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.
China’s magic bullet – the supposed carrier-killing DF-21D anti-ship ballistic missile – is all over the news…again. This time because CINCPAC Adm. Robert F. Willard commented that the weapon system had reached “initial operating capability,” giving the media yet another excuse to indulge in more orgasmic Sinophilia. Judging by the many gleeful proclamations of the impending death of the U.S. Navy, one gets the impression that certain elements in the media are looking forward to a Chinese-dominated world-order (at least until they get the memo on changes to intellectual property rights).
The last time this story was making the rounds, back in August, I posted that the threat of the DF-21D, though not insignificant, has been greatly exaggerated. Analyses that predicts the dislocation of power balances due to the introduction of a single weapon system is fundamentally flawed because it examines strategy solely from a technical perspective, neglecting technical, operational, and strategic considerations that dictate how the weapons are actually used.
RADM J.C. Wylie is of some significance to this blog. Though I am familiar with his writings and career history, his death 18 years ago precludes anyone from learning more about the man himself. Thus my keen interest when I recently stumbled across a video of Wylie speaking before a USS Fletcher reunion in late 1992, just a few months before his death, in which he shares some humorous anecdotes about his service aboard the destroyer during World War II. The quality of the video could be better, but it shows that Wylie was lucid, eloquent and sharp all the way to the end of his life, and adds some personality to the theory of Power Control.
***
LibriVox, which collects audio recordings of public domain works, has available the first four Books of On War, narrated in an Australian accent. Beware, however: the Howard-Paret translation is still owned by Princeton University Press, so the LibriVox audio is based on the nightmarish Graham translation.
Be sure to check out LibriVox’s catalog of other works. Plenty of stuff for the daily commute or jog.
***
I have been reading Alistair Horne’s A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954 – 1962, the definitive history of the French-Algerian War. He introduces Part 2 of the book with the following letter, attributed to Marcus Flavinius, a Roman centurion of the Augusta Legion:
We had been told, on leaving our native soil, that we were going to defend the sacred rights conferred on us by so many of our citizens settled overseas, so many years of our presence, so many benefits brought by us to populations in need of our assistance and our civilization.
We were able to verify that all this was true, and, because it was true, we did not hesitate to shed our quota of blood, to sacrifice our youth and our hopes. We regretted nothing, but whereas we over here are inspired by this frame of mind, I am told that in Rome factions and conspiracies are rife, that treachery flourishes, and that many people in their uncertainty and confusion lend a ready ear to the dire temptations of relinquishment … Make haste to reassure me, I beg you, and tell me that our fellow-citizens understand us, support us and protect us as we ourselves are protecting the glory of the Empire.
If it should be otherwise, if we should have to leave our bleached b0nes on these desert sands in vain, then beware of the anger of the Legions!
I have a very difficult time believing this authentic; the sentiments seem completely alien for a 1st century AD Roman centurion. In fact, Horne cites the source as Jean Lartéguy famous novel, The Centurions. I am unable to find any earlier reference to the letter, and it seems completely apocryphal. However, I would be fascinated to be proven wrong, if someone has information to the contrary.
Gen. Mohammad Yousaf, who as an ISI officer coordinated the Afghan resistance campaign from 1983 to 1987, concludes his lively [and utterly parochial] memoir with the following comment:
Although I am reluctant to admit it, I feel the only winners in the war in Afghanistan are the Americans. They have their revenge for Vietnam, they have seen the Soviets beaten on the battlefield by a guerrilla force that they helped to finance, and they have prevented an Islamic government replacing a Communist one in Kabul. For the Soviet Union even their military retreat has been turned into a huge political success, with Gorbachev becoming a hero in the West, and still his hand-picked puppet, Najibullah, remains unseated, dependent on Soviet aid for his survival.
The losers are most certainly the people of Afghanistan. It is their homes that are heaps of rubble, their land and fields that have been burnt and sown with millions of mines, it is their husbands, fathers and sons who have died in a war that was almost, and should have been, won.
Yousaf defined “victory” in terms of establishing an Islamist regime in Kabul, which was the best case scenario for both Pakistan’s national interests and Yousaf’s own fundamentalist ideology, which was shared by Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, President of Pakistan. By this measure, the hazy conclusion of the Soviet-Afghan war was an obvious disappointment, though only a few years later they did get their victory when the Taliban seized power.
Yousaf’s comment reflected the dominant narrative of events in the U.S. at the time of the Soviet withdrawal. For obvious reasons, the intervening decades have cast serious doubt on the notion of an American “victory” in Afghanistan. Instead of rehashing that ongoing debate, a more interesting question is to what extent the Soviets were truly “defeated.”
I ordered a copy of Che Guevara’s Guerrilla Warfare from Amazon a few days ago. I found a very inexpensive paperback edition that was only about $6.00 brand new, but I did not closely examine the details of the publisher. It arrived in the mail today, at which point I finally noticed the publisher – Ocean Press – and read the back cover:
“Published in association with the Che Guevara Studies Center, Havana.”
The latest opportunity for the media to engage in another shameless bout of Sinophilia concerns the rather esoteric topic of maneuverable ballistic re-entry vehicles. A recent Associated Press article loaded with triumphant language declares American supremacy on the high seas all but over, thanks to the latest Chinese magic bullet: the DF-21D.
Nothing projects U.S. global air and sea power more vividly than supercarriers. Bristling with fighter jets that can reach deep into even landlocked trouble zones, America’s virtually invincible carrier fleet has long enforced its dominance of the high seas.
China may soon put an end to that.
U.S. naval planners are scrambling to deal with what analysts say is a game-changing weapon being developed by China — an unprecedented carrier-killing missile called the Dong Feng 21D that could be launched from land with enough accuracy to penetrate the defenses of even the most advanced moving aircraft carrier at a distance of more than 1,500 kilometers (900 miles).
What makes the DF-21D unique is its payload: a maneuverable re-entry vehicle (MaRV) equipped with a conventional warhead and either radar or infrared terminal homing. This would indeed pose a threat to the U.S. Navy because existing ship-borne defense systems are designed to protect against sea-skimming anti-ship cruise missiles; a MaRV would approach its target along a ballistic trajectory within a cone that is poorly covered by existing systems. However, before proclaiming the death of U.S. naval supremacy, a few points need to be raised.
I have been reading the diary of Florentia Sale, which because of its meticulous detail is one of the primary historical sources for the disastrous events of the First Anglo-Afghan War. Florentia was the wife of Gen. Robert Sale, one of the most famous officers in British colonial history, known for his apparently total lack of fear and his penchant for joining the thick of battle alongside his soldiers. (In the First Anglo-Burmese War in 1824, Sale slew the Burmese chief in single combat, a deed that would make him eligible for the spolia opima, had it occurred in a different millennium.)
In 1840, after the British had installed Shah Shuja in Kabul and lodged garrisons around the country, Florentia and her daughter joined Gen. Sale in Kabul where they resided at the cantonments that were constructed to house the British families and much off the military contingent. In September 1841 Gen. Sale was dispatched with his brigade to the east to suppress tribal uprisings along the road to Jalalabad, leaving the capital with a severely diminished garrison. Not long after Sale’s departure uprisings began in Kabul itself, beginning the events witnessed by Lady Sale that culminated with the annihilation of the Kabul garrison as it attempted to flee the country via the Khyber Pass.
I was particularly struck by her entry on November 23, 1841, not for what it indicates about Afghanistan or the history of the First Afghan War, but what it suggests about the author, Florentia Sale herself. It would seem that she shared many of her husband’s attributes.
Perhaps this company is more widely known that I assume, but if you’re looking for cheap books, I suggest the Edward R. Hamilton Bookseller Company, which offers some incredible bargains on hardcover books in every subject and flat-rate $3.50 shipping, no matter what the size of your order. Check and money order are the only forms of payment accepted, so all purchases must be initiated via an order form sent through the mail, but the prices and shipping rates makes it worth the extra hassle. The company only ships to addresses within the United States. Check out their website to search their inventory and request their famous “Bargain Books” catalogue.
***
Charles Hill, author of Grand Strategies: Literature, Statecraft and World Order, which I briefly reviewed in my last post, was interviewed on Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson (h/t Isegoria). I recommend the interview to anyone that has read the book because he more clearly expounds on his central argument (the importance of literature to statecraft and the deficiencies of modern social science as training for future leaders) which frames – but is somewhat obfuscated by – the more specific literary criticism that constitutes the majority of his book. (All five parts of the interview are listed on the Uncommon Knowledge archive page).
At the end of the interview, Hill is asked which three books he thinks President Obama should read. Explaining why he offers the Aeneid as one recommendation, Hill comments:
It seems to me that President Obama is kind of like Aeneas. Aeneas wanders around and things happen to him; he doesn’t make things happen … He never quite knows what his real mission is. He thinks he knows but he doesn’t know; he has to go to hell to find out and when he’s in hell his father, who is a shade there, tells him what his mission is. What we hope is President Obama doesn’t have to go to hell before he figures it out.
***
One last thing: whoever reached my blog by searching for “training wheel gandalf’s other job”…congratulations on the most bizarre search string I’ve ever seen.
Is the “modern statesman” an oxymoran? Has the quality and skill of foreign policy deteriorated as the classical education has been displaced by the social and behavioral sciences? In his new book Grand Strategies: Literature, Statecraft, and World Order, former diplomat and Yale professor Charles Hill seeks to reconnect the practice of statecraft with its ultimate literary origins. As Hill argues, an understanding of literature is essential for the conduct of international affairs because it informs the values by which strategy is developed, and only literature can grasp – however tenuously – the fundamentally intangible factors that drive history.
Of all the arts and sciences, only literature is substantially and methodologically unbounded. Literature’s freedom to explore endless or exquisite details, portray the thoughts of imaginary characters, and dramatize large themes through intricate plots brings it closest to the reality of “how the world really works.” This dimension of fiction is indispensible to the strategist who cannot, by the nature of the craft, know all of the facts, considerations, and potential consequences of a situation at the time a decision must be made, ready or not. Literature lives in the realm strategy requires, beyond rational calculations, in acts of the imagination. (p. 6)
To be more specific about why literary insight is essential for statecraft, both endeavors are concerned with important questions that are only partly accessible to rational thought. Such matters as how a people begins to identify itself as a nation, the nature of trust between political actors or between a government and its people, how a nation commits itself to a more humane course of governance - all these and many more topics dealt with in this book – can’t be understood without some “grasp of the ungraspable” emotional and moral weight they bear. A purely rational or technocratic approach is likely to lead one astray. (p. 7)
What follows in the rest of the book is literary commentary on works ranging from the Iliad to The Satanic Verses, with an emphasis on key points in the evolution of the state. Accordingly, the book is also a rare defense of the Westphalian state system, which has been under siege for the past century, and for which Hill sees no viable alternative. The focus on the concept of the state provides a stable reference point when reading the more vague and nuanced language that is the vein of all literary commentary. Hill covers a lot of ground, and it would greatly help if the reader is familiar with the many works that he examines.
The book is slightly mistitled. As the quotes above indicate, the focus is not on strategy per se, but on the underlying questions that determine world order and drive strategy – questions of national identity, legitimacy, religion, and the role of the individual in the state. But it is certainly worthwhile reading, especially for the many Americans who have unfortunately – but not entirely without justification – dismissed modern literature as nothing more than a medium through which to lie, libel, and incite without consequence.
July 15, 2010
Good Reading: “Grand Strategies” by Charles Hill
Posted by NerveAgent under Books, international relations, strategic thought | Tags: books, Charles Hill, diplomacy, grand strategies, literary commentary, literature, reading, statecraft, strategy |1 Comment
Is the “modern statesman” an oxymoran? Has the quality and skill of foreign policy deteriorated as the classical education has been displaced by the social and behavioral sciences? In his new book Grand Strategies: Literature, Statecraft, and World Order, former diplomat and Yale professor Charles Hill seeks to reconnect the practice of statecraft with its ultimate literary origins. As Hill argues, an understanding of literature is essential for the conduct of international affairs because it informs the values by which strategy is developed, and only literature can grasp – however tenuously – the fundamentally intangible factors that drive history.
What follows in the rest of the book is literary commentary on works ranging from the Iliad to The Satanic Verses, with an emphasis on key points in the evolution of the state. Accordingly, the book is also a rare defense of the Westphalian state system, which has been under siege for the past century, and for which Hill sees no viable alternative. The focus on the concept of the state provides a stable reference point when reading the more vague and nuanced language that is the vein of all literary commentary. Hill covers a lot of ground, and it would greatly help if the reader is familiar with the many works that he examines.
The book is slightly mistitled. As the quotes above indicate, the focus is not on strategy per se, but on the underlying questions that determine world order and drive strategy – questions of national identity, legitimacy, religion, and the role of the individual in the state. But it is certainly worthwhile reading, especially for the many Americans who have unfortunately – but not entirely without justification – dismissed modern literature as nothing more than a medium through which to lie, libel, and incite without consequence.