It’s not difficult to imagine why many in the defense community think that the 2006 Lebanon conflict offers a preview of future war. Because Hezbollah fought as a “hybrid” adversary utilizing both irregular and conventional small-unit tactics, both counterinsurgency aficionados and conventional advocates can claim validation. Influence operations–consisting of both rockets raining down on Israeli towns and psychological warfare–were also employed. There was even a minor cyberwar brewing between Israeli and Palestinian hackers. In short, something for everybody–except the Air Force, whose Effects-Based Operations (EBO) was famously trashed by General James Mattis in a widely republished memo.
The Small Wars Journal‘s Robert Haddick, however, has his doubts: [click to continue ...]
From the monthly archives:
June 2009
I’ve added a 50-slide introduction to red teaming to the site. It addresses need, context, definitions, applications, and types. I view it as a “living” document; in other words, this is version 1.0, and I plan to update it periodically.
In his book The Lexus and the Olive Tree, Thomas Friedman first advanced the concept of the “super-empowered individual.” Friedman wasn’t describing Wolverine, Magneto, or the Incredible Hulk, but a supposedly new kind of individual who posed a crucial challenge to the nation-state. Friedman’s main argument was that globalization had radically “flattened” the globe, creating new pressure points that individuals seeking to effect systemic change could target, leverage, and exploit. John Robb, Thomas P.M. Barnett, and Zenpundit followed up on this argument by noting that network mobilization power, the increasing power of personalized weapons and technology, and the weakness of the global supply chain provided crucial opportunities for the super-empowered individual to take on the state. [click to continue ...]
In a previous article I prominently featured sociologist Charles Kurzman’s idea of the Anti-Explanation: [click to continue ...]
The conversation that Zenpundit started on grand strategy continues. Fear and Loathing in Georgetown (best blog name, I wish I had come up with it myself) answers the question I posed in my earlier post on grand strategy:
“The simple answer is the the United States lacks even a close military competitor, and forget an existential military threat. al-Qaeda is, from a strategic perspective, a minor nuisance. ..[W]e don’t need a grand strategy right now and so we don’t have one. Now, it would be nice to have one because then we could proceed in some sort of rational manner. However, we have the luxury of being so superior militarily to every other country in the world that the lack of a grand strategy is something we can afford.”
Obviously, people can and will disagree about the US’s conventional military superiority relative to other states or the impact that changing state forms have on the ability of the United States to project power. But the fact remains that there is nothing close to the former Soviet Union around today. FLG raises the most important “red-team” question of all in the grand strategy debate–is a grand strategy necessary to begin with for America? [click to continue ...]
Memes, popularly understood as discrete cultural units analogous to genes that evolve through cultural interaction and exchange, were popularized by Richard Dawkins’ 1976 book The Selfish Gene. Memetics soon became a popular field of study in the 1990s complete with its own scholarly journal and a series of books expanding the concept. However, scientists have critiqued memetics for its inability to empirically prove its claims, and media and critical theorists who generally follow a social constructivist epistemology are also hostile to memetics’ Darwinian framework. But the idea of memes continues to dominate popular discourse on cultural production and even has been prominently featured in popular videogames. [click to continue ...]
