Every few months since 1991, there is a new op-ed calling for a new grand strategy or bemoaning the fact that the US doesn’t have one. I’ve written a few blogs/articles to this tune myself. But it’s time to realize that the problem lies with the very conception of grand strategy itself.

In Foreign Policy, Rosa Brooks argues that the US needs a grand strategy:

Though different scholars and statesmen define “grand strategy” somewhat differently, at its heart, the concept is straightforward: Grand strategy is “the big idea” of foreign and national security policy — the overarching concept that links ends, ways and means, the organizing principle that allows states to purposively plan and prioritize the use of “all instruments of national power,” diplomatic, economic, cultural, and military. A grand strategy can’t be a list of aspirations, wishes, or even a country’s top 10 foreign-policy “priorities.” (When you have 10 priorities, you really have no priorities at all.) Grand strategy is the big idea that guides the tough decisions, helping policymakers figure out which of those top 10 priorities should drop off the list, which aspirations are unrealistic and impossible, and which may seem like good ideas on their own, but actually undermine the nation’s broader goals.

After this definition, Brooks then criticizes the Obama administration for not formulating one, But with such an expansive definition of strategy, is it ever possible to create one? The problem is that Brooks and other grand strategy writers searching for a “big idea” conjoin policy and strategy together.

To recap, policy (a condition or behavior) generates a strategy (an instrumental device) that executes it through operations and tactics. Policy, in turn, is the product of a political process. In my post on victory, I gave a Chinese food-flavored explanation of this in practical terms. Strategy is not supposed to be an “idea”—it is an practical method of getting things done, a purpose-built bridge between politics and raw violence. I will concede that sometimes a policy will require a global strategy to accomplish it—which is what Basil-Liddell Hart originally meant when he used the term “grand strategy” to refer to World War II.

The idea of grand strategy as both policy and strategy is by definition unachievable, and the source of much confusion.  By infusing normative policy elements into strategy, this fusion turns strategy into a manifestation of ideology rather than a technical device for getting things done.  Think, for example, of how debates about regional strategy and even the tactics and operations of COIN, drones, and counterterrorism have become proxies for domestic ideological political battles. This happens, in larger part, because the policy-strategy distinction in American national security circles is extremely weak, as strategy is taken to be politics and politics becomes strategy.

One sure way to detect politics is signs of desperate efforts to call politics something other politics. Though politics is the most elemental of human endeavors, disgust with overt political machinations is one of the most elemental of human emotions:

Who likes a brown noser?

Who likes a squealer?

Who likes the kid who gathers up his toys and goes home when he doesn’t get his way?

Who likes the guy who obviously looks out for number one?

In War and Peace and War: The Rise and Fall of Empires, Peter Turchin cites experiments intended to reveal the ethical composition of any group of humans:

During the 1990s, several economists, most notably Ernst Fehr at the University of Zurich and his colleagues, decided to test the assumptions of rational choice theory experimentally…what these experiments…reveal is that society consists of several types of people. Some of them–perhaps a quarter in experiments with American college students–are self-interested, rational agents – ‘the knaves’. These will never contribute to the common good, and will choose free-riding unless forced to [contribute] by fines imposed upon them. The opposite type, also about a quarter, are the unconditional cooperators, or ‘the saints’. The saints continue to contribute to the common pool and lose money, even when it is obvious to everybody that cooperation has failed (although most of them reduce the amount of their contribution). The largest group (40 to 60 percent in most experiments) are the conditional cooperators, or ‘the moralists’. The preference of the moralists is to contribute to the pot, so that everyone would be better off. However, in the absence of the mechanism to punish noncontributors, free-riding proliferates, the moralists become disgusted by this opportunistic behavior, and withdraw their cooperation. On the other hand, when the punishment option is available, they use it to fine the knaves [even though imposing a fine comes at a cost to them...and] the group [eventually] achieves the cooperative equilibrium at which, paradoxically, the moralists do almost as well as the knaves, because they now rarely (if ever) need to spend money on fining the free-riders.

Disgust with knavery leads saints and moralists to condemn any activity with the faintest whiff of knavery. This automatic disapproval drives saint, knave, and moralist alike to portray their own actions as driven by nothing more than the most saintly or moral of motives, as anything but political. Unfortunately, every human action is political: politics is inevitable. Politics is the division of power, for good or ill, and everyone either wants or needs power:

• Knaves want power or they wouldn’t be knaves.
• Moralists need power to punish knaves.
• Even saints need power to be saintly: a saint without power is a dead saint.

No matter the motive, no matter how saintly, moral, or knavish it is, it needs power to be realized. No power? No nuthin’. This bitter truth makes all human activity inalterably a continuation of political activity.

Politics is all-pervading but everyone conspires to pretend otherwise. The line dividing what is politics from what isn’t is hazy but everyone knows what politics is when they see it: politics is whatever the other guy is doing. Your own attempts to expose the sordid maneuvers of your opponents as mere politics were forced on you, after much reluctance, by motives whose purity stands in stark contrast to their knavish perfidy.

This cycle of coverups and uncovering coverups becomes an arms race to generate ever better names for political activities intended to convince saints and moralists that political activities are not political activities after all. Relabeling politics as something else, something disinterested, even-handed, and pure, is one ready way to disperse suspicion of knavish motives. These relabelings of politics are particular offenders, acting as universal escape hatches that let their wielders pass off their politics as something other than politics:

• policy
• grand strategy
• operational art

Policy is portrayed as the objective, virtuous, and expert pursuit of ponies for everyone. Framed this way, policy is politics without the division of power. But politics without the division of power is impossible. “Policy” is a mythical beast. ”Policy making” is mere politicking, trading one favor for another to offset one interest with another, persuading through influence when possible and enforcing compliance with violence when impossible. But this reality reeks of knavery so it must be wrapped in the most virtuous lies imaginable. Hence we see a dramatic proliferation of “policy makers” and “making policy” where we’d normally expect to see politicians and politics. WIth so many policy makers making so much policy, you’d think the good and true would be breaking out all over. But, looking around, we see nobody down here but us dumb humans, horse trading with each other to get incrementally ahead.

“Grand strategy” and “operational art” represent further efforts to divorce politics from politics through politics, leaving behind a vacuum inhabited only by virtuous technocrats. In reality, they’re both attempts by one political group to escape the power of another political group, hopefully gaining more power for themselves in the process. The formulator of “grand strategy” is often an aspiring political actor who lacks the gifts necessary for political success. So they whine from the sidelines, falling back on a passive-aggressive strategy of victimhood where they denounce expertise in politics as squalid while advocating its replacement with their own (implicitly) more virtuous expertise. They attempt to reframe political questions as technical questions best handled by professional specialists. If a political question can be reframed as a technical question, resolving it is a merely an implementation detail. Such technical minutia should be beneath most politicians. Their attention should be devoted to truly important questions, leaving details to the poor peons.

Political questions delegated to enlightened technocrats and specialists don’t stop being political questions. It only rearranges the deck chairs, increasing the power held by enlightened technocrats and specialists while reducing the held by their overtly designated political masters.

Operational art was one attempt to bring clarity to the obscure region between strategy and tactics by carving out a new “operational” level of warfare. However, while clarifying, classifying, and codifying terminology seem to be merely technical questions, every clarification, clarification, and codification is one aspect of what Swen (Sun-tzu) called shr (shih) in his Bingfa (Ping-fa). Ralph Sawyer translated shr into English as the “strategic configuration of power”. Defining values is inextricably tied up with the division of power: every human value contains an implicit strategic configuration of existing power intended to bring about a new strategic configuration of new (and more) power alongside its explicitly expressed aspiration.

Brigadier Justin Allen and Dr. Michael James Brennan argue in Alien: How Operational Art Devoured Strategy that the elevation of operational art as something distinct is often merely an agenda to replace political control by civilian politicians with political control by politicians that also happen to wear a uniform. In drawing a line between what they present as a parochial technical question best dealt with by trained military specialists and what they present as general problems best left to civilan politicians, some advocates of operational art are actually seek to increase their own power while foisting responsibility for what are actually technical military failures back on the civilians. This is another manifestation of the most ancient of military cop-outs: we failed, not because of self-inflicted failure in exercising our technical military expertise but because those ham-handed politicians interfered with our proper exercise of our technical military expertise.

Policy, grand strategy, and operational art are merely the continuation of politics with the addition of other layers of obscurity. Using those terms merely continues and adds to their obscurity. Politics cannot be divorced from human existence. Better to bite the bullet and accept the fact that nothing will ever replace a political process that is clearly recognized and acknowledged by all participants as an actual political process.

Many of those who did the crucial leg work that transformed the hope of 1787 into the reality of 1817 either helped draft the 1787 original or influenced those who drafted it. In 1787, we see them crossing their fingers. In 1817, we see many of the same men only now they are tempered by thirty years of troubled neutrality during the largest war in human history, a brief, disastrous, yet ultimately triumphant second round of war with the British Empire, partisan strife more vicious than any seen thereafter, a serious secession attempt by a disaffected region of the country, and the monumental effort it took to make that whole government of the people and by the people thing work.

Two of the first four presidents of the United States served at the convention: George Washington and James Madison. Two were serving abroad as ambassadors in mid-1787 but influenced the convention through their public and private influence: John Adams through his writings, most importantly his 1776 Thoughts on Government, Massachusetts’ state constitution of 1779, and 1787 A Defense of the Constitutions of Government of the United States against some obnoxious Enlightenment-Era Eurotrash.

Thomas Jefferson helped by not being around to screw it all up.

The U.S. Constitution contains this requirement:

Section 3 – State of the Union, Convening Congress

He shall from time to time give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union, and recommend to their Consideration such Measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient…

These yearly State of the Union reports make nice capsule reviews of the happenings between 1787 and 1817. For my amusement, I’m going to run through every State of the Union between George Washington’s first State of the Union address made to Congress on January 8, 1790 and James Monroe’s first State of the Union report delivered to Congress on December 12, 1817. I will freely translate and annotated the reports as I see fit while linking to the original in its late eighteenth/early nineteenth century fulsomeness.

When most of us bother to think about the State of the Union address at all today, we tend to think of a televised hour or so of presidential bombast punctuated by scripted partisan applause, celebrity drop-ins, live props, and a cast of thousands. Things were different in days gone by: the 1st Congress that George Washington read his first report to was composed of 22 senators and 59 representatives drawn from the eleven states of the Union and gathered at Federal Hall in New York City. The 15th Congress that James Monroe’s written report was delivered to on December 12, 1817 was composed of 25 senators and 141 representatives drawn from the 19 states of the Union who were gathered at the temporary “Old Brick Capitol” in Washington, D.C. built by local real estate speculators who feared that Congress would move the capital elsewhere after the British burned it (including the original Capitol building) on August 24, 1814.

Washington read his eight reports to Congress in person, an example followed by John Adams. In 1801, Jefferson stopped reading it in person since he considered the practice monarchial. Instead he had his report delivered to and read to Congress by a clerk. Jefferson’s example was followed by all of his successors up to noted war criminal Thomas Woodrow Wilson (the original serpent in Eden) resuscitated Washington’s original practice of delivering the State of the Union to Congress in person.

But that’s another story…

I. First State of the Union, George Washington, January 8, 1790

Fellow Citizens of the Senate and House of Representatives,

With great satisfaction, I embrace this opportunity to congratulate you on the favorable prospects of our public affairs. Many present circumstances are eminently auspicious for our national prosperity:

• the recent ratification of the Constitution of the United States by the important state of North Carolina
• the rising credit and respectability of our country
• general and increasing goodwill towards the government of the Union
• the concord, peace, and plenty with which we are blessed

As you resume your deliberations for the greater good, you can only be encouraged when you look back on how well the laws you passed during your last session satisfied the needs of your constituents despite the novelty and difficulty of your work. To further realize their expectations and secure the blessings which Gracious Providence has placed within our reach calls for the cool and deliberate exertion of your patriotism, firmness, and wisdom in the course of the present and important session.

Among the many urgent needs that will engage your attention, the need to provide for the common defense merits particular attention. To be ready for war is one of the most effective ways to preserve peace.

A free people should not only be armed, but trained and disciplined. For this end, a uniform and well-digested plan is a prerequisite. The safety and interest of a free people also require that they promote the kind of manufacturing that will make them independent of other nations in producing essential goods, particularly in military supplies.

Properly establishing an army, which I believe is indispensable, is a task entitled to your most mature consideration. WIth any arrangements that you decide to make about establishing an army, it is important to reconcile the comfortable support of our officers and sailors with the need to conserve our resources.

There was reason to hope that the peaceful measures we adopted towards certain hostile tribes of Indians would relieve the inhabitants of our southern and western frontiers from their depredations. From the information contained in a communication from the Commonwealth of Virginia which I shall lay before you, you will perceive that we ought to be ready to provide protection to those parts of the Union and, if necessary, to punish aggressors.

The interests of the United States demand that our relations with other nations should be facilitated by funds that will allow me to fulfill my duties in that area in the way circumstances may make most conducive to the public good. To this end, compensation for future employees should defined by law according to the nature of the position and enough funds designated for this purpose that we can  defray any expenses we incur in the conduct of foreign affairs.

Various considerations make it expedient that the terms under which foreigners can earn the rights of citizens should be speedily defined by a naturalization law that is uniform throughout the Union.

It is important that we have uniformity in the currency, weights, and measures within the United States. I am persuaded that you will duly attended to this need.

Since it is clear that you should advance our agriculture, commerce, and manufactures by all proper means, I trust I do not have to recommend that you do so. But I must emphasize the need to encourage introduction of new and useful inventions from abroad and exertions of skill and genius that produce inventions at home. I must also emphasize the need to facilitate commerce between distant parts of our country by paying serious attention to our postal service and post roads.

I am sure that you will agree with my opinion that there is nothing that deserves your patronage more than the promotion of science and literature. In every country, knowledge is the surest basis of public happiness. It is particularly essential in a country like ours where the sense of the community makes such an immediate impression on measures of government. Knowledge contributes to the security of a free Constitution in various ways:

• by convincing those entrusted with the public administration that the best support for every valuable goal of government is the educated confidence of the people
• by teaching the people themselves to know and value their own rights so they can discern and protect against invasions of those rights
• to distinguish between oppression and the necessary exercise of lawful authority and between burdens arising from deliberate neglect of their wants and those that result from the inevitable exigencies of society
• to distinguish between the spirit of liberty and the spirit of licentiousness, cherishing the first while avoiding the last
• to unite a speedy but temperate vigilance against encroachments on their rights with an inviolable respect for the laws.

Whether acquisition of knowledge is best promoted by providing aid to seminaries of learning already established, by instituting a national university, or by any other expedients is worthy of a place in your deliberations.

Gentlemen of the House of Representatives:

At the end of your last session, I noted with pleasure the resolution you passed that expressed your opinion that supporting our public credit is a matter of high importance to our national honor and prosperity. With this sentiment I entirely agree. To my perfect confidence that you will devote your best efforts to make provisions that truly consistent with that end, I add my equal confidence that the other branch of the Legislature will reliably and cheerfully cooperate with you in fulfilling that end. It would be superfluous for me to provide specific inducements for you to protect our public credit when the character and permanent interests of the United States are so obviously and so deeply concerned with its protection and that you have already explicitly sanctioned its protection with your declaration.

Gentlemen of the Senate and House of Representatives:

I have directed the proper officers to lay before you papers and estimates about those affairs that I recommend that you consider and that are necessary to convey to you that information on the state of the Union which it is my duty to provide.

The welfare of our country is the great object to which all of our cares and efforts ought to be directed. I shall derive great satisfaction from cooperating with you in the pleasing though arduous task of ensuring to our fellow-citizens the blessings which they have a right to expect from a free, efficient, and equal government.

One of the great sagas of conservation during the twentieth century was the search for the reclusive (or extinct) ivory-billed woodpecker:

The Ivory-billed Woodpecker (Campephilus principalis) is or was one of the largest woodpeckers in the world, at roughly 20 inches in length and 30 inches in wingspan. It was native to the virgin forests of the southeastern United States (along with a separate subspecies native to Cuba). Due to habitat destruction, and to a lesser extent hunting, its numbers have dwindled to the point where it is uncertain whether any remain. The species is listed as critically endangered and possibly extinct by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. The American Birding Association lists the Ivory-billed Woodpecker as a Class 6 species, a category the ABA defines as “definitely or probably extinct.”

Reports of at least one male Ivory-billed Woodpecker in Arkansas in 2004 were investigated and subsequently published in April 2005 by a team led by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. No definitive confirmation of those reports emerged, despite intensive searching over five years following the initial sightings.

A $10,000 reward was offered in June 2006 for information leading to the discovery of an Ivory-billed Woodpecker nest, roost or feeding site. In December 2008, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology announced a reward of $50,000 to the person who can lead a project biologist to a living Ivory-billed Woodpecker.

In late September 2006, a team of ornithologists from Auburn University and the University of Windsor published reports of their own sightings of Ivory-billed Woodpeckers along the Choctawhatchee River in northwest Florida, beginning in 2005. These reports were accompanied by evidence that the authors themselves considered suggestive for the existence of Ivory-billed Woodpeckers. Searches in this area of Florida through 2009 failed to produce definitive confirmation.

Despite these high-profile reports from Arkansas and Florida and sporadic reports elsewhere in the historic range of the species since the 1940s, there is no conclusive evidence for the continued existence of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker; i.e., there are no unambiguous photographs, videos, specimens or DNA samples from feathers or feces of the Ivory-billed. Land acquisition and habitat restoration efforts have been initiated in certain areas where there is a relatively high probability that the species may have survived to protect any possible surviving individuals.

Recently, the mighty NerveAgent, usually seen in the native habitat of his blog Visions of Empire, has been sighted:

2011 was not the year to quit blogging. The world is on fire. But I have been unable to study the flames.

Because I’m now in them.

In other news, I’ve hit the big time: an article based on my work in graduate school was recently published by Small Wars Journal. The abstract is as follows:

According to the principle of destruction the best way to achieve victory in war is to disarm the enemy by destroying his forces in battle. However, irregular warfare is commonly assumed to operate through processes that make the principle of destruction irrelevant. An analysis of the writings and military experiences of T.E. Lawrence, Mao Tse-tung and Ernesto “Che” Guevara, three of the 20th century’s most influential theorists of irregular war, supports the argument that the principle of destruction remains valid in irregular warfare. This conclusion admits of one major exception in conflicts where a sharp asymmetry of interests exists between the belligerent parties, when it is possible for irregulars to achieve victory by exhausting the enemy’s political will, rather than by destroying his military forces.

I encourage all my readers to head on over to SWJ and take a look, though unfortunately, my present circumstances preclude me from active participation in the discussion.

Until next time: Happy New Year.

Read the whole thing. It’s hard-hitting and almost 100% Pinyin-free.

And keep an eye out for giant-woodpeckers and aerial ninjas defending freedom.

Alone among connections between man and man and thing, one connection must stand out: the line of responsibility. Every man must have a return address where claims against his actions can be sent. Whoever lives at that address is responsible for the other man and the other man’s actions. The line of responsibility must be bright and clear as it connects action to other man and other man to responsible man.

There is no sovereignty without responsibility. Sovereignty is violence and cannot be refined. Sovereignty is an effective preponderance of violence exercised over real things. It is not an empire of the imagination. It is a very real boot heel pressed down on the back of a man’s neck by another man on the scene with the rifle.

Of the two flavors of power available to man, influence and violence, sovereignty does what it must about violence while it does what it can about influence. The ideal of the state is: what happens in the state stays in the state. Ideally, the state allows nothing to escape the limits of its sovereign reach. However, influence is diffuse like gas and easily drifts across boundaries. The state is doomed to radiate influence. It does what it can but limiting influence is only something the state must try to do.

The core responsibility of the state is keeping any violence within the state from spilling over its boundaries. If violence is allowed to leak than amen to that leaker’s sovereignty. Failure to restrain violence within a state means is the abolition of sovereignty. If sovereignty is abandoned, neighbors have a right to exercise it in their place. They can treat the sovereign possessions of what was (and may still claim to be) a sovereign state as unclaimed property that has reverted to unclaimed nature.

No man may commit violence without wearing the livery of the man’s state. This marks the state the man belongs to and under whose authority he commits his actions under. Allowing violence by the unliveried and unstated creates ambiguity in violence. If violence can be committed by anyone unliveried and unstated, the logic of escalation will drive everyone to commit violence unlivered and unstated. The race will be on to blur and eventually erase the line of responsibility connecting violator and those responsible for the violator.

The line of responsibility divides the guilty from the innocent. Once the line of responsibility is erased, the innocent and the guilty blur together. As violence spills over now nonexistent border lines, guilty and innocent suffer alike. The end of sovereignty is the end of innocence and baptism into a state of universal guilt.

With greater connectivity, walls fall down, lines are erased, distinctions blur, and identities become  obscured. Every increase in the number of connections between people decreases the mind’s ability to digest what’s spewed over those connections. Local catastrophe becomes global contagion. Little keeps disaster contained: the old bulwarks are rubble, every road leads everywhere else, and trouble suffers from a richness of choices. So many places to go, so many things to destroy, so many defenseless targets to exploit, and everything’s within driving distance. When connectivity is global, any disaster anywhere becomes every catastrophe everywhere.

Nothing suffers more when all are connected to all than responsibility. Universal connectivity is universal amnesty. The dark places of the globe coalesce into one curtain of obscurity. The direct line between cause and effect, action and consequence, and perpetrator and victim is lost. Everywhere ambiguity is triumphant. Uncertainty produces doubt. Doubt raises fear. Fear rouses stupidity to action and folly inevitably follows. Innocent and guilty alike are intermingled together so both suffer retribution altogether.

Connectivity creates a world whose leaders become best friends forever. Best friends forever form one exclusive club. Elites develop shared understanding. That shared understanding imprisons what passes for elite thought. Those who inherit or win power lose the ability to see dangers lurking beyond the glare of the universally fashionable. Independence leads to isolation while conformity leads to welcome. The man surrounded by the greatest number of human shields is hailed as the strongest of leaders while the man standing alone is denounced as the lowest of creatures. Followership is diligently studied by the most promising while leadership is left to lucky accident. Mankind finds itself subject to the rule of mush. And the future only promise to elevate that rule to a tyranny of mush with connectivity running through it.

There is no firewall against stupid: the safeties have come off stupidity. Never has the harvest of folly been greater. Never has personal folly had more opportunity to become shared folly. Delusion can leap from mind to mind with unprecedented efficiency, leaving mass foolishness in its wake. Never has someone’s chance to go over the cliff with a million of their closest friends been greater. Never has the crowd pushing someone towards the edge from behind been greater. With universal connectivity, the onrush of cascading folly meets too little friction and all too many willing transmitters. The whisper of the wise is buried in a torrent of fools.

Connectivity is the enemy of robustness. Yet only in robustness can what little safety there is be discovered. Universal connectivity must be recognized for what it is: it is not a virtue to pursue or a development to encourage. It is an evil to shun and a danger to suppress. A world of universal connectivity is a world beyond human scale and a world beyond human control.

Connections must be culled. The universal must be cut down to the human. The line connecting  action and impact, actor and acted upon, and offender and offended must be found along a few sun-lit paths instead of lost in a tangle of obscure back roads. In a world where everything threatens to wad itself into a one single all-connected jumble, one law must trump any other:

Every man must have a state.

Before

The metamorphosis of Saint Nicholas into the more commercially lucrative Santa Claus, which took several centuries in Europe and America, has recently been re-enacted in the saint’s home town: the city of Demre. This modern Turkish town is built near the ruins of ancient Myra. As St. Nicholas is a very popular Orthodox saint, the city attracts many Russian tourists. A solemn bronze statue of the Saint by the Russian sculptor Gregory Pototsky, donated by the Russian government in 2000, was given a prominent place on the square in front of the medieval church of St. Nicholas. In 2005, mayor Suleyman Topcu had the statue replaced by a red-suited plastic Santa Claus statue, because he wanted the central statue to be more recognizable to visitors from all over the world. Protests from the Russian government against this action were successful only to the extent that the Russian statue was returned, without its original high pedestal, to a corner near the church.

After

Alas, poor Russia. So far from God, so close to the North Pole.

On to kitties:

Ho

Good tidings we bring from you and your king

But no Cameronesque post would be complete without a disquieting millennialist moment:

Having reached agreement with the British Museum for a four-month loan of the Cyrus Cylinder, the National Museum of Iran put the cylinder on display in Tehran in September 2010. It was installed at the National Museum by a joint group of Iranian and British archaeologists and specialists. The exhibition was opened on 12 September 2010 by Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.; it was reported that over 48,000 people had visited within the first ten days. By the end of the exhibition on 10 January 2011, about 214,000 people were reported to have visited it.

The exhibition prompted some controversy over its symbolism and the form of Ahmadinejad’s opening ceremony, which involved the president draping a man dressed as Cyrus with part of the uniform of the pro-government Basij militia. The Fars News Agency proclaimed: “Cyrus The Great Becomes A Basij Member”. Commentators described the ceremony as part of a new strategy to promote a form of religious nationalism, drawing on Iran’s ancient past in a way that had hitherto been highly unusual in the Islamic Republic.

Power still flows from wealth in things. But wealth in things can suddenly shift if wealth in attention shifts. Since power favors wealth in things, only by hard strivings can those with little become those with more. Dramatic swings in power triggered by dramatic swings in attention tempt the powerless to with promise of quick and decisive outcomes. The quick path has its own perils however. Influence is the conquest of attention. Progress in that conquest favors the vivid over the dull. Like other forms of power, influence erodes under the wear of events. Unlike other forms of power, influence disappears suddenly, violently, and totally. While control over influence demands a constant flood of color and noise, even the noisiest and most colorful deluge quickly looses its influence. The struggle for influence is pitiless, a downward spiral where more and more attempts at vividness win less and less attention.

Today, where attention is limited but the legion fighting over it isn’t, more and more vividness yields less and less power. Influence erodes faster. In this war of fractions, where attention is so finely sliced and so miserly granted, the battle the weak must fight is clear:

1. First make it exciting.
2. Then make it visible.
3. Then you survive.

For the strong, who already have power, the battle plan is equally clear:

1. First make it boring.
2. Then make it invisible.
3. Then you win.

The challenger must be vivid. They have little: they must win quickly before the little they have is spent. The challenged must be dull: they must bring their power to bear before influence undermines: that works best when no one is watching.

This means the most potent form of influence, the vivid image, must be dulled beyond memory. Routine is the absence of vividness. Routine is boring. Everyone has routine. One peddler of routine is as good as another. Routine breaks down into oblivion. Oblivion silently resuscitates the challenged. It’s silent death for the challenger. In the anonymity of oblivion, things return to normal: the strong can do what they can and the weak can suffer what they must.

Trees:

Not by speeches and votes of the majority, are the great questions of the time decided — that was the error of 1848 and 1849 — but by iron and blood.

Forest:

There are members of the National Association – of this association that has achieved a reputation owing to the justness of its demands – highly esteemed members who have stated that all standing armies are superfluous. Well, what if a public assembly had this view! Would not a government have to reject this?! – There was talk about the “sobriety” of the Prussian people. Yes, the great independence of the individual makes it difficult in Prussia to govern with the constitution (or to consolidate the constitution?); in France things are different, there this individual independence is lacking. A constitutional crisis would not be disgraceful, but honorable instead. – Furthermore, we are perhaps too “well-educated” to support a constitution; we are too critical; the ability to assess government measures and records of the public assembly is too common; in the country there are a lot of Catiline characters who have a great interest in upheavals. This may sound paradoxical, but everything proves how hard constitutional life is in Prussia. – Furthermore, one is too sensitive about the government’s mistakes; as if it were enough to say “this and that [cabinet] minister made mistakes,["] as if one wasn’t adversely affected oneself. Public opinion changes, the press is not [the same as] public opinion; one knows how the press is written; members of parliament have a higher duty, to lead opinion, to stand above it. We are too hot-blooded, we have a preference for putting on armor that is too big for our small body; and now we’re actually supposed to utilize it. Germany is not looking to Prussia’s liberalism, but to its power; Bavaria, Württemberg, Baden may indulge liberalism, and yet no one will assign them Prussia’s role; Prussia has to coalesce and concentrate its power for the opportune moment, which has already been missed several times; Prussia’s borders according to the Vienna Treaties [of 1814-15] are not favorable for a healthy, vital state; it is not by speeches and majority resolutions that the great questions of the time are decided – that was the big mistake of 1848 and 1849 – but by iron and blood.

Pop history sees the trees of “blood and iron” but misses the forest surrounding it: loss aversion.  This mental bias intensifies man’s fear of loss, making it a stronger motivator for action than any hope for gain. Since the brain is a narrative computer that discovers truth by linking the most of vivid facts together through the most vivid of events, loss aversion often shows up in the form of negative fables. While positive fables link together facts with events to show how x + y + z = gain, negative fables gloomily argue that x + y + z = loss.

History, a game where the many try force square facts into round fables, often channels loss aversion as “no more” complexs.

Consider:

• No more Lehmans
• No more Iraqs
• No more Afghanistans
• No more September 11ths
• No more Srebrenicas
• No more Rwandas
• No more Vietnams

Is every stand that anyone takes in private or public life is only a thin veneer stretched over a no more complex? If so, history is little more than one no more after another. Otto von Bismarck’s own history, a history that let him to bait the (classical) liberals of the Prussian parliament with provocative talk of “blood and iron”, was strongly motivated by one “no more”: no more Olmützs.

The “punctuation” of Olmutz was a treaty signed between Austria and Prussia on November 29, 1850:

The reason for the treaty was a conflict between Prussia and Austria over  leadership of the German states. The German Confederation, dominated by Austria, had been dissolved in the Revolutions of 1848. It was partially succeeded by the Frankfurt Assembly. After the Frankfurt Assembly failed, in early 1850 Prussia  had proposed the Erfurt Union, a Prussia-led federation of most German states.

A conflict between the Electoral Prince of Hesse-Kassel and his subjects let Austrian chancellor Felix Schwarzenberg isolate Prussia. Austrian and allied armies advanced into Hesse-Kassel. On November 8, 1850, the Prussian army had come close to war with Bavaria (an ally of Austria). But Prussia decided to give in because Nicholas I of Russia had taken the Austria side in October 1850. By signing the treaty, Prussia gave up its claim to leadership of the German states. At the same time the German Confederation was restored. Prussia submitted to Austria leadership of the confederation, agreed to demobilize; agreed to partake in the intervention of the German Diet in Hesse and Holstein; and renounced any resumption of her union policy (abandoning the idea of the Erfurt Union).

To many Prussians, punctuation at Olmütz became humiliation at Olmütz, one more Prussian grievance to add to the large mound that Prussia had built up since it was demolished by Buonaparte in 1806. Prussia, always the most geographically illogical of European Great Powers, emerged from Buonaparte’s wars as the weakest European Great Power. After the Congress of Vienna, Prussia found itself with less of neighboring Saxony than it wanted but also found itself (dubiously compensated) with the distant territories of Westphalia and the northern Rhineland in what is now western Germany. This “award” of distant and backward territories (including the Ruhr, a rural backwater) violated 150 years of Prussian precedent: earlier Prussian rulers had struggled to consolidate their widely dispersed lands into a geographically contiguous bloc. Now Prussia was separated from its new territory by hundreds of miles of other, potentially hostile, German states. It was weak and Austria could bully Prussia anytime it felt like it.

The Prussian desire to free their kingdom from Austrian hegemony led to a furtive flirtation with (classical) liberal German nationalists during the “German Spring” of 1848. However, powerful factions within Prussia were more afraid of losing power to a rising (classical) liberal middle class than kowtowing to Austria. They energetically conspired to counter (classical) liberalism inside Prussia and outside in the German states. Their efforts included dispatching a younger conservative upstart, known for his outrageousness, to gum up the workings of the new unified (and (classically) liberal) German Parliament meeting at Frankfurt from the inside. So Otto von Bismarck arrived in Frankfurt, witnessed the attempt to unify Germany on a (classically) liberal foundation collapse despite many fine “speeches and majority resolutions”, and added “no more Frankfurts” to his personal no more complex.

Bismarck was among those who felt intensely humiliated by the Prussian capitulation at Olmütz. His conflict with Austrian ambassador Count Friedrich Thun und Hohenstein in the restored German Diet as they waged a duel of snub and counter-snub personalized the sting of the Prussian surrender. Twelve years passed. When Bismarck made his infamous “called shot” to Disraeli in June 1862, three months before he became minister-president of Prussia:

I shall soon be compelled to undertake the conduct of the Prussian government. My first care will be to re-organise the army, with or without, the help of the Landtag … As soon as the army shall have been brought into such a condition as to inspire respect, I shall seize the first best pretext to declare war against Austria, dissolve the German Diet, subdue the minor states and give national unity to Germany under Prussian leadership. I have come here to say this to the Queen’s ministers.

What Bismarck was really saying was:

• No more Viennas
• No more Frankfurts
• No more Olmützs

Bismarck’s resolution that his no mores would be no more made him the Cavour of Germany. But his platoon of no mores led to legions of new no mores.

Defense analyst Adam Elkus frequently cites Jamais Cascio’s notion of “legacy futures“:

Reading a talk given by science fiction author Ken Macleod, I came across this bit:

I used the term ‘legacy code’ in one of my novels, and Farah Mendlesohn, a science-fiction critic who read it thought it was a term I had made up, and she promptly adapted it for critical use as ‘legacy text’. Legacy text is all the other science fiction stories that influence the story you’re trying to write, and that generally clutter up your head even if you never read, let along write, the stuff. Most of us have default images of the future that come from Star Trek or 2001 or 1984 or Dr Who or disaster movies or computer games. These in turn interact with the tendency to project trends straightforwardly into the future.

What immediately struck me is that we all have this kind of cognitive “legacy code” in our thinking about the future, not just science fiction writers, and it comes from more than just pop-culture media. We get legacy futures in business from old strategies and plans, legacy futures in politics from old budgets and forecasts, and legacy futures in environmentalism from earlier bits of analysis. Legacy futures are rarely still useful, but have so thoroughly colonized our minds that even new scenarios and futures models may end up making explicit or implicit references to them.

In some respects, the jet pack is the canonical legacy future, especially given how the formulation (originally from Calvin & Hobbes, I believe), of “where’s my jet pack?” has become a widely-used phrase representing disappointment with the future instantiated in the present…

Just like legacy code makes life difficult for programmers, legacy futures can make life difficult for futures thinkers. Not only do we have to describe a plausibly surreal future that fits with current thinking, we have to figure out how to deal with the leftover visions of the future that still colonize our minds…

A similar, and more powerful, hold can control the human mind: legacy pasts. The past of today is not the past of fifty years ago. Inconveniently, it’s not even the past of ten years ago. The Norman conquest of 1066 today is not the Norman conquest of 1066 of 1966, the Norman conquest of 1066 of 1866, the Norman conquest of 1066 of 1166, or the Norman conquest of 1066 of 1067. All the yesterdays between 1066 and 2011 changed 1066 and 2011, one looking by backwards, one by looking forwards. History is fluid that way. But some history is less fluid than other history. This musty history is a complex of legacy pasts. And the lack of fluidity in no more complexes is extreme even for legacy pasts.

World War I was a duel between legacy pasts. Germany acted on legacy pasts that made up a “more more” complex, launching an aggressive strike through Belgium to create “more” Sedans and “more” 1870s (and Alfred von Schlieffen’s thirst for “more” Cannaes). France nursed  legacy pasts that made up its no more complexes: it wanted no more 1870s and no more Sedans so they aggressively threw themselves at German artillery and machine guns. Britain had a  legacy past cast as “no more Phillip IIs Louis XIVs Buonapartes” that led it to war under the banner of “no more Kaiser Bills”. Russia wanted no more 1453s, no more 1878s, and no more 1908s.

The United States entered the war with its own set of no mores. John Milton Cooper relates this anecdote about noted war criminal Thomas Woodrow Wilson:

As he rode up in the White House elevator on the night of April 2, 1917, after delivering his war address to Congress, Woodrow Wilson reportedly remarked to his young cousin, “Fitz, thank God for Abraham Lincoln.”, Fitz Woodrow, a grandson of Wilson’s uncle Jimmy, later recalled asking why he had said that and got the answer, “I won’t make the mistakes he did.” Wilson did not explain to Fitz what mistakes he thought Lincoln had made…

Cooper searched Wilson’s papers, including Wilson’s own writings about Lincoln, but hasn’t been able to divine what Lincoln mistakes Wilson was trying to avoid or if he succeeded in avoiding them. The possibilities are endless because of Wilson’s own legacy past as a Southerner who lived most of his adult life among Northerners:

Wilson was born in Staunton, Virginia on December 28, 1856, the third of four children of Reverend Dr. Joseph Ruggles Wilson (1822–1903) and Jessie Janet Woodrow (1826–1888). His ancestry was Scottish and Scots-Irish. His paternal grandparents immigrated to the United States from Strabane, County Tyrone, Ireland (now Northern Ireland), in 1807. His mother was born in Carlisle, Cumberland, England, the daughter of Rev. Dr. Thomas Woodrow, born in Paisley, Scotland and Marion Williamson from Glasgow…

Wilson’s father was originally from Steubenville, Ohio, where his grandfather published a newspaper, The Western Herald and Gazette, that was pro-tariff and anti-slavery. Wilson’s parents moved south in 1851 and identified with the Confederacy. His father defended slavery, owned slaves, and set up a Sunday school for them. They cared for wounded Confederate soldiers at their church. Wilson’s father also briefly served as a chaplain to the Confederate Army. Woodrow Wilson’s earliest memory, from the age of three, was of hearing that Abraham Lincoln had been elected and that a war was coming. Wilson would forever recall standing for a moment at Robert E. Lee’s side and looking up into his face.

Wilson’s father was one of the founders of the Southern Presbyterian Church in the United States after it split from northern Presbyterians in 1861. Joseph R. Wilson served as the first permanent clerk of the Southern church’s General Assembly, was Stated Clerk from 1865–1898 and was Moderator of the PCUS General Assembly in 1879. Wilson spent the majority of his childhood, up to age 14, in Augusta, Georgia, where his father was minister of the First Presbyterian Church.

Wilson studied at home under his father’s guidance and took classes in a small school in Augusta. During Reconstruction, Wilson lived in Columbia, South Carolina, the state capital, from 1870–1874, where his father was professor at the Columbia Theological Seminary.

Wilson attended Davidson College in North Carolina for the 1873–1874 school year. After medical ailments kept him from returning for a second year, he transferred to Princeton as a freshman when his father took a teaching position at the university.

Wilson’s complex no more complex might be a rat’s nest of native childhood sentiment fighting adult academic indoctrination. But, since Lincoln was the last president who’d fought a major war, it was logical for Wilson look back on Lincoln for more mores and no mores. But he did that through the lens of the legacy pasts that coalesced in his own mind and the minds of other Americans in the 52 years since the end of the Civil War.

Whatever the nature of Wilson’s personal complex of no mores, he set out to produce no more war, no more balances of power, no more authoritarianism, and no more evil on Earth. The result of his no mores was more war motivated by leaders who wanted No More Versailleses. Hitler wanted no more Versailleses to institutionalize German defeat, humiliation, and dismemberment. Mussolini wanted no more Versailleses to remind him of Italy’s 1919 wimpiness. The Japanese establishment wanted no more Versailleses to remind them that Europeans still looked down on them and denied them a place under the sun. Jyang Jyeshr wanted no more Versailleses that would acquiesce to the dismemberment of China by gwei lau. Stalin wanted no more Versailleses that would erect a cordon sanitaire around the great proletarian revolution. Churchill wanted no Versailles that left Germany a window to rise again. Roosevelt wanted no more Versailles that would let Germany doubt it had been defeated because the forces of good on the international stage lacked muscle.

World War II’s legacy pasts fathered our current crop of legacy pasts. All legacy pasts forever oscillate  between absolute truth and obsolete fiction. “No more Vietnams” will be countered by “No more Munichs”. “No more Iraqs” meet “No more Rwandas”. “No more Lehmans” face off against “No more stagflation”. “No more COIN” runs into “No more Fulda Gaps”. Humans create legacy pasts that support their personal agendas, making history a continuation of politics with the addition of other, more intensively indexed, footnotes.

Legacy pasts empower. Legacy pasts imprison. Legacy pasts may be more factual than truthful. They may be more truthful than factual. The Prussian military historian Carl von Clausewitz recommended immersive study  of narrow slices of history in excruciating detail to counter the human mind’s thirst for magically transmuting messy history into orderly checklists. Clausewitz argued that only a disciplined cultivation of unconscious and intuitive empathy that placed you alongside real people trapped in real moments when their future (and your past) was still new and hadn’t hardened into iron fable could compensate for the insistent pull that legacy pasts and no more complexes have over the mind. History may be a fable agreed upon but there’s no cure for history but history.

Before

During

After

Fable

In statecraft, there are truths, assumptions, theories, hypotheses, and guesses:

• Truths are certain and unchanging within historical time: the sun will rise and Britain is an island.
• Assumptions are held with the certainty of truth but are truly held hostage by the uncertainty of change: the Atlantic is a highway and the island of Britain physically blocks access to that highway from the North Sea.
• Theories have a smell of truth and may harden into assumptions but are even more prey to historical volatility: someone who controls the island of Britain, the seas around it, the heavens above it, and the earth below it can block access to the Atlantic from the North Sea.
• Hypotheses related one idea to another with an aspiration to theoretical rigor but can be blown apart by the slightest historical variability: putting a fleet at Scapa Flow will block traffic from the North Sea with a larger margin of safety than stationing it at Rosynth or invergorden.
• Guesses are blown away by history without endurance and without mercy: battleships stationed at Scapa Flow are the future.

These all start out as exercises in faith. They all end up being reduced to fables. Faith and fable differ in the intensity of liturgical effort they must be observed with, their consequences if followed or ignored, and the applicability of their storyline’s moral. The biggest risk statecraft runs is mistaking one kind of faith or fable for another faith or fable and taking action based on that mistaken identity. If you act on a guess that you believe is a truth when, in truth, it’s only a guess creates a mismatch between frequency, variability, verifiability, and tangibility. It’s the impact of this mismatch that separates the harmful from the harmless and the tolerable from the fatal.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb proposed two distinct spheres of human thought in The Black Swan:

• Mediocristan: the realm of truths, safe assumptions, verifiable theories, reasonable hypotheses, and best guesses
• Extremistan: the realm of absent truths, unsafe assumptions, fantasies slumming as theories, crazed hypotheses, and wild guesses

The titular black swan separates the realm of Mediocristan from the realm of Extremistan:

1. A black swan is disproportionately consequential.
2. A black swan cannot be predicted.
3. A black swan inevitably acquires a tight bodyguard of assumptions, theories, hypothesis, and guesses cleverly disguised as truths.

Black swans, contrary to their usual portrayal, aren’t always bad. They’re neither good or bad. The black swan is what you make of it. It’s a boon or disaster depending on its interplay with the existing residue of assumptions, theories, hypothesis, and guesses it collides into. The right residue of faith and fable can turn a black swan into a force for progress. The wrong residue of accumulated mental debris can let a black swan set off a chain of cascading woes.

Today, as it lives on in infamy, is the seventieth anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The usual question shows up as scheduled: could the attack have been prevented? Every fable about Pearl Harbor differs but they clump around just a few premises:

• Americans were innocent victims of Japanese treachery
• Americans pushed Japan into war with a series of provocative sanctions but didn’t realize that the blowback included a Japanese attack
• Americans expected Japanese attacks but though they’d be focused on seizing British and Dutch colonies in Southeast Asia and not American targets
• Americans expected a Japanese attack but thought it would fall on our forces in the Philippines or elsewhere in the western Pacific
• The Roosevelt administration knew there was an attack on Pearl Harbor but expected American forces in Hawaii to repel it
• The Roosevelt administration knew there was an attack on Pearl Harbor and deliberately sabotaged efforts to defend the base from Japanese attack

This focus on prevention assumes that the right warning to Japan, the Roosevelt Administration, Admiral Kimmel, or General Short would have prevented the tragedy. For many, this is the moral of their fable with their version of events and their conclusion elevated to truth, assumption, theory, hypothesis, or (when they’re honest) guess.

This longing for prophecy misses the point: the black swan came. Pearl Harbor sucked American and Japanese alike into the vortex of war in all of its primeval fury, wild contingency, and brutal instrumentality. There were no more angels of prevention in the whirlwind. Theory and hypothesis went out the window, leaving only the hard truths of bombs and torpedos, the misplaced assumptions of peacetime training, and the frantic guessing of frightened boys in metal boxes, mere food for flammable petroleum and explosive powder.

Whether a warning would have made a difference cannot be known. There were many balls up in the air. The Japanese had never performed a carrier launched aerial attack on the naval base of a Western power. The Americans had never defended a fleet in harbor from an aerial attack launched from carriers. If American fighters had been in the air, the fleet had gone to sea, or the U.S. Navy been at battle stations, the Japanese attack force might have suffered higher casualties. The Japanese expected higher losses in men and material. The lopsided results in their favor were a pleasant bonus.

It was not surprise that killed 2,402 Americans, sunk 4 American battleships and 2 destroyers, and destroyed 188 aircraft (mostly on the ground). It was the dysfunctional response, only part of which can be explained by shock. The American defense was poorly organized and uneasily split between the warring camps of Army and Navy. Everyone was still moving at peacetime tempo despite a world moving at war speed. The Japanese Navy flyers had recent combat experience operating in and around Chinese waters. The U.S. Army had experienced flyers but they were training in and around the Chinese airspace. It was the accumulation of such small differences that disproportionately rewarded the Japanese attackers and disproportionately punished the American defenders.

Now FDR had his war. He’d wanted a provocation and even conspired to start a provocation but I doubt he conspired to trigger this provocation. This provocation inflicted significant damage on FDR’s beloved U.S. Navy, the very instrument he needed intact if he wanted to win the war he wanted to fight. If FDR had his druthers, he’d have conspired to draw the Japanese (or, better yet, the Germans) into launching a surprise raid on Mom, Home, and Apple Pie. That would’ve been a massive symbolic blow but it would’ve left America’s core war fighting power untouched and undamaged.

The critical decision in the care and feeding of a black swan is what you do with it afterwards. This is where faith and fable meet contingency: statecraft can see opportunity or peril depending on the faiths and fables it brings to the scene of the crash. Many of the actions that leaders in this warring states period took were based on the the truths, assumptions, theories, hypotheses, and guesses they took away from fighting the last war.

• FDR was assistant secretary of the U.S. Navy during World War I. The lessons he took away from his experience were the the lessons that guided his conduct after Pearl Harbor:
  1. The need to preemptively keep a single power from dominating Europe. Thomas Woodrow Wilson intervened against Germany because he feared that the threat of a victorious Germany meant the permanent militarization (“Prussianization” as Wilson called it) of the United States. Wilson’s intervention, however flawed, prevented the militarization of U.S. society for another 19 years.
  2. The need to beat Germany (and anyone else) totally into the ground so they’re left with absolutely no illusion that they’d lost the war.
  3. The need for an unconditional postwar settlement that left the defeated no wiggle room to get out from under its treaty obligations.
  4. The need for more robust international security arrangements. FDR wanted the four quartes of the globe patrolled by the “four policemen”: the US, USSR, UK, and China. The facade of this four way division was a more muscular League of Nations 2.0 in the new United Nations. The reality of this four way partition was based on America running China as a puppet, destroying the British Empire by reducing Britain to a poodle, and mesmerizing the USSR with personal charm.
• For Winston Churchill, Lord of the Admiralty, lieutenant. colonel of 6th battalion of the Royal Scots Fusiliers, and minister of munitions during World War II, it offered a replay of 1917-1918. American assistance had saved the Allies from defeat and preserved the British Empire. American entry into World War I also let Churchill propose countless variations on Gallipoli where American servicemen were repeatedly thrown against the Alps guarding Europe’s “soft underbelly” in the name of outsized British interests that ballooned as Britain itself shrank.
• For Lance Corporal Adolf Hitler of the Bavarian Army, Pearl Harbor only confirmed the inevitable. Hitler’s strategy sought to create an integrated political and economic unit on the European continent with the power and clout to resist the material resources commanded by the Americans and British. This would prevent a replay of 1918-1919 when the combination of American and British material power had forced Germany into a armistice followed by an Anglo-American naval blockade in 1919 that starved Germany into signing the Peace of Versailles. Hitler would first kick away the English-speaking power’s best tool on the continent, Soviet Russia, and then he’d be able to face the maritime military and material might of America and Britain with the full resources of Eurasia at his beck and call. Hitler already thought FDR, president and tool of the center of world Jewry, was at war with him. Pearl Harbor only made it explicit under international law.
• For evil commie Joseph Stalin, it allowed him to live another day while setting the imperialists against each other, leaving the Communists to exploit the disarray after the war like Lenin did after World War I. Stalin didn’t even need a sealed train since he already had sealed moles in the White House.
• The leadership of the Japanese army saw a rerun of their short but splendid wars in World War I and earlier in the Russo-Japanese War where the shock of quick and surprising victories by little yellow men over large white supermen led to a favorable peace before Japan exhausted its limited resource base. They hoped to bleed the soft Americans white through demoralizing defeats and brutal battles.

The actions these men, and millions of others, took was based on their recent past and the mental framework they’d built on their experience but the actions they took were taken after the attack, in the circumstances and challenges that it created. It’s not the event, the black swan, or defeat that matters, it’s what you do with it. It’s how you care and feed the opportunities and perils that the black swan unleashes. In 216 B.C., a Carthaginian army led by Hannibal Barça defeated the Roman Republic at Cannae, reputedly sending over 50,000 Romans to their death in the course of one day:

Following the battle, commander of the Numidian cavalry Maharbal urged Hannibal to seize the opportunity and march immediately on Rome. It is told that the latter’s refusal caused Maharbal’s exclamation: “Truly the Gods have not bestowed all things upon the same person. Thou knowest indeed, Hannibal, how to conquer, but thou knowest not how to make use of your victory.

Whether Pearl Harbor was an American or Japanese victory is an open question. Pearl Harbor lasted a few frantic hours. But the attach has been in constant use ever since. As vintage memory fades, the black swan of Pearl Harbor wastes to gray. Soon there will be no one left to care and feed it. But the  faith and fable of Pearl Harbor, made up of half-truths, lazy assumptions, tenuous theories, fragile hypotheses, and ignorant guesses, goes moralizing along. The truth in Pearl Harbor’s faiths and fables will only show the next time the terrors of December descend on innocence out of another clear blue morning sky.

Naive OODA Loop

They see John Boyd as a cheerleader standing on the sidelines shouting “Faster! Faster!”. This idea of Boyd is that Boyd was a cheerleader for:

1. Go fast.
2. Go faster.
3. Reach ludicrous speed.
4. Profit!

Does this man look like a cheerleader?

? and ?

You can answer that question any way you want, as long you answer NO.

See this?

No

Even when Boyd was smiling, he was 100 million light years from being a cheerleader. If a Boyd particle touched a cheerleader particle, it would annihilate it, leaving behind a tremendous burst of energy and plans for better technologically advanced fighter plane than the F-35 but at  1/1,000,000th the cost.

This is the key image for understanding Boyd and his ideas:

Leuctra

Boyd taught a theory where victory came through creating a fatal disconnect between the enemy and reality through a combination of mental, moral, and physical isolation. Highlighting all three is key to the originality of Boyd’s thought. He was thinking outside the box.

This box:

Cannae 1

Or, more particularly, this box:

Cannae 2

At the battle of Cannae in 216 BC, the Carthaginian general Hannibal Barça had taken 50,000 Roman legionaries and put them in a physical box where they were slaughtered almost to the last man. The physical kill box of Cannae became the mental box that military thinkers of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century put their brains in. This was your brain:

Baron Antoine Henri de Jomini

This was your brain on Cannae:

Count Alfred von Schlieffen

Schlieffen, Chief of the Great General Staff of the Second Reich from 1893-1906, was obsessed with Cannae. He even wrote an entire monograph on it. Schlieffen, like most of his contemporaries, checked off one box on his planning checklist: does my scheme physically annihilate the enemy in the grand tradition of Buonoparte. The result was the Schlieffen Plan executed with disastrous results by the Germans in August 1914:

One reason Schliefen’s plan failed (there are many) was it only aimed at physical annihilation of Franco-British forces. It’s moral and mental annihilation components were few or vestigial. This trend continued on the Western Front for the next three years.

Boyd suggested that the German development of infiltration techniques countered this. Instead of long bombardments that the château generals thought would physically annihilate the enemy trench line, barbed wire, and fortifications, the artillery barrage that accompanied a German infiltration attack was sudden and unexpected, providing suppression as much through sudden mental or moral disorientation as through physical destruction. Instead of the physical impact of large ranks of infantrymen marching across No Man’s Land, small teams of infiltrators dribbled across the lines in small groups, causing moral and mental derangement by attacking the enemy from the rear in unexpected places at surprising times.

Traditional Greek Order of Battle vs Leuctra Order of Battle

Boyd referred back to Leuctra rather than Cannae as a guide because Epaminondas’ seemingly simpler act of stacking his left 50 deep and weakening his right was just as effective as Hannibal’s more technically complex but brittle double envelopment at Cannae. Epaminondas, because he created a fatal disconnect between Spartiate and reality through a balanced attack of physical (more husky Boeotians to beat on the Spartan right), moral (that’s against the rules!), and mental (the best Boeotian troops were on the left, not right) isolation, won a more efficient victory than Hannibal because he mauled the Spartans as effectively as Hannibal mauled the Romans without the enormous luck and complexity involved in pulling off a double envelopment.

About the Happy Kampers, John Robb posts:

It appears that Occupy’s extreme non-violence/passivity has finally generated a social system disruption.  Videos and pictures showing policemen using violence against passive protesters have gone viral (UC Berkeley students, Grandma, and open mouth were the leading examples).  Stories about this violence are now sweeping the media (7,910 news stories over the last 24 hours).  Is this going to have a strategic effect?

Let’s look at this from the late, great American strategist John Boyd‘s perspective.  The dynamic of Boyd’s strategy is to isolate your enemy across three essential vectors (physical, mental, and moral), while at the same time improving your connectivity across those same vectors.  It’s very network centric for a pre-Internet theoretician.  Here’s more detail what disconnection looks like:

• Physical isolation is accomplished by severing communications both to the outside world (ie. allies) and internal audiences (ie. between branches of command and between the command organization and its supporters).
• Mental isolation is done through the introduction of ambiguous information, novel situations, and by operating at a tempo an enemy cannot keep up with. A lack of solid information impedes decision making.
• Moral isolation is achieved when an enemy improves its well being at the expense of others (allies) or violates rules of behavior they profess to uphold (standards of conduct). Moral rules are a very important reference point in times of uncertainty. When these are violated, it is very hard to recover.

Was it effective?

Using John Boyd’s framework as a guide, this media disruption did have an effect across all three vectors:

• Physical.  No isolation was achieved.  The physical connections of police forces remained intact.  However, these incidents provided confirmation to protesters that physical filming/imaging of the protests is valuable.  Given how compelling this media is, it will radically increase the professional media’s coverage of events AND increase the number of protesters recording incidents.
• Mental.  These incidents will cause confusion within police forces.  If leaders (Mayors and college administrators)  back down or vacillate over these tactics due to media pressure, it will confuse policemen in the field.  In short, it will create uncertainty and doubt over what the rules of engagement actually are.  IN contrast, these media events have clarified how to turn police violence into useful tools for Occupy protesters.
• Moral.  This is the area of connection that was damaged the most.  Most people watching these videos feel that this violence is both a) illegitimate and b) excessive.  Watch this video UC Davis Chancellor Katehi walking from her building after the incident.  The silence is eerie.

Let’s see how the forces working on suppressing the Happy Kampers did according to Boyd’s ideas:

Physical

If you want to be successful, it helps to smell successful. Any gathering of humans over a long period without adequate sanitation or showers starts to produce smells that my grandmother would have been familiar with since even the moderate sized American city she grew up in at the beginning of the twentieth century remained densely populated with livestock. My father remembered vast herds of sheep being herded down from mountains and along the suburbun street he lived on to the railyard as late as the 1950s. Substantial tracts of farmland with potent smelling livestock remained within city limits even when I was young in the 1970s-1980s. But the smell of a large number of unwashed and their detritus, in this case a Happy EnKampment with a permanent population of underwashed Happy Kampers, would keep the virginal noses of most city folk well away.

The local Happy Kampers here somehow decided that the best site for their encampment was an out of the way public park better known for being the city’s largest open air drug market and bum gathering place ever since transient care facilities were centralized nearby back in the 1970s. This led to conflict with not only the police but with the more formidable drug-bum alliance. The upscale professionals who came to surreptitiously buy their cocaine from the local drug dealers were scared off by the Happy Kampers. The demand of the Happy Kampers for marijuana and other drugs wasn’t enough to compensate for the loss of wealthy luxury shoppers: the local Happy Kampers were usually unemployed or underemployed hippies with liberal arts majors. This isolated them from the locals so they couldn’t swim among them like fish so the locals and cops collaborated to drive them out. This was helped by…

Mental

In a season 7 episode of The Simpsons, recurring Bart Simpson nemesis Sideshow Bob attempts to escape. First he tries a Harrier jet but it crashes. Then he steals a replica Wright Brothers plane. The Air Force scrambles fighters to intercept it but they wildly overshoot it since it moves so slow. The next frame shows the same two fighter pilots following the Wright Brothers plane at a slow trot while trying to hook it. This points out a subtle assumption embedded in Robb’s description of the mental aspect of Boyd’s theory:

Mental isolation is done through the introduction of ambiguous information, novel situations, and by operating at a tempo an enemy cannot keep up with. A lack of solid information impedes decision making.

Here we see the same assumption that can be found behind the naive OODA loop: tempo is about moving faster than the other guy. However, there’s another approach that’s equally valid under Boydian theory:

Mental isolation is done through the introduction of unambiguous information, boring situations, and by operating at a tempo an enemy can’t be bothered to  keep up with. Too much solid information impedes decision making.

The Bing fa, attributed to Swen Dz, contains this often cited chestnut:

Therefore, I have heard of military campaigns that were clumsy but swift, but I have never seen military campaigns that were skilled but protracted.

No nation has ever benefited from protracted warfare.

This observation has been contradicted many times in military history. See Fabius Maximus’ Cuncator’s (“the Delayer”) bleeding of Hannibal after Cannae, Frederick the Great’s strategy in the Seven Years’ War, or the invasions of Russia in 1812 and 1945. The campaign to suppress the Happy Kampers was a result of a protracted counter-revolution. At the start of the campaign, there was room for the larger public to see the Happy Kampers as this:

Someone Save Me!

So you let a few months go by. The loosely affiliated get bored, have routine life intrude, and gradually drift away from the Happy EnKampment, leaving a hard core remnant whose previously obscured agenda is disagreeable to most Americans. The public gets tired of an EnKampment that drags on and on without a clear resolution within an hour (minus commercials). The excesses of the hardened cadres can be isolated and magnified by official propaganda to chip away at lingering public support. Pretty soon the public sees you as this:

Hippies

The public outcry when hippies are dispersed with a whiff of pepper spray is muted. The protracted nature of the counter-revolutionary operation has fatally undermined and isolated that most irreplaceable commodity of our times: attention. Following Boyd, the establishment moved at a tempo so slow that the network-centric thinking of the Internet addled younglings couldn’t adjust slowly enough and found themselves isolated from real longue durée of political struggle. They were worn down by long periods of boredom that weren’t punctuated with enough moments of sudden terror.

Moral

There’s a shelf life on shock. Too many atrocities, real, fictional, or imagined, have polluted the media space that their shock value has a shorter and shorter political effect. This produces a situation where either side, facing diminishing returns on atrocity, go for more atrocious atrocities in both quantity and quality in pursuit of a finite and ever shrinking reservoir of public outrage. This leads to mutual assured dramatizations like this encounter between the Happy Kampers and the NYPD observed by John J. Reilly:

One of the conference rooms in my building at work has a very good view of one of the access routes from Zuccotti Park to the New York Stock Exchange (it’s no great distance), so I could see one of yesterday morning’s altercations between the Occupiers and the New York City Police. On television, the scuffle looked like a scene from Potemkin. From above, it was clear the crowd was not very large, and that there were about as many police. There were about a third as many journalists. There were also many horses, all in a double column, who had nothing to do and were unhappy in the drizzle.

At ground level, the marching groups were businesslike when they were not trying to force a police barricade. I saw black flags, but no black masks. The most animated element was a small number of bearded young men who scurried around the edges of the groups while conferring earnestly on their cellphones. Police and Occupiers ignored each other except at the designated points of confrontation.

There’s retail history for you.

If we as media consumers are rapidly approaching Peak Outrage, we’re even closer to depleting our authenticity reserves. Peak Authenticity may already be past. It’s accurate to view this iteration of the Happy Kamping movement as a group of historical re-enactors, only this group of enthusiasts aim to recreate the protest movements of the 1960s instead of the battlefields of the 1860s. The result is camps that resemble historical Williamsburg in authentic period detail but without the benefits of vintage eighteenth century sanitation or family friendliness. Attempts to remove the ganja-like mustiness through cultivated atrocity will only make the re-enactment more anachronistic and less plausible. John J. Reilly observes later in the same post:

Perhaps not even the most clueless Occupiers think that they are “the many” (“multitude” is the term that neo-Marxists prefer). The point of making the claim is the hope that it can be redeemed if the Occupiers visibly undergo ritual martyrdom; then the general public will identify with the Occupiers rather than the police or ordinary civil authorities. This tactic is harmless enough when it is a matter of streetfighters provoking the police and then whining about the result. One of the creepier aspects of the Occupation, however, is the spread of human-shield tactics, the deployment of children and elderly people in crowds that also contain streetfighters. The old people probably know what they are getting into, but to bring one’s children to such an event is a grave evil.

Fortifications used to resemble this:

Fortification

Or this:

Siegfried Line

Nowadays fortifications look like this:

Sharbat Gula, the Afghan Girl

But, like other fortifications, even the photogenic young Sharbat Gula can be worn down.

After

It’s a time-tested technique in storytelling from movies to myth to build audience interest by threatening photogenic children or animals. However, if you go to the well too much, even this time-tested technique will yield diminishing returns. This is doubly true if you isolate yourself from your target audience by making your narrative obvious. Obviousness is the mortal enemy of authenticity, in atrocity as well as television. Some obviousness is needed to accommodate even the slowest members of the audience but it should be unobvious obviousness.

The obscurity about the Happy Kampers goals doesn’t help since it fails to break the obviousness barrier. There have been attempts to justify this diffused motivation by arguing that the Happy Kampouts are more about demonstrating the ability to mobilize a movement at a moments notice than actually pursuing concrete political outcomes (outside or inside The System). This “movement in being” is supposed to strike fear into the heart of the Man by threatening to descend in force on them if their undemands are not met. John J. Reilly seems to accept the Movement in Being justification in part but he argues this vagueness is intentional:

Regarding the motives of the Occupiers, it is often remarked that they have trouble articulating why they are trying to preempt public space. There is indeed a catechism of slogans that activists deliver to the press, usually touching on income inequality, but these slogans are not doctrine or even common knowledge among the participants. The know-nothing state of the Occupation is often presented as a defect. That misses the point.

The Occupation is like the old joke about the man who crosses a border checkpoint one way every day on a bicycle with sand in the handlebar basket. The customs officers puzzle and puzzle about what he could be smuggling. Finally they realize what he is smuggling: bicycles. Similarly, the reasons or unreasons that people offer who have excluded civil authority from public space are less important than the fact they have excluded civil authority from public space. Note that the occupations are generally near centers of government. This fact-on-the-ground is not in service to theory; it is what theory has always tried to achieve.

This is very Robbist: Reilly argues that the Happy Kampers are not only trying to establish a Movement in Being but Temporary Autonomous Zones where the state has been preëmptively withered away. Happy Kampers: where los Zetas behead, you camp.

But it’s not very Boydian. Boyd, chained by legacy thinking, insisted on a less distributed goal:

Evolve and exploit insight/initiative/adaptability/harmony together with a unifying vision, via a grand ideal or an overarching theme or a noble philosophy, as basis to:

• Shape or influence events so that we not only amplify our spirit and strength but also influence the uncommitted or potential adversaries so that they are drawn toward our philosophy and are empathetic toward our success,

yet be able to

• Operate inside adversary’s observation-orientation-decision-action loops or get inside his mind-time-space as basis to:
• Penetrate adversary’s moral-mental-physical being in order to isolate him from his allies, pull him apart, and collapse his will to resist.

Up to this point—by repeatedly adding, stripping-away, and recombining many different, yet similar, ideas and thoughts—we have examined the nature of conflict, survival, and conquest in many different ways.

A review and further manipulation of the ideas and thoughts that make-up these different ways suggests that, for success over the long haul and under the most difficult conditions, one needs some unifying vision that can be used to attract the uncommitted as well as pump-up friendly resolve and drive and drain-away or subvert adversary resolve and drive. In other words, what is needed is a vision rooted in human nature so noble, so attractive that it not only attracts the uncommitted and magnifies the spirit and strength of its adherents, but also undermines the dedication and determination of any competitors or adversaries.

Moreover, such a unifying notion should be so compelling that it acts as a catalyst or beacon around which to evolve those qualities that permit a collective entity or organic whole to improve its stature in the scheme of things. Put another way, we are suggesting a need for a supra-orientation or center-of-gravity that permits leaders, and other authorities, to inspire their followers and members to enthusiastically take action toward confronting and conquering all obstacles that stand in the way.

Theme for vitality and growth

Unifying vision

A grand ideal, overarching theme, or noble philosophy that represents a coherent paradigm within which individuals as well as societies can shape and adapt to unfolding circumstances—yet offers a way to expose flaws of competing or adversary systems.

Aim

Improve fitness as an organic whole to shape and expand influence or power over the course of events in the world

Ingredients needed to pursue vision

Insight

Ability to peer into and discern the inner nature or workings of things.

Initiative

Internal drive to think and take action without being urged.

Adaptability

Power to adjust or change in order to cope with new or unforeseen circumstances.

Harmony

Power to perceive or create interaction of apparently disconnected events or entities in a connected way.

Dropping the man behind the curtain

Cyber warrior Samuel Liles tweets:

Some guy named Andy Marshall keeps coming up in my life. I’m still not sure why.

Followed by:

Every time I hit a new concept scratched on the bottom is “Andy Marshall was here”

The Pritzker Military Library recently recorded two podcasts, one with Karl Marlantes on What it’s Like to go to War, the other with Marvin Kalb and Deborah Kalb on Haunting Legacy: Vietnam and the American Presidency from Ford to Obama.

The Kalbs cover how American defeat in Vietnam shaped presidential decisions about war and peace. During their presentation, the elder Kalb, a thirty year veteran of the Washington media-political complex, commented that policymaking, especially in diplomacy and defense, changes very little from president to president. Obama, age three at the time of the Tonkin Gulf Resolution and age thirteen when the last helicopter took off from Saigon, is as wound up in Vietnam as Obama appointees like the late Richard Holbrooke, a Foreign Service Officer in Vietnam from 1962-1969. Obama’s foreign policy, to the chagrin of the naifs that voted him in, is the continuation of his predecessor’s second term with an admixture of the rhetoric of love and a Nobel Peace Prize.

Marlantes discusses war and its spiritual impact on those that fight it in the light of his own experience as a young Marine officer serving in Vietnam and the post-traumatic stress disorder he suffered decades afterward. At the end of his presentation, Marlantes decries the all-volunteer military with two anecdotes from his book tours:

In the first, a young mother, babe in arms, bursts into tears while speaking to Marlantes. Her husband, also present, was departing for his seventh tour overseas. For Marlantes, this represents the tragedy of placing a disproportionate fighting burden on what Marlantes ominously calls “a Praetorian guard” while the rest of America goes shopping. Tragedy is followed by farce in his second anecdote: at another book signing, Marlantes is approached by woman his age, an upscale Boomer who protested against the war. She tells Marlantes that she is somewhat abashed about her actions back then. She confessed that she’d never known that soldiers had “slept outside” while fighting in Vietnam.

Professor Liles’ tweets refer to Andrew Marshall, Director of the Office of Net Assessment. Many American foreign policy and defense commentators decry a lack of continuity in American foreign and defense policy. Convinced that American “democratic” unruliness and partisan divides lead to incoherence at home and disaster abroad, they yearn for the steady grip on the rudder, a pilot with icy realpolitik flowing through their veins like Klemens von Metternich, Otto von Bismarck, and stereotypical nineteenth century European chancellaries. Yet, in Marshall, you have ninety year old strategist who’s held on to his job since 1973. That’s thirty-eight years, nineteen congresses, twelve secretaries of state, eleven secretaries of defense,  eight presidents, seven John Travolta comebacks, six Star Wars movies, five Star Trek reboots, three boy band waves, two sixties nostalgia flashbacks waves, and one Mr. T ago.

No wonder Marshall is called Yoda.

Brother Mycroft

Of Mycroft Holmes, brother Sherlock said:

The conclusions of every department are passed to him, and he is the central exchange, the clearinghouse, which makes out the balance. All other men are specialists, but his specialism is omniscience.

Sometimes, said the more prominent Holmes brother,  Mycroft Holmes “is the British government…the most indispensable man in the country”. Marshall’s probably no Mycroft Holmes. He may not be the indispensible ingredient for the yearned for Nineteenth Century Chancellery in a Box that naïve realists want. He may not be the George Frost Kennan in a Box that foreign policy/defense academics want (or yearn to be). He may not even be the Paul Nitze in a Box that foreign policy pragmatists would settle for (Kennan to Nitze: YOU STOLE MY FOREIGN POLICY!!! Nitze to Kennan: I MADE IT WORK!!!). Yet, even without boxed solutions, as Kalb pointed out, recent American foreign and defense policy has remained fairly consistent from administration to administration and congress to congress. This continuity is obscured by fleeting fashions of the moment. Fashions come:

• 2000: We’re all End of Historians now!
• 2001: We’re all Transformation, JDAMs, and No Doubters now!
• 2002: We’re all We’re Number 1! We’re Number 1!, We’re Number 1! now!
• 2003: We’re all Muscular Interventionist Hyperpowers now!
• 2004: We’re all Deeply, Deeply Skeptical of this War now!
• 2005: We’re all Imperial Overstrechers now!
• 2006: We’re all Come Home, Come What May, now!
• 2007: We’re all Grudging SURGErs!!! now!
• 2008: We’re all  Clear, Hold, and Builders Now!
• 2009: We’re all It’s The Time For Smart Power now!
• 2010: We’re all Peeing on CNAS now!
• 2011: We’re all Realists Balanced Austerely Offshore now!

Fashions go.

But the continuity of foreign and defense policy since the mid-seventies has been striking.  This Dr. Marshall in a Box may be a key reason. How much of this continuity results from the influence of Marshall and Marshall protegés in and out of government is obscure. Marshall himself rarely gives interviews. This interview with Wired from February 2003 may be the only Marshall interview readily available on the Web. It quotes Marshall saying, among other things:

What is the next radical change the US will reveal on the battlefield?

One that’s still under way is the emergence of a variety of precision weapons, and also coupling them with sensors. Another is the ability to coordinate the activities of separate elements of the forces to a level that has never been possible before. That’s promising, but less far along than precision weapons. A third is robotic devices: unmanned vehicles, of which the UAVs are the furthest along, but also similar kinds of devices undersea, and smaller devices that might change urban warfare by being able to crawl through buildings…

In an era of terrorism and peacekeeping, are Cold War ideas based on striking a big enemy from afar and defending against missile attack still relevant?

Yes, if we want to stay in the business of long-range power projection. And if we play the role of intervening in messy disputes, some of this weaponry is still useful, as it was in Afghanistan. However, we need ground forces to go in and keep the peace.

Does new technology ultimately make us more or less vulnerable?

A friend of mine, Yale economist Martin Shubik, says an important way to think about the world is to draw a curve of the number of people 10 determined men can kill before they are put down themselves, and how that has varied over time. His claim is that it wasn’t very many for a long time, and now it’s going up. In that sense, it’s not just the US. All the world is getting less safe.

This sums up the dominant strain in American foreign and defense (and domestic) policy since the mid-seventies, coincident or not with the start of the Marshall Era: replacing manpower intensive violence with technology intensive violence. This replacement could be seen as the logical continuation of Bingham and Souza’s notion that human evolution is driven by “death from a distance“, the ever extending reach of the unique human ability to compel from afar, whether from thrown rock or launched missile.

Or it could signal a fundamental shift in the form of human societies. The efficient violence hypothesis posits:

1. The division of power within a political marketplace favors those that most effectively mobilize coercive power.
2. Organization of human society converges on those social forms that best support the use of coercive power.

Since the battle of Stirling Bridge proved that cross-dressing Irish Army reservists on foot, led by Mel Gibson, could defeat English armored cavalry, human organization has converged on those forms that best support coercion through mass infantry. These forms include rational bureaucracy to manage mass, contractual government with a mass electorate unseen since the onset of cavalry dominance, mass production, mass markets, broadcasting to the masses, mass education, and the welfare state among others. Since the mid-1970s, social organization has shifted away from these forms. In their place, the division of power increasingly favors social forms that effectively support technology that automates or augments the few’s capacity to coerce the many. Instead of policy that supports the “greatest good for the greatest number” (a euphemism for the “greatest firepower for the greatest army”), policy now emphasizes the need to let the few have room to “innovate”.

In the mindless mumbling of the Mustache of Understanding, “innovation” is the naïve faith that technological Hail Marys are predestined to sustain broad-based prosperity of the mid-twentieth century West. In Marshall’s formulation, innovation means incremental cultivation of power asymmetries to gain timely advantage in a world political order of disorder. Marshall’s vision is more modest than expansively blind faith in the redemptive power of technology, technocracy, and the journalists that love them:

A. Short term initiatives. An organization will respond to the perspective of the top manager. If the perspective is judged sound and effective, then in time it may permeate throughout top management. With this in mind, the Secretary could:

1. Continue, both inside and outside the building, to stress the points that we have little choice but to deal effectively with the Soviets for decades, that we intend to focus on the Soviets as the potential “opponent,” and that we intend to contend with them with that same “Yankee know-how” which has historically characterized our people.
2. The SecDef should set an up-beat tone — yes, the challenge is tough, but who else could take up the challenge if we fail to do so?
3. Follow through on this spirit by initiating a series of focused requirements within the building to set major themes, interest the bureaucracy and test for areas of support. For instance, call upon the Services to develop areas where we could exploit Soviet tactical weaknesses.
4. Ask the Services to reexamine their major training programs (such as ship refresher training) to ensure that they are conducted with the Soviets, not some abstract enemy, in mind. Encourage the Services to conduct major exercises against a realistic “Soviet-simulated enemy” in order to focus the troops and explore/test clever tactics.
5. Call in certain senior military officers responsible for training and doctrine development, and query them on what their “strategy” is and how it is designed to cope with and prevail over Soviet doctrine and tactics.
6. Redirect the training of the Reserves so that they know clearly that they are being trained to fight Russians.

B. Long tern initiatives. In time, we should be able to better develop and refine our strategy for competing with the Soviets over the long haul. Some first cuts are provided in the appendices; there are, however, some initiatives which could greatly contribute to this effort.

1. Have a select group of defense thinkers formed to provide you with a series of think pieces about such subjects as:

• What is the nature of the competition, the competitive environment, and what are U.S. distinctive competences?
• What are the Soviet strategies in each of the key balance areas?
• Where do we have competitive advantage, and what are some potential competitive advantages?
• What should our overall strategy be? What should be our strategies for achieving our goals in the key balances?

2. Establish a center or institute to study the Soviets. They have an “Institute of the USA and Canada” — if we are going to compete cleverly, we might well do something similar.

Excellent summary. But I’m not convinced that no. 17 is entirely necessary:  violence (in varied form) yes, malice certainly, but death? Many are the varied interests that initiate conflict, as well as the means and ends that sustain and complete it, that the risk of life should not preclude such a case from inclusion to the scope of war only due to a lack of violent death.

In my wild youth, I favored a more expansive definition of war. I thought this broadening would bring taxonomic clarity to the muddled regions between war-war and jaw-jaw. Advancing into middle-age, I doubt my earlier inclusive generosity. Clarity comes through naming otherwise diffuse phenomena as exactly as possible, not stretching them. A term that encompasses everything encompasses nothing. This wat my motive behind number 17 i.e. “War is not war without the possibility of violent death.”

With a working assumption that “Violence is the power to change behavior through physical pain or physical annihilation”, this is my Schelling-lite taxonomy for dissecting violent power:

1. Compellance is the possibility of violence for hostile political ends.
2. Coercion is compellance with a focused possibility of physical pain through deliberate hurt.
3. War is coercion with a focused possibility of physical annihilation through deliberate killing.

This is true inasmuch as the safety of a city street coincides with the safety of regular users of that street. Haussmann’s city planning was based on the principle that the safety of a city street depends on the number of unencumbered shots that government forces can get off against the eyes that are watching them. Haussmann built broad streets and parks because it made it easier to mass and deploy men, horses, and cavalry against the revolutionary mobs that kept Paris in revolutionary tumult from 1789 through the middle of the nineteenth century while denying those mobs the narrow streets that were easy to clog up with defensive barricades. If Jacobs’ triumph was found in keeping New York planning dictator Robert Moses from running a highway through Greenwich Village, Haussmann’s triumph was found in the ease with which Adophe Thiers crushed the Paris Commune in 1871.

Both of these principles are subsets of the greater principle that morality is the annihilation of public space. In political economy, this means recognizing that the expansion of what’s considered a private matter means a contraction in public space. In theology, it means recognizing that truly private space is impossible under the unblinking Omniscience of the Divine.

1. AD 312-390: Constantinian Revolution [download video]

2. AD 350-530: Assimilation of the Germani [download video]

3. AD 500-620: Roman Empire Renewed [download video]

4. AD 500-633: The Graeco-Roman East [download video]

5. AD 630-680: The Islamic Invasions [download video]

6. AD 680-754: Latin Christendom [download video]

7. AD 754-840: Charlemagne [download video]

8. AD 840-990: The Deluge [download video]

9. AD 960-1070: A new civilization [download video]

10. AD 968-1095: The West steps forward [download video]

11. AD 1075-1122: Consensus & Crusade [download video]

12. AD 1100-1200: Cultural Efflorescence [download video]

13. AD 1100s & 1200s: Christian Republic [download video]

14. AD 1147-1204: Christendom Expanding [download video]

15. AD 1204-1238: The Feudal Polity [download video]

16. AD 1238-1291: The Struggle for Order [download video]

17. AD 1200-1350: Cultural Shift [download video]

18. AD 1276-1347: Princely Sovereignty [download video]

19. AD 1347-1396: Division & Disasters [download video]

20. AD 1356-1414: The Great Schism [download video]

On Monday evening at Zuccotti Park, Mahfouz was eager to model the fiery disobedience with which she’s inspired so many Egyptians. “Let’s march!” she said after an hour-long question-and-answer session, grabbing an Egyptian flag and flashing the victory sign with both hands.

A few hundred demonstrators fell in line behind her and Maher, who gamely joined the English chants. The police allowed the march onto Wall Street itself, and at each corner the American leaders consulted an officer about the preferred route. Weary of the somewhat stilted slogans, which lacked the umph and rhythm of Egyptian chants, Mahfouz and Maher taught the crowd the iconic cry of the Arab uprisings: “Al shaab yurid isqat al nizam,” or “The people demand the fall of the regime.” The crowd adopted its own hybrid: “Al shaab yurid isqat Wall Street.”

As they wound back to Zuccotti Park, demonstrators awaited a cue from the police before crossing Broadway. It was too much for Mahfouz. She stopped in the middle of the intersection, stopped traffic, pumped a fist in the air, and demanded the fall of Wall Street. Nervous demonstrators skittered to the sidewalk, leaving Mahfouz with just the cameras and a few dozen stalwarts who seemed willing to accept her invitation to be arrested.

For a few seconds, there was a palpable crackle of tension. But the police, it seemed, didn’t want the hassle. They stepped back, and without a confrontation, the moment subsided. Mahfouz joined her comrades back on the sidewalk.

“I wanted to show them that they need to be tough, even if they get arrested,” she said with her trademark toothy smile.

In The Atlantic‘s telling, Ms. Mahfouz seemed baffled by the lotus occupiers movement without leaders:

“Where are the organizers?” she asked. “There must be organizers.” No one knew. She ended up chatting at the welcome table with a young man wearing a straw hat.

And even more baffled by the lack of ends around which the “movement” can cohere:

“How do you sustain yourselves? How do you keep yourself energized?” he asked. “That’s our main problem.”

“You need a message,” she told him.

Apparently, the revolution really is a dinner party. And they’re serving tofu and lattes.

Some of the questions were well intended but astonishingly vague: “How do you overthrow a system?” one man asked. Maher politely replied, “It’s easier to overthrow a dictator than an entire system.”

Ms. Mahfouz, used to vivid clarity of an unresolved life and death struggle with a nakedly authoritarian establishment, tried to get the occupiers to focus:

She also advised Occupy Wall Street to select its own leaders and craft a simple message “that no one can change.”

But, like O. J. Simpson’s search for the “real killers”, the search for Occupy Wall Street’s message is a work in progress:

However, the Atlantic reports that Ms. Mahfouz did find the real organizers of the leaderless movement…apparently:

With that, she repaired for a private session with Occupy organizers — she had finally found them…

And with that, she got into a car and headed for the golf course of revolution.