards the merging of the various domains is very clear…All of these things are rendering more and more obsolete the idea of confining warfare to the military domain and of using the number of casualties as a means of [measuring] the intensity of a war. Warfare is now escaping from the boundaries of bloody massacre, and exhibiting a trend towards low casualties, or even none at all, and yet high intensity. This is information warfare, financial warfare, trade warfare, and other entirely new forms of war, new areas opened up in the domain of warfare. In this sense, there is now no domain which warfare cannot use, and there is almost no domain which does not have warfare’s offensive pattern.

- Col. Qiao Liang, PLA, and Col. Wang Xiangsui, PLA, Unrestricted Warfare

In a world where traditional Great Power war is discouraged, Clausewitz’s extrapolation of the idea of the People in Arms from contemporaneous conflicts in Spain, Russia, the Tyrol, and Prussia is more important that it was at the time On War was written. In positioning the People in Arms as a vital part of communal defense, Clausewitz reinforces the major theme of Book VI: that defense is simply the stronger form of war. The argument that unrestricted warfare possesses an inevitable ascendancy over past “generations” of warfare is one an engineer in the army of Charles VIII could have made about artillery or that Douhet made about the bomber: that offense has forever transcended defense. However, while the pendulum swings towards the offense, it inevitably swings back towards the defense all the more strongly. The trace italliene, made out of piled dirt, put a stop to the ambitions of Charles. The bomber did not always get through. Neither will the unrestricted warrior.

A People in Arms doesn’t win by density or ubiquity. It wins by being an “army in being”. The unrestricted warrior must pause to consider what complications a People in Arms introduces into his sinister plans. To him, the People in Arms:

[S]hould be nebulous and elusive; its resistance should never materialize as a concrete body, otherwise the enemy can direct sufficient force at its core [and] crush it…

With the People in Arms looming just over the horizon, with the possibility that it’s leading elements could descend at any moment, uncertainty is introduced into the equation. While the entrepreneur of war accepts some risk as an inevitable part of his endeavor, he prefers to eliminate as much risk as possible. It’s not the People in Arm’s job to stop the terrorist in a miniature battle of decision:

They are not supposed to pulverize the core but to nibble at the shell and around the edges. They are meant to operate in areas just outside the theater of war – where the invader will not appear in strength – in order to deny him those areas altogether. Thunder clouds of this type should build up all around the invader the further he advances…The flames will spread like a brush fire, until they reach the area in which the enemy is based, threatening his lines of communication and his very existence.

However, this force shouldn’t be overestimated:

One need not hold an exaggerated faith in the power of a general uprising, nor consider it an inexhaustible, unconquerable force, which an army cannot hope to stop any more than man can command the wind or the rain – in short, one need not base one’s judgment on patriotic broadsides in order to admit that peasants in arms will not let themselves be swept along like a platoon of soldiers.

The “peasants” should serve the role that Jefferson proposed: “not only to meet the first attack, but if it threatens to be permanent, to maintain the defence until regulars may be engaged to relieve them”.

This is where insurgents should build up larger units, better organized, with parties of regulars that will make them look like a proper army and enable them to tackle larger operations.

Arms aren’t sufficient to be the security of a free state. The People in Arms must also be well-regulated in training and discipline, not to mention civic vigor.

To Hugo, a good friend and a fine spirit. We’ll miss you, Crazy Bird.

Skin is largely impermeable to the outside world. It forms a clear line of demarcation between what is us and what is them. They want in. We want them out. To keep them out requires extraordinary measures on our part. For them to get in requires even more extraordinary measures on their part. There are several approaches they can take:

• Infiltrate the body through one of the convenient openings in the skin provided for interaction with the outside world. Each of these openings, however, are hardened targets with their own multi-layered dense defense networks.
• Gently penetrate the skin by gradually soaking through it.
• Puncture the skin with something pointy.
• Cut the skin with something sharp.
• Grind the skin away with something abrasive.

Skin is an organ made for war. In fact, it is the most frequent canvas upon which the horrors of war have been painted. Skin is a useful representation of the outer edge of any human community. When facing the world, each community is surrounded by a skin weaved from the intertwining forms of two strategic forms of power:

• influence: power intended to shape the enemy’s knowledge of us and our political desires.
• violence: power used to physically deny the enemy of the power to resist our political desires.

One operates in the empire of the imagination, the other in the world of the real. Both of these forms of power are directed by running hypotheses. Since man cannot see the future, he must hypothesize. Each hypothesis is a prediction about the world subject to verification by the course of human events. The rise and fall of human communities follows the success or failure of the hypotheses they generate. Much depends upon how you await the future. More depends on how you mix influence and violence due to the wild unpredictability of war. Both influence and violence make themselves manifest in the five engines that power a human community (per Howard Bloom):

• diversity generators: internal forces that create new hypotheses.
• conformity enforcers: internal forces that ensure that other internal f0rces have enough in common to exchange hypotheses.
• inner-judges: internal forces that rule on whether a hypothesis is true or false.
• intergroup tournaments: competitions that pit the hypotheses produced by one community against the hypotheses produced by other communities.
• resource shifters: internal and external forces that heavily reward winning hypotheses and even more heavily punish losing hypotheses based on the rulings of inner judges and the results of intergroup tournaments.

War itself is the ultimate intergroup tournament. The outcome of the complex interactions of the offensive and defensive influence and violence emanating from competing groups is one of the most powerful drivers of success or failure. This back and forth is a probing of the other group’s skin for weakness. The process of analysis and deduction open gaps of vulnerability where one group can penetrate another’s dissection of the world and disrupt or even dictate the trailing process of synthesis and induction. This can be done with the kinetic force of violence or the more subtle massage of influence. All of this hits the Orientation phase of John Boyd’s OODA loop where analysis and synthesis take place:

OODA Loop

Since Boyd’s conception of the OODA loop was a system where Orientation was a sun orbited by small and possibly optional planets like Observation, Decision, and Action, shaping enemy Orientation with sword and tongue is the critical target of any operation. The key action to take, while engaged in the intergroup tournament, is to target the other four mechanisms with influence and violence.

Diversity generators are critical for creating the designed, engineered, or random hypotheses that, when added together, allow a human community to adapt to the rigors of the intergroup tournament. However, too much diversity will cause a human community to fissure and split. There will be disorientation and indecision which will lead to inaction which will lead to maladaption. Speeding up the generation of diversity may rip a community apart and send the various fragments on their way. On the other hand, decreasing a community’s diversity may drastically reduce its power to adapt to the intergroup tournament.

The critical regulators of diversity are conformity enforcers. Conformity enforcers control how much diversity is tolerated within a community. Conformity enforcement is the muscle that controls diversity, letting it ride or reigning it in. If it is induced to sqeeze too tight, rigidity may set in and a community’s response will become more sluggish and behind the curve. If it is led to letting a hundred flowers blossom and a hundred schools of thought contend to such an extent that it lapses into communal incoherence, than its competition in the intergroup tournament will become disjointed and ill aimed. Producing either stifling conformity or anarchic disarray is the aim of targeting a community’s conformity enforcement.

One of the most powerful targets to hit is inner-judges. These mechanisms can freeze a community, inducing it to sink into suicidal lethargy that leaves them ripe for the plucking. Inner-judges have the power to rally a community to new heights of efforts but they’re also a potential fifth column if turned in a negative direction. If the inner-judges think that things aren’t going so well, they can flick off the internal light switch and collapse the entire war effort from the inside. Vicious little critters. Enlisting them on your side, whether they’re conscious of having volunteered or not, is a key part of a combined strategy of victory. Thinning their ranks with violence is also an option.

Resource shifters’s job is to transfer power from winners to losers. Winning hypotheses attract power. Losing hypotheses lose power. The resource shifters are ever shifting, waiting for subtle cues from the inner-judges and blowbacks from failures in the intergroup competition to tell them which way to pass the good stuff. They are no respecters of persons. They’ll pile on the power when times are good. They won’t return your phone calls when times turn sour. Like the inner-judges, they too can be treacherous and they too can be disrupted. Some winning hypothesis can be made to appear more winning so that they attract more power than they actually deserve. The distribution of power can be disrupted by slicing through supply lines and diverting power. Since politics is the struggle for power, whether through the “other means” of war or not, resource shifters are a critical target. War itself acts as a resource shifter, stealing from the loser to give to the victorious. The goal is to shift more power to yourself than is shifted away from yourself.

All of this is accomplished by penetrating the skin of a community. Influence will seek to soak through the skin, massaging its way in. It will seek the open passages in the skin, the ports of Observation, the eyes, ears, and other senses:

…suppose we were an influence (as we might be), an idea, a thing invulnerable, intangible, without front or back, drifting about like a gas? Armies were like plants, immobile as a whole, firm-rooted, nourished through long stems to the head, we might be a vapour, blowing where we listed. Our kingdoms lay in each man’s mind, as we wanted nothing material to live on, so perhaps we offered nothing material to the killing. It seemed a regular soldier might be helpless without a target. He would own the ground he sat on, and what he could poke his rifle at.

- T.E. Lawrence (of Arabia)

Violence will attempt to poke, cut, and scrape its way through the communal skin. It may be that violence will eventually be resorted to when a community has the power to wage it. It often seems cheaper than compromise and easier than influence. The two are not mutually exclusive. Violence can open the holes that influence needs to reach the mechanisms of a human community. Influence can make the breaking, killing, and maiming of violence easier. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg for the profit that can be made from getting under someone’s skin.