Rethinking Security

Review: The Dynamics of Military Revolution

Just finished reading MacGregor Knox and Williamson Murray's edited compilation The Dynamics of Military Revolution. Williamson Murray and MacGregor Knox have made many other great collaborations, and this is no exception. The topic of "military revolutions" and "revolutions in military affairs" is fraught with the legacy of the 1990s technoculture and Transformation boondoggles, and Knox and Murray and their contributors gainfully rescue the concept from technological determinism. Of particular note is Holger Herwig's chapter on 19th century to early 20th century naval policy and strategy and Mark Grimsley's chapter on the American Civil War. 

The Chancellorsville Operation and Modern Operations

Another staff ride, another reflection at RTJ.

The Gettysburg Strategic Operation and the Future of Operations?

Some thoughts at RTJ inspired by a recent trip to Gettysburg and the recent postings of Sven Ortmann.

Campaign Planning for Coercive Operations

While I want to get to writing about "The Hedgehog Idea," a ton of reading and writing on the Gettysburg campaign keeps pulling me back. Additionally, I'd like to comment on Bernard Finel's new SWJ piece. Finel makes the point that with 100,000 troops in Afghanistan comprising a higher-water mark of force available to the United States that will decline, a full-on policy of coercive bargaining with Taliban must be commenced to ensure a stable long-term outcome in Afghanistan that does not require a massive amount of troops to police.

This piece does move beyond the dichotomy of counterinsurgency vs. the "small footprint" approach, and is based on the President's original strategic intent as well as the reality that current force levels are unlikely to continue. However, the practical difficulties in tailoring operations for negotiations and shaping the political-military outcome are--as Finel notes--nontrivial. It is a step in an interesting direction and ought to be developed into a campaign design to flesh out its particulars.

As an aside, I also think to some degree that Finel's approach here may become a subject of a new area of COIN studies--designing operations for limited outcomes. It is too soon to write off US participation in future COIN missions, but the expansive objectives of past US COIN missions may be a thing of the past. Tailored operations for limited war may characterize a good deal of future out-of-area operations.

The Strategy of Control

Justin Kelly and Mike Brennan, who wrote last year's most provocative and interesting work of military theory, have done it again. In their new article "Looking for the Hedgehog Idea," they vault past the increasingly obsolete US COIN/Irregular warfare debate to get to the heart of what a new strategic paradigm for today's conflicts will look like.

I encourage everyone to read it in full, some more detailed comments coming later.

Guest Post at Thinking Strategically

I've written a guest post at Aaron Hugh Ellis' Thinking Strategically about the power of the state in future warfare.

The RZA Weighs in on the RMA Debate

I was listening again to one of my favorite Wu-Tang side projects, DJ Muggs and the GZA's collaboration Grandmasters, when this RZA line popped out at me: "In this high tech world of fire wire and microchip/
We still keep the four-five clip, filled with the spiral tip."

This is sound advice that Colin S. Gray (echoing Clausewitz) would agree with:

"Many people confuse the nature of war with its character. The former is universal and eternal and does not alter, whereas the latter is always in flux. This distinction is not just a fine academic point, with no real-world resonance worthy of note. It matters enormously if you believe that your favorite idea or innovative technology is going to change the nature, as opposed to only the character, of war."

So in essence, if you see a man in baggy pants and massive amounts of jewelry moving around Stapleton, NY with a "gun the size of a black hole" it's because he recognizes the nature of war is eternal even though its character is constantly changing.

Nevertheless, RZA and the Wu-Tang are no stodgy "Colonel Blimp" types, as evidenced by their early (and vocal) support for swarm tactics in warfare. As RZA also notes in the Wu-Tang Manual,  the Wu have also borrowed organizational structures from both the corporate and criminal worlds to advance their interests--currently settling on the "Conglomerate" model.

We also know that the Wu-Tang are consummate realists (in the International Relations sense) from the song "Da Glock," a hidden track on the Iron Flag album. In this song, the Wu elucidate many reasons they were happy they had brought a Glock semiautomatic pistol with them--which allowed them to dispense with a host of adversaries ranging from rowdy partygoers to al-Qaeda terrorists. Although the Wu-Tang are no longer Offensive Realists, they still think that when in doubt you should take the Glock with you.

What You Can't See Might Kill You

DefenseTech has a great piece on Chinese military modernization that dovetails with a lot of recent PLA studies research by James Mulvenon and others. Just because China is building towards a MTR-style recon-strike complex doesn't mean that it will hit anything without the "recon" part of it:

What’s missing is the reconnaissance piece. Smart weapons require a smart reconnaissance and targeting network otherwise they’re useless. The overlays on the map above are misleading in that we do not know whether China can accurately target those areas that fall within various missile envelopes. So far anyway, the U.S. is the only country to have built a truly global reconnaissance strike complex. Cold War exigencies and nearly limitless defense spending enabled the U.S. to build both the reconnaissance and the strike components, something other nations were unable to do.

China's challenge, even in the limited context of its Western Pacific playpen, is to develop a system of systems that can track and target the US and other assets within the region. We know, from translations of Chinese operational art, that they aspire to do so but aspiration is very far from reality--especially within the context of joint operations and C2. China has, however, made some truly impressive leaps in doctrine and capabilities since the 1970s, when they found themselves underperforming in a "local war" gone wrong against the Vietnamese.

Their leaders are very cognizant of the fact that they need to catch up to now 40-year old family of technologies that originated with the PGM/recon-strike revolution of the late 70s and culminated in the kind of capabilities that enabled a small group of special forces soldiers to devastate an Iraqi mechanized company in 2003. This is not Sun Tzu-esque trickery (although the Chinese military literature sometimes places a bit of an emphasis on it) but basic common sense.

However, the old strains of Maoist thinking about protracted war and "luring the enemy into the deep," as Ka Po Ng noted in a 2005 Chinese doctrinal review, still have a conceptual hold on some Chinese military thinkers. This might also retard their adaptation to modern conventional operational doctrine and technology.

Review and Reading Update

I finished reading John Alger's The Quest for Victory: A History of the Principles of War a couple of days ago. I heard about the book when I first read Robert Leonhard's The Principles of War for the Information Age and looked at his bibliography. Leonhard is a genius in general (side note, I need to re-read that book )and I was eager to see where he had drawn his sources. Alger's book is a fairly dry look at the evolution of the idea of "principles of war"--which are now commonplace in most doctrinal manuals. Azar Gat covers the same ground but with a broader scope---although no focus on the "principles".

Alger is pretty ambivalent about the idea of "principles" but at the same time looks at them with an open mind. Although most people familiar with European military history probably aren't going to find the influence of Jomini in the 19th century a new revelation, it is still very striking how an analytical description of Napoleonic warfare was the guiding concept of operations for at least a century. If there is a flaw about the book, it is that it is narrowly focused on the principles that it sometimes misses the connection with the wider strategic and operational concepts that those principles were used to support in doctrine over the centuries. Alger's conclusion is not very strong as well, but as someone who tends to often not write strong conclusions either I sympathize. This is complicated material and often times there is not one or two clear lessons that can be taken.

If you have already read Gat I recommend picking this up, but it may be confusing otherwise. The issue of "principles" is a very knotty one, one that very much hinges on one's perspective on the philosophy of science, history, and the general theory of conflict. Jim Storr has pretty much explained the basis of how we should approach it. I'm waiting for his book's price to climb down so I can re-read it instead of the quick read I gave my library copy of it last year.

Next up for reading is Jonathan M. House's Combined Arms Warfare in the 20th Century and finishing my copy of Milan Vego's Joint Operational Warfare: Theory and Practice. The latter I read and re-read in installments--it is a large Naval War College textbook comprising about roughly 1,500 phonebook-sized pages and contains a CD-room filled with maps of the campaigns it cites.

Overclassification: The Russian Approach

T. Greer notes on Twitter that there's some things Ivan really, really wants kept under wraps. Nuclear missile codes? Nope. The Spetsnaz targeting maps? Wrong! Suppressed evidence of Vladimir Putin's rumored past as a Bolshoi ballerina? Wrong again! Rather, the Russian want to keep under wraps a 80+-year old article from an obscure Soviet military journal: "G. Isserson wrote "Fundamentals of Deep Operation" for the Red Army in 1934. It is so important to Russian mil that it is still classified!"

This is totally ridiculous. There is nothing about Deep Operations, Georgii Isserson, or Operational Art in general that David Glantz, Harold Orenstein, Chris Bellamy, Jacob Kipp, or John Erickson has not already memorized by heart. If I were a gambling man I'd wager that David Glantz brought back G. Isserson from the great beyond to autograph Glantz's personal copy of "Fundamentals of Deep Operation" and wrestle polar bears in Siberia.

On a more serious note, it appears from a cursory Google search that an unclassified copy of this article may be available in the open source in America---making the Russian attempt to hide it doubly hilarious.