Conflict

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This just in — military force not that useful any more

The BBC ran a feature yesterday morning with the provocative title: Spent force: Are Wars still winnable? Their answer:

As America’s decade of conflict draws to an end it’s a time for reflection about the utility of force; can modern warfare within societies ever bring the tidy outcomes that policymakers strive for? It’s a question that should have been asked in Iraq and Afghanistan; and it is as relevant in Mali and across much of sub-saharan Africa today. There may be no more decisive battles like Gettysburg.

I know you’re shocked unless, by chance, you read General Sir Rupert Smith’s The Utility of Force (2005), which opened with:

War, as most cognitively known to most noncombatants, war as battle in a field between men and machinery, war as a massive deciding event in a dispute in international affairs: such war no longer exists.

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Desperate times

call for desperate measures. Actually, desperate times — and which times aren’t, even though the participants may not realize them as such — call for new options, or as Boyd said, the ability to shift from one pattern of actions and ideas to another.

Great example of this in the Marine Corps Gazette, “F–35B Needs a Plan B,” http://mca-marines.org/gazette/article/f–35b-needs-plan-b

Back in 2010, when the then-commandant proclaimed that there was no plan B to the F-35B, you knew that the Corps was setting itself up for a fall. Interesting for a service espousing the doctrine of maneuver warfare, with its emphasis on multiple thrusts. Well, now, what with the rises in costs of the program and impending cuts in the DoD budget, guess what? However, the Corps still has original thinkers, and whether you agree with the major on this particular option or not, the fact that he has written and the Gazette has published this article is a very good sign. The comments are well worth reading, particularly the replies to “Major Cannon, I certainly hope the monitors at HQMC get a whiff of this nonsense and you are never selected for Lieutenant Colonel.”

My first job at Lockheed, back in the early 1980s, was to find something new to broaden the company’s dependence on airlifters (C-130s and C-5Bs). The need we found was close air support and close-in interdiction, and for the low end of that mission, our proposal wasn’t too terribly different from Maj. Cannon’s proposal. Our favored platform, though, was a small, twin-engined jet to replace the A-10. The USSR was still around and so tank killing was a primary mission.

 

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Did we just surrender?

The United States cannot fight a war against radical Islamism and win …

There are those who will tell you that if you can’t sit in on meetings of our national security apparatus, the best alternative is to read George Friedman. So his most recent column in Stratfor, Avoiding Wars that Never End, might be taken as a trial balloon for a less intrusive policy for dealing with the treat posed by radical Islam. Friedman proposes returning to the strategy that proved successful in the two great wars of the twentieth century:

The United States cannot fight a war against radical Islamism and win … But the United States has the option of following U.S. strategy in the two world wars. The United States was patient, accepted risks and shifted the burden to others, and when it acted, it acted out of necessity, with clearly defined goals matched by capabilities. Waiting until there is no choice but to go to war is not isolationism. Allowing others to carry the primary risk is not disengagement. Waging wars that are finite is not irresponsible.

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Apres moi, le deluge

George Friedman, Founder and CEO of Stratfor, is always worth reading for the same reason that, say, James Kilpatrick was: You might not have agreed with much that he wrote, but there were usually a few nuggets amidst the infuriation, and he wrote so amazingly well. In fact, in his later years, his columns on writing were all I remember.

Friedman has an important column today in Stratfor, The Crisis of the Middle Class and American Power. He opens with:

I received a great deal of feedback, with Europeans agreeing that this is the core problem and Americans arguing that the United States has the same problem, asserting that U.S. unemployment is twice as high as the government’s official unemployment rate. My counterargument is that unemployment in the United States is not a problem in the same sense that it is in Europe because it does not pose a geopolitical threat. The United States does not face political disintegration from unemployment, whatever the number is. Europe might.

And proceeds to argue most eloquently that the United States faces exactly that. This was also something Boyd worried about. For examples, here’s part of his discussion of the prerequisites for an insurrection:

Insurrection/revolution becomes ripe when many perceive an illegitimate inequality—that is, when the people see themselves as being exploited and oppressed for the undeserved enrichment and betterment of an elite few. (Patterns, 94)

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OODA sighting

I assume most of you have seen Tom Friedman’s oped in the NYT today, “More risk-taking, less poll-taking.”

He opens with:

THE U.S. military trains its fighter pilots on a principle called the “OODA Loop.” It stands for observe, orient, decide, act. The idea is that if your OODA Loop is faster and more accurate than the other pilot’s, you’ll shoot his plane out of the sky. If the other pilot’s OODA Loop is better, he’ll shoot you down. Right now, our national OODA Loop is broken.

Although we could quibble with his use of the term (for how Boyd actually used it, see “Boyd’s OODA Loop” on the Articles page), his claim that our “national OODA loop is broken” has some validity.

Recall that in Boyd’s framework, action flows from orientation. Individuals have orientations, but when we’re talking about countries or other groups, we need a surrogate for orientation. What Boyd suggested was something called a “common outlook” or “similar implicit orientation,” which he describes on pages 74 and 79 of Patterns and pp. 18-23 of Organic Design.

What Friedman appears to be arguing, and in this I think he’s right, is that we have nothing like the common implicit orientation that we need to implement solutions to our problems, and that the President’s focus now should be on creating one.

I haven’t seen the movie, but didn’t Lincoln say something about a house divided?

 

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In his year

Many years ago, I asked a Saudi friend of mine if he didn’t long for the day democracy would come to the Kingdom (Scotch is not that hard to find over there if you know the right people, and he was the right people). He smiled and answered to the effect “Look, I have a business to run. It’s not my job to pick the government. That’s what we have a royal family for, and honestly, I think they do a better job than your system of letting anybody vote, whether they graduated sixth grade or not.” Continue reading →

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Let the cannons speak!

At Quantico, getting ready for the Boyd & Beyond conference that begins in about two hours.  I’ll be doing the lead-off, on the evolution of Boyd’s ideas, which culminated in Conceptual Spiral.

On the way up yesterday, we stopped at Cold Harbor, which is (I think) the bloodiest hour in American military history, producing some 6,000 casualties. People often cite it as evidence that Grant was an incompetent commander, just an unimaginative practitioner of hey-diddle-diddle-right-up-the-middle attrition warfare.

We can discuss that another day. In the meantime, consider Vicksburg and the fact that over the course of the Richmond Campaign, Grant’s army actually suffered a lower percentage of losses than did Lee’s, and Lee could ill afford the higher casualty rate.

Anyway, a disaster, which I’m hoping to avoid this morning.

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The truth about cyberconflict

Part 4 of Marcus Ranum’s series on cyberwar is now up on the Fabius Maximus site:

Parsing Cyberwar – Part 4: The Best Defense is A Good Defense

Let me rephrase some of his points:

1. Cyberwar is not war in the Sun Tzu/Clausewitz sense. As Ranum notes:

The big scenarios of cyberwar — “putting a country back to the pre-industrial era” — are overblown and ridiculous; generally they appeal to those who don’t really understand data networking or system administration. There are plenty of examples of successful attacks against individual point targets, but the big scenario does not follow logically as a consequence of a lot of small ones

2. As in other areas of group-on-group conflict, Einheit is critical:

At this point, we can be sure that anyone who builds a gas centrifuge cascade is going to be a little bit more careful about their software than usual; perhaps they won’t rely on the lowest bidder to configure it. And that, in a nutshell, is the whole problem. Cyberwar forces organizations to re-examine their trust-boundaries: who do they get to do what, and how can they tell whether their service providers and supply chains are tamper-proof? For a government like the US’, that seems eager to outsource practically everything, that appears to be the opening of a gigantic and very nasty can of worms.

3. Because of the nature of software, operating inside the OODA loop is critical. If you play offense in this field, you have to do what you’re going to do and then move on before your intrusion is discovered, analyzed, and the details of your attack disseminated to the world:

Since it has been revealed to the community and dissected at length, Stuxnet has done more to justify improvements in security systems than anything else; in that sense it was self-defeating. It is a stone thrown by people who live in a glass house, that will  serve to encourage more stone-throwing.

Ranum appears to be making the point that defense is the stronger form of this conflict. At the level of the individual company or home user, this may well be true (This is why I say that “On the internet, the best defense is a strong defense.”) But as with real war, the situation is more complex. For one thing, attackers often can succeed in their initial attack. And cyber conflict, as Ranum notes, needs to be considered within the larger arena of state-vs-state competition, where hacking and malware are only one tool.

Interesting series — suggest you check it out.

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Failed State Index

It is sometimes claimed that 4GW thrives in failed/failing states. I’m not totally sure I buy this. For one thing, the 9/11 attacks were apparently conceived in Afghanistan, which had a pretty strong, even oppressive, government at the time, and planned in such places as Germany and the US.

On the other hand, it seems reasonable that 4GW groups — “global guerrillas” and similar transnational organizations — might do best where they don’t have a strong central government that could be pressured into interfering with their operations.

Whichever side you come down on, here is Foreign Policy‘s Failed State Index for 2012.

A couple of points that struck me:

  • Note how much their map resembles Tom Barnett’s “Pentagon’s New Map.” Hardly a coincidence, of course.
  • Look where the USA falls in their rankings.
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Is 4GW magnifique?

Quick note to a comment by Jeff Sexton to my last post, who mentioned John Robb and his Global Guerrillas blog.

Clausewitz’s observation, of course, was made in the context of state-vs-state warfare, where, as he notes, the aim is to “disarm the enemy.” In the form of warfare Robb is addressing (if “warfare” it be, but that’s another question — you can read my take on the subject in If We Can Keep It, available from the Article page), and which also goes under such names as fourth generation warfare and non-trinitarian warfare, that conclusion may not be so straightforward.

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