Consider the implications of pop culture's most notorious schedule overrun. In the Star Wars universe, robots are self-aware, every ship has its own gravity, Jedi Knights use the Force, tiny green Muppets are formidable warriors and a piece of junk like the Millennium Falcon can make the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs. But even the florid imagination of George Lucas could not envision a project like the Death Star coming in on time, on budget. He knew it would take a Jedi mind trick beyond the skill of Master Yoda to make an audience suspend that much disbelief.2. "The Death Star's combination of inadequacy and vulnerability may be the second-most realistic aspect of the entire saga." Heh. Enormously complex systems mean enormously complex acquisition programs, which means you've got a program management team trying to catch a whole bunch of possible problems -- and one is almost certain to slip through the cracks.
Consider the fact that even the Empire, with all its vast resources and the full power of the Dark Side, could only build one Death Star at a time. Building two at once was clearly more than it could handle. This reminds me of Norm Augustine's famous prediction that at some point, the entire DoD budget would purchase just one aircraft for all the Services to share. The Empire apparently arrived at this singularity long, long ago. I'm not convinced this achievement represented real progress.4. Droids are a great example of the sort of multifunctional, utilitarian systems that can justify their cost in a range of different mission sets.
Whether it's repairing the Millennium Falcon's hyperdrive, destroying a pair of Super Battle Droids, conveying a secret message to old Ben Kenobi or delivering Luke's light saber at the critical moment on Jabba's Sail Barge, [R2-D2's] always got a trick up his proverbial sleeve.That kind of quiet competence and dependability is what led George Lucas to call R2-D2 "the hero of the whole thing."
Ideologically, the “COIN Commentariat” can generally be split into two groups: What some call the “COINdinistas,” those that supported the military’s adoption of counterinsurgency tactics in Iraq and believe fundamentally in COIN doctrine; and “COINtras,” who are skeptics of COIN or its applications in Afghanistan. But no matter where they fall on the spectrum, most members of the COIN blogosphere seems united in their disdain for the mainstream media’s coverage of the counterinsurgency in Afghanistan. “Most journalists wouldn’t know the difference between good COIN and bad COIN when they saw it,” said Old Blue of Afghan Quest. “The mainstream media has largely if not completely missed the opportunity to bring accountability through the wider conversation.”
Newspaper opinion pages too often give platforms to influential people with definite political agendas, according to some. “It’s 90 percent boosters of COIN, and a few cranks, and no substantive discussion,” said Joshua Foust. Others criticize the media for having accepted what they see as a facile explanation of counterinsurgency doctrine that emphasizes “winning hearts and minds” over the more aggressive or coercive tenets of counterinsurgency strategy.
Gulliver at Ink Spots, however, thinks that the popular understanding of COIN might finally be evolving. “There seems to be a general consensus settling over both the policy world and the media,” he said. “We have a better idea of how to do COIN well than we used to, and that understanding has helped to convince us that we ought to do it as rarely as possible, and only when it’s absolutely necessary.” So long as the war in Afghanistan continues, debate and dialogue over the counterinsurgency will undoubtedly thrive in the blogosphere. As the founders of the SWJ Blog write, “We do this in our spare time, because we want to. McDonald’s pays more. But we’d rather work to advance our noble profession than try to super-size your order or interest you in a delicious hot apple pie.”Read the rest here. Most of what's covered will be familiar to our readers, but it's definitely worth a look. Especially since we're so, um, costive these days.
My day job makes me an investigative reporter of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. There, I cover war, terrorism, football and all sorts of other things. Most people who watch TV remember me from CBS 60 Minutes or the PBS series on chemical terrorism, but mostly my gig involves finding really smart people, asking them to say interesting things, and then figuring out how this democracy will talk about it all.
So that’s what we’re going to do here, too. We’re going to talk about battle and reporting and find smart people to interview and then we’re going to converse about like adults because these are serious topics and we’re a nation at war.
I’m going to be intentionally provocative at times. I’ll tell crass jokes. I warn you that I’ll be combative and pointlessly obstinate but often enough vaguely sane.I'm sure it'll be a sight to see, so add him to your blogroll.
A couple of months back, Jason Fritz said this on Twitter:
To which Adam Elkus replied:
This led to a brief conversation among me, Jason, and Adam about the dearth of good strategic training tools for the playground set (however strong their tactical skills might be, and it sounds like the younger Mr. Fritz’s are pretty solid), and concluded with an agreement that a children’s book version of Clausewitz would be awesome.
It happened that I had just started reading On War when we had this conversation. This was the first time I had read Clausewitz through, front to back. I work three jobs, and don’t have nearly enough time to read, so I get most of my reading done on the train as I travel to and from and between works, meaning that I was carrying a 900+ page book in my bag for about two months, as I read closely, pausing frequently to re-read segments or to take notes. The weight of it on my shoulder made it more of a presence than the average book, and I began referring to it simply as Carl, as if it were a sentient being accompanying me on my commutes. (I was also inspired to get an e-reader). I like to think that Carl and I got pretty tight during this experience, and I hope that we will continue to get closer as we work together on this project (albeit through the much lighter-weight electronic version I purchased once I got that e-reader), but really Adam and Jason (as well as many, if not most, of the people with whom I interact on Twitter and whose blogs and such I read on a regular basis) are much more experienced scholars of Clausewitz and of strategy than I am.
What I bring to the table here is a lifelong commitment to being one of those people who actually does those silly things you talk about doing but never do.Read the whole post. (As a tease, the story that immediately follows this quoted excerpt is hilarious and awesome.) Monitor the blog. Enjoy the final product.
[Huffman:] What is interesting to me is that little of the current research and exploration of the Baader-Meinhof era draws any parallels to our modern terrorism challenges; because to me this is an area ripe for exploration. People don't seem to realize that there was a "War on Terror" 35 years ago that offers fairly stunning parallels to our modern "war on terror." Like in America, Germany pushed through dozens of anti-terrorism laws that curbed civil liberties in crucial ways, yet ultimately seemed to have little actual effect on stopping terrorism. Torture (or "enhanced interrogation techniques")? Check. A right wing media empire that rose to prominence and profits by beating the anti-terrorism drum? Check. Taking the criminal prosecution of the terrorists out of the standard court system? Check. Using the struggle against terrorism to build up police and military budgets? Check. The mantra after 9/11 was always "this is different." New rules need to apply. We need to reconsider our old values concerning civil liberties etc., to address this never-before-seen threat. I would argue that not only had it ALL been seen before, but it was within our lifetimes.For me, the coolest thing about the whole deal is that this is just some dude who got interested in something and now runs basically the best online resource on this subject on the planet. It tells you something about the incredible diversity of the internet, but also about the exponential multiplication in analytical power that this resource offers us. Of course, the tools for sorting wheat from chaff haven't quite evolved at the same pace, but that's a whole other story (and something I've been thinking about a lot lately). So for now, just take my word for it: this is worth reading.
Ok, so I didn't actually use that system, or else I'd be giving a hell of a lot more than what I am. But you should. So DO IT.)
Back to the NYC thing: We got an email this week from Sterling Yee of the Human Rights Watch Film Festival -- which is taking place over the next two weeks at New York's Lincoln Center -- asking us to push out word to our readership. I have no problem doing this if only because I just finished reading War by Sebastian Junger, which documents the fifteen-month deployment of 2nd Platoon, Battle Company, 173rd Airborne Brigade in the Korengal Valley and is sort of the book companion to Restrepo. Can't wait to see it when it comes to DC. So here's their promotional flyer:
The Human Rights Watch Film Festival returns to New York, 10-24 June. This year we are proud to present two astounding documentaries that focus on the obstacles the Afghan citizens and US military face during times of war and rebuilding.
Camp Victory, Afghanistan - Drawing from nearly 300 hours of vérité footage shot between 2005 and 2008, Camp Victory, Afghanistan skillfully explores the reality of building a functioning Afghan military. We are delighted that filmmaker Carol Dysinger will be present for a discussion after the screenings. Find out more.
Restrepo - Winner of the Sundance Grand Jury Prize for Documentary, Restrepo chronicles the deployment of a platoon of marines [actually, no, but close!] in Afghanistan's Korengal Valley, one of the most dangerous postings in the US military. This is war, full stop. The conclusions are up to you. We are delighted that filmmaker Tim Hetherington will be present for a discussion after the screenings. Find out more.
We think your colleagues and readers would be interested in these films because they touch upon issues facing not only Afghan society, but also the international community. With so much global attention on US involvement in Afghanistan – we hope that the films will teach and inspire New Yorkers to learn more about Afghanistan and become more active in their communities.
So go check it out. And if you do, I'll have two reasons to envy you New Yorkers next weekend: the film festival and the finals of the Churchill Cup (ok, it's in Jersey, but close enough)!
Also while you're at it, see Karaka Pend's review of War here (on SWJ, coincidentally).
Some problems that I half-expected that also turned out to be true: 1) Writing fast about serious subjects because they are in the news, without doing a lot of reporting first, can produce crap. 2) Even the better instances of that sub-genre are still not very satisfying over time to the author. There are a few transcendent deadline essayists born from time to time (Murray Kempton, Michael Kinsley, Rick Hertzberg, half the sports columnists of the last three decades) and many other very good ones, including a number blogging on this site, but the rest of us might not wish to be tempted by blogging freedom to emulate them if we can instead spend our time travelling, reporting, researching in archives, or writing books in our attics. This is just a blog post, however; I am free to revise my thinking in an hour, or whenever I revive Think Tank (as I intend to do), and presumably no one will notice.Emphasis here is mine.
when they fight against liberal democracies: this is a more tentative argument here, but liberalism probably makes it harder [for the counterinsurgent] to gain domestic acceptance when most ‘small wars’ are mightily unpleasant and prolonged affairs with almost inevitable abuses, and when elected leaders care an awful lot about being re-elected.Now this isn't exactly a novel suggestion. Those who make this case usually do so for a few basic reasons. The argument pretty much goes like this (don't get confused by the blockquote -- I'm just setting it off so it's easier to read, I'm not quoting anyone):
Democratic leaders are held accountable by voters, and are thus less likely to engage in unpopular wars or pursue them for an extended period of time. Casualty-averse publics will throw out a government that gets a lot of people killed, and the free media helps bring those casualties to light. Not only that, but press freedom means it's harder for a liberal government to hide the human rights abuses and other brutal tactics that could prove helpful in prosecuting a counter-guerilla campaign. In short, liberal regimes 1) have their hands tied, and 2) give up easier.All of those things make a fair bit of sense, perhaps with the exception of the bit about the counterinsurgent's brutality being harder to hide or tolerate in a democracy. After all, if we don't think that brutality is particularly useful, anyway, then why would efforts to restrain such behavior really have such a negative effect on the campaign.
A core proposition from decades of research on internal wars asserts that democracies, with their casualty-averse publics, accountable leaders, and free media, are uniquely prone to losing counterinsurgency (COIN) wars. Yet one should question this finding, for two reasons: First, existing studies overwhelmingly adopt no-variance research designs that only examine democracies, leaving them unable to assess their performance relative to autocracies. Second, these studies do not control for confounding factors that bias causal estimates. Democracies, for example, typically fight wars of choice as external occupiers, while most autocracies face homegrown insurgencies, a function in part of divergent levels of state capacity possessed by democratic and autocratic combatants. This study corrects for both problems using a new dataset of insurgencies (1800–2005) and matching to test whether democracies experience significantly higher rates of defeat and shorter wars. No relationship between democracy and war outcomes or duration is found once regime type is varied and inferential threats are addressed.(For a less academic summary and explanation of the work, see this very good interview with Lyall from the Rosner's Domain blog on the Jerusalem Post's website.)
The notion that democracies are "soft" and cannot sustain many casualties in revolutionary wars without a collapse of political will gained the status of an unchallengeable truism in the wake of the Vietnam war. It even resurfaced during the Persian Gulf crisis and war of 1990-91, when Iraq threatened to defeat the coalition forces "in a sea of blood." Saddam Hussein apparently believed that his regime could survive significant battlefield losses and that coalition governments could not. Michael Engelhardt examines this assumption and concludes that, at least in respect of insurgent conflicts, regime type does not matter; both dictatorships and democracies can be defeated. Furthermore, he asserts that the inclination of democracies to liquidate costly commitments can be seen as a strength, an affirmation of their democratic character, rather than a weakness.Again we see basically the same argument about softness, casualty aversion, responsiveness to popular doubts, etc. Are autocracies really unencumbered by these sorts of concerns? Or building on that, how about what may even be a more important question: even if autocrats have a free hand in the prosecution of COIN wars, might that reality not have unconstructive knock-on effects down the line?
In an effort to better understand the benefits and limitations of an authoritarian approach to counter-insurgency, this article examines the relationship between regime type and military effectiveness in the often neglected case of Soviet counter-insurgency operations in Western Ukraine. This study finds that the advantages authoritarian governments enjoy in designing, planning and implementing counter-insurgency campaigns - related to a lack of restraints and constraints - can all too easily become reversed through the excesses they permit.This piece speaks more directly to the question of brutality than of regime type, I think, though it definitely links the two together: can we really perceive authoritarianism as an advantage at the same time as we dismiss the effectiveness of brutality, as Patrick Porter does? (To be fair to Patrick, he did caveat the original statement about increased odds of insurgent success against democracies by writing "this is a more tentative argument...") When taken together, these three papers would suggest that -- in spite of what looks like a common-sense justification for exactly that -- we can't.
You’d think all the criticism from left-wing websites like the Huffington Post, Daily Kos, and Salon would royally piss off the Army. But at least one Army report finds the sites’ posts to be consistently “balanced.”Every week, the defense contractor MPRI prepares for the brass a “Blogosphere and Social Media Report,” rounding up sites’ posts on military matters. It’s meant to be a single source for top officers to catch up on what’s being said online and in leading social media outlets. Items from about two dozen national security and political blogs are excerpted, and classified as “balanced,” “critical,” or “supportive.” The vast majority of the posts are considered “balanced” — even when they rip the Army a new one.
Those who hold religious or moral objections to homosexuality because of their faith are being swept aside and their views marginalized. Worse, such is being done (again) with taxpayers’ dollars. Those who hold that system of faith and values are having their own government undermine that system. No longer is it proper to believe that a category of behaviors does not equate to race or gender.Other issues that have not been given anything close to serious discussion:The “diversity industry” will ensure that the gay lifestyle will be advocated for and promoted. Despite those who find it offensive, such reminders will be purposefully omnipresent. This same industry that has made such hash of womens’ and minority issues by the advocating for discrimination and favoritism (doing great disservice to all they “advocate” for) will do the same with gays in the military. Gay advocacy and promotion will result in command-sponsored “gay pride” events, gay history months, and the glorification of a lifestyle a vast majority of Americans find objectionable.The tolerance shown gay service members now serving under DADT may not translate into acceptance when open advocacy begins. The effects on morale and unit cohesion have the potential to be disastrous. Sexual tensions, unwanted advances, relationships within a chain of command, sexual assaults, all those things that plague current commanders with the integration of females, will likely be exacerbated. We consider all these currently to adversely affect combat readiness. Yet, we are advocating policies that will very likely give us more of those problems?Also, one has to ask: What will be next? Transsexuals being allowed to serve? Gay quotas for promotion and command?None of the above issues have been given serious consideration.
Like many who have spent time in Iraq and Afghanistan, I have come to consider latrine graffiti as something of an art form — the only interesting entertainment to be found on many dismal patrol bases and outposts.When I seat myself in a latrine and find that some arm of the military powers-that- be — a local contractor, a junior officer, I don’t really know — have spray-painted over the crude art that I so enjoy, I feel a bit frustrated. What else, after all, am I supposed to read in the cubicle? What other character does a largely prefabricated combat outpost have?I first encountered latrine graffiti on my way north to Baghdad in the summer of 2007, at the Kuwaiti purgatory called Ali al-Salem Air Base. Odor aside, what I noticed was the vivid obscenity of the things scrawled there. Words were everywhere — poetry, rap, curses, illegible scribblings.But what the eye jumped to were the drawings: huge, extraordinarily explicit pornographic drawings. Fifteen-month tours in a war zone devoid of Internet pornography, it appeared, brought out the artist in many soldiers. Evidence, I suppose, that for all the millions of dollars spent on it, training cultural sensitivity to traditional Muslim mores into American servicemen of the YouTube generation is something of a Sisyphean task.
One day last summer, in the back of a bug-like armored truck in southern Afghanistan, an American infantryman my own age asked me a question, one I’ve heard countless times from countless soldiers when they learn that at home, I study at an Ivy League college: What do they think of all this back there, in your world?I knew what answer he expected because of the surprise that registers on such soldiers’ faces when I offer a different one. He expected that in my world of left-leaning professors and privileged students, the war he and his unit were waging would be viewed with scorn or disgust, and maybe that he and his profession would be, too.That wasn’t the case, I told him. From his expression, what I told him was worse: that in my world (if it really is my world, but that’s another question) most students — young people who are his peers, at least in terms of age and video games and music — rarely spare his war more than a passing thought.Now back in college after spending much of a yearlong hiatus embedded with American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, it is a reality I’m used to, one that I understand but still find disturbing: For me, it’s easy to forget that there’s a health care debate or an immigration one. But for almost everyone I know at school, even my closest friends, it’s easy to forget there’s a war — let alone two of them.
Eric Randolph, late of Jane's Country Risk and a CTlab contributor, recently relocated to India to get a close look at the underside of AfPak - literally, by looking at goings on in India and reporting it, some of it via Janes and other outlets that pay him for his freelance work, and a lot of it on his blog, The Kikobor.I haven't had much opportunity to take a look yet, but I trust Mike on this one so it's added to the blogroll. Check it out.
