Tag: war

The return of Voxiversity

A number of you have been requesting a new Voxiversity, I’d been thinking it was well past time to do another one, and the potential connection with our hypothetical Brainstorm Club that we’ve been discussing turned it into a no-brainer.

On Saturday, May 16, the next Voxiversity will commence with the first quiz on Martin van Creveld’s A HISTORY OF STRATEGY, which will cover the Foreword, the Introduction, and Chapter 1: Chinese Military Thought. If you haven’t acquired a copy of the book yet, you can get it at Amazon or in EPUB format at Castalia House. The chapters are not long and you will be able to read Chapter 1 at least twice before Saturday. If you want to see what a Voxiversity is like, have a look at the left sidebar for previous ones on works by Thucydides, Dante, and Rothbard, among others.

However, one benefit of selecting a work by a living author is that in addition to the usual quizzes and online discussions in the comments, Dr. van Creveld has agreed to take part in an online videoconference with me that will be open to the Ilk. We haven’t set a date yet, but it will be scheduled sometime during the Voxiversity, which will run for the next eight weeks. I will interview him for the first 30 minutes, after which we will have an open Q&A session. In addition to being the author of EQUALITY: THE IMPOSSIBLE QUEST, as well as The Transformation of War and Technology and War, Dr. van Creveld will be a contributor to RIDING THE RED HORSE V2 and he has written an absolutely fascinating essay on a significant aspect of future war that very few have considered.

The event will be free, but because the number of places are limited (to exactly what, I do not yet know) priority will be given to the members of the Dread Ilk’s Brainstorm Club. While I’m still working out how that is going to operate, my current thinking is that in addition to being able to attend the monthly Brainstorm event, members will get first shot at attending the free online events such as these.

Violence, women, and war

One Owlmirror attempts to claim it is reasonable to conclude that I approve of violence towards feminist women:

I have something of a rant simmering on how it’s still reasonable to conclude that Vox Day approves of violence towards women (or more specifically, feminist women), despite the point (which you emphasized) that that’s not exactly what he wrote, but it’s long and kinda off-topic.”

It is also false. I do not approve of initiating violence period. Not towards women, not towards feminist women, not towards anyone.

Is that insufficiently clear? Do I need to type more slowly for the message to sink in?

The idea that I approve of violence against women is entirely based on false accusations. Just to give one example, despite the fact that I have never addressed the shooting of Malala Yousafzai in any detail, much less supported it, a number of people have repeated the totally false claims by Popular Science and NPR that I am “on the record as supporting the Taliban’s attempt to assassinate Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousifazi”. In fact, there is not a single post about Miss Yousafzai on this blog and my only reference to her was in a passing reference on Alpha Game in a post dealing with the demographic implosion of Japan.

“In light of the strong correlation between female education and demographic decline, a purely empirical perspective on Malala Yousafzai,
the poster girl for global female education, may indicate that the
Taliban’s attempt to silence her was perfectly rational and
scientifically justifiable.”

So, in the interest of setting the record straight, let’s go ahead and look at the Taliban’s attack on the young Pakistani woman to see whether the attack can reasonably be considered rational or not. (I will address the scientific element below.) And once you take the time to actually read about the historical context of the shooting, it rapidly becomes obvious that the decision of the Taliban to attack Malala Yousafzai was not a random act of irrational violence against women, but rather the rational and purposeful targeting of an individual they correctly considered to be a traitor in the employ of their enemies.

Most people are entirely unaware that Yousafzai was no mere “innocent
schoolgirl” who just happened to attend school, she was the daughter of a pro-Western activist, she had worked as a
paid propagandist for the BBC and other Western organizations for four
years, and she had even met with Richard Holbrooke before the “irrational”
Taliban finally decided to silence her. Given that her family “ran a chain of schools”, you could even make a reasonable case for her pro-education activism having been little more than a cynical marketing device on the part of her elders.

The Taliban has been fighting to defend their traditional way of life in their own tribal lands for 36 years. They have killed tens of thousands of people, from elite Spetsnaz soldiers to unarmed young women, in order to do so. It is quite clear that they will kill anyone who threatens that way of life, and considering how they have survived two invasions and occupations by two superpowers, their ruthlessness is not only rational, but understandable and even, from a strategic perspective, necessary and admirable. Less determined forces would have collapsed and surrendered years ago.

Does that mean I support the Taliban? Absolutely not. Does that mean I share their views? No. Does that mean I want to live the way they do? No.

But unlike PZ Myers and many people who apparently consider them nothing more than a momentarily useful rhetorical device, I take the Taliban seriously, for the obvious reason that anyone who can fight two numerically and technologically superior enemies to a standstill is obviously formidable and had damn well better be taken seriously. Fortunately, unlike ISIS, the Taliban appears to wish little more than to be left alone in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Here is the question for the left-leaning seculars in our midst. Suppose a young girl in your country adopted a strongly anti-homosexual ideology, was employed by Iraqi and Syrian agencies, met in secret with a top Syrian official, and over the course of four years was successful in convincing tens of thousands of people in your country that homosexuals should be killed by throwing them off rooftops. Suppose hundreds of homosexuals had already been killed in this way thanks to her public calls for such executions. Would you support her arrest and execution or would you oppose it?

Even if you would oppose it on moral or legal grounds, isn’t it easier to see the Taliban’s attack as being an entirely rational one when framed in that context? I see the shooting of Malala Yousafzai as being very little different than the English burning of Joan of Arc or the UK’s hanging of William Joyce. It was an act of war aimed at an enemy effective, not a random and irrational act of violence rooted in prejudice.

It is also worth noting that the Taliban have
left Yousafzai alone now that she’s no longer living in Pakistan. They don’t appear to care if she wants to take her message to foreign populations elsewhere, but they will not permit her to spread pro-Western propaganda among their own people.

Cantus asked me a few questions about this a few days ago that I did not see until now:

How do you justify the assertion that you’ve “never gone on the record
as supporting the Taliban’s attempt on her life”? Are you arguing that
an action being “scientifically justifiable” does not amount to
supporting it? 

Because I did not support the Taliban’s attempt on Miss Yousafzai’s life. I merely observed that the attempt was a rational act given their perspective, which I do not share. Yes, I unequivocally state that the fact that an action is justifiable from a scientific perspective neither makes it moral nor desirable. There are many things I consider to be scientifically justifiable that I nevertheless do not support because I do not believe science to be an appropriate or reliable guide to human behavior.

Fourth Generation disruptions

What applies to one field often applies to many. I thought this excerpt from Martin van Creveld’s Technology and War was interesting both in its own right and as it applies to the cultural war:

In practice, the difference between war and the deadliest games practiced by men consists precisely of the fact that, in war, the element of pure unbridled force is always present. Like a bolt of lightning coming out of a clear sky, it threatens to crash through the network of rules. Historically speaking, there have been many places and times when war began to resemble a game. Whenever this happened, there were people aplenty who chose to interpret the phenomenon as a sign that civilization was advancing, that eternal peace was possible, perhaps even that the millenium was about to arrive. On each of those occasions, however, sooner or later somebody came along who did not operate on the same code. Brandishing his sharp sword he tore apart the delicate fabric, revealing war for what it really was.

Nemesis, when it came, took different forms. The Hellenistic states, which had dominated the eastern Mediterranean, were laid low by the Romans who, to quote Polybius, were singularly inclined to use force (bia) in order to solve any problem. The jousts and other military games being played at the courts of France and Burgundy were rudely disrupted by Swiss pikemen and Spanish arquebusiers coming from “barbaric” countries on the fringe of civilization, nations that had never been properly feudalized. The European ancien régime was brought to an end when the French Revolution mobilized huge hordes of men and, unable to train them in the good old rules, hurled them forward at the enemy in formations that contemporaries regarded as crude but very effective. As might be expected, those who survived these eruptions often engaged in a spirited debate as to whether they involved progress or a reversion to barbarism. Though a disinterested historian writing long after the event might point out that they most probably represented both, this was scant consolation to the victims at the time.

To read the signs, our age also displays these symptoms. Partly because of the nuclear threat, partly because of the modern fascination with advanced technology per se, and partly for deeply rooted socio-ideological reasons, weapons are being turned into toys and conventional war into an elaborate, but fundamentally pointless, game. While games can be nice while they last, in our age too there is a real danger that they will be upset by barbarians who, refusing to abide by the rules, pick up the playing-board and use it to smash the opponent’s head. Let him who has ears to listen, listen: the call Lucifer ante portas already reverberates, and new forms of warfare are threatening to put an end to our delicate civilization.

It’s not an accident that there are similarities between the 4GW we are seeing throughout the Middle East and the 4GW we are seeing in the form of GamerGate. Both are reactions to overwhelming and irresistible centralized power; ISIS/DAESH could no more stand up to the US military in conventional battle than the average game player could influence the game media or the average SF novelist could expect to hit the New York Times bestseller list and be end-capped at Barnes & Noble without the support of a major New York publisher.

But technology and decentralization has allowed the Fourth Generation forces to bypass the conventional strong points. ISIS can coordinate global strikes from deep cover operatives anywhere in the world; a power not even the Emperor of Rome or the Queen of the British Empire possessed. A single gamer like Pew Die Pie has a bigger following than any game journalist. And, well, you already know about the Hugo Awards and the New York Times bestseller list has been rendered moot by Amazon’s.

This is a time of change, in both military and societal terms. As is usually the case, the change will NOT take the form that is expected by those who control the conventional forces, indeed, on the basis of past transitions, we can safely predict that those who have been most dependent upon the conventional models are the most likely to find themselves on the wrong side of techno-historical progress.

The Red-heeled Guards

There always comes a time when a state military jumps the shark. The U.S. military appears to be rapidly reaching that point:

“The purpose of the event is to create a basis of understanding about
sexual violence, stigmas and rape culture in the military as well as in
our community and to reinforce standards of behavior, active bystander
mentality and to be peer advisers to one’s unit and community,” Johnson
said. “By walking in heels, the hope is to instill standards of behavior
that will resonate.”

Johnson said they chose this event because the powerful message of
the heels would be best at capturing the community’s attention.

“The heels represent the rise of sexual assault within our
community,” she said. “Though the heels may feel one-sided, only
acknowledging that females suffer the horrors of rape and sexual
assault, that is not the case. The event is a synopses of the problem
that both men and women suffer in our community and society through the
stigmas, rape culture and lack of respect and education.”

Of course, they could always try the absolutely foolproof plan of ending rape and sexual assault within the military by banning women and homosexuals. On the other hand, considering that the American people increasingly appear to be one of the more likely opponents of this New Fabulous Army, seeing the US Army putting on red heels probably isn’t the worst thing in the world.

At this point, I would fully expect the U.S. military to not only lose a war with Russia or China, but lose it badly. It may have better toys as a legacy of its historical greatness, but even Rome’s legions eventually became toothless parodies of their former selves.

I’m not sure they were ever quite this ridiculous, though. The fact that even a single ROTC candidate member was willing to go along with the program demonstrates how hapless the future officer corps is going to be.

Ukraine has consequences

I’m sure the Israelis are just delighted with this particular blowback from the neocon invasion of Ukraine:

Vladimir Putin blew a geopolitical raspberry at the Obama Administration on Monday by authorizing the sale of Russia’s S-300 missile system to Iran. The Kremlin is offering the mullahs an air-defense capability so sophisticated that it would render Iran’s nuclear installations far more difficult and costly to attack should Tehran seek to build a bomb.

· Feeling better about that Iranian nuclear deal now?

· The origins of this Russian sideswipe go back to 2007, when Moscow and Tehran signed an $800 million contract for delivery of five S-300 squadrons. But in 2010 then-President Dmitry Medvedev stopped the sale under pressure from the U.S. and Israel. The United Nations Security Council the same year passed an arms-embargo resolution barring the sale of major conventional systems to the Tehran regime.

· That resolution is still in effect, but the Kremlin no longer feels like abiding by it. With the latest negotiating deadline passed and without any nuclear agreement in place, Moscow will dispatch the S-300s “promptly” to the Islamic Republic, according to the Russian Defense Ministry.

· So much for the White House hope that the West could cordon off Russia’s aggression against Ukraine while working with Mr. Putin on other matters. Russia and the West could disagree about Crimea and eastern Ukraine, the thinking went, but Washington could still solicit the Kremlin’s cooperation on the Iranian nuclear crisis.

Jerry Pournelle points out that it’s not that big a deal from a practical perspective, since any denuclearization attacks would likely have to be launched before the air-defense systems could reasonably be installed anyhow. And while he’s probably right, Putin’s action is yet one more reminder of how any US foreign policy that is not based first and foremost on the US national interest is bound to have unforeseen negative consequences, even for those who wish to manipulate it for their own ends.

When nukes are inevitable…

Relax and enjoy the decline of total war. Jerry Pournelle discusses the inevitability of Iranian nukes with a reader:

Assuming that we were to bomb Iran, how long could we expect to set back their nuclear program?


Let’s
assume, for the moment, a “surgical” strike whose targets are all
nuclear facilities. Comments I’ve read from people who ought to know
something maintain that we’d probably set back the program two or three
years; with the predictable consequence that Iran would immediately
begin the best financed and most clandestine program it could to produce
nuclear weapons *immediately*.

Here, I think, we run into the North
Korea quandary. It is already possible for any tyrant to make the case
that, however appalling you are, if you have nuclear weapons the United
States will leave you alone; whereas if you do not have nuclear weapons
you live on sufferance. That’s awkward. While I certainly wouldn’t want
to encourage nuclear proliferation, I’m not sure it’s helpful to
persuade tyrants that they *really, really need* nuclear weapons.

Now,
of course, the problem could perhaps be “solved” by strikes aimed not
at nuclear plants but at destroying Iran as a civilization. At which
point we really would have become a Satan. Or, at least, an apocalyptic
Babylon.

So my question to Mr. Stephens would be: short of becoming
monsters, there is probably no permanent way to prevent Iran from
getting nuclear weapons. In consequence, do we really want to pursue a
strategy whose likely result would be to urge them to get the bomb
*really quickly?* Or are delaying tactics more likely to produce useful
results?

Buying time is always a useful purchase. And perhaps the horse will learn to sing.
 
Yours,
Allan E. Johnson

Allan Johnson puts the case well and compellingly. Our choices are
few, and our technical capabilities are uncertain. Strikes at Iranian
nuclear capabilities will be bloody given their locations. Commando
style raids would make the destruction more thorough but would be far
more costly. The Iranians have been clever in their designs and
location. Uncertainties about the success of a surgical denuclearization
attack are quite high for the US or any conceivable coalition working
with us.

Of course that is doubly, triply, true for Israel; to assure the
attack’s success might require nuclear weapons, and I am quite certain
that at least some IDF generals have said this to the War Cabinet. First
use of nuclear weapons has so many devastating diplomatic and domestic
political consequences that I doubt Mr. Netanyahu would seriously
consider it.

Buying time may be all that is possible.

And buying time is pointless except for the small minority who benefit from the delay. In some cases, such as the Federal Reserve’s decision to delay the inevitable bankruptcies of the indebted, buying time has made the situation observably worse for most.

The real question is if Israel genuinely feels itself threatened by a nuclear Iran or not. Considering that Martin van Creveld has been very clear about the fact that it does not, we can safely discount the likelihood that Israel will do anything, much less nuke Iran. I don’t doubt that Israel would do so if they perceived a legitimate  existential threat, but the fact that they have not done so already suffices to indicate that they do not.

After reading several of van Creveld’s books from THE TRANSFORMATION OF WAR to A HISTORY OF STRATEGY and TECHNOLOGY AND WAR, it has become very clear that the primary military function of nuclear weapons is to take 20th century total war off the table. This does not mean that war will not take place, but rather, that it will take place on a scale more similar to those wars prior to the mass mobilizations of entire populations and the targeting of enemy civilians.

Remember, war has historically almost NEVER been primarily about killing the enemy, but rather destroying his will to fight by demoralizing him. And that should be of considerably more concern to an utterly, and literally, de-moralized West than one more nation possessing weapons it has no intention of using unless attacked.

Sun Tzu and the SJWs

In the podcast interview last night, I made a comment about how SJWs have been able to apply one element of Sun Tzu’s strategic recommendations to great success throughout the culture. And, when I thought a bit more about it, I realized there is also a second element that their deceitful nature allows them to successfully implement reliably without even being aware of it.

The first is this:

It has been said aforetime that he who
knows both sides has nothing to fear in a
hundred fights; he who is ignorant of the
enemy, and fixes his eyes only on his
own side, conquers, and the next time is
defeated; he who not only is ignorant of
the enemy, but also of his own resources,
is invariably defeated.

The second is this:

War is a thing of pretence: therefore,
when capable of action, we pretend disability;
when near to the enemy, we
pretend to be far; when far away, we
pretend to be near. Allure the enemy by giving him a small
advantage. Confuse and capture him. If
there be defects, give an appearance of
perfection, and awe the enemy. Pretend
to be strong, and so cause the enemy to
avoid you. Make him angry, and confuse
his plans. Pretend to be inferior, and
cause him to despise you. If he have superabundance of strength, tire him out;
if united, make divisions in his camp.
Attack weak points, and appear in unexpected
places.

Remember, SJWs ALWAYS LIE. Deceit is not second nature to them, it is their first and most reliable instinct. They will lie when they do not have to. They will lie when there is no reason to. They will lie when their lies are easily detected. They will lie when their lies are bound to be exposed. They will lie and and dissemble and exaggerate and spin with such shameless abandon that the average individual will find it almost impossible to believe they are doing so.

And because war is a thing of pretence, their deceitful nature makes them very successful in conflict as long as their enemy does not realize how deceitful they are, anticipate their inevitable pretenses, and take advantage of them.

Sun Tzu says: “victory is to the side that excels
in the foregoing matters.” That means that if you do not anticipate SJW deceit, if you are not proactively prepared to penetrate, expose, and defend against their lies, you will lose to them.

But defeat is not inevitable, it’s not even likely, given the first element. Due to their deceitful and self-deceptive natures, SJWs neither know themselves nor their enemy. I’ll have a post later today demonstrating this: their descriptions of me and my motivations are risibly far off the mark. Because they are emotional and for the most part limited to the rhetorical level, no amount of information is capable of changing their minds, so SJW failure tends to reinforce itself rather than be corrected. (That’s why they always double-down right up until they give up.)

This ignorant self-delusion is significantly to our advantage. The problem conservatives have is that while they know themselves, they fix their eyes only on their own side and remain ignorant of the enemy. Thus the conservative “conquers, and the next time is defeated”. The conservative knows himself and mistakenly assumes that his enemy is just like him.

Because they know neither themselves nor us, the SJWs will be “invariably defeated” so long as we identify them and see them for what they are: liars and self-deceivers. We have the ability to win every conflict with them, and yet we will inevitably lose everywhere we refuse to see them for what they are or refuse to take the field.

And, by the by, this is why reading books like A HISTORY OF STRATEGY is so often useful. One simply never knows how the intellectual seeds planted by the author will sprout in one’s mind.

UPDATE: Case in point:

神乃木荘龍 ‏@SoryuKaminogi
.@voxday You’re abysmally stupid and yet somehow disturbingly malign. Like a crocodile or a cancerous hangnail. 

Notice how their rhetoric is incoherent. They have to cling to the idea that their enemy is stupid – to do otherwise would risk harming their fragile self-esteem – but somehow this “abysmally stupid” opponent is a dangerous risk. This can only be explained by attributing the danger to evil that goes well beyond the pedestrian variety, and reaches the level of disturbing malignity.

So, they choose to believe in a very stupid, very malignant enemy rather than an intelligent opposition. Needless to say, this violates the first principle mentioned above, which is to know your enemy. They simply don’t know themselves well enough to permit them to do that.

Post-trinitarian levels of war

I’ve been reading Martin van Creveld’s excellent Technology and War, and this struck me as pertinent in light of the discussion we’ve been having about whether the problem with the Western militaries is at the Physical, the Mental, or the Moral level:

Once the politicians and commanders decided to mobilize their male populations, in one sense they overshot the mark. In 1914, and to a lesser extent in 1939, the instinctive reaction of the military to the unexpected prolongation of hostilities was to put everything and everybody into uniform. As the war dragged on, it became increasingly clear that this was a mistake. The same technology that made military mobilization possible also demanded that it remain incomplete. It was not enough for machines to be deployed on the battlefield. For them to do useful service, it was first necessary to have them designed, developed, produced, and supplied with fuel and spare parts. War itself extended its tentacles deep to the rear, spreading from the trenches into the fields, the mines, and the factories. Not content with the mobilization of those, it reached further into the design bureaus and, ultimately, into peaceful university laboratories where the most esoteric work was done and the potentially most powerful weapons were developed.

As war expanded in this way, both the meaning of strategy and its scope underwent a subtle, and at first imperceptible, change. Instead of being merely a question of concentrating the maximum force at the decisive point at the front, as Jomini and Clausewitz had taught, strategy now acquired the added dimension of an exercise in correctly distributing one’s total resources, both human and material, between the fighting front and the rear. Instead of being concerned with waging military operations, it became occupied with the overall coordination and integration of a country’s military effort. To cope with the new reality, a new term—grand strategy—was coined by the theoreticians and sometimes applied by those in charge.

For a variety of reasons, both ideological and structural, grand strategy was a field where Germany lagged behind the Western Allies during both World Wars, and for this, of course, she paid the ultimate penalty of defeat.

The levels of war aren’t difficult to understand once you grasp that there is NO DIFFERENCE between “the military” and “the politicians” or “the brave soldiers” and “society”. This is not new, it’s the framework with which military strategists and theorists have worked since Clausewitz wrote his famous dictum: “War is a mere continuation of politics by other means.”

I provided the example of Fabius Maximus in the previous comments, apparently to little avail. But I will repeat it in light of the quote above and perhaps it will help shed some light on the matter. Now, after Hannibal slaughtered 50,000 Romans and Italians at Cannae, the first thing Fabius Maximus did in taking charge was go back to
Rome and shore up public support for the war against Hannibal.

When word reached Rome of the disastrous Roman defeat under Varro and Paullus at the Battle of Cannae, the Senate and the People of Rome turned to Fabius for guidance. They had believed his strategy to be flawed before, but now they thought him to be as wise as the gods. He walked the streets of Rome, assured as to eventual Roman victory, in an attempt to comfort his fellow Romans. Without his support, the senate might have remained too frightened to even meet. He placed guards at the gates of the city to stop the frightened Romans from fleeing, and regulated mourning activities. He set times and places for this mourning, and ordered that each family perform such observances within their own private walls, and that the mourning should be complete within a month; following the completion of these mourning rituals, the entire city was purified of its blood-guilt in the deaths. This decree effectively outlawed competitive outdoor mourning, which could have had a devastating psychological impact on the survivors.

Only after he had secured the Moral level did he change Roman strategy. And there we see the interaction of the
different levels of war.

1. Moral.
2. Strategic.
3. Operational.
4. Tactical.
5. Physical.

Because
Fabius Maximus took care of the Moral level first, he was able to adopt a better
Strategy, which he knew would require a considerable amount of time, hence his nickname Cunctator, or “delayer”. Because that superior strategy was designed to affect the Operational
level, he put himself in a superior Tactical position as Hannibal’s
supplies and reinforcements dried up, thereby forcing Hannibal to retreat to Africa.

This is an amusingly ignorant statement from Wikipedia: “Fabius’ own military success was small.”

Nothing could be further from the truth. In the end, thanks to his superior Moral and Strategic generalship, Rome found itself in a position
to win on the very Physical level that Hannibal had previously
slaughtered them on at Trebia, Lake Trasimene, and Cannae. Fabius Maximus drove Hannibal out of Rome despite never seriously engaging Hannibal on the Tactical or Physical levels, something Varro and Paulus were unable to accomplish with 86,400 brave, well-drilled, well-armed Roman legionaries.

Prepare to be disappointed

The Western media’s blind faith in democracy and magic negroes would be almost touching if it wasn’t so… blitheringly stupid:

Nothing invigorates democracy more than an incumbent’s defeat. In that and other respects, challenger Muhammadu Buhari’s win over President Goodluck Jonathan represents a potentially transformative moment for Nigeria — a victory by the opposition in Africa’s biggest economy. It may begin Nigeria’s first peaceful transition of power between political parties since independence from the U.K. in 1960.

The aftermath of Nigeria’s last presidential election, also between Buhari and Jonathan, was marred by violence that tapped divisions between north and south and Christians and Muslims. Thankfully, this time, President Jonathan has already called Buhari to congratulate him. That said, the first task facing Buhari, a former Muslim general from the north who had taken power after a military coup in the 1980s, will be to persuade Jonathan’s supporters that his campaign pledges to fight corruption and crime and restore growth are not a cover for settling old scores. One of Buhari’s former critics, the writer Wole Soyinka, believes Buhari when he says that he has shed his authoritarian past and become a “born again” democrat. Let’s hope they’re both right.

This reads as if it’s written tongue-in-cheek. A country with a Muslim insurgency just elected a Muslim who formerly led a military coup and we’re supposed to anticipate a positive outcome here?

I’m not saying it’s impossible, merely that it is unlikely. After all, the violence after the last election was because Mr. Buhari lost.

Why Western troops can’t win

Martin van Creveld, the author of The Transformation of War, Technology and War, and the newly published Castalia House books A History of Strategy: From Sun Tzu to William S. Lind and Equality: The Impossible Quest, explains how the technological transformation of war has ruined the effectiveness of modern Western militiaries despite their massive technological advantages over their opponents. From his essay entitled “Pussycats”:

For several decades now, Western armed forces—which keep preening themselves as the best-trained, best organized, best equipped best led, in history—have been turned into pussycats. Being pussycats, they went from one defeat to the next. True, in 1999 they did succeed in imposing their will on Serbia. But only because the opponent was a small, weak state (at the time, the Serb armed forces, exhausted by a prolonged civil war, were rated 35th in the world); and even then only because that state was practically defenseless in the air. The same applies to Libya in 2011. Over there, indigenous bands on the ground did most of the fighting and took all the casualties. In both cases, when it came to engaging in ground combat, man against man, the West, with the U.S at its head, simply did not have what it takes.

On other occasions things were worse still. Western armies tried to create order in Somalia and were kicked out by the “Skinnies,” as they called their lean but mean opponents. They tried to beat the Taliban in Afghanistan, and were kicked out. They tried to impose democracy (and get their hands on oil) in Iraq, and ended up leaving with their tails between their legs. The cost of these foolish adventures to the U.S alone is said to have been around 1 trillion—1,000,000,000,000—dollars. With one defeat following another, is it any wonder that, when those forces were called upon to put an end to the civil war in Syria, they and the societies they serve preferred to let the atrocities go on?

By far the most important single reason behind the repeated failures is the fact that, one and all, these were luxury wars. With nuclear weapons deterring large-scale attack, for seven decades now no Western country has waged anything like a serious, let alone existential, struggle against a more or less equal opponent. As the troops took on opponents much weaker than themselves—often in places they had never heard about, often for reasons nobody but a few politicians understood—they saw no reason why they should get themselves killed. Given the circumstances, indeed, doing so would have been the height of stupidity on their part. Yet from the time the Persians at Marathon in 490 B.C were defeated by the outnumbered Greeks right down to the present, troops whose primary concern is not to get themselves killed have never be able to fight, let alone win.

Thanks to many of you, A History of Strategy: From Sun Tzu to William S. Lind is the #1 bestseller in History>Military>Strategy. The reviews are excellent; even the single 3-star review concludes: “Belongs of the shelf of every person who is interested in the theory and practice of warfare.” 

Another review says: “A History of Strategy: From Sun Tzu to William S. Lind earned five stars from me for being so readable and packed with content, despite being so brief. This is the first book of Martin van Creveld’s I have read and I look forward to delving into his catalog. In addition to being a good read, Martin van Creveld’s svelte A History of Strategy: From Sun Tzu to William S. Lind is a wonderful way for those not well read in military strategy to begin their self-directed study. Martin van Creveld discusses all the notable war theoretician authors more or less in accord with their significance as well as some of the war artisan authors. Creveld also provides a “Further Readings” section to aid those so inclined. Given the limitations imposed on him (low page count) Creveld does a fine job covering the material.”

I’m in the middle of reading van Creveld’s Technology and War myself, and I can say with confidence that the reviewer will find delving into that catalog more than worthwhile. As for the “Pussycats” essay, the observation by a military historian should cause some serious strategic rethinking on the part of those who insist on repeatedly sending unmotivated troops unsupported by popular enthusiasm into unwinnable military conflicts. It won’t, but it should.