Defense and the National Interest

By William S. Lind

I spent last week with the Royal Marines in Plymouth, England, at a conference where they were trying to prepare intellectually for deployment to Afghanistan’s Helmand province. Inspired perhaps by the atmosphere of historic Stonehouse Barracks, where Marines who served at Trafalgar once drilled, I came up with an approach to one of 4GW’s most difficult theoretical challenges, namely the relationship between the three traditional levels of war - tactical, operational, and strategic - and John Boyd’s three new levels of war, the physical, the mental and the moral. The seminar that wrote the FMFM 1-A, Fourth Generation War, wrestled endlessly with this problem with little success. If what I will lay out here works - which I leave to others to judge - it may represent a step forward.

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The problem is that everybody’s calling it appeasement, without, it seems, taking the time to learn what it means.

Chris Matthews recently took right-wing radio host Kevin James to task on this point — for foaming “appeasement” at the mouth but not knowing who Neville Chamberlain was [transcript]. But even Matthews didn’t get it quite right (he had said that appeasement was not talking with Hitler but giving away a piece of Czechoslovakia).

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by Steven Pressfield
New York: Doubleday, 2008
295 pp.

DNI Review by Chet Richards,
Editor
16 May 2008

Reviewing fiction is always a challenge because you can’t pillar the author for failing to establish a thesis. Although you can criticize such things as character development, or loose threads in the plot lines, or even an annoying style, ultimately either you like a novel or you don’t, and what I find compelling, you might see as cloying. A larger risk is that if you take your own opinions too seriously, future generations may decide that it was you and not your intended victim who was lacking in substance. Clifton Fadiman, for example, never completely lived down remarking that Faulkner’s Absolom! Absolom!, now considered a serious candidate for Greatest American Novel, represented “the final blowup of what was once a remarkable, if minor, talent.”

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In the “how did I miss this?” category:

“Learning the Right Lessons from Iraq,” by Benjamin H. Friedman, Harvey Sapolsky and Christopher Preble, The Cato Institute, Policy Analysis no. 610, February 13, 2008.

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“The Continued Existence of the State: The Clausewitzian Concept of Cohesion,” by seydlitz89 (189 KB PDF)

The second of two articles contrasting the views of Martin van Creveld and Carl von Clausewitz.

Author seydlitz89 continues where he left off “The Decline of Strategic Theory.” Whether you buy into his critique of van Creveld, there’s a lot of interesting stuff — Nietzsche, Weber, Hobbes, Polyani, plus seydlitz89’s own insights (just to name a few) — to add to your strategic tool box.

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By Michele Pileri

Translated from the Italian — Special to DNI
13 May 2008

[Author’s note: What follows was to be a shortened version of a work written to be published by the Rivista Italiana Difesa (Italian Defence Review). The original one was written for a public that has hardly ever heard of John Boyd, so it included introductory pages on Boyd’s life, career and technical accomplishment, that have been omitted here.

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A couple in the pipeline:

First, Steven Pressfield has a new historical novel out about special ops in North Africa. The author of Gates of Fire, about Thermopylae, and The Virtues of War, on Alexander, leaps two millenia ahead to take on Rommel, or more accurately, the folks who took on Rommel in 1942 and early 1943. We meet the SAS, the LRDG, and my favorite, Popski’s Private Army.

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Spencer Ackerman posted an analysis yesterday of what might be called the strategic dynamics of the Iraqi conflict:

At the risk of saying something disputable, from 2003 to mid-2007, the insurgencies in Iraq had faster OODA Loops than the U.S. did. That’s not to say that there weren’t discrete tactical successes: there were, and lots of them. But those developments are coterminous with the concept of the Loop …

To make a further contention that will be disputed by historians: what Petraeus and Odierno actually did — and it is not a small achievement — was disrupt the insurgencies’ Loops more than any other U.S. commanders were able to. They kept the insurgencies in a state of confusion for months and prevented successful orientation. But the rise in U.S. and Iraqi civilian casualties demonstrates that the insurgencies’ Loops have now closed.

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The Art of War - Spirituality for Conflict

Sun Tzu’s Art of War,
Translated by Thomas Huynh and the Editors at Sonshi.com

Annotations by Thomas Huynh
Foreword by Marc Benioff
Preface by Thomas Cleary

(Woodstock, VT: Skylight Illuminations) 210 pp.

DNI Review by Chet Richards, editor
April 30, 2008

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Request for interest, that is.

There is an opportunity to hold a short, intense seminar on the applicability of Boyd’s ideas, particularly operating inside the OODA loop and grand strategy (sustaining our own morale and attracting the uncommitted), on the weekend of September 20 and 21 at the University of Prince Edward Island, Charlottetown, PEI. That’s Canada for all you geographically challenged wonks south of the border.

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Tags: Boyd 2008