The Committee of Public Safety

NerveAgent over at Visions of Empire has made some recent posts worth reading:

The Benefits of Stupidity

NerveAgent links to my post America’s Grand Strategy Deficit…Solved!!! and points out that Edward Luttwak supports the Friendman Theorem in the revised version of his Strategy: The Logic of War and Peace, Revised and Enlarged Edition, namely that:

America’s grand strategy is to be so big and so powerful that it escapes the consequences of its own stupidity. (Listening to the podcast again, Friedman actually says that America’s grand strategy is to be so big and powerful that it can afford to be stupid).

In a strange coincidence, I had just read the final chapter of Strategy (as recommended by Adam Elkus) last week and was struck by the same point that NerveAgent makes. I was going to post on it but NerveAgent already has so go read it. His points are well in the spirit of Mark Safranski and Adam Elkus’s recent article for Small Wars Journal Theory, Policy, and Strategy: A Conceptual Muddle.

Thoughts on Rupert Smith’s “Utility of Force”

NerveAgent reviews Sir Rupert Smith’s The Utility of Force: The Art of War in the Modern World and finds it more commonplace than others have found. Another book in my library I need to finally read. Interestingly enough, Smith quotes the inferior Graham translation of On War rather than the superior Paret-Howard translation. What is it with the British? First Keegan and now Smith. Sheesh. Amazon doesn’t help when it lists 5 Graham translations in its search results. It’s like they don’t want people to read Clausewitz at all.

War: Ends and Means, Part I

NerveAgent also reviews War: Ends and Means by Paul Seabury and Angelo Codevilla. This is another book I own but I haven’t read. I admire Angelo Codevilla after listening to this podcast. I especially admire him after reading his smackdown of Sith Lord Darth Crevald during the Q&A portion of this Crevald lecture at the same event. Anyone who wipes the floor with Darth Crevald can’t be all that bad.

Yesterday marked 1 year since this blog was first inflicted on the world.

Why does anyone pay attention to the monkey? Pay attention to the organ grinder. Pay no attention to the monkey.

Unless the monkey is a radioactive baboon. In that case, pay close attention.

Eye of a Needle

America now has a single, unified, cohesive grand strategy. It turns out that even a five year old or equivalent (like an NSC staffer) can understand it. As formulated by George Friedman of Stratfor:

America’s grand strategy is to be so big and so powerful that it escapes the consequences of its own stupidity.

Cunaxa is an interesting counter-point to the three traditional pillars of Herodotus’s Histories, Marathon, Salamis, and Plataea. While those three confrontations took place in or near Attica, the cradle of democracy, Cunaxa happens in Mesopotamia, the cradle of despotism. Herodotus skillfully built a narrative of the clash of East and West, Freedom and Slavery, Democracy and Despotism out of the Persian attempts to conquer an obscure people on the fringes of the Known World. His account looms over those of his successors, even the works of the prickly Thucydides, who considered himself superior in every respect to the world traveling gossip from Halicarnassus.

Xenophon was no exception. The Anabasis almost reads like a strange mirror version of the Histories. Instead of the Ascent of Darius, Xerxes, or Mardonius into the heart of Hellas, it’s the descent of the Greeks into the heart of Achaemenid power. The squabbling Greeks, under the less than inspired figures of Clearchus, Proxenus, and Menon, appear rather shabby compared to the heroic generation of Miltiades, Themistocles, and Pausanias. Cyrus in his foolish death and disfigured body and Artaxerxes II in his pettiness and undignified scramble to keep his throne fall far short of the power and majesty of Darius and Xerxes, so exalted that Herodotus portrayed them as living embodiments of hubris, pride that not only rivaled but threatened that of the gods themselves.

Herodotus portrays the mighty Xerxes, in the full flower of his pride, flogging the Hellespont as punishment for destroying his first pontoon bridge from Asia into Europe. Artaxerxes II, on the other hand, barely escapes with his life and throne, blusters at the Ten Thousand, flees cravenly when the Ten Thousand post him up, and proceeds to engage in all sorts of gutter intrigue. With great insight, Xenophon convinces the leaderless Greeks that the Great King would never negotiate with them in good faith. Artaxerxes II knew he looked pathetic. If I were Artaxerxes II, I wouldn’t want my vulnerabilities broadcast to all the world either, especially when I’d been shown up by a bunch of country bumpkins from Arcadia, the armpit of Greece. I would kill every last man, woman, child, beast of burden, or slave of the Ten Thousand. Being routed is one depth of humiliation. Being routed by rednecks, however, is a depth of humiliation that Persians hadn’t faced since the Spartans reacted to a demand for earth and water by throwing the Great King’s emissaries down a well into the bowels of Mother Earth.

Xenophon continues Herodotus’s amateur anthropology by observing the Oriental Other. However Xenophon lacks the cosmic depths of Herodotus’s cosmopolitanism. Xenophon goes up country a Greek and comes down it a Greek. The locals are primarily defined by their non-Greekness, suffering from the irreversible disease of original high barbarity. Bar bar they all say. Bar we are shifty. Bar we are treacherous. Bar we betray even the gods with our lies. Bar we are unable to rule ourselves. Bar we are slaves. Bar we are sheep. Bar we are strange. Some of the Oriental world is familiar, a terrain populated by agrarian villages bursting with provisions and ripe for plunder. Some of it lies behind an iron cage that Xenophon, trapped in his Greekness, is barred from opening.

Everything Xenophon does is in deadly earnest. While this is largely because Xenophon’s fate and the fate of the Ten Thousand were delicately balanced on the edge of a knife blade, Xenophon doesn’t strike me as a bon vivant in any of his other works. In contrast, Herodotus is a damned hippie, cheerfully imbibing and inhaling whatever the locals would offer. Herodotus is Mr. Fun, painting the world in bright fun Deluxe Crayola colors, a literary Expressionist for all time. Xenophon is more like Thucydides, a gloomy and bitter exile justifying the vagaries of his career by pouring out apologia galore. Like Seurat, he paints the world as a summation of pinpricks, with himself cast as the most prominent prick.

I’m more sympathetic with Herodotus, who toiled away making his living through readings before a democratic mob, than with Xenophon, who spent much of his career as a literary Vyshinsky for the totalitarian Spartans. But with his descent into Mesopotamia, the birthplace of autocracy, Xenophon demonstrates that there are differing degrees of tyranny and even the citizens of Sparta had not fallen to the depths of the Great King’s slaves, driven into battle and corvee with whips. Of course tyranny, like influenza, is catching and the Ten Thousand may have brought the virus back with them from Mesopotamia, setting the scene for the passing of vigorous Greek liberty at Chaeronea a mere 63 years later. It is not without a touch of truth that the great historian Arrian’s history of the first flowering of Oriental despotism in the free soil of Greece is called the Anabasis of Alexander.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

- William Butler Yeats (1921)

Live Long and Boogie

George W. Bush wasn’t the brightest bulb in the lighting store. But he had one thing going for him: a visceral understanding of power, human relations on the most fundamental animal level, and the meanings of signals. Where this nation’s elite was talking itself in circles over Iraq, Bush recognized that backing down would be bad for America. Even the signs of weakness revealed by our wallowing in Iraqi quicksand was enough to get America’s enemies excited. That was a mere preview of what would happen if we had withdrawn under obvious disgrace from Iraq, no matter however cleverly papered over by State Department papers and blue ribbon study groups. That much was understood by Bush.

The world system is ruled by the dance of pretense and violence. The majority of the world’s population is neither with us or against us: they’re with the winner. Bandwagoning rules the day. After the end of the Cold War and the stunning denouement of the Gulf War, everyone was on America’s side. After the screwups in the Iraq War, everyone was on any side but ours. Victory is a social feast. Defeat is lonely. Reagan was lonely in 1985 but had lots of friends in 1991. Such is the feckless creature known as man.

Afghanistan is always written Afghanistan* where the asterisk goes like this:

* Afghanistan has defeated every historical figure that Americans have ever heard of, like Julius Caesar, Hannibal, Hitler, Leonardo da Vinci, that dude with the mustache, and Skeletor.

The truth is most of those people never even visited Afghanistan (with the exception of Skeletor). In fact, Afghanistan has spent most of its history as someone else’s plaything. As I like to say, 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. In honor of this truth, I will henceforth refer to Afghanistan as “East Persia”.

East Persia is like Belgium aka Europe’s Scenic Invasion Speedway™. Everyone’s always passing through. So what if they have angry tribesmen and high mountains? Angry tribesmen are designed to be culled by the Maxim Gun and mountains are meant to be avoided. My ancestors were angry tribesmen who lived in the mountains. With time (and the liberal use of the gallows), even they were cured. I live amidst high mountains and arid valleys filled with a tribe that most people consider strange religious fanatics. However, we’re really nice people once you get on our good side. You just need to be there for forty years. Erosion works on social formations as well as geologic formations.

The price of withdrawal from East Persia is greater danger in the world for America. This wouldn’t come from a resurgent al-Qaeda, even though line noise always wants its chance to sing in the bright glare of the nation’s largest media market. Everyone will know precisely which buttons need to be pressed to get America to back off, the lessons of Vietnam updated for the 21st century. That knowledge can be operationalized in unpredictable ways. There was a Soviet surge after America’s humiliation in Vietnam. Sure, you can argue that Soviet adventurism helped lead to its inevitable collapse. However, that collapse was not inevitable. As Red China has demonstrated, communism is perfectly compatible with hypocrisy. If the United States had continued to wallow in its state of malaise, Soviet Russia may not have suffered for taking too many cookies from the cookie jar or at least suffered terminal illness. The Soviet Union was cursed by having someone who believed Communism could work as its leader at the wrong time. Most tyrannies have taken note and keep their Gorbachev’s far away from the reigns of power.  The inconvenient idealist is a black swan that can come upon the most prudent of realpolitikers.

The Taliban believe they can out wait the fickle West. That’s probably the case with decadent Europe, tied to East Persia only by the barest of liturgical ties from an ancient charter intended to keep the Fulda Gap plugged. With the American people, it’s an open question. East Persia was the (ahem) Mecca of the hip Takfiri set. Eight years ago, people commanded and controlled from East Persia demonstrated the awesome power of terror inflicted in a major media market. Though not as deep or lasting as other cataclysms of American history, 9/11 caused a significant amount of psychic damage to the American people. Vietnam, though many greeted our withdrawal with relief, caused great damage to the American psyche that the Miracle on Ice and Reagan could only partially heal. The riptide from a withdrawal from East Persia would be just as large and deep, especially since our intervention in Afghanistan was entirely justifiable as a defensive war (not that I believe in just war theory). The result would not be an America free to return to its sanctified splendid isolation or to wage a renewed war on poverty and greenhouse gas. The result would be a large, dangerous power with a chip on its shoulder, a proto-revisionist power. Look at contemporary Russia with its dangerous inferiority complex, massive post-Marxist hangover, and monster sized grudge. Bring it home to Main Street, Mom, and her bitter apple pie to swallow and you have the makings of an even more bellicose America, the America that marches below the banners of Old Hickory instead of Tommy Jeff, Thomas Woodrow Wilson, and James Edward Carter, hippies all.

East Persia requires little cleverness at all. Here’s the strategy.

1. Put Taliban in headlock.
2. Noogie head until they yield.
3. If they truly yield, stop noogying but don’t release them from headlock.
4. If they were playing for time, continue noogying.
5. Repeat.

Anything else is too clever by half.

The big question is what the best representation of the OODA Loop is: how does one explain Boyd to Grandma?

Yo Joe!!!

Three recent items raise three questions:

First, Kotare takes exception to random string output generated by UMRHQ.pl, a neologism algorithm implemented in Perl as a long running CGI process at the height of the DotCom craze, a ray of Nineties nostalgia in these less heroic, sadder but wiser days:

Memo to Umair Haque: this is not war, it’s politics

“Dear President Obama. Welcome to 5G warfare. There’s a war going on in America today: an information war, being waged digitally. It’s not physically violent – but it’s culturally, socially and economically violent. And its ultimate goal is that of any war: political defeat.”

- UMRHQ.pl outputs to STDOUT

Sorry, but this is not war. It’s politics. Perhaps a virulent strain of politics, but politics nonetheless.

War involves the use of physical force, or the threat of it, to compel an opponent to submit to one’s will. Politics involves non-violent competition and struggle. When politics turns violent, this becomes a criminal act. When political activity aims at overthrow, this becomes subversion. Only when political discourse breaks down entirely, and two sides take up arms against each other, does politics become war.

Another post by Movable Type warrior Curtis Gale Weeks over at Le Grand Bombaste, entitled War is a Sausage, is frank on the origins of the Liver War:

The chaos of war is reflected in the semantic history of the word war. War can be traced back to the Indo-European root *wers-, “to confuse, mix up.” In the Germanic family of the Indo-European languages, this root gave rise to several words having to do with confusion or mixture of various kinds. One was the noun *werza-, “confusion,” which in a later form *werra- was borrowed into Old French, probably from Frankish, a largely unrecorded Germanic language that contributed about 200 words to the vocabulary of Old French. From the Germanic stem came both the form werre in Old North French, the form borrowed into English in the 12th century, and guerre (the source of guerrilla) in the rest of the Old French-speaking area. Both forms meant “war.” Meanwhile another form derived from the same Indo-European root had developed into a word denoting a more benign kind of mixture, Old High German wurst, meaning “sausage.” Modern German Wurst was borrowed into English in the 19th century, first by itself (recorded in 1855) and then as part of the word liverwurst (1869), the liver being a translation of German Leber in Leberwurst.

Hot dog.

Another post seen on Twitter (props Ahsan Ali) is this article in The New Statesmen by George Friedman of Stratfor: The next 100 years: This is the pertinent passage:

The ultimate prize is North America. Until the middle of the 19th century, there were two contenders for domination – Washington and Mexico City. After the American conquest of northern Mexico in the 1840s, Washington dominated North America and Mexico City ruled a weak and divided country. It remained this way for 150 years. It will not remain this way for another hundred. Today, Mexico is the world’s 13th-largest economy…Mexico has become a nation of more than 100 million people with a trillion-dollar economy. When you look at a map of the borderland between the United States and Mexico, you see a huge flow of drug money to the south and the flow of population northward. Many areas of northern Mexico that the US seized are now being repopulated by Mexicans moving northward – US citizens, or legal aliens, or illegal aliens. The political border and the cultural border are diverging.

Until after the middle of the century, the US will not respond. It will have concerns elsewhere and demographic shifts in the US will place a premium on encouraging Mexican migration northward…Mexico will be a prosperous, powerful nation with a substantial part of its population living in the American south-west, in territory that Mexicans regard as their own.

All three, each in their own way, asking three questions:

1. What constitutes war?
2. If one side of an issue considers itself at war but the other side doesn’t, are they at war?
3. Does one side putting itself on a war footing while the other side does not give the side that considers itself at war an advantage?

Clausewitz observed the central truth about war in Book VIII of On War: war is the continuation of political intercourse with the addition of other means. In their translation of On War, Michael Howard and Peter Paret usually translated the German word politik as “policy”, the rational process of governmental initiatives. Hence their rendering of an even more famous Clausewitzian phrase as “War is the continuation of policy by other means”. But politik has two meanings. It can be used to refer to policy but it can also be used to refer to politics. Politics itself is actually two separate processes that are often conflated. We will label these, for convenience, politics major and politics minor. Politics major constitutes its own distinct layer in the process of human social development. Politics minor is a strategy used by politics major.

Politics major is a process described by several authors. Here’s James Burnham’s take:

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

Noted Clausewitz scholar Christopher Bassford expands on this definition:

Politics is the highly variable process by which power is distributed in any society: the family, the office, a religious order, a tribe, the state, an empire, a region, an alliance, and the international community. The process of distributing power may be fairly orderly—through consensus, inheritance, election, some time-honored tradition, or it may be chaotic—through assassination, revolution, and warfare. Whatever process may be in place at any given time, politics is inherently dynamic and the process is under constant pressures for change…

Bassford illustrates this argument with the example of economics:

…in reality, economics is just an element of politics: if politics is the general process by which by which general power is distributed, economics is just a subsystem by which power specifically over material wealth is distributed. In some societies, as in command economies, there is virtually no distinction. Even in market democracies, how much of domestic ‘politics’ is really about the redistribution of wealth? Economic issues become ‘politicized’ when strictly command or market processes are perceived to be providing economic outcomes unacceptable to groups capable of responding to the inequity with other kinds of tools…Thus economic objectives easily become political objectives…

Politics major is at best a peaceful process of distributing power and at worst a violent struggle for power. The peacefulness of the process is driven by a choice between strategies. The choice between strategies is largely driven by the nature of the desires that an individual or community seeks to realize. If those desires are hostile towards another side’s desires, there is little chance that a division of power will be accomplished without resort to a less than peaceful strategy. If there is room enough in the world for two competing sets of desire to be accommodated, a more peaceful strategy may be in the cards. Strategy is, after all, a reconciliation between power and desire. Hostile desire favors the accumulation and expenditure of hostile power while more pacific desire favors the collection and use of peaceful power. A hostile strategy is the likely outcome of the reconciliation of power with hostile desire and a peaceful strategy is the likely outcome of a reconciliation of power with peaceful desires.

So the nature of the ends desired will usually dictate the nature of the means employed. If desires are relatively non-hostile, politics minor is a likely strategy to adopt. Politics minor is a strategy intended to make the other side conform to your desires when doing so is in accord with what they would do if they had the power to resist you and sufficient knowledge of your true intent. Politics minor, also known as politicking or logrolling, is a combination of operational methods like negotiating, wheeling and dealing, debate, alliance forming, and posturing. It’s central characteristic is its peaceable intent and conduct.

It is important to distinguish between politics major and politics minor when discussing war. Politics major is above both war and politics minor; both are subordinate to it and are instruments in its hands. Politics minor and war are both strategies. They are coequal in rank if not desirability; they interact but one is not clearly subordinate to the other. It’s more a game of constant one-up-manship. War is as much natural continuation of politics major as politics minor. Neither war nor politics minor constitute all of politics major. Most of the activity takes on an oil and water quality: the intent of politics minor is peaceable while the intent of war is hostile. It is its hostile intention rather than its occasionally hostile means that makes war war.

I usually define war as a strategy intended to make the other side conform to our desires when it is contrary to what they would do if they had the power to resist us and sufficient knowledge of our true intentions. In politics minor, if the other side of an issue had the power to resist us and possessed sufficient knowledge of our true intentions and yet still acceded to our desires, the result was not a product of war. The other side had full freedom to say no and possessed enough knowledge to make a clear decision. If those elements are not present and the other side lacked either freedom to say no or knowledge about what we were truly up to, then any result produced from such an interaction is a result of war. The key requirements to characterize an act as war rather than politics minor is:

1. Did they have the freedom to say no?
2. Did they have sufficient knowledge about what we were up to in order to make an informed decision?

If the answer to either of those questions is no, than any result of our strategy is a result of war. Any action that seeks to produce such a result constitutes war and not politics minor. The root of war, as CGW points out, is confusion. War may or may not involve violence but war always involves deceit. As Master Sun reminds us, war is the Tao of deception. As du Picq pointed out, most slaughter on the battlefield occurs after one side breaks and runs. Their opponent can then run them down and slaughter them at leisure since, frequently, the panicking troopers on the defeated side throw away their implements of war like armor and weapons since, instead of instruments of survival, they become impediments to survival. This leaves them defenseless with their back exposed to the enemy. What reduces them to these desperate straights? Terror, the product of intentionally induced and merely fortuitous confusion. Violence is only an enabler and a beneficiary.

Politics may involve the use of physical force, or the threat of it, to compel an opponent to submit to one’s will per Clausewitz. That is war. Politics may involve non-violent competition and struggle. That can be war if the intent is hostile. Politics may involve subversion. Subversion is method of operational art and not a strategic method and as such would be subordinate to a strategy like war. Politics may involve two sides take up arms against each other. That is war in its (ironically) less confusing and therefore less warlike form.

Whether one side sees itself as waging a war while the other side regards the interaction as mere politics minor constitutes war may seem unclear. However, war does not have to be a two-way street. If one party wages war while the other doesn’t, the result is still war since at least one side has hostile intentions. Whether this yields them a specific advantage is ambiguous. Take Friedman’s example of Mexico. To what extent does Mexico’s at worst intentional and at best neglectful encouragement of northward migration constitute an act of war? If the American people had the power to resist and full knowledge of the true intentions of the Mexican government, would they voluntarily accede to this mass exodus? Demographic war may constitute such a large phenomenon that it is only a vague notion shared by Mexicans moving north that the cumulative pressure of individuals making seemingly disconnected decisions in their ones, twos, and threes can create a political shift north of the Rio Grande. While that would be war, how do you fight a threat that diffuse? Exposed as war it might generate significant opposition. Considered mere politics minor, it may generate no opposition. Shifting American public opinion one way or the other may be politics minor. Or, at worst, it may be an act of war by some elements of the United States on other parts.

Cue Twilight Show Zone theme.

Came across this interesting version of the OODA loop that contains the full Boyd but keeps it simple enough to grasp. Rather than the dumbed down version like so:

Dumb it down

You get this:

Better OODA Loop

Definite improvement.