Rethinking Security

Be Suspicious of Essentialism

Sven Ortmann has a great post dispelling the myth that Germans are a uniquely warlike people. He runs down the list of events in German history that most misunderstand, and argues that there is no uniquely German impulse to take to the battlefield. Ortmann's larger point, however, cannot be emphasized enough:

"The whole idea of "warlike tribe", warlike nation" and so on is very misleading in my opinion. It's a curtain that conceals the more complicated origins of military prowess - and this curtain tells nothing about the origins."

It is very common, for example, for Americans to make jokes about French cowardice. Yet even a passing glance at the kind of losses that the French suffered on the Western front in World War I falsifies such a notion. The passionate nationalism and military exertion that characterized French history from the Revolution to World War I also belies the notion of uniquely French pacifism.

Even more common are essentialist works that expound on a certain "Asian way of war" characterized by subterfuge--an equally specious notion that ignores the tremendous diversity in military traditions across Asia and the commonalities between Asian and Western military thought and practice. Not to mention the fact that reading Sun Tzu instead of Mao may not be of much help in understanding modern China.

Essentialism appeals to people because it offers the opportunity to trace an unbroken line from past to present and easily categorize. But it is extremely harmful in practice for security decisionmaking.

The Tactics of Urban Assault

The recent attacks on Pakistani cities and military bases, John P. Sullivan and I argue, falls into a larger pattern of urban attacks and paramilitary assaults that makes for increasingly more violent strikes against urban targets. The strategic significance of these attacks, however, is hard to assess. Check our article out at OpenDemocracy's new security page.

Stop Trying to Bribe the Tribes

Joshua Foust has a great new op-ed about the prevalence of a media meme that does not in any way reflect the sociological structure and norms of Afghanistan. There are many great parts:

"Despite three horrible, bloody wars that killed tens of thousands of British citizens (not just soldiers, but their families as well), [pundits] claim the [19th century] British policy 'worked adequately.' ... Then again, we already tried that. It didn’t work, in part because in Afghanistan the word “tribe” is so ambiguous as to have almost no meaning. ...It’s been decades since anthropologists really thought of 'tribe' as a useful descriptor for Afghan communities—'tribe' is a flexible concept, with identical names applying to different levels of genealogy. It also implies a hierarchy where none exists—if you know someone is from a 'tribe' that is 'higher' than his neighbor’s 'clan,' will that give you any tools for leveraging influence or power? I assure you, it will not."

The persistence of this meme is depressingly familiar. Many harmful ideas about the Arab world from Raphael Patai's outdated and almost completely fraudulent text The Arab Mind migrated into public discourse after 9/11. But even crediting many writers about the "Arab street" and "Muslim World" with having read a book is too great a compliment.

Expanding the Southern Battlespace

Sam Logan and John P. Sullivan have a new piece up at ISN on the expansion of the Mexican drug war to Panama and Honduras. Key graph:

"Drug trafficking and the endemic criminal violence it breeds are a threat to the entire Western Hemisphere. The southern states of Central America are just encountering the risk involved. At least two Mexican cartels, the rival Sinaloa and Gulf Cartels are active throughout Central America. It is near certain that the Zetas and others are active as well. Add to this the traditional Colombian cartels and transnational, third-generation gangs such as the Mara Salvatrucha, and the potential for cross-border drug wars and criminal insurgencies rises."

Scary stuff, but that's what's going on..

American Strategy's Conceptual Muddle

Mark Safranski and I have an article at Small Wars Journal on why post-9/11 strategy's conceptual muddle has led to confusion and the need to substitute operational methodologies for foreign policy.

No Carriers, No Problem

Defense correspondent Toshi Yoshihara and Naval War College professor James Holmes have a timely piece on Chinese preparations for cross-strait war:

"China does not need to compete symmetrically or across the globe to challenge US staying power in Asia, which Washington considers the main theater. That Beijing cannot fight the United States in a one-on-one contest in the Pacific says little about the strains the PLAN can impose on US naval forces short of an all-out sea battle."

China is maximizing cheap technologies such as missiles to provide a defensive umbrella for its units in a Taiwan theater contest. Meanwhile, the gap in capabilities between US technologies and emerging Chinese technologies is steadily eroding. This is not necessarily a new point, as focus on "anti-access" weapons has been a staple of US strategic analysis of China since the mid-1990s. The larger question--which is open for debate--over whether carriers are, as the authors termed it, "wasting assets," and that China can effectively contest sea control in Asia beyond nearby waters.

The Imperial Meme

Tell 'em how you really feel, Joshua Foust:

"Afghanistan in 2009 is not Afghanistan in 1839. If a Russian looked at American Civil War history and used that as a justification for some kind of policy toward America, he’d be laughed out of the planning session. Why we think it’s okay to look 160 years into our past for ideas for Afghanistan, when we can look to the 1990s and 2000s is beyond my ability to understand."

Foust is right. A deep knowledge of historical trends and political cultures in a state can be used as a means of understanding it. But extrapolating from a sole data point 160 years ago to create plans for foreign policy is questionable at best. The enthusiasm, however, for looking at British solutions is not likely to go away. If comparing America to Rome was all the rage in 2002-2003, the implicit foreign policy meme is that the US is Britain during the "Indian Summer" of the late 19th century. While there are many similarities to the US and Britain (e.g. both are primarily sea powers), we should not take the metaphor too far.

Application

RTJ editor Mark Mateski asks:

"I want to consider the goal of achieving non-linear effects consistently. Does it work in the real world? Sometimes it does, certainly, but for all the papers and presentations trumpeting the advantages of non-linear strategies, my sense is that consistent success remains elusive. This is despite the fact that current U.S. strategists and leaders have been raised on complexity, systems perspectives, RMA, transformation, and effects-based operations. I would guess that for every thousand strategists who read Sun Tzu, fewer than a hundred can implement the principles effectively and consistently outside of the classroom. Why? Good strategy is never a checklist exercise. Context counts, and it changes. Even the best strategist is susceptible to biases. Incomplete information, deception, the fog of war–the list of challenges is long and daunting. ... So, what’s the answer? What can we do that we’re not doing already to generate better real-world strategies?"

Mateski is making an extremely valuable point about problems with non-linear effects. There are two things at play here.The first is that, as both Jomini and Clausewitz agreed, individuals who can draft and apply effective strategies are extremely rare. Studying strategy is worlds away from implementing it and designing it. In fact, the perilous thing, as Joseph Fouche memorably noted, is that study of strategy and geopolitics can even create a narrower view for the "geopolitical nerd":

"He suffers from a contradiction: he can see the narrow slices of reality that he specializes in exquisite and even excruciating detail. Unfortunately, he sees the world outside as a mixture of his tiny area of expertise writ large and a land populated by large bright shiny ideals that he can see in all of its fine shades. Based on this perception, he can formulate responses perfectly calibrated to exploit his unique domain knowledge to remake the world in the image of his vision. However, the nerd’s intentions suffer from a major defect: they are usually fatally out of sync with the means available to achieve that vision"

Second, one of Sun Tzu's fatal flaws (which is shared by complexity, systems methodologies, effects-based ops) is that he emphasizes a level of knowledge and understanding about the world that most do not possesses and will never acquire. In the American context, this is even more galling because of continuing ignorance of other cultures and continuous de-emphasizing of history.

And Now For Something Completely Different

Leslie Gelb with a, um, original take on North Korea:

WWII Naples as a Feral City

One unfortunate theme running through arguments against US intervention in general is that of "ancient hatreds"--the idea that just because a given Third World state is corrupt, superstitious, and fractured at one point in time it has been that way since the dawn of recorded time and will continue to be so forever. In a review of a Allied intel officer's World War II memoir of occupied Naples, Kenneth Payne at Kings of War notes the parallels to Iraq and Afghanistan:

"Criminality is rampant – military and medical provisions are lifted straight off the ship, copper wire is no sooner installed than stolen. Pervasive corruption extends to the provisional government, whose officials are deeply complicit in the huge black market. Armed groups patrol the countryside, raiding convoys and villages. Allied soldiers, in this case rapacious Moroccans, are captured by locals, tortured and decapitated. Flagellants march through the streets, beating their bloodied chests. Nascent democracy, imposed by the allies, produces great political fragmentation, extremist ideas, and politicized religion – nuns distribute bread in exchange for votes. Rumour and superstition are rife, as are hunger, disease and poverty."

So are Italians naturally uncivilized? Anyone with a passing grasp of history gained from watching History Channel, PBS, and National Geographic can tell you otherwise. Furthermore, the US bore some responsibility for the mess through the both accidental and purposeful re-importing of criminal syndicates that Mussolini had largely crushed in his rise to power. We should debate the costs and benefits of stability operations missions, but make extra effort to refrain from the 19th century colonialist idea that peoples living in failed states are unusually rapacious and incapable of governing themselves.