Tag: war

3GW at sea?

The US military may be beginning to learn the hard way that high-tech warfare is powerful, but fragile:

On 10 April 2014, the USS Donald Cook entered the waters of the Black Sea and on 12 April a Russian Su-24 tactical bomber flew over the vessel triggering an incident that,
according to several media reports, completely demoralized its crew, so
much so that the Pentagon issued a protest.

The USS Donald Cook (DDG-75) is a 4th generation guided missile destroyer whose key weapons are Tomahawk cruise missiles with a range of up to 2,500 kilometers, and capable of carrying nuclear explosives. This ship carries 56 Tomahawk missiles in standard mode, and 96 missiles in attack mode.

The US destroyer is equipped with the most recent Aegis Combat System.
It is an integrated naval weapons systems which can link together the
missile defense systems of all vessels embedded within the same network,
so as to ensure the detection, tracking and destruction of hundreds of
targets at the same time. In addition, the USS Donald Cook is
equipped with 4 large radars, whose power is comparable to that of
several stations. For protection, it carries more than fifty
anti-aircraft missiles of various types.

Meanwhile, the Russian Su-24 that buzzed the USS Donald Cook carried neither bombs nor missiles but only a basket mounted under the fuselage, which, according to the Russian newspaper Rossiyskaya Gazeta, contained a Russian electronic warfare device called Khibiny.

As the Russian jet approached the US vessel, the electronic device
disabled all radars, control circuits, systems, information
transmission, etc. on board the US destroyer. In other words, the
all-powerful Aegis system, now hooked up – or about to be – with
the defense systems installed on NATO’s most modern ships was shut down,
as turning off the TV set with the remote control.

The Russian Su-24 then simulated a missile attack against the USS Donald Cook,
which was left literally deaf and blind. As if carrying out a training
exercise, the Russian aircraft – unarmed – repeated the same maneuver 12
times before flying away.

After that, the 4th generation destroyer immediately set sail towards a port in Romania. Since that incident, which the Atlanticist media have carefully
covered up despite the widespread reactions sparked among defense
industry experts, no US ship has ever approached Russian territorial
waters again.  According to some specialized media, 27 sailors from the USS Donald Cook requested to be relieved from active service.

This has been going around, but while the SU-24 is confirmed to have successfully buzzed the destroyer, some of the details are being disputed.

In truth the Russian fighter did fly 12 times provocatively close to the US destroyer, and Col. Warren did report the incident to Reuters. However, this is where the truth ends.

In reality Warren told the following to the agency: “This provocative and unprofessional Russian action is inconsistent with international protocols and previous agreements on the professional interaction between our militaries.”

The plane appeared to be unarmed, according to Warren. The pilot did not respond to multiple queries from the Cook. Warren also added that another Russian fighter was also flying in the area, but not as close to the ship as the other one.

Warren said the vessel was not in any serious danger. The Pentagon website cited the Colonel’s words: “The Donald Cook is more than capable of defending herself against two SU-24s.

I think that the only way we can know the truth is by observing if US Navy ships continue to enter the Black Sea or not. One thing American readers may not know is that Russian warplanes have tested NATO air defenses more than 40 times in the last nine months. So it’s far from implausible that they are sending a similar “back off” message to the US naval forces as well in light of the Obama administration’s foolish, if not downright insane, decision to interfere in Ukraine.

However, the specific details appear to be closer to a Tom Clancy novel than anything that happened in 2014. It’s much more likely that 27 pregnant sailors were quietly relieved from active duty than 27 sailors quit from sheer terror of Russian ECW capabilities.

Two failed wars

A lieutenant general regrets the wasted lives of his soldiers, thrown away for nothing in Iraq and Afghanistan:

As a senior commander in Iraq and Afghanistan, I lost 80 soldiers.
Despite their sacrifices, and those of thousands more, all we have to
show for it are two failed wars. This fact eats at me every day, and Veterans Day is tougher than most…. We can convince ourselves that we did our part, and a few more diplomats or civilian leaders should have done theirs. Similar myths no doubt comforted Americans who fought under the command of Robert E. Lee in the Civil War or William C. Westmoreland in Vietnam. But as a three-star general who spent four years trying to win this thing — and failing — I now know better.

We did not understand the enemy, a guerrilla network embedded in a quarrelsome, suspicious civilian population. We didn’t understand our own forces, which are built for rapid, decisive conventional operations, not lingering, ill-defined counterinsurgencies. We’re made for Desert Storm, not Vietnam. As a general, I got it wrong. Like my peers, I argued to stay the course, to persist and persist, to “clear/hold/build” even as the “hold” stage stretched for months, and then years, with decades beckoning. We backed ourselves season by season into a long-term counterinsurgency in Iraq, then compounded it by doing likewise in Afghanistan.

What went wrong in Iraq and in Afghanistan isn’t the stuff of legend. It won’t bring people into the recruiting office, or make for good speeches on Veterans Day. Reserve those honors for the brave men and women who bear the burdens of combat.

That said, those who served deserve an accounting from the generals. What happened? How? And, especially, why? It has to be a public assessment, nonpartisan and not left to the military. (We tend to grade ourselves on the curve.) Something along the lines of the 9/11 Commission is in order. We owe that to our veterans and our fellow citizens.

Such an accounting couldn’t be more timely. Today we are hearing some, including those in uniform, argue for a robust ground offensive against the Islamic State in Iraq. Air attacks aren’t enough, we’re told. Our Kurdish and Iraqi Army allies are weak and incompetent. Only another surge can win the fight against this dire threat. Really? If insanity is defined as doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results, I think we’re there.

As a veteran, and a general who learned hard lessons in two lost campaigns, I’d like to suggest an alternative. Maybe an incomplete and imperfect effort to contain the Islamic State is as good as it gets. Perhaps the best we can or should do is to keep it busy, “degrade” its forces, harry them or kill them, and seek the long game at the lowest possible cost. It’s not a solution that is likely to spawn a legend. But in the real world, it just may well give us something better than another defeat.

Clearly the general should have read ON WAR. William S. Lind could have told him – in fact, did tell him – that the US military could not defeat the Pashtun in Afghanistan or rebuild the state it shattered in Iraq.

SJWs are Gramscian culture warriors

In which esr points out that SJW tactics are the same as those utilized by the Nazis and the Communists before them:

Americans have never really understood ideological warfare. Our gut-level assumption is that everybody in the world really wants the same comfortable material success we have. We use “extremist” as a negative epithet. Even the few fanatics and revolutionary idealists we have, whatever their political flavor, expect everybody else to behave like a bourgeois.

We don’t expect ideas to matter — or, when they do, we expect them to matter only because people have been flipped into a vulnerable mode by repression or poverty. Thus all our divagation about the “root causes” of Islamic terrorism, as if the terrorists’ very clear and very ideological account of their own theory and motivations is somehow not to be believed.

By contrast, ideological and memetic warfare has been a favored tactic for all of America’s three great adversaries of the last hundred years — Nazis, Communists, and Islamists….

I think there is still an excellent chance that the West can recover
from suicidalism without going through a fevered fascist episode and
waging a genocidal war. But to do so, we have to do more than recognize
Stalin’s memes; we have to reject them. We have to eject postmodern
leftism from our universities, transnational progressivism from our
politics, and volk-Marxism from our media.

The process won’t be pretty. But I fear that if the rest of us don’t
hound the po-mo Left and its useful idiots out of public life with
attack and ridicule and shunning, the hard Right will sooner or later
get the power to do it by means that include a lot of killing. I don’t
want to live in that future, and I don’t think any of my readers do,
either. If we want to save a liberal, tolerant civilization for our
children, we’d better get to work.

Esr is addressing the danger posed by Islam here, not SJWs, and he’s talking about the entire West rather than the assault on the game industry but he’s describing the same tactics derived from the same playbook as part of the same anti-Western cultural war.

I have little doubt that he is right. Many, if not most, #GamerGaters would rather drink the blood of every single SJW than submit to them. In the same vein, many Americans would rather see a ruthless pro-white, pro-Western government led by the hard-eyed likes of Vladimir Putin than watch their nation continue to vanish in a swarm of third world immigration. The Left, for all their drama queen antics, doesn’t realize how many Men of the West are never, ever going to submit to them.

And if the sweet reason of the esr’s prove impotent, the Breiviks will rise. Esr thought, back in 2006, that there was an excellent chance the West can recover from the intellectual disease without violence. Eight years later, in 2014, I am considerably less sanguine about those odds.

What created the Fourth Generation?

The Israeli military historian Martin van Creveld has an interesting hypothesis concerning where the seeds of the Fourth Generation’s military bypass of the state were planted:

Many of the distinctions between army and people which had been established by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century international law also broke down. Armed violence, far from being limited to combatants, escaped its bounds. Terrible atrocities, including even the planned starvation of tens of millions, were carried out against the inhabitants of occupied countries both in Europe and in Asia. The populations themselves did not acquiesce with their lot. Occupation per se was now regarded as a monstrous injustice and resisted. In places such as Yugoslavia, Tito’s partisans, though comprising neither government nor army, came close to waging full-scale conventional conflict; and indeed in retrospect this may have been the most important of all the changes which the War brought about. Meanwhile the sky was filled with mighty fleets of heavy bombers—later, flying bombs and ballistic missiles—headed in both directions. They deliberately set out to kill civilians, women and children not excluded. Entire cities were destroyed by firestorms in a manner not seen in Europe for three centuries. A climax of violence was reached in 1945 when two nuclear bombs were dropped on Japan, killing 150,000 people in flat disregard of the fact that peace negotiations were already going on in Moscow at the time. Officially the destruction of enemy civilians was justified by their wickedness. In practice, often they had to be declared wicked so that they could be destroyed by the indiscriminate weapons available….

Metternich, looking back from the eve of his resignation in 1848, might have felt satisfied with the results of the Congress of Vienna despite several limited revolutionary outbreaks that had taken place in the meantime. Similarly, a backward glance from the perspective of 1990 makes the attempt to put the genie back into the bottle appear successful up to a point; those who set out to establish a new world order after World War II did their work reasonably well. The principal reasons for this outcome were the ever-present fear of nuclear Armageddon and, of course, sheer war-weariness. At any rate, to date there has been no repetition of “total” conflict on the model established by both World Wars. When the principal military powers went to war—always excepting the “low-intensity conflicts” which, though they formed a large majority, hardly counted as a war—they usually abided by the rules. Whatever may be said about the Falkland War, it did not witness either the breakdown of distinctions between the military and civilians or, consequently, large-scale atrocities. The same is true about the Arab-Israeli Wars, except perhaps for the first; though in this case things might have looked different had victory gone to the other side.

The point, however, had been made and would not be forgotten. Whatever else total war may have done, it put an end to any idea that armed conflict, including specifically the largest ever fought, is necessarily governed by the Clausewitzian Universe. Historically speaking, in fact, trinitarian war—in other words, a war of state against state and army against army—is a comparatively recent phenomenon; hence, the things that the future has in store for humanity may also be very different indeed.

The interesting thing here is that he presented this idea that war had moved beyond the state and trinitarian war in his book The Transformation of War, which was published in 1991. After all, if since the people have become the targets of total war, they have been made participants whether they will or no. And so, as Lind told a group of Marines at Quantico in his Four Generations of Modern War lecture: “[4GW doesn’t want to fight you, it wants to bypass you and go straight after the society you are supposed to be defending.”

Cultural war on Twitter

In a cultural war, communication is king. So, that’s why it behooves the potential 4GW forces of the Christian right to learn from #GamerGate as well as from the tactics of our SJW enemies. Here is one example of an SJW attempting to mine for DISQUALIFY:

Vox Day ‏@voxday
#GamerGate “Saying things on Twitter both feels futile and dangerous” – SJW. They are openly afraid of public ridicule now. Show no mercy.
28 retweets 33 favorites

Average Joe ‏@ridinjustice
@voxday are you really saying to publicly ridicule SJW without mercy??

Vox Day ‏@voxday
@ridinjustice Until we can apply for hunting licenses, yes, that will have to do.

Average Joe ‏@ridinjustice
@voxday and then what?

Vox Day ‏@voxday
@ridinjustice Then we will convince you of the error of your ways with Aristotelian dialectic and sweet reason.

Average Joe ‏@ridinjustice
@voxday why not use reason now?

Why not? Because, as Average Joe and I both know, the SJWs are incapable of having their minds changed by mere information. If they were capable of discourse at the dialectical level, they would not be SJWs in the first place. They are creatures of emotion, they communicate via rhetoric, and what Average Joe was seeking was something capable of inflaming emotions that he could wave as a red flag to incite his side. That’s how they operate.

But there was no need to spell it out or waste any more time on his fishing expedition. I baited him with the promise of a really big red flag, and then denied it to him. But that wasn’t the important part, that was just me amusing myself. The important part was the initial tweet, which the 63 retweets and favorites indicate had the effect of remoralizing people on our side due to the revelation of the demoralization on the part of one of our enemies.

As Col. Boyd observed, the moral element is the highest level of war, and morale is a vital part of it. (One can even connect Boyd’s model to the Aristotelian perspective by observing that rhetoric is an important weapon at the moral level just as dialectic is a primary tool at the intellectual level.) So, when people sneer at blog posts and tweets, all they are doing is indicating that they don’t understand how war operates at its highest level. One reason ISIS is so formidable is that they put out over 90 tweets per minute, a constant stream of remoralization for their own troops and demoralization for their enemies.

Later today, I will answer in more detail the question that was posed to me: “what can we do?” But one effective thing that everyone who is reading this can do, very easily, is this. Create a Twitter account. Follow me, Roosh, Adam Baldwin, Nero, Hotwheels, the Leader of GamerGate, The Devs of GamerGate, and other reliable schwerpunkts. Then do at least one tweet with a relevant hashtag, one retweet and one favorite per day. If even 500 people do that, it will have an observable impact on the moral level.

Remember, this is not about games per se. Games are merely the latest battleground that the cultural Marxists have chosen to attack. This is about the cultural war that has affected, and demoralized, so many of you. If you want your culture back, you will have to fight for it, and this is the first ground where there is a strong and fearless anti-SJW force that you can reinforce. So, whether you are a gamer or not, stop complaining about ads on TV and horrible messages in Disney movies and strike back. This is just a small step, of course, but every journey has to begin with one.

Of course, you have to expect this sort of thing from time to time. But don’t be put off by it, as women on our side can actually use it to our advantage:

Vox Day ‏@voxday
#GamerGate Women already have their game industry without men. I believe it’s called “Zynga”.

Damon Gant ‏@Demon_Gant
@voxday fuck you.

Vox Day ‏@voxday
@Demon_Gant Please stop harassing me. Your tweet is offensive, Indigenophobic, and harassment.

Damon Gant ‏@Demon_Gant
@voxday fuck you, you disingenuous asshole.

Vox Day ‏@voxday
@Demon_Gant You’re being repeatedly abusive. This is harassment and Indigenophobia. Please stop harassing me.

Damon Gant ‏@Demon_Gant
@voxday Shut up. Everyone hates you. You’re an awful human being. Pretend victim language doesn’t disguise your cloacal stench. #gamergate

Vox Day ‏@voxday now
@Demon_Gant This is the third time you have harassed me. I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to report your abusive tweets to Twitter now.

Here is another good one:

Robot Archie ‏@RobotArchie
To repeat that warning to the #gamergate community. @voxday is a genuine racist. He has done years worth of damage to the SF community.

Unsurprisingly, the Concern Rabbit didn’t get the response for which he was looking, but was instead met with derision by several parties for his racist indigenophobia and Hispanic hate.

A soldier’s review of ON WAR

Derek Thornton, a 20-year veteran of the Mississippi National Guard, reviews William S. Lind’s ON WAR:

Having
been deployed to Iraq twice, I naturally retain much interest in
events in the Middle East, especially Iraq. Before my first
deployment, I was a true believer in “nation building”, the
ascendancy of democracy and the superiority of the U.S. military.
Such is no longer the case. By my second deployment, the first two
were at the back of any priority list and I concentrated on training
my fellow soldiers so that we could all just come back alive. I still
thought the U.S. military was the best, but had niggling doubts due
to our inability to truly defeat our foe. With recent events and ISIS
rolling over the sham of a nation we left behind in Iraq and the
constant destabilization of states in the region by our own
governments backing, I was coming to a lot of conclusions. This book
showed me that those conclusions had already been reached long before
they started crystallizing in my mind….

 I
cannot stress [enough] the importance of reading this book. We continue to
repeat the mistakes of the past again and again. We need a new way
forward to meet the coming challenges.

I think it is very important to observe that while the politicians and the military-industrial complex may be dubious about the 4GW framework (about which more later today), the soldiers and Marines who have been deployed and possess actual combat experience tend to intuitively grasp its relevance. For those who are particularly interested in gaining a more complete understanding of 4GW and its implication for the 21st century, you may wish to obtain a copy of the lecture that started it all in 1988, prior to the famous article that was simultaneously published in the Marine Corps Gazette and Military Review.

Fortunately, then-Major Greg Thiele, USMC, had the foresight to video a subsequent repeat of that first lecture, called The Four Generations of Modern War, given extemporaneously at Quantico to a group of USMC officers, which he graciously sent me a few weeks ago. I transcribed the lecture, edited it to correct a minor historical infelicity or two – it was indeed General Weygand, and not Gamelin, with whom Churchill was meeting in June 1940 – and we are now making the combined audio/ebook available exclusively from the Castalia House store for $3.99. This, and other forthcoming audiobooks will not be available on Audible for the time being because we intend to keep our audiobook prices considerably lower than Audible insists on charging.

However, please keep in mind two things. First, the audio quality is not what you’d get in a studio. Thanks to Vidad cleaning it up, you will have no problem understanding any of it, but it is a live speech and not a studio-recorded narration. Second, if you are a newsletter subscriber, you will have the opportunity to obtain it free in the future as part of our New Release program, so you may want to keep that in mind.

Russia supports democracy

I don’t see how the USA and the neocons, with their oft-expressed love of forcibly exporting democracy and self-determination, can possibly do anything but endorse Vladimir Putin’s muscular endorsement of free elections in Ukraine:

Ukraine’s military accused Russia on Friday of sending a column of 32 tanks and truckloads of troops into the country’s east to support pro-Russian separatists fighting government forces.

Thursday’s cross-border incursion, if confirmed, is a significant escalation of a conflict that has killed more than 4,000 people since the separatists rose up in mid-April and would call into question Russia’s commitment to a two-month-old ceasefire deal.

The truce has looked particularly fragile this week, with each side accusing the other of violations after separatist elections last Sunday condemned as illegitimate by the West.

I was always skeptical about past claims of Russian incursions. Putin strikes me more as the sort of man who isn’t going to intervene in a small and plausibly deniable way. He wants to win, and he wants to win in a manner that lets his opponent know that he’s the winner.

“Almost everywhere, the state is losing”

Syria is de facto lost to the forces of 4GW chaos:

Harakat Hazm and the Syrian Revolutionary Front just surrendered to Al Qaeda in Syria. Most people have never heard of either organization, though they’ve been sort of quietly backed by the US since they oppose the Assad regime, the Al Qaeda-linked Nusra Front, and the Islamic State. Now they may be effectively finished.

The US waited far too long to back proxies in Syria while the Islamic State and the Nusra Front spent years building up their strength and conquering territory. Throwing support behind anyone but the Kurds at this point is too little too late.

It’s over.

They were bad proxies anyway. The Syrian Revolutionary Front was an Islamist organization. Less deranged than Al Qaeda and the Islamic State, sure, but it was still an Islamist organization. Harakat Hazm is more secular, but it consists of a measly 5,000 fighters while the Islamic State has as many as 100,000.

Syria is gone.

Some believe that the destruction of the sovereign states is part of the globalist master plan. Others believe that the USA is practicing divide-and-conquer in the Arab world at the behest of The Nonexistent Lobby That Dare Not Be Named. Still others think that the first Muslim President is laying the groundwork for the rise of the New Caliphate.

Regardless, the tiger has a way of escaping the control of those clinging to its tail. Neither the architects of WWI nor the architects of WWII realized their goals, and with two formerly stable dictatorships, Iraq and Syria, now collapsing into areas of Fourth Generation disorder like Afghanistan, Somalia, and Yemen, it may not be long before we see larger, more important countries, such as Egypt, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia following suit.

Importing war through immigration

Australia has successfully imported the centuries-old Sunni-Shi’ite war:

A friend of Rasoul Al-Musawi, the man who was shot outside an Islamic prayer centre in Sydney’s south-west, said he was targeted by people claiming to be supporters of Islamic State.

Mr Al-Musawi’s friend – who did not wish to be named – is a Shiite Muslim and said the shooting in Greenacre was motivated by the sectarian struggle in the Middle East.

‘They called us “Shia dogs” and they threatened to come back down tonight and kill you, shoot you, whatever,’ he told ABC Radio on Monday.

This further demonstrates the insanity of the belief in the transformational magic of geographic location. And it is an ominous harbinger of the 4GW in the West that William S. Lind warned more than a decade ago would result from immigration combined with the USA’s misadventures in the Middle East.

In “Germany’s Blunder”, Mr. Lind writes:

“For the Establishment, the hard part will be accepting the need to isolate ourselves from centers and sources of disorder.
 
Centers of disorder will be the growing number of failed states. Sources of disorder will certainly include Islam, thanks to the concept of jihad, even if some Islamic societies are ordered internally. Isolation will mean minimizing contacts that involve flows of people, money, materials and new primary loyalties, such as religions ideologies, into the United States. First and foremost, that requires ending the current de facto policy of open immigration. In a 4th Generation world, open immigration is akin to leaving the castle gate open at night when the Huns are in the neighborhood.”

In “4GW on the Home Front” he observes:

“In a 4th Generation world, invasion by immigration can easily be more dangerous than invasion by a foreign army. At some point, the foreign army will go home. But immigrants stay, and if they do not acculturate, they permanently change the cultural landscape. As the Dutch recently discovered, the changes may go beyond introducing some highly spiced dishes into an otherwise bland cuisine.”
 
Both of these were written more than 10 years ago, in 2004. Both are selections from Mr. Lind’s ON WAR, in the event you are interested in getting a deeper insight into where the world is heading as 4th Generation warfare spreads around the world.

In defense of civilian military theorists

There is long and documented history of military veterans being dubious about the wisdom of listening to so-called military experts who personally lack military experience. It brings one to mind of the famous incident of Machiavelli’s visit to a mercenary camp:

While in Piacenza [Machiavelli] spent some time in the camp of the famous mercenary Giovanni delle Bande Nere, whose small army was the one truly capable fighting force in the anti-imperial league. According to the writer Matteo Bandello, who claims to have been there, the battle-tested general thought it might be amusing to teach the author of The Art of War a lesson. Opening Machiavelli’s book to the chapter on infantry drills, Giovanni asked him to attempt to put into practice what he’d written by marching his three thousand men about the parade ground. Machiavelli gamely took up the challenge but, not surprisingly, proved hopelessly out of his depth. The troops were soon milling about in confusion and could only be disentangled by the prompt intervention of their captain.

“How great the difference is,” Bandello sneered, “between womeone who knows and who has not set in operation what he knows and someone who, as well as knowing, has often rolled up his sleeves and… has derived his thoughts and mental view from outward deeds.”
– Machiavelli: A Biography, Miles J. Unger, p. 324

There is, therefore, good reason to be initially skeptical of any intellectual whose ideas are both untested and rejected by those with practical experience. If nothing else, 80 years of failure to successfully manage the economy with Keynesian, Neo-Keynesian, and Ur-Keynesian theories should suffice to justify a considerable quantity of skepticism in this regard.

But skepticism is not always justified, particularly when there are more than a few experienced practitioners who recognize the intrinsic value in the theory, when the theory is successfully implemented, and when it is used as the basis of accurate predictive models. A Marine recently sent me a copy of William S. Lind’s Maneuver Warfare Handbook and I was somewhat amused to read the Foreword by Colonel John C. Studt, USMC (Ret), written nearly 30 year ago, in light of the fact that some critics of maneuver warfare doctrine, to say nothing of 4GW theory, are still attempting to DISQUALIFY Mr. Lind’s ideas on the grounds of his lack of military service.

The author of this book has never served a day of active military duty, and he has never been shot at, although there are no doubt some senior officers who would like to remedy that latter deficiency. Yet he demonstrates an amazing understanding of the art of war, as have only a small handful of military thinkers I have come across in my career.

I served over 31 years active duty with the Marine Corps, saw combat in both Korea and Vietnam, and attended service schools from The Basic School to the National War College. Yet only toward the end of my military career did I realize how little I really understood the art of war. Even as a Pfc in Korea, after being med-evaced along with most of my platoon after a fruitless frontal assault against superior North Korean forces, it seemed to me there had to be a better way to wage war. Seventeen years later, commanding a battalion at Khe Sanh, I was resolved that none of my Marines would die for lack of superior combat power.

But we were still relying on the concentration of superior firepower to win—–essentially still practicing Grant’s attrition warfare. And we were still doing frontal assaults!

When I first heard Bill Lind speak, I must confess I resented a mere civilian expressing criticism of the way our beloved Corps did things. After all, he was not one of us, he had not shed blood with us in battle, he was not a brother. And I had strong suspicions that he would have difficulty passing the PFT. But what he said made sense! For the first time I was personally hearing someone advocate an approach to war that was based on intellectual innovation rather than sheer material superiority: mission-type orders, surfaces and gaps, and Schwerpunkt, instead of the rigid formulas and checklists that we normally associate with our training and doctrine. It was a stimulating experience!

Through Lind’s articulation, years of my own reading of military history began to make a lot more sense. But why all this from a civilian instead of a professional soldier? In fact, the entire movement for military reform is driven largely by civilian intellectuals, not military officers–one notable exception being retired Air Force Colonel John Boyd.

When you think about it, this is not surprising. We have never institutionalized a system that encourages innovative ideas or criticism from subordinates. Proposing significant change is frequently viewed as criticism of superiors, since they are responsible for the way things are, and borders on disloyalty if not insubordination. So it is not surprising that the movement for reform comes from outside the military establishment….

B. H. Liddell Hart once remarked that “The only thing harder than getting a new idea into the military mind is to get an old one out.” In 1925, when he was expounding such heretical theories as the “indirect approach,” the American General Service Schools’ “Review of Current Military Literature” dismissed one of Liddell Hart’s major works as: “Of negative value to the instructors at these schools.” I expect Marine Corps schools to receive this publication with similar enthusiasm. But I cannot believe a professional military officer would not benefit by reading it.

Never mind that a 31-year veteran of two wars declares that the ideas will be beneficial to any professional military officer. Never mind the fact that attempting to disqualify an idea on the basis of its genesis is to commit the basic logical fallacy known as the Genetic Fallacy. If one simply recalls the famous Clausewitzian aphorism that “War is the continuation of Politics by other means”, then it should not be even remotely surprising, much less controversial, that an intellectual with a deep background in Politics might have something insightful to say about War.