The Committee of Public Safety

Triune Brain

To live is to desire. This burning desire originates from the interaction of seven internal loops (three loops in hardware for performance, one loop in firmware for stability and plasticity, and three loops in software for maximum flexibility) with the unfolding external environment:

Hardware

1. Reptilian loop
2. Mammalian loop
3. Hominid loop

Firmware

4. Cultural loop

Software

5. Political loop
6. Strategic loop
7. Operational loop
8. Tactical loop

The most fundamental desires emerge from deep in the brain. They rise through the cultural loop, where they are prioritized and on to the political loop to receive their division of power. The strategic loop follows and the desires are reconciled with power. Then the desires and their allotted power is arranged in space and time until, finally desire and power directly interact with the outside environment through the tactical loop.

Desire faces a uncertain environment. It may encounter friends and if may encounter enemies. It may only encounter indifference. At minimum, fulfilling a desire faces two obstacles: friction, the inanimate factors that cumulatively add up to make things difficult, and opposition, living competitors that react when acted upon. Together friction and opposition create a byzantine maze of barriers that stand between a desire and its realization. The only escape from frustrated desire is through adaption and control.

OODA Loop

Adaption follows John Boyd’s Observation-Orientation-Decision-Action (OODA) loop. The first step is observing the environment. Observation takes a snapshot of a slice of the universe. This Observation is forwarded on to the Orientation stage. Orientation is the most important stage in the adaption process because it is where compression occurs.

To learn is to compress. The universe is vast. The mind is not. Yet, to adapt to the universe, the mind must fit it inside the mind. Through the process of Orientation, some bits of the universe are selected and other bits are discarded. This process follows a progression from analysis/deduction to synthesis/induction. First the original Observation is analyzed by breaking it into smaller, more easily processed chunks through a process of deduction which starts from the Observation’s surface and works inwards. Then the Observation is synthesized by reassembling it into a new, compressed, and possibly more relevant pattern through a process of induction which starts from inside the analyzed Observation and works outwards. Some analytic/deductive and synthetic/inductive criteria is determined in software, some in firmware, and some is hardwired into hardware. The deeper in the mind you go, the more Observed information is thrown away in analysis, the tighter the compression produced by synthesis becomes, and the more reliance is placed on compression shortcuts like heuristics and archetypes. For example, reptilian loop compression is tighter than tactical loop compression. The closer you get to the reptilian core, the more the world is reduced to stark blacks and whites.

World's Tightest Fit

The end product of Orientation is a hypothesis, a synthesized compression of the original Observation that offers a prediction of what the future holds. This hypothesis is subjected to testing either through immediate Action or by being forwarded to the Decision stage for further deliberation. If the hypothesis and the Action it produces are correct, the success will be Observed and the OODA loop will repeat. If it’s incorrect, assuming the mind taking the action isn’t killed as a result of their mistake, the unsuccessful result will still be Observed. Both mistakes and successes contribute to learning. If a hypothesis is correct and the results are stored for future recollection, adaption has been achieved. If a hypothesis is incorrect or the results of previous OODA loops are discarded, adaption has failed.

Adaption is largely a defensive reaction to the environment. Control, however, is an offensive imposition on the outside environment. Control takes the synthesized compression stored inside the mind and attempts to impose it on the outside world. Instead of synchronizing the mind with the outside environment, control is intended to synchronize the outside environment to the imprint of the mind. This is usually not a total imposition of control on the outside environment but “some selected degree of control”, as Wylie commented. The selected degree of control is determined by the nature of desire, the mind’s “own purpose”.

Desire is what drives any and all attempts to impose control on the external environment. Control’s mission is to make the world save for desire. To do this, it seeks to make the outside world conform to its internal hypothesis. Since a hypothesis is a prediction, control above all seeks to make the outside world predictable. Reality inside the mind is predictable. It’s the rudeness of outside interruptions that keeps introducing unpredictability. Some of this can be dealt with adaption. However, that may only achieve mere survival. Control holds within itself the possibility of achieving all the desires of the heart. But any selected degree of control can only be achieved through the accumulation of power.

Control Loop

The process of applying control runs through a control loop, the very same OODA loop as adaption uses. The progress of the control loop regulates power as it runs through the PAR loop:

1. Potential: power that has not been used.
2. Application: power that is in the process of being used through conversion from one form of power to another.
3. Realization: the impact of the use of power.

Progress through Observation, Orientation, Decision and Action regulates progress through Potential, Application, and Realization. The reference point by which progress is gauged is desire. However, this gauging of progress is complex. This complexity comes from the multitude of control loops guiding the consumption of power towards the realization of desire. There are seven control loops, the same seven loops introduced earlier. Each of these loops serve different functions and move at different speeds. In the loops of the software layer, adaption can be quite brisk. In the firmware layer, adaption is somewhat slower and more plastic. In the hardware layer, adaption can take centuries to eons to change. For example, tactical loop adaption is fast while reptilian loop adaption is slow. One is adaption entirely in software. The other is adaption in hardware. One is shaped by conscious design. The other is shaped (at least up to this point) solely by biological circumstance.

In some ways humans are profoundly unprepared for the modern world. Their most primeval loops are optimized for a hunter-gatherer lifestyle where the world is populated by hostile predators, especially other humans. Nassim Nicholas Taleb argues that the compression the human mind utilizes is optimized for a predictable range of eventualities. His example is that of seeing a leopard. Seeing a leopard, the danger centers of the reptilian and mammalian brains kick in and you turn and run. This is a response with a fair degree of success and was rewarded by natural selection. A species of people running from leopards was created and filled the earth. However, the same instincts fail in stock trading. If you see a crash, you’re tempted to run from it. The modern world is filled with ambiguities the hardware of the human mind is unprepared for, though seeing a banker bearing derivatives is good reason to turn and run.

Pareto distribution

The worse thing that the mind is unprepared for is the black swan. A black swan has a profound impact, it is unexpected, and all you can do afterward is moralize it. The OODA loop could accurately be called the Observe-Moralize-Decide-Act loop. This is because the black swan, with its occurrence in fat tails, tempts the mind to beat a Pareto curve into a Bell curve.

Bell Curve

This is the realist dilemma: when all you see is bell curves, everything is a bell curve. Imagine yourself an Eastern Roman or Sassanid IR scholar. 700 years of incremental warfare has presented you with a stable international regime where parts of Armenia and Syria might change hands several times every 100 years. You would expect both regimes to endure since they’ve both been around for 700 years. Both are relatively politically stable and have seen many a crisis and endured them just fine. Based on the bell curve, you would be right. Unfortunately, you would be wrong.

The realist is baffled by the black swan. He, following the logic of control, seeks predictability by imposing his well-worn compression on a world. Sometimes the world will be compliant. Sometimes, however, it will black swan. Some desert dwelling nomads of no consequence will pour out of the Arabian wastes, inspired by an idea. The Byzantines were driven beyond the Taurus mountains and pressed within an inch of their lives. The Sassanid state was destroyed and its religion and political order destroyed. The IR scholar would be found in a wasted city or in a refugee column. Perhaps a passerby would be kind and listen to his wailing over the destruction of his theories of equilibrium. All should mourn with the IR scholar. Theirs is the lot of modern man, the ever more frequent victim of the black swan and his own slow control loops.

The Islamic universalist tide, instantiated in jihad, continued to sweep the world. More worldly men would attempt to buy it off or make peace with it but that was only a temporary respite if there was any at all. Islam was quite entrepreneurial. Since every Muslim was under the command to spread the faith, every local ghazi or khan could launch his own local offensive against his infidel neighbor. A Shadow of God on Earth such as Suleiman the Magnificent was perfectly happy to strike a realist alliance with a naive infidel like Francis I of France. If the infidels in the House of War were fighting each other, it just made the job of the Faithful that much easier.

Islam did encounter counter-movements. Some of these succeeded. Some failed. The Crusades failed to win permanent Christian possession of the Holy Land but it did regain Portugal and Spain, nations built upon a universalist ideal that carried them around the African coastline in search for Prester John as an ally against the Muslim tide and across the New World in search of souls, among other commodities. While faith did not reclaim the Holy Land for the Christians, it did regain the Holy Land for the Muslims. Call it the Last Crusade, if jihad can be called a crusade. About the point when Islam was reaching its extremes under the Moguls and the Ottomans at the beginning of the eighteenth century, a new Islam was rising on the Atlantic seaboard of the North American continent. This tide would eventually destroy the old empires of Eurasia and aggressively provide a model that was so pervasive that modern tyranny would parrot its forms as the tribute vice gave to virtue. But that’s a story for another time.

The Supreme Realist and the Supreme Idealist

Pure foreign policy realism, especially in an American context, is like an fine revolver that no one bothered to load. It can produce ominous clicking noises but will have little or no kinetic impact. You can produce the exact same effect with a cap gun and for a far lower price. It also has the smell of elevating the tactical to the level of strategy. Take Svechin’s discussion of the difference between strategy and tactics:

While strategy pursues goals, tactics solve problems. A goal means a comprehensive major objective from which we are separated by a certain distance; the achievement of one goal requires the solution of several problems; the problems facing us grow in immediate proximity to us and become very urgent in nature. By this we would like to emphasize that strategy is essentially future-oriented, while tactics are practically immeasurable in time: while tactics may divide the conduct of a battle into certain phases, these phases are very close to one another and follow one another very quickly.

Realism tends to become tactical and the tactical tends to focus on the immediate and concrete, Svechin’s problem. Almost inevitably it degenerates into status-quo-ism where the focus becomes the known and well-lit present rather than the unknown and dimly lit future into which the present is hurtling. Yet strategy, the reconciliation of cultural desire with political power, is fundamentally future oriented. Saying you’re strategy is realism is means oriented: it says nothing about what you’re being realist for. Realism is a means to an end, not an end in and of itself.

The real is real in spite of whether humans are around or not. Reality as humans view it will always be somewhat fictional. We see upside down with no loss of peripheral vision. The mind flips it right side up and sharpens the focus on the immediate foreground. The mind also can’t fit the universe into the human mind. There’s something of an impedance mismatch:

World's Tightest Fit

Some, perhaps most, of the universe will be lost in the translation from universe to brain. Important bits are inevitably left out amidst the bustle. The end result is that the world the realist sees is already profoundly unreal. Unfortunately for the realist, realism itself is something of an ideal.

There is also the problem that the interaction between the human mind and the unfolding environment is a two way street. In one direction, instinct and culture attempt to impose their particular compression of reality upon the outside world. This is control, the degree to which an individual can impose their internal compression on external reality. The goal of all foreign policy is Wylie’s “some selected degree of control” over the quick and the dead. In the other direction, the outside environment attempts to impose its infinitude of plenitude on the individual. This is adaption, the degree to which reality can impose itself on an individual’s internal compression.

Pure realism is great on adaption but poor on control. It’s perpetually in reaction mode since the realists actions are held hostage to the readily discernible. While this can be an advantage in that defense, as Clausewitz argued, is stronger than offense, the urge to control is universal and someone will inevitably inject instability into even the most thoroughly maintained international order. Human nature is like a guitar. It has only six strings but the combinations that can be played with those six strings are vast. Say you successfully created a stable order based on the probable combinations of the guitar. That’s great. Now add electricity. You still have the same six strings but now the world rocks.

Darn hippies.

Thucydides identified three strings on the human guitar: fear, honor, and interest. The realist, focusing on the readily quantifiable, latches on to interest and won’t let go. As a result, realism sometimes sounds like a one string solo. However, Clausewitz’s trinity of rationality, chance, and passion is also applicable. Interest is a matter of rationality. However fear and honor belong to the wilder realms of passion. Throw in chance and you have a maelstrom. Preserving a status quo in a dynamic system is a losing proposition.

The winning hand is not a policy of realism but a policy of hypocrisy. America is a Christian nation but the United States is a secular state. This makes hypocrisy not only suspicious to Americans but, given The Lord’s frequent denunciation of hypocrisy, a sin. Outside of America, strategists frequently have a more enabling idealism. Stalin, a former seminarian usually portrayed as the consummate realist, was actually the consummate hypocrite. Stalin, it seems, was at heart a sort of twisted idealist. A realist would follow the NEP, like Bukharin advocated and Deng later initiated in China. Stalin, however, wanted to bring about a communist society and the nature of Marxist strategic idealism, rooted in revolutionary violence against a corrupt imperialist capitalist class, enabled an operational and tactical realism that formed one of the great strategic juggernauts of history. His goal was control, the imposition of Marxist compression on the world. Wylie comments:

Philosophically the pressures and constraints of control are perhaps the most subtle and at times, the most pervasive and persuasive of all.Consider the amount of control exercised over the past two millennia by the philosophy of Christianity. Consider the control exercised today by the philosophy of communism. And by the philosophy of individual freedom.

This is what we seem somehow to have missed in our strategy for freedom in the rural-peasant societies of the world—in those areas where the Mao theory of “wars of national liberation” is, far and away, the most dangerous foe we have to face.

In some ways we have, intuitively, recognized the problem…[But none of our] efforts seems to get at the root of the problem, which is the need for articulation of a philosophy to be “for”.

This is not a suggestion that someone go out and think up a brand new religion or a brand new political scheme. But it is a suggestion that, at the least, we might do a better job of adapting what we have (which is very fine indeed) to the actual situations that confront us.

We have known for a long time that, in our society, the Anglo-American, two-party electoral system of applied democracy is both an efficient and an acceptable system for the allocation, use, and transfer of power, which is the basic problem of politics. And we have known, too, that it provides us a quite satisfactory context for the observance of our predominantly Christian spiritual ethic.

But we have had a great deal of difficulty in stretching these two schemes of ours to fit other societies. Our basic, and usually tacit, assumptions have not often been in very close coincidence with those of other societies that we have wanted to win over to our side.

If we could adjust the assumptions to fit the reality of the scene of action, we might get forrader faster.

It is a little difficult to give an illustration of what is meant in this abstract discussion of philosophic strategy because illustrations are so scarce. But [one] may serve…

Mao has rearranged the theories of Marx to fit the situation in China. Marx focused on the urban worker who suffered under the dislocations of the early days of the Industrial Revolution. This man did not exist in China, or at least did not exist in sufficient number to be a governing element of effective revolution. So Mao revised Marxian theory to focus on the rural peasant, and the revised theory has worked with chilling effectiveness in rural societies…

It is something like this that we need to serve as a sort of foundation on which to build the whole strategic rationale. We would not all agree that it need be based on Jesuit Catholicism, or perhaps even on any religious philosophy. But it must have an acceptable and locally viable philosophic base; and it must be a strategy suited to, rather than imposed upon, the actual scene. The fighters must believe in what they fight for. The basic assumptions must fit the reality.

On a cultural and political level, this is a policy of idealism. On the strategic, operational, and tactical level, this is a policy of realism. Realism, as a solution to problems, is suitable to tactical and even operational problems. It is however, not a strategy, since it is inappropriate for pursuing goals in the future. For that, you need a vision.

From Lexington Green over at ChicagoBoyz:

The revised schedule is for our roundtable on Xenophon’s Anabasis of Cyrus is as follows:

Week of September 13, 2009: Posts re: Books I, II, III and IV
Week of September 20, 2009: Posts re: Books V, VI and VII
Week of September 27, 2009: “Wrap up” Posts: Opinions, Analysis, Conclusions.

Late in August I will post the list of contributors.

I am starting to think about what I am going to write, having recently finished my first read-through of the Anabasis.

I have been looking at two books on background, which I am finding of interest: Xenophon’s Retreat: Greece, Persia, and the End of the Golden Age by Robin Waterfield, and Xenophon and the Art of Command by Godfrey Hutchinson. I also hope to read at least some portions of Xenophon’s The Education of Cyrus, also translated by Prof. Wayne Ambler.

(I linked earlier to this review of the Anabasis from Military Review.)

ALSO: A “distant early warning” for our readers. The current thinking is that we will have roundtable discussion of The Federalist Papers in the Winter of 2010, and we will have a roundtable discussion of selections from the Arthashastra of Kautilya (The Clausewitz, Sun Tzu and Machiavelli of India all in one) in the Fall of 2010.

Two good articles about Kautilya’s Arthashastra.

An earlier post on Kautilya from CoPS can be found here.

Fabius Maximus Cunctator links to this article on China’s massive and decisive assistance to Sri Lanka’s crushing victory over the Tamil Tigers. China provided diplomatic cover by blocking any toothless UN resolutions from being imposed on the Sinhalese dominated Sri Lankan government. China shipped massive amounts of weapons to Sri Lanka. China probably funded a great deal of Sri Lanka’s final offensive and may have provided some of the training. This example may provide China with a killer recipe for state building in the 21st century:

• Building up the coercive power of the state may be a prelude to real sovereignty. Especially if there is a real majority to empower. Growth in the coercive power of the state preceded modernization in most European countries. It may have to proceed modernization in Africa and less developed parts of Asia open to Chinese influence.
• If the messy process of state building involves bloodily killing uppity minorities until state identity congeals, China’s more amiable attitude towards actions that violate Anglo-Saxon norms may be more constructive in encouraging state cohesion than those of the hyper-Wilsonized West.
• If the most basic human right is security, China’s model may get you there quicker than the “let’s hold an election and go home” model promoted by the United States.
• China’s government, under less popular pressure than Western governments, may be able to sustain longer and more consistent foreign entanglements than the West.
• China can freeze the United Nations, inasmuch as it ever resembles a working institution and its imprimatur means anything, in order to give cover for its foreign policy. Same as the USSR during the Cold War.
• China provides a model of economic modernization without yielding power to uppity democracy types. Yet.
• Counter-insurgency is about securing the population. This can also be interpreted as securing control over the population, since the people are as much a sea to swim in as the ocean. And China has millennia of experience in controlling populations.

Robert Kaplan offers his thoughts.

UPDATED:

There are two Fabii in this corner of the blogosphere. One overt Delayer and one less overt Delayer. Get your Fabii straight and accept no cheap substitutes.

I, for one, would pay real Canadian currency for a cage fight to determine who the dominant Fabius Maximus of the blogosphere would be.

One shall stand. One shall fall.

Of course it would be as painful as curling to watch. Each would circle the other and use delaying tactics to wear the other out. It could take 14 years and the emergence of a young whippersnapper from the crowd to get a victor.

I ran across this military history bibliography by John A. Lynn. Lynn has written such notable works as Battle: A History Of Combat And Culture (does a good job of questioning Victor David Hanson’s thesis about the uniqueness of Western face to face infantry combat that magically emerges from a subterranean cave every 500 years or so to route the Oriental Other only to quickly go underground again (Hanson’s on stronger ground talking about ancient Greek warfare and its interaction with Mediterranean agriculture)) and Feeding Mars: Logistics In Western Warfare From The Middle Ages To The Present. Lynn also has a good bibliography of early European military history.

This military history bibliography is passable. This one is promising.

This World Military History Bibliography (available on CD-ROM) is focused on non-Western and pre-modern history.

I’m in the process of listening to a series of lectures made by the Foreign Policy Research Institute last year on Teaching Military History, Why and How: A History Institute for Secondary School Teachers. The lecture series had numerous luminaries of military history: Jeremy Black, Kimberly Kagan, Angelo Codevilla, Martin Van Creveld, and Williamson Murray.

Murray mentioned in passing that he had created a comprehensive bibliography of military history back in 2003 for the Pentagon that was available to the general public. After some digging, I located it in an obscure corner of the Web and decided to post it here for general reference. The bibliography has two parts. The first is a listing of Murray’s top 25 “essential” books on military history and theory:

Ancient Warfare to 500 AD

• Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War: Either the Rex Warner translation or The Landmarck Thucydides
• Victor David Hanson, The Western Way of War: Infantry Battle in Classical Greece: Agriculture and warfare in ancient Greece.

The Eighteenth Century (1686-1789)

• Winston S. Churchill, The Life of Marlborough. A bit of family history.
• Fred Anderson, Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754-1766: The reconstruction of George Washington’s first military skirmish by itself justifies the price of admission.

General Works: Military History and Strategy

• Carl von Clausewitz, On War (Howard and Paret translation): You’ve never read Clausewitz until you’ve read it in the original Klingon.
• Peter Paret, Clausewitz and the State: By one of the translators of the definitive contemporary version.

The French Revolution and [Nabulione Buonaparte] (1789-1815)

• Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace: Take a week off and do nothing else to finish.

The American Civil War (1861-1865)

• Ulysses S. Grant, Memoirs: Mark Twain called it the best piece of writing in English in the nineteenth century (of course, he was the publisher).
• James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era

General Works: Military History and Theory

• Michael Howard, War and the Liberal Conscience: Why the West has such a hard time with war.

The First World War: Literature

• Frederic Manning, The Middle Parts of Fortune
• Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth. Enough that the Nazi’s were going to liquidate her.

The Interwar Period (1919-1939)

• Allan R. Millett, In Many a Strife, General Gerald C. Thomas and the US Marine Corps, 1917-1956

The Second World War: General Works

• R.V. Jones, The Wizard War: British Scientific Intelligence, 1939-1945
• MacGregor Knox, Mussolini Unleashed: Politics and Strategy in Fascist Italy
• Gerhard Weinberg, A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II

The Second World War: Strategy

• Michael Howard, Grand Strategy, Volume IV, August 1942-September 1943 History of the Second World War

The Second World War: Airpower

• Sir Charles Webster and Noble Frankland, The Strategic Bombing Offensive Against Germany

The Second World War: Memoirs, Diaries, Biographies, and Literature

• George MacDonald Fraser, Quartered Safe Out Here: A Recollection of the War in Burma
• William Slim, Defeat into Victory
• E.B. Sledge, With the Old Breed at Pelilu and Okinawa

The Second World War: The War at Sea and in the Pacific

• Richard B. Frank, Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire

The Second World War: Intelligence (1939-1945)

• Patrick Beesly, Very Special Intelligence

War and Strategy Since 1945

• Alistair Horne, A Savage War of Peace: Algeria, 1954-1962: Of recent interest.
• Lt. Gen. Harold Moore and Joseph Galloway, We Were Soldiers Once…and Young: Ia Drang — The Battle That Changed the War in Vietnam: Good movie too.

The second part of Murray’s bibliography lists hundreds of military theory and history books. It would be interesting to see an updated version.

The Scorpion King

I was interested one evening in finding out who was the first historical figure based purely on archaeological finds. A quick search brought up this blog post. The candidates are:

1. Iry-Hor: predynastic pharaoh of Upper Egypt c. 3200 BC. His existence is a matter of dispute
2. Ka: predynastic pharaoh of Upper Egypt c. 3200 BC. Possible successor to Iry-Hor
3. King Scorpion I:  predynastic pharaoh of Upper Egypt
4. King Scorpion II: predynastic pharaoh of Upper Egypt
5. Narmer: pharaoh of Upper Egypt c. 3100 BC. Unifier of Upper and Lower Egypt into a single Egyptian state. Some contend he is the same as Scorpion II or Menes.
6. Menes: pharaoh of Upper Egypt c. 3100 BC. Listed as the unifier of Egypt by later Egyptian historians. May be identical with Narmer or his successor Hor-Aha.
7. Enmebaragesi: king of Kish in Sumer c. 2600. First Sumerian king on the Sumerian king list to have his existence corroborated with archaeological evidence.

John M. Collins provided some Principles of Deterrence in a 1979 essay:

1. Principle of Preparedness: Boy Scout motto: “Be prepared” and your deterrence will be more effective.
2. Principle of Nonprovocation: Don’t provoke a fight you’re not looking for.
3. Principle of Prudence: Defense should be strong enough to persuade potential attacks that the risks of war are greater than the potential payoffs.
4. Principle of Publicity: Advertise your capabilities. Unknown capabilities have no deterrent value.
5. Principle of Credibility: The threat of the deterrent must be credible, meaning that if red lines are crossed than the deterrent will be used.
6. Principle of Uncertainty: If credibility fails, there is always the principle of convincing the other guy that you’re so crazy that they better leave you alone or you’ll do something nuts even if everyone’s going to lose.
7. Principle of Paradox: Going to war in one theater may prevent war in another theater.
8. Principle of Independence: Don’t depend upon understanding with the enemy to maintain deterrence.
9. Principle of Change: Deterrents must adapt to changing conditions.
10. Principle of Flexibility: Sometimes you have to modify your response. “Bear in mind that Tyrannosaurus rex, the most menacing monster the world has ever seen, was a victim of overspecialization. His only known survivors are found in museums.”

Collins expands on these principles in his essay and in his book Military Strategy: Principles, Practices, and Historical Perspectives.

From the postscript to RADM J.C. Wyile’s Military Strategy: A General Theory of Power Control written in 1989, twenty years after the book’s initial publication:

There is another aspect of strategy that has come more to the forefront that it was twenty years ago when this book was published. This is the problem of terrorism in all its forms—murder, kidnapping, violent and selective destruction, well-publicized threats, and all of it planned for clever and effective exploitation of modern mass communications in free societies. This latter, mass communications in free societies, is an indispensable element of terrorism. Closed societies, with control of mass communications, are not good targets…

Among the many books on the subject (and there literature on the matter has proliferated along with the fact), the best and most succinct exposition of terrorism that I have encountered is by Robert F. Delaney, in an independent study course designed to inform both police and industrial security  personnel. The following two paragraphs are condensed from it:

Who are these politically activated persons whose alienation is so complete that they desire to destroy their own (as well as other) societies?

They are largely from the middle and upper middle classes, often young (in their twenties), usually well educated, totally dedicated, opinionated, dangerous, well trained, and invariably well armed.

To add to Delaney’s profile, it is worth noting that most terrorists have a highly developed instinct for the jugular, a quality that separates the excellent from the run-of-the-mill strategists.

The best definition of the the aim of terrorism that have found also comes from that same study guide: “…the capture and control of the processes of social change.” Delaney goes on to note: “that not one military word is used in this definition [is]…significant because it establishes the distinction between a conventional military approach and the revolutionary approach of an insurgent enemy.”…

It is of interest to note, though, that the strategies of the terrorists do follow quite closely the general theory of strategy postulated in this book.

In their war against society, their aim is “some selected degree of control [of the processes of social change] for…[their] own purpose.” They seek to achieve this “by control of the pattern” of their war against society. And they do this by creating and manipulating a “center of gravity” (a person or an installation that will ensure public attention) which they have selected “to the advantage of the strategist and the disadvantage of the opponent“, the opponent being the organized society over which they want to exercise control.

Their pattern of operation is to control “the nature and the placement and the timing and the weight of the center of gravity” that they have chosen “toward [their] own ends“—the control of the processes of social change. They select their targets for the greatest impact on that society.

Viewed in this context, the murder of Lord Mountbatten and the often indiscriminate bombings in Belfast make a weird and repugnant sort of sense. So do the kidnappings in Beirut, the murder of Aldo Moro, the aborted piracy of the Achille Lauro, and the threats or the facts of bombing this or that public (and usually governmental) building.

Though I am sure none of them ever saw this small book, they do follow quite closely the theoretical model of strategy. And it is in part for this reason, to illustrate the validity of theory, that I have digressed to include terrorism in the postscript.