Current Issues

Commentators have outdone themselves the past few days criticizing the now-immortal Afghanistan slide. Unfortunately, they’ve largely missed the point.
      What are we really looking at in the chart? (It’s available, among other places, at Small Wars Journal.) Yes, it’s a presentation slide, but the figure itself is a causal loop diagram. The presentation package merely provides the frame, and the standard debate regarding the quality of DoD presentations is, at best, secondary here. Tom Fiddaman’s thoughts at MetaSD on the utility of causal loop diagrams are much more informed, balanced, and relevant.

I have been looking forward to Dima Adamsky’s The Culture of Military Innovation: The Impact of Cultural Factors on the Revolution in Military Affairs in Russia, the United States, and Israel (very wordy title) for a while, so I was very excited when Stanford University Press sent me a review copy (I suppose I should note as a full disclosure that I regularly receive review copies from them as well as other publishers, free of charge). I have followed Adamsky’s work on the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) and operational theory generally and have been eagerly awaiting his summary of how the RMA (or, the Military-Technical Revolution in Russia) concept diffused through three military cultures. [click to continue ...]

Joseph Fouche has an interesting post that I missed on General Philip Sheridan of Civil War fame visiting the front lines of the 1870 Franco-Prussian War. Sheridan went off to see the latest in conventional operations. This is part of a longstanding tradition in American strategy of sending observers or volunteers into foreign conflicts to observe trends. As Clausewitz and Ferdinand Foch both wrote in their respective works on strategy, a lack of experience in conflict forces the defense policy maker and soldier to use history and battlefield trends elsewhere as a guide for formulating strategy. [click to continue ...]

Awareness that traditional methods of assessing the risk of adversary attack are inadequate seems to be growing. One example is this SRA press release from last month referring to Parnell, Smith, and Moxley’s work. Another example is this DHS announcement. [click to continue ...]

All in all, the 2000s were a banner decade for strategic theory. Much of it was new or relatively new theories such as Hybrid Warfare, Fourth Generation Warfare, or Netwar. As the hipster Clausewitz (h/t Deichmans) image hints, some of it was old as well. Counterinsurgency came back in style too. Of course, the impetus for this strategic debate was the worst terrorist attack in American history–and nine years of what many now call the “Long War.” As 2010 emerges, here’s five new year’s resolutions (arbitrary number, I know) for strategic theory. Unlike your rather fantastic pledge to actually run a marathon this year, these pledges matter. [click to continue ...]

The coming year promises to be very interesting. And while red teaming really isn’t about predicting the future, we’re still interested in hearing what you think. Are any RTJ readers willing to go out on a limb and forecast the watershed trends or events of the coming year?

Social media and disaster reporting has now almost completed the cycle of wonder, hype, backlash, and normalcy. In 2008, Twitter and other crowdsourced aggregation tools were hailed as the most accurate source of information on the Mumbai attacks. Because Twitter’s network of users was small at the time, the signal-to-noise ratio was perfect for amplifying correct information and sorting out the inevitable mass of rumors that emerge from all breaking news events. The ensuing hype cycle hit a high point with the a wave of “Twitter revolutions,” the Summer 2009 Iran election crisis being the most prominent.
      The backlash has effectively begun. Even at the height of crowdsourcing hype, Twitter was criticized for spreading false information about the H1N1 Flu. But even those criticisms pale in comparison to the sheer bitterness of TechCrunch writer Paul Carr’s column on the Ft. Hood shootings:

“For all of our talk about “the world watching”, what good did social media actually do for the people of Iran? Did the footage out of the country actually change the outcome of the elections? No. Despite a slew of YouTube videos and a couple of thousand foreign Twitter users turning their avatar green and pretending to be in Tehran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is still in power. It’s astonishing, really. Despite how successful ten million actual voters marching through Washington, London and other major cities in 2003 were in stopping the invasion of Iraq, a bit of entirely virtual cyber-posturing by foreigners didn’t lead to real change in Iran. And so it was at Fort Hood. For all the sound and fury, citizen journalism once again did nothing but spread misinformation at a time when thousands people with family at the base would have been freaking out already, and breach the privacy of those who had been killed or wounded. We learned not a single new fact, nor was a single life saved.”

      Carr’s criticism is unduly harsh, but it serves a useful function–we can move past the technological “hype” stage to that of normalcy, where a technology is actually operationalized into everyday practice by pragmatic professionals. To use a military analogy, it is the difference between J.F.C Fuller’s fantasies of all-tank armies and Panzer Group Kleist’s practical usage of armor in the 1940 French campaign. Social media, in isolation, can never be as successful a source of information (or for that matter, social change) as its boosters claimed. But when integrated into a larger framework it can serve a valuable purpose. As I noted in my article “Information Counterrevolution,” what crowdsourced reporting needs is a better (crowdsourced) means of controlling white noise and organizing information. Wikipedia, to some extent, has already done this through its gradual increase in the power of an core elite. News organizations are also likely to develop crowdsourced networks of their own that feed into the higher level.

For those of you who follow RTJ, you’ve probably noticed that things have been a bit slow around here lately. They’ll pick up again soon. We have two very interesting papers pending, for example.
      While we’re preparing those, I’d like to raise a question.
      First some backstory … When Red Team Journal started in 1997, the world was very different. (At least most observers’ perceptions of the world were very different.) The United States was smitten with a bad case of overconfidence. The concept of a revolution in military affairs (RMA) held sway at the Pentagon, and, if you accepted the prevailing mindset, no one would emerge to challenge U.S. dominance for at least a decade, probably longer. If we were to simplify the world into a board game of global dominance, most players in 1997 would have preferred to “play” the United States.
      So, here’s my question: assuming the same board game of global dominance, who would you choose to play today?

With George Will’s call for a drawdown of US forces in Afghanistan, expect to hear many variations on this concept:

“America should do only what can be done from offshore, using intelligence, drones, cruise missiles, airstrikes and small, potent Special Forces units, concentrating on the porous 1,500-mile border with Pakistan, a nation that actually matters.”

      Will is describing offshore balancing, a strategy principally employed by the British. Up to World War II, the British largely adopted a largely hands-off policy towards the continent, intervening with men and material largely to influence events on the ground and prevent the rise of a continent-wide hegemon able to threaten the British isles. Realists often reference this idea favorably in reference to Iraq and Afghanistan. While appealing in theory, offshore balancing does have some significant drawbacks.
      NATO airpower, even under the new guidance issued by Gen. Stanley McChrystal, has spurred controversy about target selection accuracy and civilian casualties. It is likely that some residual force will remain even in the event of a significant drawdown, but advocates of an offshore balancing approach need to clarify how the US will generate intelligence for targeting and direct action raids. Furthermore, the 2006 Lebanon War and the 1999 Kosovo conflicts are evidence of the unpleasant fact that airstrikes and standoff fires are not necessarily decisive instruments, especially against opponents skilled in the use of camouflage, dispersal, and military deception. Drones have proven more deadly because of their pervasive surveillance of the battlefield, lessening the ranks of al-Qaeda and Pakistani Taliban commanders. If Will and other advocates of the offshore approach are planning a more expansive covert war on the border with direct action raids the methodology and political aims of such a campaign should be clarified. Offshore raids and airstrikes are not going to prove much more successful than the US’s current campaign without a defined political aim for Pakistan policy.
      Drawdown and offshore balancing also lessens the ability of the United States and its allies to exert influence in Afghanistan itself, especially if forces are consolidated into a series of super-Forward Operating Bases (FOBs) or in major cities. A capability for strategic raids may create a deterrent option, but a focus on kinetic deep raids such as the Marine Corps’ Operational Maneuver from the Sea is not currently being emphasized by defense policymakers. Such a weakness may come back to haunt the US should the consequences of drawdown prove dire. “Offshore” balancing without credible forcible entry operations will not work. On the other hand, it is plainly clear that US force has not bought political influence or control even over clients such as the Afghan president Hamid Karzai.
      Offshore balancing and drawdown may be the best options for current US strategy, but they must first be developed into viable proposals for action. At present they are just as nebulous as everything else in the current Afghanistan/counterinsurgency debate.