The Committee of Public Safety

Truth in Democracy

It is with great amusement that I observe the “international community” bend over backwards to support the “democratically elected” president of Honduras, who was overthrown and packed into exile by a Honduran military operating vaguely under the aegis of the Honduran Supreme Court. This shows the tragedy of elevating the means, democracy, over the end, liberty. This, once again, raises the crucial distinction between a republic and a democracy.

Democracy is based on the principle that an effective majority can determine everything about a society. Vox populi, vox dei. A republic is based on the principle that concentrations of power have to be avoided in order to preserve liberty for all or part of a population. Democracy is a weighing. A republic is a balancing. In a democracy, some selected degree of control is given to the people because it’s the people’s right. In a republic, some selected degree of control is given through various sundry paths because the people hopefully provide a check on the elites of their polity, preserving space for liberty. It is the series of balances, power being made to counter power and ambition being made to check ambition, that define a republic. If giving people none of the power would maintain liberty, that would be an acceptable republican solution. If giving people all of the power would maintain liberty, that would be an acceptable republican solution. It is the maintenance of liberty, not the expression of the will of a majority, that is the overall goal of a republic.

The Peisistratos playbook has been to use democracy, the means, to undermine liberty, the end. You get support from the poorest against the elites and, using the numerical and moral superiority of commanding an effective majority of the people, you gain enough power to overturn the fundamental law of a political community. This opens the road to tyranny. However it’s a special type of tyranny. It’s tyranny legitimized by the magical invocation of democracy. The clause “democratically elected” attached to any petty tyrant is an instant red flag that something is terribly wrong. Even the original form of democracy instituted by Cliesthenes in Athens was not called demokratia. It was called isonomia (“equality vis à vis law”, iso=equality; nomos=law). Equal rights was the refrain, not equal suffrage. It may even be that sortition, rule by the lot, also used in places by the Athenian democracy, is a better mechanism than majority rule to ensure liberty. Republics like Venice used a mixture of sortition and election quite successfully.

Democracy is not an ideal to uphold. It is an evil to be tolerated because other means have greater toxicity for liberty.

A victim of Twitter War

Three levels of power proposed by RAND:

…(1) resources or capabilities, or power-in-being; (2) how that power is converted…; (3) and power in outcomes, or [who] prevails in particular circumstances…[C]apabilities—demographic, economic, technological, and the like—only become manifest through a process of conversion. [Politics needs] to convert material resources into more usable instruments, such as combat proficiency. In the end, however, what policymakers care most about is not power as capability or power-in-being as converted through national ethos, politics, and social cohesion. They care about power in outcomes. That third level is by far the most elusive, for it is contingent and relative. It depends on power for what, and against whom.

This suggests three stages in the life cycle of power:

1. Potential Power: power that has not been used to pursue desire.
2. Applied Power: power in the process of being used to pursue desire.
3. Realized Power: effect of the use of power on the pursuit of desire.

Thus there are three zones of power in space:

1. Zone of Potential: where power is unconsumed in pursuit of desire.
2. Zone of Application: where power is being consumed in pursuit of desire.
3. Zone of Realization: where the use of power in pursuit of desire produces its effects.

Power cycles through the stages of power in time and the zones of power in space. The point of power is to move through the cycle from potential to application to realization. Successful realization of the use of power constitutes success while failure to realize the use of power is failure. This process parallels the adaption cycle of the OODA loop. The OODA loop passes through a zone of potential in orientation and decision, a zone of application in action, and a zone of realization in observation.

War is a strategy intended to make the enemy conform to our desires when doing so is contrary to what they’d do if they possessed both the power to resist us and sufficient knowledge about our true desires. As a strategy, war is an instrument of politics and the main preoccupation of politics is power. Therefore, the main preoccupation of war is power. To paraphrase J.C. Wylie:

The primary aim of the strategist in the conduct of war is some selected degree of [power over] the enemy for the strategist’s own purpose; this is achieved by [power over] the pattern of war; and this [power over] the pattern of war is [obtained through] manipulation of the center of gravity of war to the advantage of the strategist and the disadvantage of the opponent.

The successful strategist is the one who [has power over] the nature and the placement and the timing and the weight of the centers of gravity of war, and who exploits the resulting [power over] the pattern of war toward his own ends.

This power follows a few working principles:

1. Power is exercised in several dimensions of power such as land, water, air, space, society, and cyberspace.
2. Each dimension of power is both a target of power and a medium of power. A medium of power allows power to be projected through it on to a target of power.
3. Each dimension of power has two characteristics: resistance, how well it acts as a medium of power, and persistence, how well some selected degree of power can be maintained over a target of power.
4. While a dimension of power that offers little resistance is a good medium of power, the same lack of resistance gives them a lack of persistence. Thus they function better as a medium for power than as a target for power.
5. Power is accumulated faster through power over a dimension of power characterized by low resistance than a dimension of power characterized by high persistence.

There are three levels of power over a dimension of power:

1. Sufficient power to collect knowledge within a dimension of power (read).
2. Sufficient power to generate change within a dimension of power (write).
3. Sufficient power to exercise absolutely power over a dimension of power (execute).

There are six sub-levels of power, three negative and three positive. The negative (and defensive) sub-levels are:

1. Sufficient power to prevent others from collecting knowledge within a dimension of power.
2. Sufficient power to prevent others from generating change within a dimension of power.
3. Sufficient power to prevent others from gaining absolute power over a dimension of power.

The positive (and offensive) sub-levels are:

1. Sufficient power to collect knowledge about others within a dimension of power.
2. Sufficient power to generate change in others within a dimension of power.
3. Sufficient power to exercise absolute power over others within a dimension of power.

Example: Twitter War. Millions of people got twitter-painted over events in Iran. This is the zone of potential. In the zone of potential things seemed great. People turned their icons green and RT’d many a tweet emanating from Iran. This passed the war into the zone of application. Noise increased due to confused Iranians, mullah disinformation, well-meaning but clueless Westerners, and Iran’s advanced surveillance architecture. Much information passed out of and into Iran. The end result once we reached the zone of realization? Before Iran, Twitter was a way to get millions of nerds excited about a topic to no great end. After Iran, Twitter was a way to get millions of nerds excited about a topic to no great end.

The mullahs and IRG may have been dazed by the reaction of the people just before and just after the election, but they are professionals. Many of the core cadres have extensive revolutionary, subversive, or combat experience. The opposition is primarily composed of hippies who’s appeal and identification with the West is that they are interested in this life. The regime is backed by hardened fanatics who are often, among the rank and file, more interested in the next life. Khamenei, in the words of Zenpundit, is a political valet interested in this life. He is interested in concrete power. The opposition would only ever triumph if they attracted government elements who could present a sufficient physical counter-force to Khamenei’s forces. As of yet, that has not happened. Twitter War would have to…

• Trigger internal forces to side with the opposition.

Or.

• Trigger external forces to intervene on the side of the opposition.

…in order to actually reach the zone of realization with any impact. It is only in that zone that the dream of Iranian regime change can be effected. Twitter is a dimension of power characterized by low resistance and low persistence. It is a target of power primarily because it’s a medium of power through which a war of influence could be waged. It is not the goal. Control of Twitter does not bring you into the zone of realization. Twitter is only a medium of power, a zone of application. The target of power, the zone of realization, is any force sufficient to bring kinetic power to bear on the regime. That didn’t happen because the medium was mistaken for the target. Twitter, a subset of cyberspace, like the sea and the air and space, is not a medium in which power persists. It’s a medium through which power passes through on the way to the target of that power. It is the road to realization, not the destination of realization. At this point, it’s role as a medium seems deficient. Airpower, sea power, and ultimately land power seem to be better bets for shaping the regime’s actions. Broader social power may also contribute in the long run. At this point, Twitter power ain’t there yet.

Strategy

Strategy is the reconciliation of cultural desire with political power. That’s the inward reconciliation. Strategy is also the reconciliation of cultural desire and political power with the external environment. That’s the outward reconciliation.

The first law of good strategy is easy: match the quality and quantity of desire with the quality and quantity of power. As Alexander Hamilton remarks in Federalist 31:

[There are fundamental] maxims in ethics and politics…the means ought to be proportioned to the end; that every power ought to be commensurate with its object; that there ought to be no limitation of a power destined to effect a purpose, which is itself incapable of limitation.

Extremes demonstrate this point further:

• You don’t use an thermonuclear bomb to scratch that itch you can’t reach.
• You don’t use a back scratcher to conquer the world.

It’s possible that you might develop the world’s smallest thermonuclear weapon to scratch that itch. It’s even possible that you might build the back scratcher to end all back scratchers and win the Sovereignty of the World. The principle is the same: “the means ought to be proportioned to the end” while “every power ought to be commensurate with its object”. The quality/quantity of desire should fit the quality/quantity of the power available to pursue that desire. In the case of the Bomb, the Itch, the Back Scratcher, and Global Domination, the dichotomy between ends and means is easily demonstrated. Unfortunately, most strategic problems aren’t characterized by this clarifying extremism.

The proposition that the quality/quantity of desire should match the quality/quantity of power is an ideal. Desire and power are diametrically opposed. Desire reaches towards the edge of infinity while power is always finite. Desire takes flight only to have power pull it back to earth. Power tends to dissipate while desire tends to intensify. Restraining the expansive impulse of desire while expanding the easily exhausted force of power is difficult. It’s cats and dogs living together.

Defining the quality and quantity of power and desire is also difficult. Quality is always a fuzzy concept. The only test of quality is subjecting it to the trial of usage. Quantity is more exact but also prone to nebulousness. The boundaries keep shifting. This means that most strategic formulation is pounding the proverbial square peg into a round hole. Connecting all the dots, inasmuch as the dots aren’t a sort of Rorschach test, is done in the dark by feel. Power can be mistaken for desire while desire can be mistaken for power. It’s much like sexing a lizard: only another lizard can tell if a lizard has that special quality that makes it a mate or rival.

Strategy is ever present. Even the absence of strategy, whether triggered by some Taoist mindset or simple lack of imagination, is a strategy. Most strategy is the aggregation of several loosely connected cultural desires, political power, and other stray threads. Sometimes the strategy appears cohesive. Sometimes it appears to be disjointed. Most of the time, however, even if it is several flows, it all flows in one direction. A strategic rivulet may fork off here and there but situational gravity pulls it back to the fold. Strategic bandwidth is narrow and that tends to compress it down to a few lines of approach. The mortal human brain can’t store an infinite range of strategic choices.

It is proverbial that every problem looks like a nail if you only have a hammer. Indeed, the nail-hammer axis is a near perfect example of strategic reconciliation. What better way is there to drive a nail than a hammer? A nail gun. But not everyone has a nail gun. Sometimes they only have a screw driver. It’s not futile to try and drive a nail with a screwdriver. However, you have to be very persistent. Reconciling a screwdriver and its twisting aspirations with the nail and its up-and-down solution set is a difficult problem. No solution will be perfect. But ofttimes you find yourself needing a strategy that reconciles the screwdriver with the nail. Life is not always fair. Thus the need for strategy.

Race to the Sea

Strategy is a Race to the Sea.

The Race to the Sea in 1914 pitted Britain, France, and little Belgium against the onslaught of the Hun. The Hun attempted to seize the coast of the English Channel in order to cut the French off from the British, something they achieved in a later act of Hunnish aggression in 1940. It started in the middle of the line. The Germans would advance and the Allies would block them. The Germans would attempt to flank the Allies and get blocked again. This pattern continued until both sides had reached the coast of the English Channel and could proceed no further. The result was stalemate and four years of incremental steps to one up the other side. In the process European civilization suffered a death blow from which it never recovered and millions died. The ancien regime was swept away in a sea of blood and discontent. Many fine fashions like classic French uniforms of red and blue and the Huns pointed helmets retreated to the realm of motorcycle gangs and reenactors.

The logic of strategic formation follows the logic of the Race to the Sea. You’re always probing for the weak spot in the opponent standing between you and the object of your desire. You will hit the weak spot. If you’re blocked due to it not being as weak as it looked, you probe for another spot or hit the same spot again. But, as Clausewitz maintained, action on the enemy is action on a living mass; the enemy gets a vote. So they’re constantly looking for weakness as well. As Clausewitz says in Book I of On War:

War is nothing but a duel on a large scale. Countless duels go to make up war, but a picture of the whole can be formed by imagining a pair of wrestlers. Each tries through physical force to compel the other to do his will; his immediate aim is to throw his opponent in order to make him incapable of further resistance.

This constant non-linear shifting of force and counter-force moves up and down the scale of power and desire in an attempt to find the right mix:

Systems in Conflict

Strategy is an ongoing attempt to reconcile cultural desire, political power, and outside stimuli into a pattern that will yield RADM Wylie’s “some selected degree of control”:

The primary aim of the strategist in the conduct of war is some selected degree of control of the enemy for the strategist’s own purpose; this is achieved by control of the pattern of war; and this control of the pattern of war is had by manipulation of the center of gravity of war to the advantage of the strategist and the disadvantage of the opponent.

The successful strategist is the one who controls the nature and the placement and the timing and the weight of the centers of gravity of war, and who exploits the resulting control of the pattern of war toward his own ends.

A point along the spectrum of power where you have blocked the enemy from finding a strategic advantage is a selected degree of control along that wavelength of the spectrum of power. A point on the enemy’s spectrum of power where you have found advantage over the enemy is a selected degree of control over along their wavelength of the spectrum of power. An ideal strategy would yield a selected degree of control along both your spectrum of power and the enemy’s spectrum of power. However, to strategize is to choose. You must decide where, given finite power, you concentrate your forces for defense and offense along the spectrum of power. Frederick the Great observed that, “he who defends everything defends nothing”. The obverse is also true: he who attacks everything attacks nothing.

Zenpundit posted on an ongoing debate he and Cheryl Rofer of WhirledView are having on the subject of Rofer’s advocacy of a drawdown in nuclear weapons with the goal of complete abolition of nuclear weapons sometime in the future. Zen has argued that the abolition of nuclear weapons would bring back the era of Great Power war that abruptly came to an end in 1945 with Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Rofer counters that, contrary to the world we had in 1913 or 1938, we have a more mature international community that has moved beyond politics where power is inherited and international relations that turn on family relationships. This reminds me of an exchange between the characters Captain Jean-Luc Picard, from the 24th century, and Lily Sloane, from the mid-21st century, in the movie Star Trek: First Contact:

Captain Jean-Luc Picard: None of them understand The Borg as I do! No one does. No one can.
Lily Sloane: What is that supposed to mean?
Captain Jean-Luc Picard: Six years ago, they assimilated me into their collective. I had their cybernetic devices implanted throughout my body. I was linked to the hive mind. Every trace of individuality erased. I was one of them. So, you can imagine, my dear, that I have a somewhat unique perspective on The Borg and I know how to fight them. Now, if you will excuse me, I have work to do.
Lily Sloane: I am such an idiot. It’s so simple. The Borg hurt you, and now you’re going to hurt them back.
Captain Jean-Luc Picard: In my century, we don’t succumb to revenge. We have a more evolved sensibility.
Lily Sloane: Bullshit! I saw the look on your face when you shot those Borg on the holodeck. You were almost enjoying it!
Captain Jean-Luc Picard: How dare you!
Lily Sloane: Oh, come on, Captain! You’re not the first man to get a thrill from murdering someone! I see it all the time!
Captain Jean-Luc Picard: GET OUT!
Lily Sloane: Or what?! You’ll kill me?! Like you killed Ensign Lynch?!
Captain Jean-Luc Picard: There was no way to save him.
Lily Sloane: You didn’t even try! Where was your evolved sensibility then?!
Captain Jean-Luc Picard: I don’t have time for this!
Lily Sloane: Oh, hey! I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to interrupt your little quest. Captain Ahab has to hunt his whale. . .
Captain Jean-Luc Picard: What?
Lily Sloane: You do have books in the 24th century. . .?
Captain Jean-Luc Picard: This is not about revenge. . .
Lily Sloane: Liar!

Zen argues that:

Human nature does not change. I agree that democracies are far less inclined, on average to fight one another than are authoritarian states but this average could easily be a product of modern democracy being a rarefied commodity until the last twenty years. We still have many brutal tyrannies on planet Earth and democracies are not incapable of aggression, error or hubris. Athens embarked upon the expedition to Syracuse, Republican Rome was more ferociously expansionistic than its later Emperors and the U.S. went through a Manifest Destiny phase.

The logic of disarmament runs counter to the logic of strategy. Strategy seeks to pit strength against  weakness. If that isn’t available, it seeks to pit strength against strength. The least palatable option is to pit weakness against strength. A tie between two opposing wavelengths of equal strength on two opposing spectra of power is better than nothing. In the case of the most extreme end of the spectrum of power, annihilation, there is currently a tie between the nuclear armed Great Powers. That section of the spectrum has been taken off the table. To reopen the annihilation wavelengths will merely tempt others to seek advantage where the bravely virtuous have renounced their warheads and beat them into flower pots.

An “evolved sensibility” will not save you where sensibility is not backed by effective counter force. Evolved sensibility is merely the glove hiding the iron fist. Conflict, as Clausewitz explained, is a trial of moral power through the medium of physical power. Morality can only constrain where the correlation of forces is favorable. If the correlation of forces shift, every thing becomes a repeat of the Race to the Sea. As Zen argues:

A world that formally abolishes nuclear weapons, or reduces them to the point where major war appears to be a “survivable” risk even if they are used, creates incentives for states to wage war where previously the fear of nuclear escalation made statesmen pull back from the brink. Moreover, I do not think we will return to exactly the world of 1913 or 1944. History never repeats itself quite so neatly. No, I think we will see the dystopian worst of both worlds – increasing “bottom-up” chaos of 4GW insurgency ( which is driven by more factors than just the nuclear age) coexisting with a renewed interest of states in pursuing interstate warfare at the top.

Strategy is fundamentally as much about the denial of advantage as it is about the achievement of advantage. That is the reason for neutralizing the wavelengths of nuclear weaponry: to deny those wavelengths to the enemy. That is the reason for mastering COIN: the denial of insurgency as an option for opponents of the United States to run the Vietnam play. Narrowing available wavelenghts on the spectrum of power is better than widening it.

It’s simple prudence.

The End of Miss Jane McCrea

The death of Neda Agha Soltan reminds me of the death of Jane McCrea. Both serve as a further reminder that it’s not the wild randomness of events that necessarily shapes history but the wild randomness of human reaction to events that shapes history. Death occurs all the time but the right death occurs only rarely. Jane McCrea and Neda Soltan were both bystanders to conflict. Both were in the wrong place at the wrong time. They were not necessarily protagonists in the grander sweep of history. However, even if they weren’t looking for history, history came looking for them. Martyrdom follows death, sometimes with a lag time of hours, weeks, months, years, and even centuries. Death is tragedy. Martyrdom is exploitation. One is a product of fate. One is a product of design.

Strategy is primarily a reconciliation of cultural desire with political power. However, it’s also the reconciliation of cultural desire and political power with the external environment. The expression of the outside environment usually comes as a rain of events. The classical OODA loop of John Boyd is a model of the process of how individual and social organism’s react to stimulus. Observation is made, the observation is oriented, the orientation is decided upon, and action is taken. A useful death will feed observation but it is orientation, decision, and action that turn that death into martyrdom. When cultural desire, political power, and a timely atrocity intersect, you have the raw material of strategic opportunity and strategic danger. Whether such a moment becomes opportunity or plunges you into danger is a matter of the strategic aggregator on the spot reconciling the three inputs of power, desire, and event.

Failure to Aggregate

Jane McCrea was engaged to a Loyalist in the American Revolution. Jane McCrea was a Loyalist. Yet her death at the hands of Indian allies of the British led to a mobilization of American morale, not Loyalist morale. The strategic aggregator on her side, General John “Gentleman Johnny” Burgoyne, failed to ameliorate the situation. He was advised that punishing the Indians responsible would cause all of his Indian allies to abandon his army, leaving it high and dry in the middle of the American backwoods. Burgoyne refrained and suffered a massive setback. The strategic aggregators on the American side were not. Word of Jane McCrea’s death spread like wildfire. The individual circumstances of Jane McCrea’s life and death were of little relevance. What mattered was that a young white woman had been cruelly slaughtered by savages who were, incidentally, allies of the murderous British. Every white American in the vicinity of upstate New York looked at their own daughters, grabbed their muskets, and marched. The forests around Burgoyne became infested with enraged Americans who began slaughtering stray British and Hessian soldiers. Gentleman Johnny, a playwright by trade and a jolly chap, found himself in the middle of a bad melodrama with himself cast as the evil antagonist.

Crap rolled downhill for Burgoyne from that point on, culminating in his defeat at Saratoga. Saratoga was then woven into the master tapestry of the Godfather of American Independence, the ruthless master manipulator Charles Gravier, comte de Vergennes, foreign minister of His Most Christian Majesty the King of France. Vergennes wanted to draw the British into a quagmire in order to reverse Britain’s lopsided victory in the Seven Years’ War. He was only waiting for the Americans to demonstrate enough capacity to provide the quagmire he required. Jane McCrae’s martyrdom handed that opportunity to Vergennes.

Martyrdom is a great source of exploitable strategic matter, if someone chooses to seize it. Whether Ms. Soltan will find her strategic aggregator is an open question.

Many Rhodes

Blood thought he knew the native mind;
He said you must be firm, but kind.
A mutiny resulted.
I shall never forget the way
That Blood stood upon this awful day
Preserved us all from death.
He stood upon a little mound
Cast his lethargic eyes around
,And said beneath his breath:
‘Whatever happens, we have got
The Maxim Gun, and they have not.’

- Hiliare Belloc

One hundred years ago the world was being carved up by the nations of the West. Much of this conquest was accomplished on the cheap by obscure men following obscure orders in obscure corners of the globe. Technological prowess let small groups of white men easily subdue the spear wielding tribesman and the obsolescent feudal levies of more ancient civilizations. Much of the “New Imperialism” happened because it was so easy. Inertia and a miserly effort could gain you as large an empire as all the frenetic efforts of the conquistadors of history combined were able to achieve.

Then there was a change. The rest of the world gained freedom from imperialism in a cascading wave following the conclusion of World War II. There were many reasons for this. The West, impressed by the impact its weapons and technology had on the natives, decided it would be profitable to use those same weapons and technology on each other not once but twice in twenty years. This left them unwilling to pay the price of lordship and they abandoned their colonies one by one. The United States, conditioned to an imperialism of indirect rule in its own corner of the world, discouraged and in some cases actively fought its own allies over their empires. But a crucial contributor to the creation and maintenance of the liberty of nations comes from the Soviet package of liberty. That the package became a package of liberty was somewhat of an accident, an unintended consequence of the USSR’s own brand of imperialism.

The USSR was proficient in mass producing large numbers of cheap weapons. In order to further the Communist revolution and their own imperial sphere of influence, they exported millions of weapons to the colonial world. This gave incentive to casualty averse colonial powers to hasten their exit and let the rebels outgun any potential local communist resistance in order to seize power. However, in the end, the weapons spread out of the hands of reliable cadres, undermining the imperial efforts of the USSR and hoisting it on its own petard. The USSR crumbled into the dustbin of history. The remnants were left with massive surpluses of weapons and little more than the capacity to manufacture more. The result was a flood of weapons into the developing world and a further arming of the global populace.

The AK-47 and its variants are based on a stolen German design and reduced to a simple rugged weapon that could be repaired by any village blacksmith anywhere in the world and turn any peasant into a praying and spraying Rambo. The RPG-7 is also based on a German design and provides simple and reliable firepower. Both are amenable to simple tactics and simple training. In contrast, Western weapons were often more mechanically complex and assume greater tactical proficiency on the part of its users than can easily be achieved. My brother spent a great deal of time in remote villages in Nicaragua. A former Sandinista he met told the story of how they would wait for US parachute drops, pick off the contras waiting for it, seize the supplies, and discard the flaky M-16s, which they had found to be unsuited to their needs.  Their beloved AK-47s, on the other hand, could fire to the point the barrel started to glow red and melt. Add in a RPG for firepower and you have enough firepower to cause a real ruckus.

Throw in the occasional PK machine gun and you have the Soviet package of liberty. That is liberty for a nation, which means liberty for a local elite, not liberty as in personal liberty. One justification for the Peloponnesian War for Sparta was to “free the Greeks”. This meant freedom from interference from other poleis in a polis’s affairs. More exactly it meant the freedom of local oligarchs from Athenian imposition of tribute and democracy. This is the sort of freedom many local elites sought from their European colonial masters: the freedom to rule and oppress their own people free of meddling from far off white masters.

The Soviet package of liberty helps ensure local oligarchic freedom by denying easy interventions to the West. Intervention by outsiders is likely to trigger resistance by local gunmen that is sufficient enough to cause political headaches back home. Western militaries are more powerful and more proficient but operate under a different cultural, political, and strategic regime. They have less incentive to kill recalcitrant locals than local gunmen.

As a strategy, weapon exports can make a great deal of sense if you’re a spoiler. As a spoiler, you don’t have enough power for hegemonic domination but you do have enough power to frustrate the hegemon’s initiatives. In the case of weapons exports, through the ubiquitous distribution of weapons you can create heavily armed hedgehogs. You can make it difficult for a hegemonic power to intervene or expand itself by making individual states a cause of hegemonic indigestion and making clumps of individual states a cause of hegemonic diarrhea. If, as in the case of the USSR, your weapons are easily duplicated, you will soon have other states replicating your weapons, selling the results, and making the problem worse. This spreads spoilage and counters the hegemon. Hedgehogs may not direct further your own power and you may eventually have to deal with them yourself but the proliferating effort serves to deny easy increases in power to dominant powers. You create a heavily armed world that requires each corner of the globe to be bloodily cleared and patrolled to keep them from having weapons leak back in.

This may accelerate the decline of a hegemon by making them bleed from a thousand paper cuts since they are constantly putting out fires in distant corners of their domain. While they are dispersed, you are focused. You get concentration of force. They get fatally divided. This creates opportunities for the spoiler.

How do you measure national power? A RAND Corporation report entitled Measuring National Power discusses how to do that. Extracts:

On how gauging the real power of the United States is important:

[T]he concept of power is more important than ever and also more debated. How to measure the power of the United States is fundamental to the major debates over American foreign policy. If, as the globe’s unipolar power, the United States has power beyond precedent, then its foreign policy problem is simplified, because friends and allies will have to follow it whether they like it or not and would-be adversaries will be cowed by the prospect of that power.

If, on the other hand, that power is less than sometimes assumed or less usable than hoped, the United States may face the prospect that erstwhile allies and friends will, almost as a law of physics, want to see it taken down a peg. They will, if not balance against it, then at least sit on the fence…They will be inclined to view the United States’ travails with a certain Schadenfreude, happy to see its dominant power reduced to a more normal size but prepared to stand with the United States if it were in serious trouble.

On converting power into desired ends:

State power can be conceived at three levels: (1) resources or capabilities, or power-in-being; (2) how that power is converted through national processes; (3) and power in outcomes, or which state prevails in particular circumstances. The starting point for thinking about—and developing metrics for—national power is to view states as “capability containers.” Yet those capabilities—demographic, economic, technological, and the like—only become manifest through a process of conversion. States need to convert material resources into more usable instruments, such as combat proficiency. In the end, however, what policymakers care most about is not power as capability or power-in-being as converted through national ethos, politics, and social cohesion. They care about power in outcomes. That third level is by far the most elusive, for it is contingent and relative. It depends on power for what, and against whom.

On the changing state system and the rise of non-state actors:

The most obvious change is that states now have more competitors, named by what they are not—non-state actors (NSAs). They range from terrorists and drug traffickers to advocacy groups, think tanks, and private corporations. Those groups, and the transnational forces they create, then become the framework within which state power must be exercised. Sometimes, as with World Bank prescriptions for poorer nations, the exercise of these transnational forces is quite direct and raises questions about the differential vulnerability of states to those forces. Other transnational forces are values; they may be less easily manipulated by any actor but also may have differential impact on states: for example, a new “wave of democracy” could be important for Syria but would not have much effect on Denmark.

On the minefield created by non-state actors:

Looking at cases is an indirect way to understand softer forms of power…The recent treaty banning land mines was a remarkable confluence of NSAs acting in concert with medium-sized powers. The NSAs controlled the agenda, setting both the terms of and the deadline for a treaty. Another indirect way to measure the influence of NSAs is by looking at trends, of which all six seem to contribute to redistributing power away from states and toward NSAs:

• Access to information. The government monopoly eroded.
• Speed of reaction. Markets react in seconds, but governments are much slower, so the information technology (IT) revolution inevitably moved action away from governments toward nimbler organizations.
• New voices. The process created new channels of information and new, credible voices. The loudest voice, that of government, became less dominant.
• Cheaper consultation. Because of nearly unlimited bandwidth, communication costs began to approach zero. Coordinating large and physically separated groups became much cheaper.
• Rapid change. Governments, by nature, are more likely to sustain the status quo than drive change, and so NSAs are often the drivers by default.
• Changed boundaries in time and space. IT again is driving the change, just as the invention of the printing press undermined the church’s role as broker between people and their God.

On the spectrum of power and hard and soft power:

The traditional distinction between hard power and soft power is not entirely persuasive. For one thing, economic power might be thought of by the United States as softer than military alternatives but still be regarded as hard by the recipient. More important, the language tends to regard soft power as subordinate and second-best, whereas in fact policymakers would prefer to achieve their desired outcomes with soft power. If state power ranges from coercion to bribery to persuasion, then the last is the most cost effective; it means convincing others that your aim is also theirs. Imagine, instead, a continuum ranging from ideal power (persuasion) to worst-case power (military).

On measuring soft power:

Measuring softer forms of power is no mean feat, though some metrics are available—for instance, university attendance by foreigners, or content analysis of media. One direct way of making comparisons across states might be to ask the question: Where would you live if not in your own country?

On how the United States’s fate is tied to the vigor of network televison:

According to one provocative argument, the soft power of the United States peaked
after the fall of the Soviet Union when, in a quite real way, “entertainment—the power of ideas as spread by the media—finished the job of containment.” Now, however, the backlash…is not just a reaction to U.S. policies. To those for whom life centers on faith, America appears immodest and materialistic. It is not easy for the United States to do much about that backlash.

On the downsides of being a “moral superpower”:

When, moreover, the United States acts like a “normal” power, it breaks the consensus on which soft power depends. For the unipolar power to act not only unilaterally but also as a normal power—that is, only in its own interest—is, by definition, to undermine the basis of the consensual hegemony granted to it by others who expect it to look after their interests as well. Now, the “other superpower” is not a state but global public opinion..

There’s two parallel narratives in a recent talk at Duke’s American Grand Strategy Program given by John Lewis Gaddis. One is a narrative about teaching Grand Strategy. The other was on America’s strategic deficit. Here’s some extracts from that:

On past grand strategy:

[People would have known about grand strategy], I think, during the fifty years of insecurity that separated the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December, 1941, from the final collapse of the Soviet Union in December, 1991. We had a grand strategy for fighting World War II already in place at the time of Pearl Harbor – go after Germany first – and with adjustments we stuck to it throughout that conflict. We had, in containment, a grand strategy for fighting the Cold War worked out within the first five years of that conflict – some would say earlier. With adjustments, we held on to that strategy for the next four decades, despite the confusions generated by our domestic politics, our relations with allies, and at least one grievous miscalculation of fundamental
interests, which was the war in Vietnam.  We maintained purpose and direction during those dangerous years because we had to. For as Dr. Samuel Johnson once put it:  “Depend on it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.”

On the strategic deficit:

[M]aybe historians of some distant future will conclude that the United States has been equally adept at framing and sustaining grand strategies during the two decades that have passed since the Cold War ended. Revisionist ingenuity is always surprising.  But I have difficulty right now seeing how that argument is going to be made.  Consider the record.

The administration of George H. W. Bush, facing the most favorable prospects ever for the use of American power in the international arena, spoke grandly of building a “new world order” but then did little to bring it about, as if the coining of a phrase alone would construct the reality.  The Clinton administration spoke of “enlargement” and “engagement,” without specifying what was to be “enlarged” or who was to be “engaged.”  It was a bad sign when President Clinton assured an aide in 1994 that Roosevelt and Truman had gotten along fine without grand strategies. They’d just made it up as they went along, and he didn’t see why he couldn’t do the same.

The morning of September 11, 2001, dispelled any lingering illusions on that score, just as abruptly as the attack on Pearl Harbor ended a similar period of complacency on another morning almost six decades earlier.  But would anybody claim, seven and a half years later, that the strategy George W. Bush devised compares favorably with the ones Roosevelt and Truman embraced during World War II and the early Cold War?

Bush’s strategy succeeded in one important respect:  there were no further attacks on American soil, and for that he will eventually get the credit he deserves.  The surge in Iraq will also be remembered as a Bush success, but one necessitated by his greatest failure, which was not knowing what to do with Iraq once he was in charge of it.  Beyond that, the record is disappointing, especially when compared with the seven and a half years after Pearl Harbor, during which the Roosevelt and Truman strategies vanquished two formidable adversaries and were containing a third, while leaving the United States in a far stronger position at home and abroad than it had been in when external dangers first shook it out of its isolationism.

So it seems fair, looking back on the years since the Cold War ended, to apply the Ronald Reagan test:  are we better off in 2009 than we were in 1989? I don’t think so. And why didn’t Dr. Johnson’s great principle – that danger is a school for strategy – work as well following 9/11 as it did after Pearl Harbor?  That’s a really good question.

You’ve heard a lot in recent years about the democratic deficit, and even more now about the financial deficit and the common sense deficit that accompanied it.  What I’m suggesting is that there’s a grand strategic deficit, that it’s been developing over the past two decades, and that its roots extend even further back than that.

On “theateritis”:

Some of you may remember how often General George C. Marshall, arguably the greatest of modern American grand strategists, complained about what he called “theateritis” – the tendency of military commanders to look only at the needs of their own theater of operation, and not at the requirements of fighting the war as a whole.  The best illustration of this was a Herblock cartoon from the Korean War.  It showed General Douglas MacArthur – often a cause of General Marshall’s anxieties – planning military operations on a square globe, with only the Asian mainland visible at the top of it.  A nervous Washington official is reminding him:  “We’ve been using more of a roundish one here lately, sir.”…Washington was indeed, at the time, using more of a roundish one, which had something to do with why the Korean War did not become the Third World War.

On foreign grand strategic prowess:

[T]he Russians have shown us what a real grand strategy looks like…They waited patiently until a young American-educated democracy enthusiast who happened to be the president of a prospective member state went a bit too far, whereupon they invaded his country, occupied enough of it to show how easily they could control all of it, and then withdrew from most of it.  They chose a country that had not yet joined NATO, showing that they had the capacity to defy the alliance without actually having to do so.  They quickly produced, thereby, a psychological chilling effect on all who sought the further expansion of the alliance, and then added to it an actual physical chill this winter by reminding both the new and old European members of NATO who controls their energy supplies.  It isn’t the United States, which from eastern and central Europe now looks distant and ineffectual, something that cannot be said of Russia.  Which, presumably, was the objective of the strategy the Russians set in motion in the first place last summer.

Mao Zedong used to like to tell his associates that the offshore islands of Quemoy and Matsu were a noose around the neck of the Chinese Nationalists and their American allies, which he could tighten or relax whenever he found it useful.  Nikita Khrushchev had a similar but more graphic saying about Berlin:  it was, he would chuckle, “the testicles of the West.  Every time I want to make the West scream, I squeeze on Berlin.”

Now surely one purpose of a grand strategy is to diminish the possibility of having a noose around your neck tightened, or – well, never mind.  Either alternative would have the effect, as Dr. Johnson would have put it, of concentrating the mind.  But the American strategy of expanding NATO has managed to place the alliance in just that vulnerable position:  the Russians can now tighten, or squeeze, or prod, or poke, or turn on and off the gas, whenever they like.  So is NATO stronger now than it was when this strategy was first set in motion?  I’m not at all sure that it is…

A kind of conceptual “theateritis” can set in, even at the highest levels of government, even over a considerable period of time.  You focus on one big thing, which…has been the undeniably worthy cause of democracy promotion.  But you neglect a few other little things, such as how far the [NATO] expansion process should go, how Russia might respond to it, whether small states
targeted for inclusion will always act wisely, how military strength dissipates as
perimeters to be defended grow larger, how great powers that have become enfeebled can regain their strength, how power can reside in the ability to keep people shivering – which, come to think of it, is the danger that drove the United States, in 1947, to come up with the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan in the first place.  Details?  To be sure.  But devils have been shown to reside within them.

On misleading grand strategic theory:

Do our leaders rely too heavily on theories, even as they too easily brush aside pesky details? I’ve suggested that a good deal of brushing aside took place in the case of NATO expansion, and there was certainly a theory that inspired it:  it was that the advance of democracy, across all cultures and in the face of all difficulties, was irreversible;  and that because democracies don’t fight one another, an acceleration of this advance would enhance the cause of peace.

This theory originated in the academy, but because it emerged as the Cold War
was ending, it gained greater traction within the policy community than would normally have been the case.  It provided an explanation for what had happened that gratified both liberals and neo-conservatives, hence the support it received in the otherwise quite different administrations of Clinton and Bush. It provided assurance, on the basis of the recent past, of what the future was going to bring. It made NATO expansion look easy.

A longer time horizon, however, might have provided a larger perspective. After all, democracy did suffer reversals in Europe after World War I.  It survived for only a few months between the two Russian revolutions of 1917.  It’s never been robust in Latin America, despite the influence of the United States in that part of the world. It was two great democracies – the Union and the Confederacy – that fought one of the bloodiest civil wars of the 19th century.  And, of course, there is the sad short history of Athenian democracy, whose demise Thucydides chronicled, with a view to projecting its lessons as
far into the future as our own day, and even beyond.

How, then, could this belief in an irreversible advance of democracy arise within the academy, where there’s a rigorous insistence on the testing of theories to keep questionable ones from taking hold?  Well, there used to be, back in the days when disciplines exchanged their findings with one another.  These days, however, the academic landscape strikes me as resembling the medieval landscape, and I don’t just mean the architecture.  I’m talking about the existence of castles, each of them equipped with high walls, deep moats, and bristling armaments, the purpose of which appears to be to repel raids from, or even commerce with, the departments just down the street.  Attempts to break through these defenses, I’ve learned on more than one occasion, can
echo the exploits of Don Quixote, who should perhaps become the patron saint of interdisciplinary studies.

So I don’t have much confidence in the ability of universities, as currently
organized, to scrutinize theories critically.  For in too many fields now to question procedures is to challenge identity, and to defend them requires methodological and even ideological uniformity.  The testing of theory that comes from disciplinary diversity is harder to accomplish now than it used to be in the bad old days when so many other forms of diversity did not exist.

On grand strategic autopilots:

Investigators of airplane crashes know that pilots will occasionally fly their
planes, in perfectly good weather, right into the ground.  Why?  Because they’ve punched the wrong coordinates into their computer.  The phenomenon even has an acronym:  CFIT – “controlled flight into terrain.”  “That’s not a mountain,” Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern will assure each other as they watch the one looming ahead through the windshield – in this scenario, they haven’t taken our class and won’t be.  “The autopilot says it can’t be.”

So could it be that one of the sources of our grand strategic deficit – if you agree with me that there is one – resides in an excessive reliance on autopilots?  That’s what theory, when it’s misused, can become:  you try to deduce universal laws governing every single case, regardless of all haphazard influences. Grand strategy, in contrast, demands both reliance on theories and the disposal of them.  Knowing which to do when requires the ability to see all of the parts in relation to the whole:  the vision is not that of a theorist but of a quarterback.  For it’s only if you know where you’re trying to go and what stands in the way that you can make decisions about which theories to respect and which to abandon.  And that brings us back, one more time, to the need for generalists.

Grand strategy is…an ecological discipline. It’s about seeing forests and not just trees, about viewing the world as round and not square, about relating all of the means at your disposal to the ends you have in view.  But it’s also, these days, an endangered discipline, for in the absence of sufficiently grave threats to concentrate our minds, there are insufficient incentives to think in these terms.  We ought to be able to reverse this trend without waiting for some new calamity to do it for us: we need not be bound forever by Dr. Johnson’s principle. But that will require rethinking priorities at the places to which we look to train our leaders.  I hope that Duke and Yale can be such places:  that we can make our institutions as safe for generalists as they now are for specialists, that we can return to training grand strategic ecologists.  For the need is great, and the time is nigh.

Two academic programs, one at Yale University and one at Duke University, have the laudable goal of teaching American students grand strategy. Yale’s Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy:

[S]eeks to revive the study and practice of grand strategy by devising methods to teach that subject at the graduate and undergraduate levels, by training future leaders to think about and implement grand strategies in imaginative and effective ways, and by organizing public events that emphasize the importance of grand strategy.

We define ‘grand strategy’ as a comprehensive plan of action, based on the calculated relationship of means to large ends. Never an exact science, grand strategy requires constant reassessment and adjustment. Flexibility is key. Traditionally believed to belong to and best-developed in the politico-military and governmental realms, the concept of grand strategy applies—and ISS believes is essential—to a broad spectrum of human activities, not least those of international institutions, non-governmental organizations, and private businesses and corporations.

The Yale program features such heavyweights as John Lewis Gaddis, Paul Kennedy, Charles Hill, and Walter Russell Mead, and Paul Solman. Duke’s program follows a similar path:

American grand strategy is the collection of plans and policies by which the leadership of the United States mobilizes and deploys the country’s resources and capabilities, both military and non-military, to achieve its national goals. Grand strategy exists in the real world of governing, whether it is carefully formulated and articulated in advance, or whether it evolves ad hoc out of the world-views, predilections, and subjectivities of those who govern. It is a fruitful field for scholars and students to study so that those who govern and those who are governed might have the richest conceptual repertoire with which to construct and evaluate national policies.

[...]

We have distinctive strengths in political science and public policy, including a diversity of experience across the partisan divide, and we complement that with a rich tradition of close collaboration with military and diplomatic history. Through workshops, distinguished lectures, and courses, participants in the Program on American Grand Strategy have the opportunity to interact with leaders in policy and the academy.

[...]

Grand strategy is a quintessentially interdisciplinary concept, approach, and field of study:

• Grand strategy is the art of reconciling ends and means. It involves purposive action – what leaders think and want.
• It operates in peacetime and wartime, incorporating military and non-military tools, and aggregating subsidiary tactics, operations, and policies.
• Grand strategy begins with theory: leaders’ ideas about how the world and what is or ought to be their states’ roles in that world. Yet it is embodied in policy and practice: government action and reaction in response to real (or perceived) threats and opportunities.
• It lends itself to vigorous interpretive academic debates, yet it is so realistic that practitioners can and must contribute for it to be properly understood.

The Director of Duke’s program, Peter Feaver, blogged on teaching grand strategy recently at Foreign Policy (What is grand strategy and why do we need it?):

The study of grand strategy — and arguing about grand strategy, for you cannot study something without arguing about it — is experiencing a renaissance of sorts. Yale has pioneered an extraordinarily popular Grand Strategy Program headed by distinguished historians, John Lewis Gaddis and Paul Kennedy, and distinguished practitioner Charlie Hill. Several graduates of that program have gone on to positions of responsibility in the Clinton, Bush, and now Obama administrations…

I am starting a similar program at Duke and I find it is an excellent way to bridge theory and practice. Grand Strategy begins with theory: leaders’ theories about how the world works and what is or ought to be their states’ roles in that world. Yet it is embodied in policy and practice: government action and reaction in response to real (or perceived) threats and opportunities. Grand strategy may be born in debates at the highest levels of national power, but it lives or dies in the collaborative action of myriad junior officials.

Grand strategy lends itself to vigorous interpretive academic debates, yet it is so realistic that practitioners, current and former, can and must contribute for it to be properly understood. It leads to constructively critical appraisals of leaders: helping students empathize with the leaders even as they critically evaluate their choices.

Grand strategy blends the disciplines of history (what happened and why?), political science (what underlying patterns and causal mechanisms are at work?), public policy (how well did it work and how could it be done better?), and economics (how are national resources produced and protected?). Students are especially drawn to grand strategy because it makes history more relevant, political science more concrete, public policy more broadly contextualized, and economics more security-oriented.

Indeed, the study of grand strategy may require a revolution of sorts in the way that we educate students. That, at least, is the thesis of a talk given by John Gaddis at Duke recently (and available here). He argues, persuasively to my ears, that grand strategy is a useful way of blending academic history, academic political science, and the real-world experience of practitioners. He argues, less persuasively to my ears, that the United States does not do grand strategy well and hasn’t had a functioning one since the end of the Cold War. But he is absolutely correct that we need to do a better job of training the next generation to engage critically in the hard work of designing, implementing, and revising American grand strategy.

The talk by John Lewis Gaddis is an illuminating discussion of grand strategy (read the whole thing). On the problem of establishing grand strategy as a course subject:

When my colleagues Paul Kennedy, Charlie Hill, and I first began talking about
setting up a grand strategy course at Yale in the late 1990s, at least half the people to
whom we tried to explain this thought we were talking about “grant” strategy:  how do
you get the next federal or foundation grant?

On the genesis of the course on grand strategy:

Let me begin with the event that caused us to begin teaching this [grand strategy] class.  The date was September 24, 1998.  A NATO briefing team had invited itself to Yale to make the case for the Clinton administration’s policy of expanding the alliance eastward.  There would be no problem about including the Czechs, the Poles, and the Hungarians, the briefers told us, because so much effort had gone into reorganizing committees in Brussels to make them feel welcome.  The briefing concluded after about half an hour, and questions were called for.

Our colleague Bruce Russett raised his hand and asked whether NATO expansion might not cause difficulties with the Russians, perhaps undermining President Yeltsin’s efforts to democratize the country, perhaps creating an awkward situation for the new or prospective members of the alliance as Russian power revived, perhaps even driving Russia into some new form of cooperation with the Chinese, thereby reversing one of the greatest victories for the West in the Cold War, which was the Sino-Soviet split.  There was a moment of shocked silence.  Then one of the briefers exclaimed, in front of our entire audience:  “Good God!  We’d never thought of that!”

[...]

And as Professors Kennedy, Hill, and I walked out of the briefing that afternoon, shaking our heads at what we’d heard, we agreed that something had to be done.  That was the beginning of the Yale grand strategy seminar.

On what is taught as grand strategy:

So maybe our Yale briefing was not an anomaly.  Perhaps with respect to NATO expansion, Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern really have been in charge.  And if that’s the case, then similar experts may have been designing other aspects of post-Cold War American grand strategy, thereby contributing to the grand strategic deficit I mentioned. But let’s reserve judgment on that unhappy thought for the moment.  Instead, I want to repay the debt my colleagues and I owe to Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern, who without quite realizing what they were doing, contributed so much to getting the Yale grand strategy seminar underway.  It seems only fair now to admit them belatedly to that class, and to review what we might have tried to teach them.

We’d have begun by reminding Roz and Gil – as they’d have asked us to call them – that we we’d not be offering them a public policy course…We’d not be trying to influence what was happening in Washington now or in the foreseeable future.  Instead we’d be building on Henry Kissinger’s observation that “the convictions that leaders have formed before reaching high office are the intellectual capital they will consume as long as they continue in office.”  We’d be trying to enhance the intellectual capital of Roz, Gil, and their fellow students.  This would be a hedge against the day when they’d be running things and we’d dead, or senile, or they’d be too busy to take our phone calls or track our twitters.  We’d have their attention at the moment – at least as much as it’s possible to get the attention of any overcommitted Wi-Fi addicted Yalie – and we’d be taking advantage of it.

Within these limits, we’d conceive of grand strategy very broadly.  My own definition – not shared by my colleagues, for we are argumentative in the classroom – is that grand strategy is the calculated relationship of means to large ends.  It’s about how one uses whatever one has to get to wherever it is one wants to go.  Our knowledge of it derives chiefly from the realm of war and statecraft, because the fighting of wars and the management of states have demanded the calculation of relationships between means and ends for a longer stretch of time than any other documented area of collective human activity.

But grand strategy need not apply only to war and statecraft:  it’s potentially applicable to any endeavor in which means must be deployed in the pursuit of important ends.  That’s why we regularly get papers from our students on the grand strategy of navigating the Yale curriculum, or of surviving a summer internship, or of achieving success in soccer, football, and especially rowing, a sport that particularly attracts the members of our class, probably because of its ancient echoes in Herodotus and Thucydides.  As does, predictably, one other topic of great significance to them, which is the grand strategy of falling in and out of love.

The actual process of teaching:

How, though, would we teach this subject?  We’d explain to Roz and Gil that our course, which begins in the spring, extends over the summer, and concludes in the fall, encompasses three schools:  a school of the classics, a school of surprise, and a school of responsibility.  Let me explain what I mean by each of these, starting with the classics.

There’s a reason why people continue to read them, but hardly anyone ever tells you precisely what it is.  George Kennan, looking backward, came close in 1959 when he wrote that only the study of history “can expose the nature of man as revealed in simpler and more natural conditions, where that which was elemental was less concealed by artificialities.”  Thucydides, looking forward, said much the same thing 24 centuries earlier when he introduced his great history of the Peloponnesian War as “a possession for all time,” meant for those “who desire an exact knowledge of the past as an aid to the understanding of the future, which in the course of human things must resemble if it does not reflect it.”

Roz and Gil would be studying Thucydides and Kennan in the spring semester of our Yale seminar, and a good many other chroniclers and practitioners of grand strategy as well.  They’d include Sun Tzu, Polybius, Machiavelli, Elizabeth I, Philip II, the Founding Fathers, Kant, Metternich, Clausewitz, Lincoln, Bismarck, Salisbury, Wilson, Churchill, the two Roosevelts, Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Kissinger, Isaiah Berlin, and Ronald Reagan – all within thirteen weeks.  Some of our colleagues at Yale find this eclecticism a bit alarming, so we’ve tried to reassure them in a couple of ways.

One has been to suggest that we’re vicariously enlarging our students’ experience, which is what all educators do.  It’s true that babies quickly develop strategies for getting what they want without ever having read Sun Tzu or Clausewitz.  But their parents do, nonetheless, eventually pack them off to school, on the grounds that it would be inefficient for them to go through life making it all up as they go along:  that there’s value in exposing them, in a properly distilled form, to the accumulated wisdom of those who have gone before.  They do so in the spirit of Machiavelli, who reminded his prince that “no greater gift could be made by me than to give you the capacity to be able to understand in a very short time all that I have learned and understood in so many years and with so many hardships and dangers for myself.”

[...]

Roz and Gil would come out of our spring semester, then, steeped – even if superficially – in the classics.  But what are young people supposed to do with a classical education, however compressed it may be, once they’ve got it?  We’ve thought a lot about that question, and have found an answer of sorts in another classical tradition, which is the odyssey.  Thucydides wrote of “experience which is learnt in the school of danger,” and that’s how an odyssey has usually been understood:  it’s a time of testing in which you pit your own strength and cunning against ogres, gorgons, sirens, cyclopic giants, and sometimes really bad weather…

If updated for the opportunities and constraints of our own age, it can certainly be a useful thing for grand strategy students to do.  All of them learn, from reading Clausewitz, that on battlefields “the light of reason is refracted in a manner quite different from that which is normal in academic speculation.”  Most of our students won’t be on military battlefields, but their lives will be filled with other battles in which the light of reason will not be refracted as it was in our classroom.  That’s what we hope to give them a sense of in our summer school of surprise.

An odyssey, we believe, should be something more than an internship, where the only monsters confronted tend to be difficult bosses, recalcitrant copying machines, and boring routines:  if there are ogres or gorgons, they operate on a small scale.  So rather than sending Roz and Gil on one of those assignments, we’d try if at all possible to give them…an adventure that would get them out into the wide surprising world, with the great classical texts still fresh in their mind.

[...]

By the beginning of the fall semester, then, our students Roz and Gil will have arrived back in New Haven, smiling, sun-tanned, and a little shaggy, ready to begin the third part of our course, which is the school of responsibility.  Our objective here is to preview the world in which they’ll work, for we don’t want them doing odysseys all their lives.  That means mastering the contemporary classics:  Fukuyama, Huntington, Zakaria, Kagan, and now Walter Russell Mead, who is co-teaching the class with us this year.  Theirs are the books that have defined the post-Cold War world.  We use them as a framework for what follows, which is the most dreaded portion of our course:  the seven weeks we spend on student policy briefs or, as the military likes to call them, murder boards.

Up to this point, we’ve been nice to our students;  but now this stops, because we don’t want them to get the idea that the world is going to be nice to them.  So we turn ourselves into ogres, requiring the students, in teams of three or four each week, to brief us on one of several broad issues that current and future leaders are going to have to face…

It’s up to the students to decide what policy-makers need to know about these problems, in terms of action that needs to be taken now, what the present administration should try to accomplish before it leaves office, and where the long-term national interest lies.  We require written briefs prepared according to General Marshall’s specifications from World War II:  hence, they’re called “Marshall briefs.”  But the students must also deliver their briefs orally in business attire using Power Point, before their classmates and their professors.  The faculty particularly enjoy this part of the course, because we get to play the president of the United States and his top advisers.  Sometimes, we’re even able to arrange for real or recent top advisers, without warning, to walk in the door.

We simulate as closely as possible the conditions of a real-world briefing, interrupting our students frequently, demanding to know the sources of the information they’re giving us, chewing them out for not having it on hand or presenting it well.  If they start reading their Power Point slides aloud to us, we’ll stop them, or even get up and stalk out of the room.  We haven’t yet taken up Kissinger’s old habit of ripping apart written briefs, wadding them into little balls, and throwing them at the oral briefers, but I have that on my list of things to try this fall.

Our objective is to train our students to handle responsibility, for virtually all of them, sooner than they may realize, will be called upon to brief a boss.  We expect them to compress complexity while conveying it clearly – in short, to generalize, that skill so rarely taught in Yale’s increasingly professionalized, specialized curriculum.  Most of all, though, we’re trying to teach poise under pressure.  We want our students to learn how not to get rattled.  We want them to be able to say, without embarrassment:  “I don’t know, sir (or ma’am), but I’ll get you that information.”

[...]

Our course concludes by relinquishing responsibility to our students.  They elect a president and vice-president of the United States, who in turn appoint a staff, a cabinet, and a press secretary.  On two successive weekends in December, we take over a Yale building, turn it into the White House, and from our secure control room run a crisis simulation exercise in two stages.

The “administration” first has to prepare a national strategy statement on something, but they won’t know what it is until they come in at the beginning of the day.  They have to do this under the scrutiny of the media – Yale Daily News reporters perform that function – while fending off Congressional investigations and defusing diplomatic crises.  Former students from the class play these roles gleefully, using appropriate regional accents and, for the diplomacy, difficult foreign languages.  And of course the president is called out of the Oval Office frequently for ceremonial occasions, such as reading to school children, pardoning Thanksgiving turkeys, or lighting the national Christmas tree:  we have a particular tree outside which we use for this purpose each year.

On the second weekend, a full-blown crisis erupts that requires the administration to put its strategy into operation.  Quite often, under the pressures we create, the students forget that they had a strategy, which is in itself a useful lesson.  In several instances, our scenarios have come unsettlingly close to real events.  Three years ago, for example, our crisis involved a small former republic of the Soviet Union, now an independent state, whose American-educated president was keen to take his country into NATO.  The Russians objected to this, and at a critical moment seized a small portion of the country’s territory.  Our simulated administration responded by deploying the Sixth Fleet into the Black Sea, and having it sail up the Dneister River.  Without checking the water depths.  And Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern weren’t even in the class that year.

On what teaching grand strategy is supposed to accomplish:

So what exactly are we trying to accomplish with this year-long seminar in grand strategy, how does it relate to the larger grand strategic deficit I’ve been describing?  Let me reiterate that we aren’t trying to connect our course in any immediate way with the course of the country.  We’re not sitting by our phones waiting from calls from Washington.  We’re not even regularly checking our Blackberrys.  We don’t expect our students to go right away from running a simulated administration to significant responsibilities within a real one.

We are, however, thinking about long-term leverage:  the possibility that a small but well-placed investment of thought, or effort, or money can – with patience – bring disproportionate benefits over an extended period of time.  I emphasize those words because I don’t want to suggest analogies with the shorter-term leveraged assets that have been in the news recently.

I have in mind, rather, the leverage that comes from educating bright young people who, at the moment, have no clearer idea than we do of what they’ll wind up doing or how they’ll use the instruction we’re providing them.  The only bet we’re making is that some of our students, at some point in the future, will be in a position to do some great things.  Our only assumption is that, when they reach that point, some of them will remember something of what we tried to teach them.

And what was that?  Chiefly, I hope, that it’s risky just to make it all up as you go along.  That it helps to know something about what’s worked and what hasn’t over a period of time that exceeds your own.  That Thucydides was onto something when he wrote that although history doesn’t repeat, it does resemble.  Or, as Mark Twain added, it rhymes.

Hence, it’s useful to know how the Athenian democracy – the world’s first – became an overstretched, brutal, and self-destructive empire.  Or how Rome, which was never a democracy, was able to hold on to its empire so much longer than Athens did.  Or how Philip II and Elizabeth I anticipated a modern management dilemma – whether to concentrate authority or to delegate it – at the time of the Spanish Armada.  Or how Kant and Metternich defined a civil society:  they were closer than you might think.  Or how Napoleon, like Hannibal, overextended his supply lines, and how Kutuzov, like Fabius Maximus Cunctator, was able to exploit that mistake.  Or how the American Founding Fathers – including Lincoln, the nation’s Re-Founder – made so many tough choices that turned out to be right choices.  Or how Churchill, at a critical moment in the spring of 1940, made a few great speeches that began the rescue of western civilization from the evils that had arisen within it.  Knowing these things can give you a conceptual center of gravity.  It can keep you from being swept away by foolish things.

History alone, though, is not enough:  it’s equally important to do theory.  Here the best guide is Clausewitz, who condemned:

those people . . . who “never rise above anecdote” . . . and who would construct all history of individual cases – starting always with the most striking feature, the high point of the event, and digging down only as deep as suits them, never get[ting] down to the general factors that govern the matter.  Consequently, their findings will never be valid for more than a single case. Theory, Clausewitz insisted, “teaches us to recognize the relations that essential elements bear to one another.”  But, he also pointed out, “it would indeed be rash from this to deduce universal laws governing every single case, regardless of all haphazard influences.”

So how can there be a theory that’s not universal?  That allows for haphazard influences while rising above anecdote?  Clausewitz’s answer comes close to what Machiavelli told his prince:

Theory exists so that one need not start afresh each time sorting out the material and plowing through it, but will find it ready to hand and in good order.  It is meant to educate the mind of the future commander, or, more accurately, to guide him in his self-education, [but] not to accompany him to the battlefield;  just as a wise teacher guides and stimulates a young man’s intellectual development, but is careful not to lead him by the hand for the rest of his life.

Or, as Machiavelli himself put it:  “God does not want to do everything.”  And where have you heard this before?  Well, probably from parents, teachers, and even coaches, who sooner or later told you:  “We’ve done all we can for you, kid, now you’re on your own.”

What does that mean, though:  being on your own?  I think it means benefiting as much as you can from what your educators have taught you, but not looking over your shoulder for the rest of your life while you wait for them to whisper the next set of instructions into your ear.  It means being as much a fox as a hedgehog:  you’ve got to combine the knowledge you’ve accumulated of one big thing – the profession you’re about to enter – with the ability to cope with all the little things for which your professional training will not have prepared you.  That’s why, in our Yale course, the schools of the classics and of surprise precede the school of responsibility, for without that sequence, our students might do something irresponsible.  Like, in the words of Clausewitz’s warning, attempting “to deduce universal laws governing every single case, regardless of all haphazard influences.”

UPDATE:

MIT has a course available for download as part of their OpenCourseWare project.

Clan Armstrong

Farewell! my bonny Gilnock Hall
Where on Esk side thou standest stout!
Gif I had lived but seven yeirs mair
I wad a gilt thee round about
John Murdered was at Carlinrigg
And all his gallant companie;
But Scotland’s heart was ne’er sae wae
To see sae mony brave men die.

So goes the ballad of Johnnie Armstrong:

John Armstrong of Gilnockie near Langholm was a famous Scottish border raider (‘reiver‘), infamous plunderer, and cattle ‘lifter’ from the powerful Armstrong family along the lawless Scottish Border…He raided into England when Scotland was in the ascendancy and would raid into Scotland as power shifted.

[...]

[I]n 1530. John Armstrong…was persuaded to attend a meeting under a letter of safe conduct at Caerlanrig with King James V who, unknown to Gilnockie, had the malicious intent to silence the rebellious Borderers. The ruse succeeded as Gilnockie and fifty followers were captured.

The Royal order to hang them was issued and despite several pleas for the King to be lenient in exchange for obedience, it was carried out. Defiant to the last, Gilnockie said these words directly to King James V: “I am but a fool to seek grace at a graceless face, but had I known you would have taken me this day, I would have lived in the Borders despite King Harry and you both.”

Reivers

John Armstrong, my great-great-great grandfather, hailed from the small town of Haltwhistle in northern England, about fifty miles southeast of the Armstrong heartland. John Armstrong was a respectable skilled tradesman. He was well-educated for a member of the middling classes. He was noted for his punctuality, his sense of responsibility, and his professionalism. He was greatly esteemed by his employers and his family.

How did we get from John Armstrong, cattle thief, to John Armstrong, skilled tradesmen?

King James VI & I decreed that the Borders should be renamed ‘the Middle Shires’. In 1605 he established a single commission of ten drawn equally from Scotland and England to bring law and order to the region. Reivers could no longer escape justice by crossing from England to Scotland or vice versa . The rough-and-ready Border Laws were abolished and the folk of the middle shires found they had to obey the law of the land like all other subjects.

In 1603 the King placed George Home, 1st Earl of Dunbar in charge of pacification of the borders. Courts were set up in the towns of the Middle Shires and known reivers were arrested. The more troublesome lower class reivers were executed without trial; known as “Jeddart justice” [Hanging first. Trial second.]. Mass hanging soon became a common occurrence.

In 1607 James felt he could boast that “the Middle Shires” had “become the navel or umbilic of both kingdoms, planted and peopled with civility and riches”. After ten years King James had succeeded; the Middle Shires had been brought under central law and order. By the early 1620s the Borders were so peaceful that the Crown was able to scale down its operations.

Indian Country

Digesting tribesman is a traditional role for civilized societies. In the wild, tribes suffer from an unforgivable sin. As explained by the movie Maverick:

Annabelle Bransford: What’s with you and Indians anyway?
Bret Maverick: Oh nothing, I try to shoot one every day before noon…I figured it was their fault too…for being on our land when we got here.

Since the tribes were squatting on land claimed by but as yet unoccupied by civilization, the first thing civilization had to do is get them off of it. Oftentimes this was accomplished by killing every tribesman, tribeswoman, and tribeschild you could get a hold of. More Maverick:

The Archduke: What’s greatest Western thrill of all?
Joseph: Kill Indians!
The Archduke: Kill Indians? Is it legal?
Joseph: Oh, white man been doing it for years!

Then you plant properly domesticated peasants on the tribes’ vacated land. Cultivated areas spread like inkblots, gradually squeezing out the tribes and pushing them on to more and more marginal lands. More Maverick:

Bret Maverick: Oh, you sure do pick the spots!
Joseph: Yeah, I know. You know the next time you people come and drive us off our land I’m gonna find a nice piece of swamp that’s so God-awful, maybe then you’ll leave us the hell alone!

Author Steven Pressfield has crafted the sort of brilliant propaganda that’s extremely rare in this circle of the woods. His original thesis, that the war in Afghanistan is fundamentally a war with tribes, is entitled It’s the Tribes Stupid!. This thesis has now been supplemented with a new It’s the Tribes Stupid! website complete with High Quality Video and blog. Pressfield has released four of five videos:

• Episode 1: “It’s the Tribes, Stupid”
• Episode 2: “The Citizen Vs. The Tribesman”
• Episode 3: “Tribes Are Different From You and Me”
• Episode 4: “Fighting a Tribal Enemy”

Zenpundit offers this commentary on Pressfield’s argument:

…I think what Pressfield is doing here is well-intentioned, helpful to a degree, likely to be successful in spreading as a meme and ultimately off-target in a harmful way for the same reasons that his meme can effectively propagate in our information age. In short, what Pressfield is saying is useful tactically but could mislead us strategically, but boy, he sure says it well!

I say it is useful tactically in that most 18-21 year olds in military service are not cultural anthropologists and speaking from nearly 20 years experience in teaching, young Americans are breathtakingly egocentric in their worldview, even when they adopt a pose of critical antagonism toward their own country, it tends to be blindly self-referential. Walking a mile in another’s shoes is not something they do naturally and unprompted. That other people have radically different conceptions of “normal” is often a mind blowing epiphany for them when it sinks in, usually in their late 20’s, if at all.

In that Pressfield conveys the generalized and simplified basics of a generic “tribal mindset” in sound bites digestible to the average twenty year old from a dying Mill town or small Deep South rural county  is a feature, not a bug. We can’t send all the recruits straight from boot camp to do a few years at Oxford or Yale before they deploy to Khost or Anbar – we need “good enough” for a starting point, not perfection. Pressfield gets an “honor culture” and “primary loyalty identity” across effectively and that could, possibly, save some lives. Let’s keep that point in mind.

Secondly, Pressfield’s point that tribal mentality is significantly different from that of a Western citizen is fundamentally correct. Different political economies and social hierarchies rest on different value systems and alternate psychologies. Col. Pat Lang wrote that most tribesmen could “escape to be cab drivers” if they chose to do; tribesmen prefer tribal life and believe it to be superior to a ”civilized” society that is bereft of honor, even if it is materially richer. We are unlikely to convince them otherwise and they will resent us for trying.

Professional Tribalist

I agree with Zen’s analysis. Pressfield is slick, gets some decent points across, and provides a how to for Internet advocacy. His analysis, however, is dreadfully simplistic without being illuminating:

• Islam the religion is in someways an attempt to defang the endemic tribalism of the Arabian peninsula and replace it with a large unit, the umma. Islam the culture, however, is very tribal, even spreading tribalism to places that had detribalized earlier.
• No outsider has successfully conquered Afghanistan with the exception of this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, and maybe this one. In truth, Afghanistan has spent the majority of its history as a Persian sock puppet.
• Tribalism is a two edged sword. Tribalism kept the Taliban from consolidating power over all of Afghanistan up to 2001, was responsible for the abrupt disintegration of their power in the 2001 campaign, and saps their energy now.
• The Taliban are conducting a state-building exercise in greater Pashtunistan by killing off local leaders and replacing them with Taliban friendly leaders. The Taliban are anti-tribal in the long run. This isn’t the West vs. the tribes. It’s one state-building exercise vs. another state-building exercise.

Pay attention to true professionals like this guy. The way to defeat tribes is divide and rule. The solution to hardcore tribes is more divide and rule. The solution to even more hardcore tribes is divide and rule. This should be interwoven with selective slaughter of the most irreconcilable elements and taking hostages. The long term solution is civilizing the tribes. Afghanistan is tribal because it’s remote. Build rail lines, roads, and airports. Drain the young into the fleshpots of the cities. Urbanization is a tribal blender, reducing it to a more manageable stew. This process was underway before the Soviet invasion. Get back the mojo. That’s how you go from John Armstrong to John Armstrong.