The Committee of Public Safety

Creditanstalt was an Austrian bank whose failure in May of 1931 triggered the penultimate crisis of the worst depths of the Great Depression. I wonder if Dubai World is the Global Financial Crisis’s Creditanstalt?

Everyone should have their own Boyd page.

The Full Boyd

Boyd.

Boyd.

Still here?

Boyd.

I own most of noted British military historian John Keegan’s books except a few. Keegan has written some indisputable classics of military history like The Face of Battle, The Mask of Command, The Price of Admiralty, and Six Armies in Normandy. However, he’s produced a few howlers like Fields of Battle and The Iraq War (which was so obsequious to Tommy Franks that even I, a supporter of the War in Iraq, was sickened). The worse offender in my eyes, however, is Keegan’s A History of Warfare, his attempt at a magisterial world history of war. I had never heard of Carl von Clausewitz before I read the first chapter of A History of Warfare in the local Barnes and Noble bookstore. My introduction to Clausewitz, therefore, was overwhelmingly negative. When I finally got around to actually reading a good copy of On War, I was therefore shocked by how utterly inaccurate Keegan’s portrayal of Clausewitz was.

The intensity of my disappointment is the root of my Clausewitzian orthodoxy. It’s why I find Martin van Crevald so appalling. Keegan has plausible deniability. Crevald, as the author of The Immortal Clausewitz in Michael Handel’s Clausewitz and Modern Strategy, knows better. Keegan confuses Clausewitz; Crevald libels Clausewitz. His Clausewitz is a strawman that Crevald sets up to knock down at whatever whim Crevald has at a given moment. That’s not a new crime, Liddell Hart was as bad or worse. Crevald, however is the most fashionable. Given the amount of influence Crevald’s (and Liddell Hart’s) distortions have had on new fangled frameworks like 4GW, network centric warfare, and effects based operations, the usefulness of such frameworks is fundamentally flawed.

Back to Keegan. Apparently he has a new book on the American Civil War out. The reviews are not kind, even when written by the genial James M. McPherson. Keegan has lost some of the deftness of touch he had as a young and hungry military historian. The Face of Battle may be the best work of military history of the late twentieth century. However, Keegan, like Niall Ferguson, has not been the same caliber of historian since he became a big shot. His name on the cover of this book is almost as big as the title. It might as well be John Keegan’s Civil War, Featuring John Keegan, Presented by John Keegan.

I feel better now.

The Mighty Curtis Gale Weeks, He Who Has Tasted Internet Death and Laughed, comments:

You and Peter and David appear to be merely reinventing the wheel.

For instance, in 2007, I had already written about the kinds of problems both you and Peter have been discussing, in “X vs X:Boom and the Generations in Conflict“, specifically the question of linear progressions pigeon-holed to specific epics. Although there I also, like later contra-Arherring and some others, proposed, and still maintain, the worth in seeing these generations/grades/whathaveyou in relationship to each other:

“Viewing the generations in a linear representation, in relationship to the Boom as Arherring has done, may offer insights to different styles of fighting which need not emerge solely as a uni-directional development of warfare. We might in fact contemplate particular strategies which have been employed throughout the history of humanity (which generally runs along with the history of warfare) and place these strategies either to the left of the Boom or to the right; are they, then, also “generations” of warfare? The question may be moot, if we are only to consider strategic dynamics as they relate to the Boom, or to kinetics, in the way Arherring has done. However, to postulate a generational model is to suggest a general uni-directional development through which different strategies emerge as a consequence of previous strategies which have been employed. A singular generational model need not be applied to the entire history of warfare in order to box certain styles of fighting into specific epochs, and only those epochs, within the history of humanity; rather, a generational model only need show that a given style of fighting has resulted as a consequence of another — and this will usually occur within a specific epoch, or a small time frame, simply because some overlap of generations, or competitive conflict, must occur in order for one style to develop as a consequence of another.”

In the later post, I made an argument against the sort of thing Peter has done with his “new framework” approach; such approaches, similar to Lind’s — and after all that seems to be his only model, ever — are mere descriptive. This reduces such frameworks to near uselessness. To reduce his offering to absurdity, suppose I could do similarly by delineating the style of dress, uniform, or combat gear broken out for distinct periods of time. This could be done. It might actually describe epochs, at least vis-a-vis the apparel; or, it might actually describe certain niches or styles which have reappeared throughout history. But it’s merely descriptive:

“In point of fact, Lind’s model has often caused dispute, particularly on the fourth tier, that is with regard to the prognostication of 4GW. Useful or not, the first three generations are descriptive of what has already occurred in our modern era and so are “pre-verified”. The fourth generation is a guess of what is to come, which has been partly verified by current conflicts but was left open enough to suggest all future conflicts.

The fact that Lind’s GMW leaves “fourth generation warfare” open to becoming whatever happens in the future — the definition is vague and fluid enough — severely limits the usefulness of GMW. What are we to learn from GMW that will benefit us, whether as a state or as individuals engaged in conflict? By leaving no room for the development of a “fifth generation of warfare” that could defeat a “fourth generation warfare”, we are left no recourse in GMW except the ability to describe: Having described 1GW through 3GW, we come to “4GW” which we can use to tag all future events. What we are to do about those events doesn’t matter and is conspicuously absent from the GMW model.

xGW, on the other hand, would seek to suggest a framework which would allow problem-solving. If we eject the word “generation” from the model and instead use something else, such as “grade” [2], and by so doing eject the most common connotations of “generation”, we can perhaps begin to postulate not merely the styles of conflict as they emerge exterior to us, one after another, but also the relationship of these styles to one another in a useful manner: i.e., we may postulate an interior activity, or a reflective and prospective activity which becomes problem-solving. One force sees its opponent’s activity, assesses itself, and seeks to develop a better method of fighting. For me, this is at heart the greatest strength of xGW.”

And if I may backtrack (which these recent postulations, here and there, seem to be), I would reintroduce from that first link the very same idea, or nearly the same, given by a commenter at one of Peter’s threads: that we may view these G’s as they appear within a specific culture, area, etc., without trying to lump all of human history, the world over, into a singular unidirectional progression:

“For our xGW, we only need to understand the possessive pronoun. Criticisms of the xGW theory that is currently propounded usually take the extreme position of pointing out that Alexander the Great or Julius Caesar or some other historical figure or group also fought in an xGW manner or an x+1GW manner; and since the proponents of current xGW theory are assumed to be referring to the entire history of war when they discuss xGW, a theory which one assumes must fit a single uni-directional evolution of warfare spanning the entire history of humanity, those proponents are speaking gibberish. Well, some are; others concern themselves only with our xGW, limiting the theory to the period since the Peace of Westphalia or in some other way.”

I.e., this effort to create a Descriptive Model ™ that must be able to describe all that has happened in the history of warfare, the world over, may be moot or distracting. What we have to do now is understand our own time (which extends backward somewhat, even to before our particular births, but not back to the dawn of humanity) and try to come to some valuable understanding of our time which we might apply to current needs. If we do see a useful somewhat-generational — taking several meanings of that word – development in our time, using what we see does not require that we also find a way to lump other efforts, from thousands of years ago or from vanished societies, into our vision of our own time.

Also, a final note: this hang-up on terminology seems to me to be pretty silly, even juvenile, and generally self-serving. Peter can only see so far into the definition of “generation” and so he had an apoplexy, like many others accustomed to stopping at “1.” in the dictionary. “Grade” and “gradient” may serve to trip up others, for similar reasons. It is too bad, but suggesting a whole theory is trash merely because a word brings up one particular connotation for one particular person, or several persons, is useless.

To which I attempted to reply over at CGW’s but his CAPTCHA was fighting a never-ending war of attrition with my browser. So I will post my reply here:

@CGW

(BTW, Akisment thought your comment was spam but it has been rescued.)

The problem with xGW is that it has outgrown its current taxonomy. 4GW made sense in its original context because Lind was talking about four generations of war. Hence calling it 4GW makes sense. Though I don’t find 4GW very interesting as a framework, within its original context its chosen taxonomy makes sense.

xGW emerged as an expansion of the original 4GW framework but it has acquired more relevance and, in many ways, transcends the original framework. The tight terminological coupling between xGW and legacy 4GW, however, does xGW a disservice. It merely confuses transient passers-by like Haq, draws the derision of legacy 4GWers, and completely confuses n00bs. It deserves to be freed from 4GW and its trappings.

Peter’s proposed taxonomy is not a significant improvement as it seems too influenced by a temporary 4GW overdose. John Keegan had a taxonomy similar to Peter’s in his deeply flawed A History of Warfare twenty years ago: warrior, mercenary, slave, regular, conscript, and militia. To quote Keegan:

The warrior category is self-explanatory, but I use it to include such groups as the samurai of Japan and the Western knightly class, the nucleus of which may almost always be identified as the remnant of a warrior tribe, alien or native; warrior cults, like the original Muslims and the Sikhs, and self-made warrior polities, like the Zulu or Ashanti, include themselves. Mercenaries are those that sell military service for money—though also for such inducements as grants of land, admission to citizenship (offered by the Roman army and the French Foreign Legion) or preferential treatment. Regulars are mercenaries who already enjoy citizenship or its equivalent but choose military service as a means of subsistence; in affluent states regular service may take on some of the attributes of a profession…[An example of the slave system is the Mamelukes, which Keegan discussed earlier in the book]…The militia principle lays the duty of performing military service upon all fit male citizens; failure or refusal to do duty usually entails loss of citizenship. Conscription is a tax levied upon a male resident’s time at a certain age of life, though to citizens payment of such a tax usually represented as a civic duty; selective conscription, especially if for long periods of service to an unrepresentative government — twenty years was the term in Russia before the emancipation of the serfs — is difficult to differentiate from the slave system.

Not satisfied with that, Keegan organizes his chapters by a chronology based on succeeding technologies of war: stone, flesh (mainly horseflesh), iron, and fire.

Dave Ronfeldt’s TIMN predates anything that’s happened in this circle of the woods with either xGW or 4GW so labeling it a “reinvention” of 4GW or xGW is inaccurate. If you go to the RAND website you can download his original TIMN paper (from 1996). The paper on “melee, massing, maneuver, and swarming” (MMMS) dates from 2000: He couldn’t be “reinventing” anything unless he took copious notes on D5GW, went back in time, and posted his RAND studies as “original” papers. Mr. Rondfeldt is a talented man but he’s not that talented.

I can see your point that using 0…5 can serve as an incentive to pulling yourself up to the next GW in order to improve your GW but I think it’s still too linear. War follows parallel paths; suggesting that the path of adaption follows a model of “Bob is waging 3GW ergo I must wage 4GW to beat his 3GW mojo” does not handle the case of “Bob is waging 0GW, 1GW, and 5GW at the same time, ergo I must use 6GW mixed with 97GW to beat his 0/1/5GW”. Classifying warfare by jumping back and forth along a number line is more a exercise from second grade math than a useful analytic framework. Yes, analysis must act by breaking down a complex spectrum of conflict into discernible wavelengths but saying that “this gradient of war is brought to you by the letters G and W and the number 5″ is not sufficiently clear. Categorizing war by the composition of the belly button lint caused by the presence or absence of a particular style of uniform may actually be more precise than de-generationalized xGW. War operates among parallel paths of belly button lint not linear belly button lint. It transcends the imprint of “innie” and “outie”.

Terminological exactitude is necessary not only for war nerds like us but for the great unwashed. They need a better framework of war that is sufficiently clear enough that they can understand the great matters of war and peace. Moving the American public past “no one wins in war”, “all war is bad except when waged against Nazis”, “no more Vietnams”, “the Good War”, “there is no military solution, only a political solution”, and other such claptrap is not helped by obscurely numbered gradients. I could explain 4GW to grandma but I’d have a hard time explaining xGW.

I aspire to a universal and accessible theory of war. As a military history buff, I see commonalities from Sun-tzu and Thucydides down to Kilcullen, commonalities that can be arranged in a universal framework, commonalities that xGW can throw light on outside of its current Lindish straight jacket, and commonalities that elude the military naifs that populate Washington right now. These commonalities can not only provide explanations relevant to the military historian but relevant to the problems of the current strategic practitioner. If a theory does not provide a (yes) descriptive framework for general understanding a phenomenon, especially when it’s a phenomenon as broadly consequential as war, then it has no practical usefulness except as entertainment for those who find debating the number of angels who can dance on the head of a pin amusing (3/4 of the male Internet population but still…).

xGW could have more usefulness but not as currently constituted.

I’ve been following Kotare’s examination of the Generations of War (4GW) framework over at The Strategist:

1. On the bullshit of “generations of war”
2. Roots – the origin of “generations of war”
3. “We few, we happy few, we band of [1GW] brothers”
4. “Cohorts of War” – a general framework

Kotare has gone from a straight up attack on 4GW to a somewhat tentative embrace, even developing his own “cohorts of war” pantomime of 4GW. David Rondfeldt made this comment:

From a different angle, always open for discussion and refinement, here’s an alternative, four-fold view, focused on organization and doctrine, that John Arquilla and I have elaborated before, including before I knew about 4GW:

“Accordingly, the history of warfare is a history of the progressive development of four fundamental forms of engagement: the melee, massing, maneuver, and swarming. Briefly, warfare has evolved from chaotic melees in which every man fought on his own, to the design of massed but often rigidly shaped formations, and then to the adoption of maneuver. Swarming appears at times in this lengthy history, but its major advances as a doctrine will occur in the coming years. Some are now underway.”

If this formulation ever looks interesting, go here to download our old Rand study on “Swarming and the Future of Conflict”:

http://www.rand.org/pubs/documented_briefings/DB311/

Chapter Two (pp. 7-23) is about the evolution of military organization and doctrine: melee, massing, maneuver, and swarming, with reference to the roles of information and information technology in the evolution of these four forms.

What that write-up does not show, except in a passing footnote, is that this formulation derives from a view of social evolution — my pet theory about TIMN — which holds that, across the ages, societies have come up with only four major forms of organization: tribes, hierarchical institutions (as in states and their militaries), markets, and networks. Thus, early tribes are associated with melees, hierarchical institutions with the devekopment of massed formations, the rise of market-oriented societies with the turn to maneuver doctrines, and now the information age with networked swarming.

4GW overlaps with networked swarming.

My comment was  growing a bit lengthy so it’s been upgraded to a post:

David Ronfeldt’s TIMN is a much better general framework than the Generations of War framework. Every iteration of the Generation of War framework eventually runs into the problem that the phenomena it describes (line and column, maneuver, etc.) do not manifest themselves linearly throughout history. Someone who wishes to keep using the Generations of War for substantive analysis must then replace their generations with some other categorization that allows each “generation” to appear in parallel with other “generations” or appear before a “generation”, disappear, and then reappear again. Always in motion these generations are. Inevitably, the temptation arises to substitute “gradient”, “gradation”, (my apologies Peter) “cohort”, or some other numerically denominated category for the original “generation”. TIMN, on the other hand, unfolds chronologically from tribe to institution to market to network but all elements of TIMN have manifested themselves in varying degrees since the beginning of human history and they are all manifesting themselves now to varying degrees. F.A. Hayek’s one insightful comment fits in with TIMN:

If we were to apply the unmodified, uncurbed, rules of the micro-cosmos (i.e., of the small band or troop, or of say, our families) to the macro-cosmos (our wider civilization), as our instincts and sentimental yearnings often makes us wish to do, we would destroy it. Yet if we were always to apply the rules of the extended order to our more intimate groupings, we would crush them. So we must learn to live in two sorts of a world at once.

Much of the interesting implications of TIMN comes from the lag between the mental universe our mind inhabits (that of the tribe) and the complex world we inhabit (in order from least to most confusing, institution, market, network). The much smaller lag between Lind’s original four generations is less threatening because it has yet to cause the mental contortions of the lag between tribe, institution, market, and network.

TIMN also intersects with the Adaptive Market Hypothesis:

The primary components of the AMH consist of the following ideas:

• (A1) Individuals act in their own self-interest.
• (A2) Individuals make mistakes.
• (A3) Individuals learn and adapt.
• (A4) Competition drives adaptation and innovation.
• (A5) Natural selection shapes market ecology.
• (A6) Evolution determines market dynamics.

EMH and AMH have a common starting point in A1, but the two paradigms part company in A2 and A3. In efficient markets, investors do not make mistakes, nor is there any learning and adaptation because the market environment is stationary and always in equilibrium. In the AMH framework, mistakes occur frequently, but individuals are capable of learning from mistakes and adapting their behavior accordingly. However, A4 states that adaptation does not occur independently of market forces but is driven by competition, that is, the push for survival. The interactions among various market participants are governed by natural selection—the survival of the richest, in our context—and A5 implies that the current market environment is a product of this selection process. A6 states that the sum total of these components—selfish individuals, competition, adaptation, natural selection, and environmental conditions— is what we observe as market dynamics.

The key insight of AMH is the lag between the speed of biological evolution and the speed of cultural evolution:

The proper response to the question of how individuals determine the point at which their optimizing behavior is satisfactory is this: Such points are determined not analytically, but through trial and error and, of course, natural selection. Individuals make choices based on experience and their best guesses as to what might be optimal, and they learn by receiving positive or negative reinforcement from the outcomes. If they receive no such reinforcement, they do not learn. In this fashion, individuals develop heuristics to solve various economic challenges, and as long as those challenges remain stable, the heuristics eventually will adapt to yield approximately optimal solutions.

If, on the other hand, the environment changes, then it should come as no surprise that the heuristics of the old environment are not necessarily suited to the new. In such cases, we observe behavioral biases—actions that are apparently ill advised in the context in which we observe them. But rather than labeling such behavior irrational, we should recognize that suboptimal behavior is likely when we take heuristics out of their evolutionary context. A more accurate term for such behavior might be “maladaptive.” The flopping of a fish on dry land may seem strange and unproductive, but under water, the same motions propel the fish away from its predators. And the antagonistic effect of human emotional reactions on logical reasoning described earlier is maladaptive for many financial contexts.

A specific example of lag that the AMH paper discusses is the structure of the triune brain:

The starting point is a basic fact about the brain: it is not a homogeneous mass of nerve cells but a collection of specialized components, many of which have been identified with particular functions and types of behavior. For example, the brainstem, which is located at the base of the brain and sits on top of the spinal cord, controls the most basic bodily functions such as breathing and heartbeat and is active even during deep sleep. The limbic system, which comprises several regions in the middle of the brain, is responsible for emotions, instincts, and social behavior such as feeding, fight-or-flight responses, and sexuality. And the cerebral cortex, which is the tangled maze of gray matter that forms the outer layer of the brain, is what allows us to think complex and abstract thoughts and where language and musical abilities, logical reasoning, learning, long-term planning, and sentience reside. These three areas form the triune brain model, proposed by MacLean; he refers to them as the reptilian, mammalian, and hominid brains, respectively. This terminology underscores his hypothesis that the human brain is the outcome of an evolutionary process in which basic survival functions appeared first, more advanced social behavior came second, and uniquely human cognitive abilities emerged most recently (that is, within the past 100,000 years).

My previous post commented:

From this we can postulate three biological OODA loops within the human brain, each one with ever shorter lags in adaptation:

1. The reptilian loop
2. The mammalian loop
3. The hominid loop

If we follow the momentum of AMH and take the logic of evolution into less biologically hardwired human “software”, we can see five OODA loops and the steadily decreasing lag between each:

1. The cultural loop
2. The political loop
3. The strategic loop
4. The operational loop
5. The tactical loop

Much of the adaptation mismatches that occur in human political communities and individuals can be traced to adaptive lag. A particular loop is optimized for a specific environment and acquires optimizations peculiar to that environment. However, the environment changes and loops with slower lag times adapt at a sometimes glacial pace. Within the “software” portion of the human brain, culture is the slowest to adapt, followed by politics, and strategy. This is not to say rapid adaption in software can’t happen at these higher levels like culture, only that, on average, adaption will be slower than the lowest levels.As the AMH argues, systemic human irrationality is not necessarily globally irrational as it is locally irrational. Many adaptations such as heuristics and cognitive biases make sense in a legacy adaption context but make less sense in a contemporary adaption context. They are rational under the right circumstances but irrational under other circumstances. Similarly, the software stack of adaptation contains rationalities under some contexts but irrationalities under other contexts. The true measure of adaptive capacities is how rapidly irrationalities can be replaced with rationalities. Since some irrationalities are bound up in emotion and power distributions, this isn’t always easy. On the other hand, some adaptions which seem irrational to a “rational” observer and that are done away with turn out to have been rational after all. The end result is a stack of OODA loops that contain a mix of rationality and irrationality and lag behind the adaption curve on average.

TIMN fits this logic very well. The human brain is very optimized for the tribe, the dominant form of human organization for 99.999999% of our shared history. When dealing with inter-familial or inter-personal relations, our brains function reasonably well. When, as Hayek expounded, we take that same tribal mindset and apply it to the more complex “macro-cosmos” of the institution, market, or network, our touch is less sure and our errors are larger. This increasingly veers into Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s “fourth quadrant” where the optimized structures of our brain run into phenomena their less and less able to accurately process. From this quadrant emerges the “black swans” that Nassim Nicholas Taleb has loosed upon the world. You need more than four generations to digest them.

T. Greer asks:

I am curious as to your definitions of “politics” and “policy.” In the original German Clausewitz did not (or was unable to – I have no experience with the German language) distinguish between the two. Where do you draw the line between the two?

I’ve made quite a few posts on this subject, so I’ll link them for T. Greer’s reference in order of relevance:

Links to my assumptions series:

1. Assumptions: Desire
2. Assumptions: Adaption
3. Assumptions: Control
4. Assumptions: Power
5. Assumptions: Complex Adaptive Systems
6. Assumptions: OODA Loop
7. Assumptions: Orientation
8. Assumptions: Decision
9. Assumptions: Adaption Stack
10. Assumptions: Culture
11. Assumptions: Politics
12. Assumptions: Strategy
13. Assumptions: Operational Art
14. Assumptions: Tactics
15. Assumptions: War

(props Shloky) Defense and the National Interest is shutting down. For those that don’t know, DNI is the home of the late great John Boyd’s compendium. This is a priceless archive of one of the great and original American military thinkers of the twentieth century that has been available as a free download as a service to the greater strategic community. Shloky reports that John Robb is working on creating an archive of DNI but, in the interim, be a resilient community and download the Boyd library for yourself:

A Discourse on Winning and Losing

Abstract of the Discourse and Conceptual Spiral (413KB pdf)

Destruction and Creation (on chetrichards.com)

Patterns of Conflict

Original format in PDF (2.9 MB)
PPT (1.5 MB)
PDF of PPT (830 KB)

Strategic Game of ? and ?

Original format in PDF (587 KB)
PPT (319 KB)
PDF of PPT (97 KB)

Organic Design for Command and Control

Original format in PDF (409 KB)
PPT (201 KB)
PDF of PPT (90 KB)

The Essence of Winning and Losing (on chetrichards.com)

Earlier work

Aerial Attack Study (7572KB pdf)

Fast Transients (1292Kb pdf)

Source lists

Patterns of Conflict

Destruction and Creation

There’s also a lot of 4GW material for people who swing that way including the original Lind article.

The common modern taxonomy of war used in these United States has four levels:

1. Political
2. Strategic
3. Operational
4. Tactical

Of these the conception of the operational level of war is the most recent. Alien: How Operational Art Devoured Strategy by Justin Kelly and Mike Brennan argues that operational art is a monster that has consumed what used to be considered strategy to no great effect. This quotation from John Hay’s and John Nicolay’s biography of Lincoln is suggestive of what the authors of “Alien” posit is a more traditional view of strategy:

War and politics, campaign and statecraft, are Siamese twins, inseparable and interdependent; and to talk of military operations without the direction and interference of an administrator is as absurd as to plan a campaign without recruits, pay or rations.

Hay and Nicolay were Lincoln’s staff during the Great War of the Rebellion and had front row seats on the man they called the Great Tycoon’s management of a war as the politician and strategist in chief. In an earlier Committee report I related some of Abraham Lincoln’s style of command. Lincoln would walk from the White House down to the War Department telegraph room, open the drawer where all the dispatches for that day were kept, and read through all of them. In this way Lincoln often knew what was happening on distant battlefields before the high command in Washington knew. He would also send orders directly to field commanders based on his readings. Whether this was a good thing or bad thing from a purely military stand point is something Civil War historians differ upon with some arguing that Lincoln was a strategic genius and others arguing he was a strategic imbecile. What seems unarguable is that he was one of two men in the entire Union who could keep the war in his own head, Ulysses S. Grant being the other. Part of this came from the fact that the interface between politics and strategy happened within Lincoln’s brain.

In contrast to an argument that other military writers, most notoriously the Elder Moltke, have advanced, that political leaders should keep entirely out of “purely military” affairs, Kelly and Brennan argue that political leaders should be intimately involved in strategy and even tactics. Lincoln himself was involved in tactics: almost any gun maker could drop by the White House with a new gun design and get the president, often accompanied by one of his boys, to go out behind the White House and shoot the guns. Note the example of Christopher Miner Spencer, inventor of the Spencer Repeating Rifle:

Although the Spencer rifle had been developed as early as 1859, it was not initially used by the Union. On August 18, 1863, Christopher Spencer walked into the White House carrying one of his rifles and a supply of cartridges. He walked past the sentries, and into Abraham Lincoln’s office. After some discussion, he returned the following afternoon, when Spencer and Lincoln were joined by Edwin Stanton, Secretary of War and other officials, and the group then proceeded to walk out on the Mall. Near the site of the Washington Monument, they engaged in target shooting.

Moltke, a contemporary,would have probably danced a jig or thrown a fit. Nevertheless, some of America’s greatest war presidents like Polk, Lincoln, FDR, and Truman were constantly meddling in what today would be considered the sandbox of the military. America’s worst president, Thomas Woodrow Wilson (may he burn in hell), despite being a control freak and a sanctimonious prig, exercised little control over military strategy. Before Black Jack Pershing went off to France, he met with Wilson only once. When he tried to tell Woody something about the war, Wilson cut him off with the remark that Pershing came to him highly recommended and that he, Wilson, was sure he’d do a bang up job. That was the effective end of the interview and, true to his word, Wilson paid little attention to the military effort, leaving the running of the war to Secretary of War Newton Baker, avowed pacifist and former mayor of Cleveland, OH, Peyton C. March, Army Chief of Staff, and Pershing. If the otherworldly Wilson had employed something like strategy such as engaging in a build up of the U.S. Army before entry into World War I as a way of persuading the Germans and the Entente to be more reasonable (reasonable being do what we say) instead of counting on his shining personal righteousness acting as a beacon of peace from across the Atlantic, maybe some of the destruction of a disastrous war and a disastrous peace might have been avoided.

Kelly and Brennan cite Clausewitz in support of their argument, making a point that this blog has made repeatedly, that war is a continuation of politics, not policy, with the addition of other means:

Clausewitz held a clear view that war was a Gestalt that could be understood only in terms of its political direction. He described war as an extension of politics that were themselves the product of the interplay of rational, nonrational, and irrational influences mutually interacting in “the remarkable trinity.” Therefore, political direction was not equated to rational policy but to rational policy shaped, circumscribed, and subverted by the irrational and nonrational forces inherent in the base polity. At the same time, the realities of combat—chance, uncertainty, and friction—and the independent will of the enemy made warfare as dynamic and unpredictable as its political direction. Clausewitz understood the dynamism of war—why it was “more than a true chameleon” which only changes its skin color. In today’s terminology, Clausewitz saw war as a complex system constantly threatening to escape human control, to lose coherence and slide into chaos. This recognition led him to postulate a theory of war based on how war might be prevented from losing its coherence, and he posited a systems view in which it was made coherent only by its political aim. To Clausewitz, keeping actions aligned behind the political aim was both the greatest challenge in warfare and the essence of good practice.

Clausewitz therefore argued that in war every action needed to contribute to the attainment of the political aim: “tactics teaches the use of the armed forces in the engagement. Strategy, the use of engagements for the object of the war.” Clausewitz’s elegant explanation avoids the reductionism of Jomini, while providing incisive clarity as to the need to connect tactics (engagements or battles) directly to the attainment of the political objective of the war. As usual, Clausewitz is able to explain to us not just what something is, but how it works in practice.

The authors hint that a distinct level of “grand strategy” may be as unnecessary as they argue a distinct level of operations is:

In his writings, [Basil] Liddell-Hart often uses the term “strategy” when he is in fact (in stark contrast to Clausewitz and others) speaking about operational art. He coined the term “grand strategy” to fill the resulting void in the higher direction of wars. To Liddell-Hart, “tactics lies in and fills the province of fighting. [Operational art] not only stops on the frontier, but has for its purpose the reduction of fighting to the slenderest possible proportions.”

It may be that there is no need for extra levels of war beyond the more traditional:

1. Politics
2. Strategy
3. Tactics

Strategy (and war, itself a strategy) should be seen as a direct continuation of politics with all of its contradictory goals, mercurial pursuit of the latest fashions, back room deals, back slapping, and distribution of power. Policy conceived as a meritocratic, technocratic, disembodied, and dispassionate rational design of ideal plans above and away from the messy contortions of politics should be consigned to the realm of fairies, leprechauns, civil servants, and other fantastic creatures of myth and fancy. Grand strategy has always had a mystique of clever mandarins and military geniuses sitting somewhere deep in the bowels of government around a table designing clever and devious ways of winning power based on the intelligent application of cool and collected realpolitik. That’s dangerously close to the belief many on the leftward end of the spectrum have in public-spirited, selfless, enlightened, and incorruptible policy makers. The political reality of the level any hypothetical grand strategic decision-making would take place on probably places such decision-making squarely in the realm of politics and whatever diminished rump remains after politics is amputated from it should probably just be called strategy. The concept of an operational level of war makes sense to me, perhaps placed within narrower bounds, as Brennan and Kelly suggest.

As a software engineer, I am constantly being barraged with further obfuscation and novelties. Yet the fundamental principles of software engineering and computing have been fairly constant for twenty years. Much of technology development currently consists of the rediscovery and reimplementation of ideas that were discovered and implemented years ago. Many technology commentators declare that you shouldn’t reinvent the wheel and yet time and time again the wheel is reinvented and repackaged as the new hotness. Contemporary technologists aren’t as original as they think they are and older generations weren’t as stodgy as we think they are. Technology development is thought of as the discovery of the new when much of it is rediscovery of the old. Cutting to the essence of what a technology does and does not do is an important part of technocracy and yet the navel gazing fascination of the technology industry with the latest and greatest obscures the essence of most platform. Those with a longer view are usually marginalized and forgotten by an industry that thirsts for youth that will work long hours for little pay if only they get to play with the latest toy. Lack of historical memory is a characteristic of American culture but it reaches dangerous extremes in the technology field.

New and powerful tools for analysis to use in the ongoing adaption of power to the demands of the world is needed. But what is also needed is synthesis, as Boyd preached, and while many contemporary military jargon has great analytic power, it suffers from a relative poverty in the power to synthesize. The cult of the new overwhelms the cumulative experience of the past, which is often engaged selectively and then only in defense of the latest novelty. The engagement of the prospective strategic mind with military history should be deep and broad. It should probably engage with the whole of East and South Asian military history instead of a Reader’s Digest version of Sun Tzu. The West is important and I’m as in favor of immersing yourself in your own cultural heritage as anyone. But the role of non-Europeans in the world of the future is likely to wax instead of wane and the engagement we in the West have with it is shallow and spotty. My own buzzword enriched field of technology seems to have fatally infected military discourse with serious jargonese.

For all of us over here, I apologize.

More thoughts on Kelly and Brennan here.