Media > Politics

The Clinton era marked a transition period in modern politics, marking the inflexion point between the printing press and the modern mass media-industrial complex. CNN was born under Reagen and had struggled to it's feet by Tiananmen in 1989 with enough vim to coin the term the CNN Effect. 24-hour infotainment and the internet has redefined journalism and news in ways we still don't quite get.

Douthat now suggests that now Fox News has actually contributed to the decline of the right. Riffing off a Jonah Goldberg quote that the popularity of Fox and talk shows is evidence of the right's strength, Douthat suggests that the right has mistook the forest for the trees, counterpointing conservative popularity against liberal policy. Douthat makes a strong case that the ever-increasing market share of conservative media outlets (I still snicker when I hear Fox News, the most popular cable news channel, deride the mainstream media) is not only a misplaced metric, but actually counterproductive to the conservative movement. Where once the journal of elite intellectualism guided the spirit of conservatism, today's reliance on popular media has degraded both the quality of the intellectual foundations for contemporary conservatism, and the quality of the interlocutors to parse the differences between liberalism and conservatism.

The Tea Parties make for an interesting case study of this struggle, as they've come to dominate the cutting edge of conservative thought. Lind reminds us that as much as establishment Republicans have attempted to co-opt the Tea Party movement, it was birthed as a mass movement. It lacked(s) ideologies, manifestos, or recognizable leaders. Glenn Beck gave it an enormous profile last summer, and it's as much the child of Fox as anything institutional or formal, hailed as a bellweather of both common American opinion and the future of Republican politics. The irony is that both are almost institutionally impaired from serving as intellectual pioneers.

Journalism is hardly the place to develop extended discourse. An editor or owner might produce a general perspective, filter a bias into the overall coverage, but a prolonged, rigorous development of philosophy and ideology just isn't possible in a media environment. The media can shape or guide or affect policy sure, but by journalism is about reporting, telling what happened. Obviously, plenty of journalists have been extremely influential in creating coherent ideology, but as authors, not journos, 1200 words at a time. Columnists at WSJ or WP or NYT comment. And bloggers are almost prisoners of echo chambers of their own devising.

Likewise, the Tea Parties are like hydras without heads. Vaguely libertarian, vaguely fiscally conservative, vaguely racist, wholly diffused. It isn't even cellular, with little mini-hierarchies that report to bigger hierarchies. It's as much a group of people defined by what they're not than by what they are, and that's not an environment conducive to producing manifestos. Even if regional organizations produce intellectual coherence, there's no reason their beliefs will translate to the next community or a reason it should. Vox populi, vox deus might eventually produce social changes, warp the fabric of American culture, but those changes take generations, centuries. Not the mechanism I'd trust to experiment with future policy.

Best of the Web 20APR10

On Why the USG Doesn’t “Get” AQ as a “Global Insurgency” - ZenPundit: Mark Sanfraski is always good for thought-provoking pieces. Here, he explores the widening gulf between "classical" (Maoist) insurgency, which forms a core of COIN theory, and post-Maoist insurgency, which typifies most insurgencies operating today. Interesting implications for state-centric foreign policy and theory.

Forgetting our American Tradition - David Brim via Sigma Forum: David takes a novel swing at the professionalization of American national security. Whereas most takes on contemporary civil-military relations focus on the "growing gulf" between the military and the civil worlds, David explores the difference between a preventative, elite professional approach versus a "resilient", civilian reserve. In doing so, he recasts our national security narrative from a focus on "fighting them over there so we don't fight them here" (incidentally, Zen questions this narrative above as well) towards a culture capable of rapid bounceback and "counter-attack".

When Heads Roll - Jenna Jordan: Analyzing the data for 298 leadership decapitations from 1945-2004, Jenna makes the provocative claim that: "The marginal utility of decapitation is negative for many groups, particularly for larger, older, religious, and separatist organizations." This surfaced as I was reading about the Army's leadership problems in Vietnam, and the impression strong component of American leadership was trapped in their experiences and modus operandis. For the groups Jordan reviewed, new leadership meant new direction and invigoration; new blood. Makes me wonder if the "optimal" age of authority isn't younger than we expect. The old guard becomes very good at perfecting how things used to be done as the present passes them by, while the Young Turks don't have the experience or seniority to pioneer real change. Senior middle management though...

hint.fm - Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg: Researchers in visualization, the pair has created some astounding projects. Web Seer is a fascinating little tool to cross-correlate Google search terms, while Many Eyes is a public forum for visualizations of, well, everything. History Flow, the project that gained the initial acclaim, captures the self-healing nature of Wikipedia by allowing anyone to track the history of changes. All-in-all, highly enjoyable.

Cities Under Siege - Geoff Manaugh: As the world turns urban, I'm interested in anything studying the direction of our coming urban spaces. Manaugh proposes that in addition to degradation towards a "feral city", our responses will be increasingly military and technological. Future cities will be islands of civilization and privilege surrounded by slums and lawlessness, isolated and controlled through physically balkanized districts, checkpoints, and surveillance. Call Baghdad the pilot program.

"The Army and Vietnam" Review

Fourteen years removed from the end of Vietnam, and predating Iraq by nearly twenty years, The Army and Vietnam by Andrew Krepinevich gives voice to what are now the prevailing tropes about America's conduct during the war. At a time when the rest of the Army was busying itself perfecting Air-Land Battle, developing the war machines that would define cutting edge military technology, and gazing across the Iron Curtain, Krepinevich looked back at Vietnam and said: "we got this really, really wrong". The contemporary explanations castigated the shackles of civilian leadership, presaging an almost dagger-in-the-back attitude. What introspection did occur affirmed the belief that that Army belonged atop tanks, going head-to-head with Soviet divisions.

Krepinevich summarizes this attitude with the two-fold Army Concept. First, the Army is properly employed in mid- to high-intensity conflicts (conventional state-on-state war and nuclear war, respectively). Second, wherever possible, firepower and technology is to be substituted for men; casualties are anathema. Both aspects are as potent today as ever. The debates between COINistas and COINtras, the use of artillery or drones, these are the same issues, and we're only slowly overcoming the handicaps imposed by the Concept.

Kennedy made the most concerted effort to challenge the Concept's precepts, but his study groups were staffed with conventionalists, albeit well-meaning conventionalists, and he died before doing a significant shakeup. McNamara was more interested in challenging the budgeting and acquisition process to question Army doctrine, and Taylor was too interested in protecting his career and political access to rock the boat. The actual COMUSMACVs grew up in WWII and Korea. They were children of massive, conventional conflict. It was what they knew. That doesn't excuse them for being unsuited for the nature of their job, but rather to note that dismissing them as closeminded or ignoramuses doesn't give full faith and credit to their attempts to do their job. They tried to do their job as best they could, but they lacked the experience to appropriately frame the conflict.

In a way, they were victims of their own success. Their experience, both personal and institutional, was based on winning WWII. It isn't hard to imagine a "if it ain't broke, why fix it?" attitude permeating decision making. Ia Drang proved to be a concrete example of that belief. If we could just fix the NVA, we'd cream 'em. The biggest obstacle to that was finding the NVA that melted away before our forces, so that means we needed to be more mobile. Ergo, the rapidity with which we could introduce airmobile troops at Ia Drang and employ fires validated a conventional doctrine and demonstrated that inconvenient changes to doctrine and training were unnecessary. The apocryphal conversation between COL Summer and COL Vu that the US never lost a battle yet lost the war underscores the seduction of illusionary victory.

Our modern Army (and population) is no more immune to that trope than our predecessors. Gulf War I was a smashing success for the US, yet as Fredrick Kagan points out in Finding the Target, we fought an enemy stupid enough to fight us on our own terms. 1990-era Iraq used Soviet weaponry, Soviet-style tactics and Soviet-style force structures, while the United States had spent the 1970s and 80s developing Air-Land Battle specifically to counter Soviet warfare and creating the weaponry necessary to do so; we fought the perfect fight. Ironically, we won so overwhelmingly, we all but spelled the obsolescence of that generation of warfare.

The narrative of American victory developed into an almost mythic story, which produced two-consequences. First, the US armed forces believed themselves omnipotent, and more importantly, so do the American people. Second, we became so powerful that all anyone had to do to win against us is not lose. That’s how 18 soldiers dying in Mogadishu became a political crisis, and why Task Force Hawk was never employed in Kosovo. The propaganda of even minor defeats or setbacks trumped the military gains we would exact in exchange.

Likewise, the mythic potency of the US military helps explain Rumsfeld’s agenda when he entered office and how the invasion of Iraq was planned. The stunning successes in Afghanistan sang a siren’s song that validated Rumsfeld’s vision of a lean 21^st century military, of commando teams backed by the world’s premier air force and offshore cruise missiles. The means were modern, but the thought process was decades old. If we could see it, we could kill it. If we killed it, we win. Victory through overwhelming firepower.

If the American Army was too wedded to employing third generation warfare, it is worth remembering that fourth generation warfare was still in its infancy. Mao articulated the now classic three phases of revolutionary war, but even his own revolution was a patchwork employment of that doctrine, hardly a model. A massive, diffused style of warfare capable of intense destruction by a handful of people was novel, untested. Both experience and schemata framed partisans as retroguard irritants. The experiences and history of warfare in the 21^st century thus far tended towards the concentration of military and political power, with lower-intensity conflict being a distraction, adjuncts to the central conflict.

At this point, it is worth parsing the differences between guerrillas, partisans, and insurgents. In general, the terms connote a spectrum of organization, concentration of objectives, and ability, ranging from the fragmented guerrilla bands to a professionally organized insurgency. All represent various forms of low-intensity conflict, but present enormous range across the spectrums that inhibits neat encapsulation.

“Guerrilla” was a term developed to describe the forces opposing Napoleon in Spain. They used raids and ambushes to strike at exposed French formations, but ultimately, their goal was disruption and distraction. Even more so than today, warfare was a series of giant, set battles, so their refusal to confront massed French troops eventually drove Napoleon to distraction. Yet they lacked a coherent strategy more profound than “strike the French when we can and don’t get caught”. Insofar as it could be called a strategy, it was a strategy of weakness, of frustration and inability to force decisive battle. Accordingly, it lacked the means to produce victory for the guerrillas, or even to deny victory for the invader. Instead, it just made life very irritating as the invaders moved their possessions into the palace (such as the British for the 150 years they occupied India). Lacking uniforms, uniform training, or standards of performance, a guerrilla can’t even be properly called a lay soldier, and fights more against something (someone, really), than for something. They may strike at political targets, with potentially enormous consequences (think of the assassination of Franz Ferdinand), or may engage in military activities, but its targets of opportunity or individual initiative. In this framing, a guerrilla war is a state military (typically a foreign invader) versus a popular, militia-style force.

In contrast, a partisan represented a unique formation of state-level armies. I personally use the terms partisan and irregular interchangeably, and both reflect that while the fighter is engaged in violent, military activities, they do so without uniform. Even if they act independently of their “host” military, they operate in support of its objectives and generally operate against military targets, not political. This is where we would find most OSS activities, from the Jedburgh teams in Europe to Detachment 101 in the Asia theater. While the partisan enjoys the material and financial support of a state, they are ancillary to the main force efforts. The actions of SF in northern Iraq in 2003 are perfect examples of how this force can be employed with devastating effect. But partisans alone don’t produce victory. That requires conventional forces and a more standard production of victory. Here, a partisan is a supplement to state-level conflict.

Lastly, an insurgent is, strictly, a force in armed opposition to the ruling government. This is a force organized along Mao’s guidelines, with differentiation between political cadre, auxiliaries performing assassination and sabotage, and armed fighters. Tactically, an insurgent will employ the same raids and ambushes as a guerrilla, but the presence of the political cadre and organization towards a strategy give an insurgency the capability of producing victory. While an insurgent may enjoy foreign support, it is a domestic force, capable of self-sustenance through kidnappings, intimidation, and coercion, or through popular support, although at degraded capability.

Vietnam, then, blends certain aspects of partisanship and insurgency that make describing US efforts, both actual and in the historical conditional, difficult. First, the boundaries that created Vietnam were arbitrary and recent, making South Vietnam both nascent and a political organization, rather than a nationalistic one. Even using French Indochina as a model better captures the impermeability of the national borders. Insisting on international standards of national sovereignty for governments that represented people spanning four countries is more an exercise in political convenience than material fact. The casual disregard of the North Vietnamese for national borders suggests this handicap was one-sided. For these reasons, using geographical constraints to define the scope of operations was flawed from the inception, and one exploited capably by the North Vietnamese who used both Laos and Cambodia to stage massive amounts of men and material, provide safe havens for troops in contact, and extend infiltration route across the breadth of the country.

Second, a “typical” insurgency would be defined by local actors and separation from neighbors, yet the division of Vietnam in the Geneva Agreements in 1954 represented reverse nationalism, cleaving a people, and blurring the distinctions between the VC as a popular insurgency and the VC as auxiliaries to the NVA. An insurgency is a fight over the affections, loyalties and obediences of the people. It is a violent referendum on the conduct of the government. Yet the VC received enormous support from “foreign” sources. Krepinevich convincingly makes the case that preoccupation with this external support inhibited the ability of American leadership to understand that the insurgency itself constituted a material threat, and that strategy and disposition suffered accordingly. However, it is worth remembering that the NVA fought in the war as well, and in this the VC operated as partisans in support of the phase three-style conventional forces. A counterinsurgency campaign alone would have been insufficient to match the threat posed by main force NVA units. So while current operations in Iraq and Afghanistan lack the threat of imminent invasion that frees them to craft a focused counterinsurgency campaign, Vietnam did not enjoy that luxury.

Third, the doctrine of a people’s war was itself revolutionary and embryonic. Guerrilla doctrine had literally in the process of being articulated. Mao’s On Guerrilla Warfare was written in 1937, while Che’s Guerrilla Warfare wasn’t written until 1961. Giap was inventing his own revolutionary style as he went along, modifying Mao’s models to suit Vietnamese circumstances. Meanwhile, such literature as existed on counterinsurgency could be more accurately defined as counter-guerrilla under the above typology. Calling it counter-guerrilla calls attention to the facts that previous insurgencies had lacked comprehensive organization, guidance, or support. A substantial portion of the grievances focused on foreign occupation (the French in Algeria during Galula’s composition of Counterinsurgency Warfare, which wasn’t written until 1964) and lacked unifying principles, either in ideology or organization. So while literature had been written describing revolutions, Vietnam precluded copy-and-paste style application of what nascent counterinsurgency theory existed.

Krepinevich rightly faults leadership, both civilian and military, for failing to take advantage of what experience it did have; failing to utilize one’s full range of capabilities is simply inexcusable. However, such experience as did exist in the US at the time was in unconventional war, i.e. partisans. Officers from Detachment 101 could have provided invaluable advice about South-East Asia and atraditional forms of warfare. But whereas Krepinevich cites the discrepancy between articulated policy, doxied up in the vocabulary of counterinsurgency, and practiced policy of conventional divisions performing search-and-clear missions as examples of how the Army’s commitment to its Concept overruled its willingness to explore alternatives, I find it more persuasive that the Army, even in its more experienced and erudite officers, was ignorant of a form of warfare still being created. They used language that indicates familiarity with both guerrilla and counterinsurgency theory, but the historical record was thin on material to persuasively argue that the people’s war would be qualitatively different than the guerrilla wars of colonial liberation, to say nothing of the quantitative differences enabled by modern infrastructure, weaponry, and foreign support.

Krepinevich argues persuasively that the leadership who lead us into was married to the Army Concept. He makes the case that we systematically ignored the Southern Vietnamese people as a center of gravity and wasted our time looking for massed tank divisions in the Central Highlands, positions with considerable merit. He acknowledges that the American bench was very weak in general in any type of atypical conflict, be it unconventional warfare or counterinsurgency. But there were plenty of officers with experience either in the OSS or who had misgivings about the course of the war available to change the strategy and planning process. Even so, I wish Krepinevich would have spent more time exploring the tension involved in crafting policy and doctrine in times of such profound change. Nuclear policy posed existential threats to the Army, and it had attempted to resolve that threat through supremacy in mid-intensity conflict. That dictated force structure, procurement and training, and changing those aspects was an ideational risk. It is worth exploring the question of crafting policy to address the immediate concern of Vietnam (or wars of national liberation in general) versus the greater Black Swan of facing down the Soviets in Germany.