Gates is going to have a very interesting tenure. In the space of a week, he's taken some big swipes at the military-industrial complex, wasteful procurement, the Navy's force structure, the size of the civilian bureaucracy, and now the excessive number of flag officers. The latter called to mind two recent articles.
First, an article by Jenna Jordan, When Head's Roll. Her thesis is simply that assassination in counterproductive, based on case studies spanning nearly 70 years. It's tempting to say backlash, like the failed bombing in NYC this past week, is the price we pay for a winning strategy. We become our own collateral damage, to be avoided whenever possible yet understood as the cost of doing business on the path to victory. But Jordan makes the case that instead of decapitating a movement, assassination revitalizes violent, revolutionary groups, as the ossified old guard is replaced by younger, more dynamic leaders. With the change in leadership comes changes in tactics, technologies, and personal relationships. It also made me wonder where the inflexion point in an organization occurs before it becomes too old. That perhaps the people who should be in charge is senior middle management, not the boardroom.
Meanwhile, David Brooks wrote a fairly concise history of the development of the COIN doctrine. The piece is unsurprising to anyone familiar with the struggle, and a good enough synopsis for those tuning in. Some saw the summarization in "few hundred words facile", but what struck me most was Brooks' closing graf, wherein he identifies the tension between the old guard, trained "to use overwhelming force to kill bad guys" and the COINindistas who stepped outside the Army to relearn population-centric warfare. They went into academia, to private civilian schools, and they welcomed NGOs and tie-wearers into their deliberations. And, with very few (albeit very notable) exceptions, they were colonels and majors and captains. One of the most profound military theorists in recent memory, John Boyd, was an Air Force colonel.
In combination, the two articles make me wonder if the Army hasn't gotten too old, especially in an age such rapid technological change. Not knowing any generals personally, I can only speculate, and from what I've read of quite a few, they're a highly dynamic group. Still, my general impression is that the truly innovative wither and die just before flag rank, and only an extremely select few of an already highly restricted group are tapped. 1% of colonels make general (beat that Harvard). One of the few times the Army promotion system has broken into the mainstream was when (then) COL H.R. McMaster was passed over for flag rank in 2007, and it attracted a lot of vitriol from industry watchers; he has since been promoted. I'm not even going to guess on something that far above my paygrade. But reviewing my own auto-didactic library of RMA, COIN, and military innovation, I'm struck by the preponderance of (relatively) junior rank, both as authors and as citations.
Monday, May 10, 2010
Tuesday, May 4, 2010
A People's History of Vietnam
Although irritatingly polemical, reliant on superlatives, and full of facile analogies, Innes brings up a sorely overlooked aspect of most retrospective histories of the Vietnam War. Namely, little scholarship exists documenting the war from the Vietnamese perspective. For any perspective, governmental, Army of the Republic of Viet Nam, the Viet Cong, the North Vietnamese Army, there is simply deficient scholarship. But most of all, we lack a people's history of the war.
The mantra in counterinsurgency operations is that the people are the centers of gravity. Win their love, obedience, or minds, and win the war. The modern US Army has pioneered a number of initiatives designed enable better comprehension of the social battlefield in Iraq and Afghanistan thru biometric scanners, opinion polls, and Human Terrain Teams. (The latter has been condemned by academic and professional colleagues for aiding and abetting the military, not academea's finest hour.) So, a people's history of Vietnam would provide some very interesting insights into what the war looked like from the people how lived it for generations.
A couple of books have approached the topic, although since they're war memoirs, they're written for Americans by Americans. But books like The Village by Bing West offer a view into the lives of ordinary people living in a country torn by decades of war and the industrial might of global superpowers. If we want to win conflicts, it would certainly behoove us to understand that perspective, to understand what is like to live as an innocent bystander in a village subject to constant infiltration, low-level yet omnipresent violence, and the threat of massive artillery barrages. What will people endure, what will they ignore, what will they obey, what will they respect, and what will they never forgive?
The mantra in counterinsurgency operations is that the people are the centers of gravity. Win their love, obedience, or minds, and win the war. The modern US Army has pioneered a number of initiatives designed enable better comprehension of the social battlefield in Iraq and Afghanistan thru biometric scanners, opinion polls, and Human Terrain Teams. (The latter has been condemned by academic and professional colleagues for aiding and abetting the military, not academea's finest hour.) So, a people's history of Vietnam would provide some very interesting insights into what the war looked like from the people how lived it for generations.
A couple of books have approached the topic, although since they're war memoirs, they're written for Americans by Americans. But books like The Village by Bing West offer a view into the lives of ordinary people living in a country torn by decades of war and the industrial might of global superpowers. If we want to win conflicts, it would certainly behoove us to understand that perspective, to understand what is like to live as an innocent bystander in a village subject to constant infiltration, low-level yet omnipresent violence, and the threat of massive artillery barrages. What will people endure, what will they ignore, what will they obey, what will they respect, and what will they never forgive?
Monday, May 3, 2010
A Floating City says Obey Me Now
A number of articles have popped up recently tackling China's military and speculating on it's import. Robert Kaplan has advocated for years a sort of neo-Mahanism, that naval power is what really counts in international power calculus and our preoccupation with COIN distracts us from the (ascendant) great power challenges facing the US. A constant refrain arguing for the F-22 was China's development of 3.5-5th generation fighters.
And now, especially in light of Gates' Saturday speech rumored to systemically challenge the carrier battle group model, a fascinating article crops up exploring China's incessant attempts to build an aircraft carrier as a function of social identity theory.
On face value, the Chinese attempts to build an aircraft carrier is anachronistic. First, any other, non-American design in the world is inferior to those currently afloat and would field inferior aircraft. Second, the lack of quantity would match the lack of quality; as Payne notes, changing the balance of power from 11-0 to 11-1 is... unlikely to affect matters materially. Third, with China investing so heavily in asymmetric capability, most relevantly anti-carrier cruise and ballistic missiles, that indicates a strategic foresight to transcend current American conventional military primacy, investing so heavily in such a conventional technology almost looks like a step backward.
Personally, I offer three explanations for China's motive. First, I agree with Larson and Shevchenko: Aircraft carriers are symbols. As much as China purports to pioneer an Asian (read: Chinese centric) metric for international importance in everything from human rights to environmental policy, they know what symbols the old system uses to judge countries. So, an aircraft carrier is a potent physical declaration saying: "I'm a great power and I have the toys to prove it". So Larson and Shevchenko argue a carrier is a fulfillment in China's need for self-esteem and prestige.
Second, judging Chinese power relative only to the US is a mistake. In addition to being a symbol of Great Power status, an aircraft carrier is a symbol of expeditionary force. Nothing says American hegemony like a carrier. A carrier says: "I can reach out and touch anyone, anywhere, anytime". The US might possess the most advanced fighter aircraft, the most sophisticated submarines, and the best-equipped Army in the world, but without it's network of forward deployed bases, pre-staging areas, and international agreements, all that military might would sit in warehouses in Iowa. That's why Russian and Kyrgyzstani politics are so salient for Afghanistan. It's why critics can dismiss Chinese military modernization. Even with modern fighters or a trained army, they couldn't project that power. A carrier would change that, especially relative to regional neighbors or perhaps as a big stick against recalcitrant Africans.
Third, a carrier introduces the possibility of winning the battle, yet losing the war. At the turn of the 20th century, British naval preeminence was unquestioned. The British fleet represented more combined tonnage than all their competitors combined. The fleet controlled the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, and the byways of South-East Asia, simultaneously. The French possessed a not insignificant fleet, but it was pretty much localized to the Med. Even the French, an active colonial power, were subject to British fleets controlling the lanes of communication. So when Germany, newly minted and eager to prove itself a global power, entered the Great Game, they could not tolerate British control of the seas. Germany was humiliated in the First Moroccan Crisis, and grew increasingly frustrated at it's overseas ambitions being subject to British sufferance. In the coin of the era, a Dreadnought was the symbol that Germany was a Great Power and could project power globally.
But what makes the comparison is not just a jejune analogy between two ascendant powers. Rather, it is the calculus employed by the German admiralty. Cognizant that Britain far outclassed them in tonnage, the Germans realized they didn't need to defeat the British in straight up combat. Instead, they decided to make their fleet strong enough that the British could not afford to defeat them. Because once the British defeated the German fleet, the French fleet, the Russian fleet, hell, maybe even the Japanese fleet, would all assert their authority in their respective spheres, and the British fleet would be too weak to fend them off. Additionally, Germany's proximity to Britain meant that while global British tonnage might outclass everyone else combined, their North fleet alone would have to be sufficient to defeat the Germans; the Germans were an existential threat. Consequently, as the German fleet grew, the British retracted their global commitments, until they finally, and amicably enough, seceded the Med to the French as part of their Triple Entente obligations so that they could concentrate their full might on defending the Home Isle.
Now, I'm straight up speculating if any of that influences the Chinese decision making process. There are certainly copious reasons why the analogy is imperfect or misleading. An aircraft carrier is a far more sophisticated vessel than a dreadnought, and the technological and developmental gap between the US and China is accordingly greater than it was between England and Germany. Secondly, there isn't a commensurate French fleet to affect balance of power calculations. Russia has a global fleet, sure, as does India, but neither is strong enough or motivated enough to play the same role. So whereas the British had to evaluate against the Germans, and the French, and the... the US really balances against China, with a few et als for spice. Third, China lacks the proximity or the means to poses the same existential threat Germany posed England. Certainly, a carrier could pose a threat to regional allies, but that's not quite the same thing.
Ultimately, my point is that whereas the British could not afford to lose the tonnage that made them vulnerable to the other Great Powers, the US cannot afford to lose even one carrier. As Gates' noted, a Ford-class carrier represents $15 to $20 billion in a single asset, to say nothing of the propaganda value. The Chinese don't need to have a carrier left afloat if they ever challenge us to Midway 2.0. They just need to sink ours.
And now, especially in light of Gates' Saturday speech rumored to systemically challenge the carrier battle group model, a fascinating article crops up exploring China's incessant attempts to build an aircraft carrier as a function of social identity theory.
On face value, the Chinese attempts to build an aircraft carrier is anachronistic. First, any other, non-American design in the world is inferior to those currently afloat and would field inferior aircraft. Second, the lack of quantity would match the lack of quality; as Payne notes, changing the balance of power from 11-0 to 11-1 is... unlikely to affect matters materially. Third, with China investing so heavily in asymmetric capability, most relevantly anti-carrier cruise and ballistic missiles, that indicates a strategic foresight to transcend current American conventional military primacy, investing so heavily in such a conventional technology almost looks like a step backward.
Personally, I offer three explanations for China's motive. First, I agree with Larson and Shevchenko: Aircraft carriers are symbols. As much as China purports to pioneer an Asian (read: Chinese centric) metric for international importance in everything from human rights to environmental policy, they know what symbols the old system uses to judge countries. So, an aircraft carrier is a potent physical declaration saying: "I'm a great power and I have the toys to prove it". So Larson and Shevchenko argue a carrier is a fulfillment in China's need for self-esteem and prestige.
Second, judging Chinese power relative only to the US is a mistake. In addition to being a symbol of Great Power status, an aircraft carrier is a symbol of expeditionary force. Nothing says American hegemony like a carrier. A carrier says: "I can reach out and touch anyone, anywhere, anytime". The US might possess the most advanced fighter aircraft, the most sophisticated submarines, and the best-equipped Army in the world, but without it's network of forward deployed bases, pre-staging areas, and international agreements, all that military might would sit in warehouses in Iowa. That's why Russian and Kyrgyzstani politics are so salient for Afghanistan. It's why critics can dismiss Chinese military modernization. Even with modern fighters or a trained army, they couldn't project that power. A carrier would change that, especially relative to regional neighbors or perhaps as a big stick against recalcitrant Africans.
Third, a carrier introduces the possibility of winning the battle, yet losing the war. At the turn of the 20th century, British naval preeminence was unquestioned. The British fleet represented more combined tonnage than all their competitors combined. The fleet controlled the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, and the byways of South-East Asia, simultaneously. The French possessed a not insignificant fleet, but it was pretty much localized to the Med. Even the French, an active colonial power, were subject to British fleets controlling the lanes of communication. So when Germany, newly minted and eager to prove itself a global power, entered the Great Game, they could not tolerate British control of the seas. Germany was humiliated in the First Moroccan Crisis, and grew increasingly frustrated at it's overseas ambitions being subject to British sufferance. In the coin of the era, a Dreadnought was the symbol that Germany was a Great Power and could project power globally.
But what makes the comparison is not just a jejune analogy between two ascendant powers. Rather, it is the calculus employed by the German admiralty. Cognizant that Britain far outclassed them in tonnage, the Germans realized they didn't need to defeat the British in straight up combat. Instead, they decided to make their fleet strong enough that the British could not afford to defeat them. Because once the British defeated the German fleet, the French fleet, the Russian fleet, hell, maybe even the Japanese fleet, would all assert their authority in their respective spheres, and the British fleet would be too weak to fend them off. Additionally, Germany's proximity to Britain meant that while global British tonnage might outclass everyone else combined, their North fleet alone would have to be sufficient to defeat the Germans; the Germans were an existential threat. Consequently, as the German fleet grew, the British retracted their global commitments, until they finally, and amicably enough, seceded the Med to the French as part of their Triple Entente obligations so that they could concentrate their full might on defending the Home Isle.
Now, I'm straight up speculating if any of that influences the Chinese decision making process. There are certainly copious reasons why the analogy is imperfect or misleading. An aircraft carrier is a far more sophisticated vessel than a dreadnought, and the technological and developmental gap between the US and China is accordingly greater than it was between England and Germany. Secondly, there isn't a commensurate French fleet to affect balance of power calculations. Russia has a global fleet, sure, as does India, but neither is strong enough or motivated enough to play the same role. So whereas the British had to evaluate against the Germans, and the French, and the... the US really balances against China, with a few et als for spice. Third, China lacks the proximity or the means to poses the same existential threat Germany posed England. Certainly, a carrier could pose a threat to regional allies, but that's not quite the same thing.
Ultimately, my point is that whereas the British could not afford to lose the tonnage that made them vulnerable to the other Great Powers, the US cannot afford to lose even one carrier. As Gates' noted, a Ford-class carrier represents $15 to $20 billion in a single asset, to say nothing of the propaganda value. The Chinese don't need to have a carrier left afloat if they ever challenge us to Midway 2.0. They just need to sink ours.
Sunday, May 2, 2010
Lost and Really Really Found
Backpacker Magazine has a fascinating article in their newest issue (May 2010), but sadly, the article itself isn't available online, only a video diary by the author.
The article, by Jim Thornton, is about being lost in the Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness in Idaho. As an experiment, he volunteered to be flown blindfolded into the middle of the 2.3 million acre national park to experience what it meant to be totally, completely, lost. Over the course of his experience, he makes what I consider to be unbelievable errors, like not stopping immediately when he locates an identifiable landmark or taking compass readings so infrequently he only knows he's headed north-by-not-southish. Even so, it sounds like a fascinating experiment, and one I would love to try on my own at some point.
But it got me thinking about when I've ever been lost in my life. I mean, there have been times where I didn't know where I was, or I was in a new environment with no map, but I could not think of a time where I've ever been legitimately lost. I mean lost like: "I have absolutely no idea where I am and I'm not sure I have the means to keep myself alive until I do". The closest I could think of was when I went to Thailand. I remember getting off the plane in China, and getting swindled by the taxi cab driver because I was so wet behind the ears, but I had at least enough rudimentary language skills to get from point A to B, buy train tickets or food. But in Thailand, if I wandered off the very specific path of hotel to airport, or a list of very specific destinations, there was a not insignificant chance I couldn't find my way back to my hotel. I couldn't even pronounce the name, and half the cabbies to whom I gave the hotel's business card to had no idea where it was either. But it was a city, and eventually I'd run into someone who spoke some English. I was never lost, just in a highly foreign environment.
Which is the second odd part of this experiment. At one point, Thornton quotes Daniel Boone as saying he had been lost for weeks at a time, but says it was all ok, because Boone knew how to live off the land. Which is true enough, I suppose, but it made me think two things. First, it was evidence of just how detached even a highly experienced backpacked was from the land in which he routinely walked. It gave me the impression that Thornton lacked even basic survival skills. But secondly, it also occurred to me that you always came from somewhere. In terms of normal human terms, the experience of finding yourself in a place without at least a basic idea of where you are or where you came from is pretty rare.
Survival in the ocean is one possibility, as is hiking some place and falling into a ravine or the like, a place where even though you know how you got in, you can't backtrack your way out. But for hikers, people on their feet, this sort of spontaneous manifestation is really pretty rare. And, as long as you keep your head, that memory of how you got in is exploitable, a key to going home.
In the article, Thornton talks about transporting squirrels to new, foreign habitats, and notes that, almost always, the squirrel dies because it knows nothing about it's new environment. We're creatures of accumulated knowledge, experiences of where is safe, where we can find food, and where predators come from. Disruptions to that environment make us nervous, but we can adjust. But changing everything all at once is debilitating, and very dangerous.
The article, by Jim Thornton, is about being lost in the Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness in Idaho. As an experiment, he volunteered to be flown blindfolded into the middle of the 2.3 million acre national park to experience what it meant to be totally, completely, lost. Over the course of his experience, he makes what I consider to be unbelievable errors, like not stopping immediately when he locates an identifiable landmark or taking compass readings so infrequently he only knows he's headed north-by-not-southish. Even so, it sounds like a fascinating experiment, and one I would love to try on my own at some point.
But it got me thinking about when I've ever been lost in my life. I mean, there have been times where I didn't know where I was, or I was in a new environment with no map, but I could not think of a time where I've ever been legitimately lost. I mean lost like: "I have absolutely no idea where I am and I'm not sure I have the means to keep myself alive until I do". The closest I could think of was when I went to Thailand. I remember getting off the plane in China, and getting swindled by the taxi cab driver because I was so wet behind the ears, but I had at least enough rudimentary language skills to get from point A to B, buy train tickets or food. But in Thailand, if I wandered off the very specific path of hotel to airport, or a list of very specific destinations, there was a not insignificant chance I couldn't find my way back to my hotel. I couldn't even pronounce the name, and half the cabbies to whom I gave the hotel's business card to had no idea where it was either. But it was a city, and eventually I'd run into someone who spoke some English. I was never lost, just in a highly foreign environment.
Which is the second odd part of this experiment. At one point, Thornton quotes Daniel Boone as saying he had been lost for weeks at a time, but says it was all ok, because Boone knew how to live off the land. Which is true enough, I suppose, but it made me think two things. First, it was evidence of just how detached even a highly experienced backpacked was from the land in which he routinely walked. It gave me the impression that Thornton lacked even basic survival skills. But secondly, it also occurred to me that you always came from somewhere. In terms of normal human terms, the experience of finding yourself in a place without at least a basic idea of where you are or where you came from is pretty rare.
Survival in the ocean is one possibility, as is hiking some place and falling into a ravine or the like, a place where even though you know how you got in, you can't backtrack your way out. But for hikers, people on their feet, this sort of spontaneous manifestation is really pretty rare. And, as long as you keep your head, that memory of how you got in is exploitable, a key to going home.
In the article, Thornton talks about transporting squirrels to new, foreign habitats, and notes that, almost always, the squirrel dies because it knows nothing about it's new environment. We're creatures of accumulated knowledge, experiences of where is safe, where we can find food, and where predators come from. Disruptions to that environment make us nervous, but we can adjust. But changing everything all at once is debilitating, and very dangerous.
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