The Committee of Public Safety

The first principle Walter McDougall proposes as part of his “Old Testament” of American foreign affairs in his 1997 book Promised Land, Crusader State is that of “Liberty, or Exceptionalism (so called)”. McDougall (and others) have argued that the War for American Independence was fundamentally conservative, especially when compared and contrasted with the revolutions that followed in France, Latin America, Russia, and elsewhere in the Great Wide World outside the United States. As a conservative revolution, the American Revolution was primarily a war of defense fought to preserve the century old Whiggish institutions and mores then existing in the Thirteen Colonies from the dangerous constitutional innovations of King George’s Tories, innovations that would lead to the Second, more illiberal, British Empire of the nineteenth century.

This radical defense against the encroachments of the King in Parliament was conceived in the fevered imagination of America’s Lenin, Samuel Adams, years before it became politically palatable to the Colonies or their leaders. There was a real danger of British oligarchic encroachment on colonial affairs. The Parliament of George III was less representative of the English (and Scottish) populations than the Parliaments that battled King Charles the Headless and his constitutional innovations 14o years before. In fact the earlier battles of the English Civil War were themselves a conservative revolt against a King intent on governmental innovations that would destroy existing English institutions and liberties. Both the English and American revolutions threw up their share of crusading radicals who wanted to make the world anew under a Leveling wind but in both cases the Establishment kept the crazies from taking the entire endeavor over the edge and into a Jacobin abyss.

The Founding Fathers were looking backwards at the English Civil War; the resulting dictatorship of Cromwell, his major generals, and his standing New Model Army; the Restoration of the Stuarts through the intrigues of General Monck; the attempt to subvert Parliament again in the interests of Stuart autocracy, French pretensions, and Popish plots; the Dutch Invasion of 1688 and William of Orange’s coup against his uncle/father-in-law James II, the menacing corruption of Sir Robert Walpole, and the pretensions of George “Be King” Hanover III, Defender of the Faith. Benedict Arnold, looking backwards, conceived of himself as the second coming of George Monck, rounding up the crazies of the New New Model Army, with Washington as the new (inconveniently alive) Cromwell, and restoring King and Colonies to their proper harmony. George Washington, looking backwards, played the role of the anti-Cromwell, the anti-Monck, and, even further back, the anti-Caesar. Due to myriad socio-political factors and the will of Almighty God, the liberty of white Protestant males had been miraculously preserved in the Colonies and, darn it all, Americans were going to keep it that way.

McDougall argues that American foreign policy from the earliest days of the First Continental Congress to the disastrous regime of Thomas Woodrow Wilson (may he burn in hell) was based on this simple formula:

American Exceptionalism as our founders conceived it was defined by what America was, at home. Foreign policy existed to defend, not define what America was. In given circumstances all sots of tactics might be expedient save only one that defeated its purpose by eroding domestic unity and liberty.

This creed was famously summed up in a Fourth of July speech delivered by John Quincy Adams in 1821:

If the wise and learned philosophers of the elder world, the first observers of nutation and aberration, the discoverers of maddening ether and invisible planets, the inventors of Congreve rockets and Shrapnel shells, should find their hearts disposed to enquire what has America done for the benefit of mankind? Let our answer be this: America, with the same voice which spoke herself into existence as a nation, proclaimed to mankind the inextinguishable rights of human nature, and the only lawful foundations of government.

America, in the assembly of nations, since her admission among them, has invariably, though often fruitlessly, held forth to them the hand of honest friendship, of equal freedom, of generous reciprocity.

She has uniformly spoken among them, though often to heedless and often to disdainful ears, the language of equal liberty, of equal justice, and of equal rights.

She has, in the lapse of nearly half a century, without a single exception, respected the independence of other nations while asserting and maintaining her own. She has abstained from interference in the concerns of others, even when conflict has been for principles to which she clings, as to the last vital drop that visits the heart.

She has seen that probably for centuries to come, all the contests of that Aceldama the European world, will be contests of inveterate power, and emerging right. Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She will commend the general cause by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example.

She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force…. She might become the dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit…. [America’s] glory is not dominion, but liberty. Her march is the march of the mind. She has a spear and a shield: but the motto upon her shield is, Freedom, Independence, Peace. This has been her Declaration: this has been, as far as her necessary intercourse with the rest of mankind would permit, her practice.

McDougall argues that the fundamental worldview of the Founders was Manichean: the world was divided into a House of Peace and a House of War:

So what did American Exceptionalism mean wben it came to foreign policy? That the United States would make no alliances, fight no wars, spurn all intrigue? Of course not. If anything, America’s vulnerability from 1776 to 1820 only proved the timeless wisdom of the Roman motto Si vis pacem pare bellum (If you desire peace, prepare for war), and you will find that dictum in the writings of Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Hamilton, Franklin, Jay, Patrick Henry, John Marshall, James Gadsen, and Richard Henry Lee. Did American Exceptionalism mean that the Founding Fathers embraced none but idealistic ends sought by scrupulous means? Jefferson might have wished it were so. but in the end even he bowed to reality in defense of the national interest.

Inside the House of Peace, McDougall asserts, the man in power must walk softly to preserve the liberty and unity that already exist at home. Outside, in the House of War, a state of nature among nations that is red in tooth and claw and follows only the law of the jungle, all means are on the table except those that threaten liberty at home. American liberty is a gift from God for its citizens to treasure and exercise at home. It is not a spear for our enemies to impale us upon or a rope to go hang ourselves with while abroad.

I’m a big fan of historian Walter McDougall. In my opinion, McDougall is in the midst of writing the best series of histories about these United States. The two volumes he has completed thus far are Freedom Just Around the Corner : A New American History: 1585-1828 and Throes of Democracy: The American Civil War Era, 1829-1877. Since he is a generalist dipping into many far-flung domains, devotees of a particular area of focus may be appalled by his conclusions within their chosen bailiwick. As a Mormon, for example, I’d quibble with his portrayal of Joseph Smith, the founder of my faith. However, his treatment is more nuanced than other portraits I’ve encountered. In balance, his judgments are usually sound and balanced, and he’s not afraid to offer them.

Another McDougall book that throws some interesting light onto recent discussions in the stratesphere over American grand strategy is Promised Land, Crusader State: The American Encounter with the World Since 1776, published back in 1997 but still relevant. Following an approach that reminded me of Walter Russell Mead’s Special Providence, McDougall identifies two main themes in United States’s relationship with the outside world. Both are referenced in the title of his book: the Promised Land and the Crusader State. The Promised Land theme refers to the earliest tradition in American foreign policy that focused on preserving American liberty from threats abroad, especially those which, by the domestic response they triggered, could lead to internal corruption, despotism, and division at home. The Crusader State theme covers a later foreign policy tradition where America went abroad in search of monsters to destroy. The first tradition was the dominant influence for most of the nineteenth century and the second dominated the twentieth and into the twenty-first. McDougall refines these two themes into further subdivisions, identifying four sub-themes under the Promised Land theme and four under the Crusader State theme.

McDougall, with a strong awareness of the impact of religion on American history that shows up in this and many of his other works, relabels the two traditions as the “Old Testament” and “New Testament” of American foreign policy:

Our Old Testament:

1. Liberty, or Exceptionalism (so called)
2. Unilateralism, or Isolationism (so called)
3. The American System, or Monroe Doctrine (so called)
4. Expansionism, or Manifest Destiny (so called)

Our New Testament:

1. Progressive Imperialism
2. Wilsonianism, or Liberal Internationalism (so called)
3. Containment
4. Global Meliorism

More later…

If Francis Fukuyama didn’t exist and hadn’t ever written The End of History and the Last Man, the Department of Defense would have had to create a RoboFukuyama deep in the bowels of Area 51 and set it free to liberate pontificators on the post-Cold War era. If you couldn’t reach into the bag of lazy journalistic flourishes and pull out your Fukuyama Bat to rhetorically beat dear Francis once more, you’d never get this:

In the summer of 1989, American political economist Francis Fukuyama foresaw the “End of History” in a landmark essay, meaning that no credible alternative had survived to political and economic liberty as practiced in the U.S. and Western Europe. All that remained, he argued, was for other countries to catch up.

Today, history is back, according to writers such as Israeli military historian Azar Gat. In his new book, “Victorious and Vulnerable,” he says that although democracy is the most benign system in history, it will have to demonstrate its advantages all over again in the face of its latest rival: authoritarian capitalism, as practiced by self-confident powers such as China and Russia.

We’ve noted Azar Gat’s central thesis before in a Committee report. Gat also wrote about it in the closing chapters of War In Human Civilization and The Return of the Authoritarian Great Powers. Gat’s argument is that:

Today’s global liberal democratic order faces two challenges. The first is radical Islam — and it is the lesser of the two challenges…The second, and more significant, challenge emanates from the rise of nondemocratic great powers: the West’s old Cold War rivals China and Russia, now operating under authoritarian capitalist, rather than communist, regimes. Authoritarian capitalist great powers played a leading role in the international system up until 1945. They have been absent since then. But today, they seem poised for a comeback.

Gat has argued that the victory of liberal democracy over the “authoritarian capitalist” powers in WWI and WWII was more contingent than most inhalers of free air would think:

Liberal democracy’s supposedly inherent economic advantage is also far less clear than is often assumed. All of the belligerents in the twentieth century’s great struggles proved highly effective in producing for war. During World War I, semiautocratic Germany committed its resources as effectively as its democratic rivals did. After early victories in World War II, Nazi Germany’s economic mobilization and military production proved lax during the critical years 1940-42. Well positioned at the time to fundamentally alter the global balance of power by destroying the Soviet Union and straddling all of continental Europe, Germany failed because its armed forces were meagerly supplied for the task [...] All the same, from 1942 onward (by which time is was too late), Germany greatly intensified its economic mobilization and caught up with and even surpassed the liberal democracies in terms of the share of GDP devoted to the war (although its production volume remained much lower than that of the massive U.S. economy). Likewise, levels of economic mobilization in imperial Japan and the Soviet Union exceeded those of the United States and the United Kingdom thanks to ruthless efforts.

Reading Adam Tooze’s The Wages of Destruction, you get a better case for Gat’s argument than Gat argues above. Tooze demonstrates, contrary to the widely shared belief that Gat refers to, that the German economy more mobilized, even in 1940-1942, than the Western powers. The advantage of the Western powers was overwhelmingly quantitative instead of qualitative. Indeed, according to Tooze, the democracies overwhelming economic advantage was not only the crucial ingredient in their victories in both world wars, it was the primary cause of both world wars. In both wars, Germany went to war because its leaders thought that whatever advantage it currently possessed was transient in the face of rapidly growth in the power of the West, projected through the East. Hitler in particular was fixated on the need to acquire a vast eastern hinterland in order to even begin to challenge the British Empire and the United States with their vast internal markets. In Hitler’s mind, Germany had to achieve similar economies of scale to compete with the (purportedly) Jewish run democracies and escape the trap that defeated Imperial Germany in World War I.

The looming power of America was always the shadow looming over Hitler’s future Aryan paradise. Fixated on the overwhelming power of America, threatening to swamp Germany and all of old Europe, the Nazi’s optimized Germany’s economy to make the Wehrmacht punch above its weight and, as a result, won more results than Germany’s paltry resources justified on their own. If it had merely been based on material resources, Germany would have lost. Those in the German government who could evaluate the material disparity were desperate for peace. But Hitler gambled and, in one of the most miraculous victories in history, defeated France in 1940 and drove the British off the Continent. However, even with the combined resources of a subjugated Western Europe at his command, Hitler was still outclassed by America. He believed that American power would only grow with time and that his only hope was seizing Russian resources. The German high command believed that Russia was a paper tiger and not the threat that America was. It could easily be disposed of before America strangled Germany. The road to Washington led through Moscow.

Germany, however, found Nemesis. The Americans cleverly fed the Soviets resources to keep the Germans tied down, trading money, weapons, and Russian lives by the million for the lives of American boys and killing thousands of Germans in the process. The Red Army digested the Wehrmacht deep in western Russia and Hitler’s longshot gamble came to its most probable and predictable end.

While the Nazis and Japanese had to exhort their soldiers and populations on to greater displays of spirit to close their material gap, the new “authoritarian capitalist” powers like Russia, China, and the other SCO members, Gat proposes, have the advantage of huge resource bases and vast spaces. If Germany and Japan, perhaps driven by a relative poverty of national resources, have been driven to heights of population mobilization rarely achieved elsewhere, Russia and China have a poor record of maximizing their populations in the most efficient way possible. Russia and China are both examples of how you can punch above your weight military through economics driven by pure coercion but are poor examples of extracting maximal productivity from their populations through economics based on the mix positive and negative incentives offered by capitalism. The authoritarian capitalist revolution was pioneered by Lee Kwan Yew in Singapore offered them a way out. Deng Xiaoping picked it up from there:

China’s ruling Communists, who had bloodily suppressed their own street protests around Tiananmen Square in June 1989, were transfixed by the revolutions sweeping Eastern Europe that summer and fall. Their first reaction was to freeze economic and political change. But “paramount leader” Deng Xiaoping took the view that the Soviet bloc had failed because of its economic stagnation.

In early 1992, weeks after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Deng toured China’s south to promote a strategy of rapid economic change, coupled with tight political control.

“Deng’s approach was something new,” says Michael Yahuda, a leading historian of China. “In the previous reform period, from 1979 to 1989, there was much discussion of political reform too. Thereafter, there was no mention of political change,” he says.

The question of which arrangement of government and economy is best is still in flux. Gat explicitly and Tooze implicitly argue that it may not be the intrinsic superiority of the democracies that beat out the original authoritarian capitalists. It was their superior resources, much of which were won and developed at a period in the democracies’ past when they were less democratic, that was the critical determinant. The past 70 years have demonstrated that some form of capitalism is superior to a pure form of command economy. But it has yet to demonstrate what the best admixture of positive incentive and negative incentive is in an economy. It has yet to demonstrate which mixture of motivation through command and coercion and motivation through interest and voluntarism is bets. Most importantly, it has yet to demonstrate which mixture of politics and economics is optimal.

The crucial weakness of authoritarianism is leader selection and rotation. While diktat by one man may yield efficiencies in some circumstances, it definitely creates negative situations in others. Rotating an authoritarian in when their on fire and out when they’ve cooled off is a problem authoritarian government have solved only sporadically and over limited periods of time. Capitalism involves a certain degree of personal autonomy that authoritarian regimes have a hard time restraining themselves from violating. Capitalism involves rotations of classes and elites which practically beg incumbents to use coercion to stop. The modern authoritarian capitalist regimes that Gat fears have shown some progress in those areas but have yet to demonstrate that they have conclusively solved them. However it may turn out that economic liberty is essential to creating a powerful state, possibly leavened by a dose of personal liberty here and there, but that political liberty as generally understood in the Anglosphere is not.

The battle is joined.

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.

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.

• War is a strategy intended to make the enemy conform to your desires when doing so is contrary to what they’d do if they possessed both the power to resist you and sufficient knowledge about your true desires.
• The giant caveat to the preceding definition is that war is also an enemy strategy intended to make you conform to the enemy’s desires when doing so is contrary to what you’d do if you possessed both the power to resist and sufficient knowledge about your enemy’s true desires.
• The nature of a war is determined by the nature of the desires pursued in a war, not by the nature of the power used in a war.
• The power used in war is quite vivid. It can easily overshadow the sometimes nebulous desires sought in war. Yet the more spectacular species of power used in war are not always present in war. In contrast, desire is always present.
• The essence of war is hostile intentions. Your intentions are hostile if you want to make others conform to your desires when doing so is contrary to what they’d do if they possessed both the power to resist you and sufficient knowledge of your true desires. War is any action taken on the basis of such hostile intentions.
• The stage of war is set by hostile intentions but then the appropriate forms of power must be found to fulfill those intentions in order for hostile intention to become hostile realization. Hostile intentions come first. Hostile power follows.
• While hostile intentions can shift the nature of available power from forms of power that are less appropriate for pursuing a set of intentions to forms that are more appropriate, often the quality and quantity of desire must be adapted to the quality and quantity of the power available to pursue them.
• Since war is a strategy, its nature is highly dependent on the politics that employs it. The nature of politics, more specifically the nature of the internal division of power and the internal struggle for power, determines the nature of war.
• However, in turn, the nature of war will shape the nature of the politics that employs it.
• Politics is always an appallingly messy process and the guidelines it lays down for war are equal parts wishful thinking, cynical rhetoric, and timid hedging. This makes the process of strategic reconciliation problematic and directly affects the nature of war.
• As a strategy, war is an instrument of politics and the main preoccupation of politics is power. Therefore, the main preoccupation of war is power.
• As a political tool, war is a strategy intended to create a division of power in our favor that others would resist if they had the power to do so and possessed sufficient knowledge of our true desires.
• War impacts culture by changing the division of power, which in turn changes the priority of cultural desires. The scale of a war’s impact on culture is directly proportional to the scope of the desires sought by the combatants and the power they have at their disposal to pursue them. A war with limited ambitions would create very few cultural ripples while a war with grander ambitions could permanently shift or even stop a culture’s forward march.
• Culture, through the medium of politics, regulates war, a political instrument. It acts as a ratchet to increase or decrease the scope and intensity of the desires it seeks and the scope and intensity of the power used to pursue them, which in turn dictates the scope and intensity of any war pursued in the name of culture and the politics it produces.
• Since culture is the art of the unspoken assumption, much of war’s aim and execution is guided by unspoken and largely unconscious assumptions and default choices.
• Changed politics will result in changed culture.
• War, as both an expression and instrument of culture, will continue to disproportionately influence culture in ways that escape conscious observation.
• War is the ultimate human intergroup tournament. While all wars are intergroup tournaments, not all intergroup tournaments are wars. Only some intergroup tournaments meet the definition of war.
• A key action to take, while engaged in the intergroup tournament, is to target the other four mechanisms of adaption with influence and violence.
• Diversity generators are critical for creating the designed, engineered, or random adaptations that, when added together, allow you to adapt to the rigors of the intergroup tournament.
• However, too much diversity will cause you to fissure and split. There will be disorientation and indecision which will lead to inaction which will lead to maladaption.
• Speeding up the generation of diversity may rip you apart and send the various fragments on their way.
• The critical regulators of diversity are conformity enforcers. Conformity enforcers control how much diversity is tolerated within a community.
• Producing either stifling conformity or anarchic disarray is the aim of targeting a community’s conformity enforcement. If conformity enforces squeeze too tight, rigidity may set in and your adaptation will become sluggish and behind the curve. Taking the opposite approach, letting a hundred flowers blossom and a hundred schools of thought contend to such an extent that incoherence is produced, than adaption will become disjointed and ill aimed.
• One of the most powerful targets to hit is inner-judges. Inner-judges have the power to rally a community to new heights of effort. If inner-judges think that things aren’t going so well, they can flick off the internal light switch and collapse the entire war effort from the inside. Enlisting them on your side, whether they’re conscious of having volunteered or not, is a key part of a combined strategy of victory. Inner-judges are a potential fifth column if turned in a negative direction. Thinning their ranks with violence is also an option.
• OODA loops, if they repeatedly produce losing adaptions, may have a inner-judge that starts to disrupt it internally, meaning that if it is under attack, it ends up fighting a two front war, one against the outer intergroup tournament and one internally against an inner-judge. The inner-judge, because it’s deeply embedded in the cycle, may be tougher to defeat.
• Since politics is the struggle for power, whether through the “other means” of war or not, resource shifters are a critical target. Some winning adaptions can be made to appear more winning so that they attract more power than they actually deserve. The distribution of power by resource shifters can be disrupted by slicing through supply lines and diverting power.
• War itself acts as a resource shifter, stealing from the loser to give to the victorious. The goal is to shift more power to yourself than is shifted away from yourself.
• War operates along a spectrum of power that falls between an absolute concentration of power at one extreme and an absolute absence of power at the other extreme.
• What separates one end of the spectrum from the other is energy and visibility.
• Energy is how much power it takes to make the enemy conform to our political desires while visibility is how easy it is for the enemy to gather knowledge we don’t want them to have.
• There’s a trade off between visibility and energy. The more energy that’s concentrated into a form of strategic power, the more visible it is. The smaller the amount of energy that’s concentrated into a form of strategic power, the less visible a form of strategic power is.
• War is a mixture of two forms of strategic power: violence and influence. In the middle between violence and influence is coercion, the strategic power we use to hurt the enemy until they stop resisting our desires. It’s an even mix of violence and influence, a recipe for moderate palates.
• Influence has low visibility and low energy while violence has high visibility and high energy.
• Influence takes many forms: diplomacy, propaganda, subversion, commerce, agitation, intelligence, education. However, the most elemental form of influence in war is deception, the strategic form of power used to distort enemy perceptions in ways that help us satisfy our desires.
• More depends on how you mix influence and violence due to the wild unpredictability of war.
• It may be that violence will eventually be resorted to when a community has the power to wage it. It often seems cheaper than compromise and easier than influence.
• The two are not mutually exclusive.The process of analysis and deduction open gaps of vulnerability where one group can penetrate another’s dissection of the world and disrupt or even dictate the trailing process of synthesis and induction. Violence can open the holes that influence needs to reach the inner mechanisms of enemies. Influence can make the breaking, killing, and maiming of violence easier.
• Strategic asymmetry in war results from one side orienting, aggregating, and compressing more successfully than the other side. War is a clash between compression algorithms.
• A point along the spectrum of power where you have blocked the enemy from finding a strategic advantage is a selected degree of control along that wavelength of the spectrum of power.
• War is not an attack on a lifeless mass. War is an attack on a living enemy and the one thing you quickly learn about the enemy is that he reacts.
• The nature of the power used in war (the power of violence) can release raw passions of hatred and enmity in both violator and violated. These strong feelings can distort the original cultural priorities and political goals that the strategy of war was supposed to achieve. Throw in chance and probability and you’ve created a volatile mix. Throughout history, many have poorly judged the impact of hostility and change in the strategy of war, especially when choosing when to use it and when not to use it.

• Tactics is the fifth and final software control loop on the adaptive stack.
• Like culture, politics, strategy, and operational art, tactics is an OODA loop.
• Tactics is the direct interaction of power and desire with the outside world.
• If tactical interaction leads to the successful pursuit of desire, than tactical adaption is successful. If tactical interaction fails, than tactical adaption is unsuccessful.
• There is nothing between tactics and the outside world. Once tactical action is taken, the outside world pushes right back. This leaves little time or space for deliberation.
• Tactics is the instrument by which operational art successfully arranges desire and power in time and space. If tactical interactions end successfully, operational art can make a successful arrangement. Such arrangements often require that opposition be cleared out of a certain space at a certain time.
• Tactical success and failure flow up the stack, making the chances for operational, strategic, political, and cultural success or failure either much greater or much reduced.
• Tactics needs the Automatic System more than the Reflective System because it has a greater demand for quick reaction.
• Since tactics is easier to reduce to routine and habit than politics, strategy, and operations, military thinkers such as Clausewitz considered tactics more of a science than an art. Principles can be derived from tactical examples that have some hope of application beyond a passing set of circumstances.
• A specific tactical implementation rapidly becomes obsolescent but the principles remain, when interpreted with caution, fairly consistent over time.
• Most obsessions about ongoing adaption are obsessions about tactics. Tactics are easy to see and easy to describe. Most daily interactions are tactical. Obsession with tactics leads to a shallow, short-term fixation on the easily visible and short term rather than the obscure and long-term of other control loops.

• The operational control loop is the fourth highest level software layer on the adaptive stack.
• Like culture, politics, and strategy, operational art is an OODA loop.
• Operational art arranges the prioritized desires of culture and the divisions of power made by politics, joined in a reconciliation mediated by strategy, in time and space.
• If this arrangement successfully pursues desires, operational adaption is successful. If not, operational adaption is unsuccessful.
• Operational art is the instrument of strategy, the means by which strategic reconciliation is made. Operational art moves desire and power into the arrangement that strategy determines will make a reconciliation between the two effective in realizing desire.
• Operational art experiences more friction and willful opposition from opposition than strategy, politics, or culture. It is far closer to the edge of survival and further from the luxury of abstraction than higher control loops on the stack. The more abstract notions of culture, politics, and strategy meet the real world with its real pressures. Abstractions begin to break down and the uncompressed mess of the outside world starts to leak in.
• Operational adaption is faster than cultural, political, or strategic adaption because feedback from the outside world comes faster.
• Operational art uses tactics to effect the best arrangement in time and space. It maneuvers desire and power to the point of contact with the outside world. Then tactics engages and interacts with the outside world.
• Operational methods can be visualized as lying along an operational spectrum, categorized by the concentration of power they involve. Methods that use a low concentration of power are found towards the left end of the spectrum, culminating in passive observation of the opponent. Methods that use higher concentrations of power are found to the right, culminating in the total annihilation of opposition.
• The operational spectrum can be seen as a controller knob. You start with white lies. After the white lies you turn the dial to to systematic fraud: propaganda, subversion, media. Further on, you reach posturing. Turning further, you reach threats and intimidation. Turn further and you reach hurt, actions which cause pain and coerce but do not necessarily destroy. Turn a bit further and you reach destruction of property, then the destruction of individuals, finally culminating at the end of the dial with annihilation of populations and the outside world, the expression of absolute violence.