Repost: China and “Unrestricted Warfare”

As China’s power increases and the attention of the world’s strategic analysts shifts to Asia, it has become fashionable to attribute to the Chinese a level of conceptual power that they do not actually have. This often manifests itself as rhetoric proclaiming the Chinese to be infinitely superior and subtle strategists that put their clumsy and naive Western counterparts to shame. For example, and with only mild exaggeration: “China is planning global hegemony: they will soon invade Taiwan and proclaim the restored Middle Kingdom. And we Americans are too stupid to realize that this is happening under our noses. Unless we take action now, we are doomed!”

Fear of Chinese power is nothing new, and in centuries past it was referred to as the “yellow peril.” But whereas in the past alarmists used to demean the Chinese as racially inferior and degenerate barbarians who threatened to overrun the world, today they are regarded as intelligent, insidious, and utterly ruthless in their quest to achieve global supremacy. I like to call this phenomenon “reverse ethnocentrism”; regarding a foreign people as superior to ones’ own, at least in the realm of strategy.

So when in the late 1990s two PLA colonels – Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui – authored a treatise on their theory of “unrestricted warfare,” their work was immediately seized upon as proof of the inferiority of Western strategy next to its sublime Eastern rival. However, an actual reading of the document reveals military thinking that is mediocre at best.

A popular English translation showcases perfectly the phenomenon I’m talking about. The book is subtitled as “China’s Master Plan to Destroy America,” and the cover image depicts the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center, insinuating that the Chinese were somehow responsible. Ali Santoli’s introduction also suggests this. In addition to being inflammatory, this is misleading. The US figures prominently as the main adversary, but the document is a piece of military theory, not a “master plan” by any stretch of the imagination. Terrorism is mentioned as a form of “unrestricted warfare,” but the authors are warning of its threat rather than advocating its use.

The central argument of the book is that rapid technological advance and economic globalization is opening up new spheres of warfare aside from the traditional battlefield, and that these new spheres could be the decisive “theater” in future war. The authors give a long list of what they consider to be new forms of warfare, such as financial warfare, network warfare, environmental warfare, technological warfare, etcetera:

All of the prevailing concepts about the breadth , depth, and height of the operational space already appear to be old-fashioned and obsolete. In the wake of the expansion of mankind’s imaginative powers and his ability to master technology, the battlespace is being stretched to its limits.

The position of military and political weakness has stimulated very creative military and strategic thinking throughout history, including Unrestricted Warfare. As the authors state in their introductory chapter, they conceived their theory as a means to escape the endless cycle of competition in weapons technology, which is dominated by the United States:

To ensure that the weapons are in the lead, one must continue to up the ante in development costs; the result of this continued raising of the stakes is that no one has enough money to maintain the lead. It’s ultimate result is that the weapons to defend the country actually become a cause of national bankruptcy … Obviously, it will be difficult for anyone to keep going. Naturally, the way to extricate oneself from this predicament is to develop a different approach.

Thus, in an attempt to overcome U.S. superiority in the conventional military sphere, the authors hope to exploit new spheres that have been made available by technology and globalization. But for this strategy to work, these new battlespaces must be able to deliver victory. The authors argue that they can.

Methods that are not characterized by the use of the force of arms, nor by the use of military power, nor even by the presence of casualties and bloodshed, are just as likely to facilitate the successful realization of the war’s goals, if not more so … Any war that breaks out tomorrow or further down the road will be characterized by warfare in the broad sense – a cocktail mixture of warfare prosecuted through the force of arms and warfare that is prosecuted by means other than the force of arms. The goal of this kind of warfare will encompass more than merely ‘using means that involve the force of arms to force the enemy to accept one’s own will.’ Rather, the goal should be ‘to use all means whatsoever – means that involve the force of arms, means that involve military power and means that do not involve military power, means that entail casualties and means that do not entail casualties – to force the enemy to serve one’s own interests.’

The preceding passage demonstrates the weakness behind their theory of unrestricted warfare, because to make it work, the authors had to redefine the object of war. Rather than use force to impose one’s will on the enemy, the object is “to force the enemy to serve one’s own interests.” The West has similar concepts, but we understand them within the terms of international politics. In other words, what the West calls politics, the Chinese call war. With this understanding, “unrestricted warfare” loses much of its novelty. Indeed, the authors write with the enthusiasm of someone who has rediscovered the wheel and is attempting to sell it under a new name.

Revealing a very naive ethnocentrism of their own, the authors state that this manner of thinking “is not a strong point of the Americans, who are slaves to technology in their thinking. The Americans invariably halt their thinking at the boundary where technology has not yet reached.” Nonsense. The Americans understand the concepts of “unrestricted warfare” just as the Chinese, but they consider them as tools of international politics in an anarchic world-system. “War” is reserved for organized violence to serve political ends. The absence of war does not mean the absence of conflict; the struggle for power and security is endless, and occurs outside the context of open warfare. But ultimately, violence is the final arbiter of conflict; only by violence is it possible to impose your will on the enemy. The authors acknowledge that conventional military operations may occur simultaneously with operations in the new battlespaces, but the battlefield has lost its role as the final court of war. But this raises a question: if the traditional battlefield no longer offers the possibility of decision, why do the authors argue that it will still coexist with the new battlespaces? How is it not still the decisive sphere?

Despite all the attention that this book received in the United States, it is a useful example of the weaknesses of Eastern strategic thought, entering into the surreal at times. At one point, the authors suggest using holographic technology to frighten religiously devout soldiers. They also propose that the golden ratio of mathematics and geometry (1.618…) is the key to all victory in war. They admit that they have no idea how this can be practically applied, but insist it should be done anyway. Alas, semi-fantastical notions of bloodless victory through clever stratagems are inherent to the Chinese concept of war.

War has always involved marshalling resources that are not military in nature and committing them to the effort to defeat the enemy. The hype over Unrestricted Warfare is similar to that which surrounds its American equivalent, “Fourth generation warfare.” Ultimately, they are both concepts that repackage and restate the eternal truths of war. Unrestricted Warfare is a commendable piece of military theory, but the Chinese will need more than this to displace the U.S. as the world’s preeminent superpower.

 

MercMart: The Future of PMCs

Continuing the theme of my last post, I thought I might offer my own ideas on the future of the private military industry. Private military corporations (PMCs) in all their various guises have become a critical component of U.S. military operations and power projection. There may never again be a situation where private security contractors are employed to the extent that they were in Iraq, but it has become impossible for the U.S. government to embark on foreign contingencies without extensive support from the private sector. Thus far, however, PMCs have functioned in a supporting role; an ancillary element to an official mission.  There are some scenarios where they might be able to function as an independent, decisive instrument. Let’s examine a few of them:

1. In the employ of the United Nations. The dismal record of UN peacekeeping operations has done serious damage to the organization’s credibility. It is true that “peacekeeping” was never meant to function without the consent of all the belligerent parties, but the failure of UN forces to protect civilian populations in such places as Rwanda, the Congo, and Sierra Leone has destroyed much faith the world body, no matter what the academic definition of “peacekeeping” is; war ravaged peoples tend not to be interested in semantics. One of the problems is that these missions rely on military contributions from member states. These troops are often of poor quality, and the governments contributing them usually place restrictions on the types of operations they can engage in, severely limiting their effectiveness. This problem could be alleviated were the UN to have its own military legitimacy, and private military corporations are immediate solution.

In the years following the Rwandan genocide, it was revealed that UN officials debated hiring mercenaries to enter the country and put a stop to the genocide. In 1998, Kofi Annan explained why the decided against this, stating that “the world may not be ready to privatize peace”. Perhaps the world wasn’t ready, but one million Rwandans certainly were…

That said, the idea of the UN buying its own military forces and kicking in the doors in a forcible intervention should be cause for concern; I doubt any government on the planet is comfortable with the notion. Even if the mission was a legitimate enterprise to stop another genocide, the UN bureaucracy is so corrupt and incompetent that not even a crack army of mercenaries could save the day.

2. Employment by weak states. The use of mercenaries by governments is often condemned as somehow undermining accepted norms of state behavior. The implication of this argument is that weak governments in war-torn countries are morally obligated to either (a) surrender to the insurgent forces that seek to unseat them, or (b) throw themselves at the mercy of the “international community” in the hope that a foreign intervention will come save them. Given the importance attributed to the principle of state sovereignty by that same “international community”, this norm makes no sense whatsoever. Decolonization created a number of states that exist in name only, and the only way that they can protect their territory is with hired help. How can state sovereignty be respected if a different norm forbids governments from taking the measures necessary to exercise that sovereignty?

3. Employment as an independent instrument of U.S. foreign policy. It is possible to imagine scenarios where critical U.S. interests are not at stake, but U.S. intervention is otherwise desirable. In these circumstances, the absence of political will prohibits the employment of U.S. forces, but PMCs offer an alternative.

Let us imagine a fictional scenario to illustrate what I mean. In future decades, the distribution of world power will once again trend toward bipolarity as China continues to rise and the American “unipolar moment” comes to an end. Inevitably, a mutual suspicion will set in between these two superpowers. Let us then imagine that ethnic violence on a genocidal level breaks out in the tiny African nation of Equatorial Guinea (not a completely unrealistic prospect…it has happened before). As usual, the UN would be paralyzed, and European states would have neither the will nor capability to intervene. After the long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. is not eager for any foreign adventures, least of all one that does not involve vital U.S. interests. But there would be one reason to intervene: to get there before the Chinese do. Were the Chinese to intervene under the pretext of a peace enforcement mission, they would secure another source of oil and gain a base on the Atlantic Ocean. This would not be unprecedented for China; in the past, Beijing has committed troops to UN missions as part of strategy to isolate Taipei. A few years ago they joined the UN mission in Haiti, which was one of a handful of states in the Western Hemisphere the extended diplomatic recognition to Taiwan.  Committing U.S. forces might not be possible, but why not a PMC?

Of course, there are many reasons why not. Outsourcing foreign policy like this could set a very dangerous precedent. Intervening in any region where vital interests are not at stake is a questionable endeavor, no matter what forces are committed. In any case, the U.S. has managed to topple unfavorable governments when secondary or tertiary interests are involved (Liberia, Haiti, etc.) with little enough controversy.

Ironically, the best arguments for employing mercenaries tend to be the humanitarian ones. A crisis like the Rwandan genocide is one where armed intervention is most necessary but least attractive. This is where the employment of PMCs would have the most value, and it’s the niche that the private military industry is trying to exploit.

 

Mercenaries – Я – Us

Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries:

These, in the day when heaven was falling,
The hour when earth’s foundations fled,
Followed their mercenary calling
And took their wages and are dead.

Their shoulders held the sky suspended;
They stood, and earth’s foundations stay;
What God abandoned, these defended,
And saved the sum of things for pay.

– A. E. Housman

I recently finished reading A.J. Venter’s 2006 book, War Dog: Fighting Other People’s Wars – The Modern Mercenary in Combat, a fascinating collection of exploits by modern soldiers of fortune, with an emphasis on Africa. Venter is an experienced “Africa Hand” and has been writing about the continent for decades. I can’t help but think he belongs to a dying breed of journalists. One of the photographs included in the book depicts Venter – graying beard and all – dressed in camouflage, holding an AK, and posing with one of the South African mercenaries he was “embedded” with in Sierra Leone. The back cover features another image of Venter in the front pod of an Mi-24 Hind gunship as it prepares for a sortie against RUF rebels. To get his story, Venter isn’t afraid to take risks that most people would pale from, occasionally becoming part of the story in the process.

By contrast, today’s ideal journalist is the Ivy League-educated political reporter who measures success in terms of subversion and risk in terms of distance from the nearest coffee shop. Their output focuses ad nauseum on political nuances that exist only in their minds, and they rarely venture out of their precious coastal cities; forget venturing into some Third World hellhole (though they will claim credit for this if they’ve ever traveled beyond the suburbs). Without reporters like Venter much of what happens deep in the wilds of the world would pass unknown to the rest of civilization.

The stories recounted in the book range from the halcyon days during decolonization to the current operations of private military corporations in Iraq and Afghanistan. There is a particular emphasis on aviation; with no industrial capabilities of their own, underdeveloped African states often employ mercenaries to pilot the handful of Eastern-bloc aircraft in the government’s inventory. Venter relays some truly remarkable adventures: Neall Ellis, the prolific South African gunship pilot who single-handedly saved Sierra Leone from RUF rebels – not once but twice – by flying multiple combat sorties per day for months on end (Venter often accompanied him on these missions, hence the photograph on the back cover); Dana Drenkowski, the American pilot who flew hundreds of missions in Vietnam, fought for Ian Smith in the Rhodesian Bush War, and even flew for Qadhafi (back when the CIA still had a relationship with him) before settling down for a successful career as – of all things – a San Francisco lawyer; the first mission of the South African firm Executive Outcomes, when a handful of mercenaries defended Angola’s Soyo oil installation against hundreds of UNITA rebels for several days.

The exploits of Executive Outcomes in both Angola and Sierra Leone are fairly well-known, but Venter is one of the few journalists to write about them in detail. In Sierra Leone a few hundred EO mercenaries accomplished what tens of thousands of UN troops would later fail to do: defeat the RUF. Venter’s account of UNAMSIL’s (United Nations Mission in Sierra Leone) will be disturbing reading for anyone who still hopes that blue helmets will bring peace. The mission was monumentally corrupt and incompetent. The military forces that were committed – entirely by Third World governments, as is typical of UN missions – were useless. Some Nigerian officers even became involved with the RUF to enrich themselves from Sierra Leone’s diamond wealth. Even more disturbing, there is evidence that, out of some juvenile fascination with revolution, some NGO personnel acted as informants for the RUF despite the latter’s horrific atrocities. And yet they constantly condemned the mercenaries (who were actually fighting the RUF) as paid killers.

Venter closes out the book with a discussion on the industry’s efforts to “go legit” through incorporation, and how this process is playing out in Iraq and Afghanistan. He echoes several other commentators by asserting that the world should welcome the advent of private military corporations. After all, contract soldiering is as old as war itself, and it’s not going to die; allowing mercenaries to “go corporate” makes it possible to regulate, channel, and exploit the phenomenon in the service of national interests and the international community at large.

Interestingly enough, Venter interviews several people who worked with Simon Mann, the recently released British mercenary who was jailed in Equatorial Guinea for his role in a coup attempt, and few have anything nice to say about him. Some of his colleagues thought him an arrogant little man who always managed to make himself scarce when the shooting started. It’s fair to say that many were frustrated by the entire harebrained scheme, which was a PR disaster for mercenaries trying to go legitimate in the corporate world; overnight Simon Mann and Co. undid years of work toward improving the credibility and public image of the private military industry.

The book itself could have used some better editing. As I mentioned, it is not a cohesive history but rather a collection of exploits. Venter has a tendency to repeat himself and to veer off in a completely different direction in the middle of his chapters. Some of the tales he recounts have only one witness (the person involved) and thus seem rather exaggerated (a few “there I was…” sort of stories). But the book is an excellent read or those interested in how the mercenary industry has evolved over the past 5 decades and the corporate direction that it’s headed in.

 

Balkhing at Kabul

A short piece in the London Times encapsulates the political dilemma currently facing the U.S. in Afghanistan:

There are few better illustrations of the weakness of the Afghan state than the situation developing in one of its most secure regions. General Atta Mohammad, a powerful Tajik warlord and Governor of Balkh province, has successfully kept the peace — and the Taleban at bay — across a swath of the north of the country since 2004.

However, critics say that he has carved out a mini-state openly defying Kabul, sparking increasingly determined efforts in the capital to unseat him.

By operating under the delusion that a centralized government based in Kabul can rule Afghanistan, the U.S. blinds itself to the successes that can be achieved if we reconcile our strategy to Afghan society. Atta Mohammad may be a warlord who is carving out his own personal fiefdom, but he has kept the peace and kept out the Taliban; in Afghanistan, the U.S. should ask for nothing more. If U.S. strategy embraces feudalism the success of Balkh province could be replicated all across the country.

 

Sailing to Oceania

Aside from this blog, I like to record my thoughts in what I prefer to call a “commonplace book.” Not a “journal,” mind you… Keeping a journal would be a major contravention of my Midwestern sensibilities which regards such things as the province of troubled high school girls. Essentially, a commonplace book is a high-falutent all-purpose notebook. Commonplacing originated back in the day when paper was expensive and authors couldn’t afford many volumes to take notes in, so they often made do with one.

Anyway, I was looking back through some older “entries” and noticed the following comment on the dystopian implications of world government:

If humanity was ever politically united, either here on Earth or among the planets in the far future, the union would be immediately challenged by rebellion and civil war on an epic scale [ note my optimism ]. But the unity would be so profound an achievement, so remarkable an opportunity, and so fragile a dream that the government, in an attempt to keep the dream from fading away, would lapse into a brutal totalitarianism. This would only hasten the dissolution by fuelling rebellions, but humanity would be so desperate to preserve the unity that it would go to any length to keep it from failing. Universal government has been a promise of Western idealism for centuries, and it is considered by realists and idealists alike as the only viable way to preserve peace. The difference is that idealists think it possible and realists do not. If achieved, however, there would be anything but peace. Only permanent war and crisis would be able to maintain the unification, resulting in the ultimate irony: though unification is the long-sought zenith of human affairs – the final condition of an evolved mankind – it will only result in darkness as all the accumulated social capital is wasted away in wars to preserve the union, both to crush actual rebellions and to concentrate the energies of the people on a common goal. Fear world government, for a new darkness follows close behind.

The point I was trying to make was that a universal government would immediately become a colossal tyranny because so many people would be willing to do anything to preserve it, including both liberal idealists and pragmatic realists.

 

Aging in Afghanistan

Remember Forward Operating Base Rhino…the very first piece of Afghan real estate seized by U.S. forces at the beginning of the war? The past eight years have not been kind to this landmark. The paint has been sandblasted from the walls and roofs, part of the main hangar has collapsed, and the north side of the base is completely overwhelmed by dunes. The Registan Desert is rapidly reclaiming the site.

Allegory?

 

Confessions of a Compulsive Book Buyer

Like most wannabe-intellectuals, I buy a lot of books. Rarely a day goes by that I don’t have an open order with one of the major book outlets on the internet (usually Amazon, sometimes Alibris, Barnes & Noble, Half.com, and Ebay). I read about 50% of these acquisitions immediately and the rest get added to my library, where they might remain for several months before I touch them again.

But I have a problem. Occasionally I will hear of a rare out-of-print title that is relevant to my interests and I become absolutely OBSESSED with buying a copy, willing to pay completely unreasonable prices. I’ve had four really bad episodes so far.

The first occurred several years ago when my reading was focused on ancient Rome. I had been studying the role of the Praetorian Guard in Roman politics when I learned of the Scholae Palatinae, which succeeded the Praetorian Guard following the latter’s defeat at Milvian Bridge. Constantine disbanded the Praetorian Guard after his ascension, replacing it with the Scholae which functioned as an elite palace guard that was much more politically reliable than its predecessor. There is one major study of the Scholae in the English language: a 1969 monograph from the American Academy in Rome entitled Scholae Palatinae: The Palace Guards of the Later Roman Empire. I had access to the work via the inter-library loan networks of nearby universities, but that wasn’t enough for me. I had to OWN a copy. So I started watching the major book markets, and finally, after several months, a used copy turned up on Amazon. I snatched it up immediately. I paid way too much, but the copies I’ve noticed for sale since then have been several times more expensive so perhaps it was a good investment after all. And of course, I haven’t read it yet. But it proudly remains on my shelf as a trophy of my indomitable will [or a pathetic token from an undiagnosed case of OCD].

Later on I was exploring the sadly neglected subject of Byzantine military strategy. This is one area of history where there is much work to be done because Byzantine studies generally focuses on society, culture, art, etc. Nevertheless, there are several notable works on the subject, one of which is the unassumingly titled Some Thoughts on Byzantine Military Strategy [which sadly inspires me when I can't think of witty names for my blog posts]. While I was in D.C. I made a visit to the Library of Congress for the sole purpose of reading this book, but the hassle of that experience nixed any subsequent visits. Copies of the book have since appeared for sale on Amazon, but I have resisted the urge to buy one. It’s been difficult.

In related news, this November Harvard University Press will be releasing Edward Luttwak’s long-anticipated Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire. Luttwak previously authored an excellent study of ancient Rome’s grand strategy. Hopefully, his work on Byzantium will fill in many of the holes that have been left by the neglect of this topic.

My next obsession was Brooks Adams’ Law of Civilization and Decay. Adams purportedly had a major influence on Theodore Roosevelt’s worldview. Very briefly, Adams argues that when a civilization divorces itself from challenge and struggle, it loses the martial virtues that hold it together and settles into commercial patterns of existence that will ultimately corrode it. The book is still in print, but I spent quite some time searching for a 1st edition before I settled for a 2nd edition from 1896.

Lastly, Sir Charles Gwynn’s Imperial Policing. With the possible exception of C.E. Callwell’s Small Wars (which I also own), this is the most famous manual for colonial warfare ever written during Britain’s age of imperialism. After months of searching through every book outlet I could think of, I recently found a tolerably priced copy on Ebay from a seller in the U.K. With the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan this book has reportedly become a must-have for counterinsurgency specialists, explaining its relative scarcity on the internet. I’m not aware of a recent edition, but with its current popularity a new printing run would be a profitable venture. Thankfully I have a legitimate excuse for buying this one because it’s relevant to a project I’m currently working on.

So…of all the hundreds of books that I’ve purchased, why did I become so obsessed over these four? I have no idea.

 

The Benefits of Stupidity

Joseph Fouche over at the Committee of Public Safety brings us George Friedman’s (founder of stratfor.com) ridiculous prescription for American grand strategy:

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

Laughable though it may seem, this policy has much to recommend it. Edward Luttwak offers the best explanation as to why.

Strategy is an intricately complex exercise, with a multi-layered vertical dimension that consists of the many interacting levels of strategy – from the lowest level of technical competition to the highest level of grand strategy itself – and a horizontal dimension that consists of the enemy’s response. A perfectly optimized strategy requires a policy that is in harmony with all levels of both dimensions. Reaching this harmony would be no small achievement even in the simpler times of antiquity, but in the modern bureaucratic state it is infinitely more difficult. In Luttwak’s own words,

the highly diversified bureaucratic apparatus of modern states is itself a major obstacle to the implementation of any comprehensive scheme of grand strategy. Each civil and military department is structured to pursue its own distinct goals, and each has its own institutional culture. Consciously or not, the separate departments are likely to resist a concerted scheme whenever it clashes with their particular bureaucratic interests, habits, and aims. For the implementation of a normative grand strategy, the organization of modern states is both the essential instrument and a powerful impediment.

Dictatorships obviously have an easier time of it, but for democracies, complex strategy making is all but impossible:

Democracies cannot function as cunning warriors stalking their enemies in the night. Nor can modern pluralist democracies achieve coherence in their foreign policies, shaped as they are by the contending forces of voluntary pressure groups, organized lobbies, contending bureaucracies, and political factions. Yet there is much to be said for the resulting incoherence.

With all the impediments to efficient strategy making in the U.S., we are lucky to reach a consensus on the need to be big and powerful.

But even if we assume that it is realistic – or at least possible – to craft an optimized grand strategy we are still left with a question: is a unified grand strategy even necessary? It can be argued that ad hoc policymaking has produced outcomes only slightly less favorable than those of a universal strategic scheme. American foreign policy might be sloppy and full of mistakes, but it avoids permanently systematizing critical failures, which is a danger inherent in more coordinated strategies:

…while the successful application of a grand strategy should reduce the prevalence of small errors of disharmony, it will do so at the risk of focusing energies to perpetuate much larger errors. That is why the warlike ventures of dictatorships that can impose the tightest policy coordination, exploit the paradoxical logic to the full, and routinely achieve surprise whenever they attack begin well, only to end in utter disaster.

Strategy is a reciprocal enterprise; every action provokes a response from both enemies and allies. Americans look at the overwhelming disparity in military and economic power between the U.S. and the rest of the world and lament their failure to leverage this power toward the creation of a truly American world order. So they gnash their teeth, rend their clothes, and tear out their hair in exasperation of America’s strategic incompetence. Yes, it is true that America has not harnessed its resources in service of a unified grand strategy, but by not doing so, we avoid the inevitable counter-strategy from the rest of the world:

There is now a multidimensional American supremacy that is quite unprecedented in all of human history and that awaits only the determined pursuit of a power-maximizing global strategy to become fully effective for the United States, and intolerably oppressive for everyone else. Defensive responses and hostile reactions of widening scope and mounting consequence would inevitably follow…

Whatever added leverage could have been obtained by purposeful coherence in the first stage, thereby evoking coalition building in the second, would be lost in the third and final stage, in which some sort of global equilibrium would be restored once the original enhancement of American power was negated. Even if incidental disasters were avoided along the way, the United States would lose not merely what it would have previously and briefly gained but much more than that, because of the damage inflicted by intra-Western quarrels on multilateral institutions and long-established cooperative practices.

Finally, let us remember that, in the words of Sun Tzu, “the pinnacle of military deployment approaches the formless. If it is formless, then even the deepest spy cannot discern it or the wise make plans against it.” What strategy could be more formless than no strategy at all?

 

Why War Movies Suck

I recently came across an older piece by Andrew Klavan, “The Lost Art of War,” that explains why Hollywood has been producing such politically confused box office catastrophes. Essentially, producers are infected with a cosmopolitanism that refuses to acknowledge the reality of the nation as the principle unit of human organization; the universal metaphysical values of their worldview do not involve the defense of territory, hence the incessant depiction of the U.S. military – which does have to defend territory – as a collection of murderous thugs and PTSD-plagued simpletons. Also has some interesting comments on the politicization of art and the implication this has on public discourse. Definitely worth a read. The last couple paragraphs deserve to be quoted:

Locked in an echo chamber of fashionable leftism, our filmmakers have lost the ability to question discredited assumptions. Only in fantasy war films – films like Spielberg’s undervalued War of the Worlds, Michael Bay’s amusing Transformers, or Peter Jackson’s wonderful Lord of the Rings trilogy – does the truth of our present situation emerge. Here filmmakers don’t have to confront the deathblow that radical Islam deals to the logic of leftist ideology. They can portray evil without giving it a human face and affirm our values without paying too particular a tribute to the nation in which those values become flesh. The warrior’s sacrifices makes sense again, martial virtues can be openly honored, and those who protect us are given back their glory.

That glory, however, is not the stuff of fantasy alone. The threat of global jihad is all too real, and  the stakes are all too high. Liberty, tolerance, the harmony of conflicting voices – these things didn’t materialize suddenly out of the glowing heart of human decency. People thought of them, fought and died to establish them, not in the ether, but on solid ground. That ground has to be defended or the values themselves will die.

 

Thoughts on Rupert Smith’s “Utility of Force”

Media darling?

Gen. Rupert Smith’s The Utility of Force is one of those enormously popular books that I resist reading exactly because of its popularity. Shortly after its publication I noticed that the media was using it as a cudgel against the Bush administration and I heard that Smith appeared on The Daily Show which made me suspect that it was another opportunistic screed against the Iraq war. I had seen the Book TV interview back in 2008, but since the interview was conducted by a bumbling and incompetent “beltway bandit” eager to score political points, I didn’t learn much about Smith’s ideas, though I was impressed by his performance in the interview. Eventually I acknowledged that not reading the book was intellectually irresponsible so I bought a copy and I’m glad that I did.

Overall I thought it an excellent work: very well-written and well-argued, with points that are manifestly relevant to the current ongoing wars. However, there are a few aspects about it that I was uncomfortable with and which have not received much comment in the other reviews that I’ve read. I’d like to share some of these thoughts. Let me be clear: these comments focus on the critical, but I am not condemning the whole of his work.