TMLutas contemplates a recent news development, and concludes that proliferation of WMD among non-state actors is inevitable, and that the current aversion of members of the modern Western intelligentsia to violence is only likely to lead, in the end, to far worse violence.

When the generals start getting restless, they do things like this preemptive nuclear strike proposal. But why are the generals getting restless all over NATO? Amerca’s Gen. Shalikashvili, Germany’s Gen. Naumann, the UK’s Field Marshall Inge, the Netherland’s Gen van den Breemen, and France’s Admiral Jacques Lanxade are all serious military players of varying politics. These are not brash, unthinking chest beaters. What possessed them to intervene in this manner and damage their societies’ moral standing in the world (and thus their vaunted ‘soft power’) by proposing an updated, in your face, first strike policy, coupled with a much more active NATO and explicitly decoupling military action from the UN?

I can see no other explanation than a profound, international vote of no-confidence in the political class of the West by heavily experienced military minds that live, breathe, eat, and sleep the problem of defending us all from violent threats to our liberties and very existence. I am not even sure that the presentation of the plan in Bucharest in April is coincidence. After all, Romania is a very good example of how even dead broke powers with unstable, highly repressive regimes can extract uranium and enrich it while nobody takes the threat seriously. Had Ceausescu managed his internal repression better, Romania would be a balkans “hedgehog” today similar to the Swiss except with nuclear armed Scuds and a sociopath’s hand on the button. Romania’s Ceausescu era relations with North Korea were always very good. They also had friends across the muslim world.

The ‘peace faction’ that does not look beyond its own nose will be shocked, outraged, and redouble its efforts to neuter the military so it cannot be used. It’s as if they have never heard of feedback loops or their own part in this very pernicious one. Spelling it out explicitly, the peace factions have neutered the political process so even vigorous peaceful competition is impossible. After all, to draw a caricature of Mohammad, write an insensitive book, or film a blaspheming movie draw death sentences from which we have little practical defense. The best we can do is a sort of life-long semi-imprisonment, insecure in our lives and our possessions, never knowing when the knife will fall.

The “peace faction” ensures that persistent, responding, violent escalations cannot happen so we end up implicitly enslaved because, in the real world, others are willing to persistently bring to bear more violence than we are. We shrink from exercising our freedoms because of justifiable fear. And thus we lose them in a practical matter because the muslims (and in their success they will draw imitators) are willing to tolerate periodic violent episodes that spasmodically, ineffectively lash out at them more as a sop to western domestic factions that demand “a response” because a durable majority in so many Western countries has shrunk back from the military buildup necessary to generate “a solution”.

The only thing that is left in modern Western political discourse is to make the spasmodic response so terrible, so violent, that in that short political window when the West permits itself to respond at all will annihilate our enemies and form a sort of “solution” after all. And thus the general staff rebellion in the making.

What the general staffs across the West see is the death of Western supremacy of violence…

Read the whole thing.

Hat tip to Glenn Reynolds.

There is a famous military history by Kenneth P. Williams, titled Lincoln Finds a General, describing the lengthy series of unsuccessful Union commanders and the dismal record of Union defeats in the Eastern theater of the war, before, after three years of fighting, Abraham Lincoln finally made Ulysses Grant general-in-chief.

In Grant, Lincoln found a general who had an unbroken record of victory in the West, and it was Lincoln’s decision to give supreme command to a fighting general with a habit of success which brought his war to a successful conclusion.

Burdened with a similarly protracted war, one happily unmarred by any American defeat, but nonetheless a war increasing dramatically in unpopularity with the electorate, George W. Bush has found not a fighting general with a record of victory, but a staff officer. He has appointed not a general-in-chief with unlimited authority to wage war, but rather “a war coordinator” whose role will be “to eliminate conflicts among the Pentagon, the State Department and other agencies.”

Following Lincoln’s example would have been more to the point.

Associated Press story

USAToday recently reported an in-progress study by military historians commissioned by the Department of Defense demonstrates that insurgencies can be defeated, but doing so takes time and requires ingenuity and patience.

Insurgencies, such as the one the United States is fighting in Iraq, last an average of more than 10 years, according to a study commissioned by the Defense Department.

For the United States, the good news is that rebels lose more often than they win. Chances for stopping an insurgency improve after 10 years, the study shows. …

“The violence in Iraq is going to go on a minimum for at least three or four more years and in reality another five plus years,” said Christopher Lawrence, director of The Dupuy Institute, which is conducting the study.

The Iraq war is in its fifth year.

The Annandale, Va.-based Dupuy Institute is under a Defense Department contract to study insurgencies to help give commanders more information about what works and what doesn’t. The study is due to be completed in September.

The military recently produced a new counterinsurgency manual that establishes doctrine for waging a counterinsurgency.

According to the manual, defeating an insurgency requires:

•An understanding of local society;

•Good intelligence about the enemy;

•Establishing security and a rule of law;

•Establishing a long-term commitment.

The new doctrine points out the limits to using overwhelming firepower, which could anger civilians, and the need to find political solutions to win over the population.

The manual says counterinsurgency is much more complex than other forms of warfare, requiring the coordination of political, military and economic efforts.

As part of the study, the institute built a database of 63 post-World War II insurgencies, including Vietnam, the French in Algeria and the Soviets in Afghanistan.

The United States experience in Vietnam soured the U.S. military on insurgencies, Lawrence said. The prevailing military doctrine after Vietnam emphasized building conventional capabilities to counter the Soviet threat. “The subject (of counterinsurgencies) has not been seriously analyzed by the Army since the 1960s,” Lawrence said.

Not all insurgencies are quagmires, the report shows. Insurgents only win in 41% of the conflicts in the database, Lawrence said. The remainder were victories for the counterinsurgents, were inconclusive or are still going on.

One of the most successful counterinsurgencies was the British victory over communist insurgents in Malaysia during the 1950s.

Col. Timothy Reese, director of the Combat Studies Institute at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., cautions against reading too much into it.

Each conflict is unique, and the differences are as important as the similarities, Reese said.

“War cannot be reduced to a formula,” Reese said. “War is an art as much as it is a science.”

Lt-.Col. Paul Yingling, in Armed Forces Journal, argues that America’s generals today, like Prussia’s 18th century commanders, remain fixated on past successes and continue failing to adapt to new wars fought by insurgency.

For the second time in a generation, the United States faces the prospect of defeat at the hands of an insurgency. In April 1975, the U.S. fled the Republic of Vietnam, abandoning our allies to their fate at the hands of North Vietnamese communists. In 2007, Iraq’s grave and deteriorating condition offers diminishing hope for an American victory and portends risk of an even wider and more destructive regional war. …

Armies do not fight wars; nations fight wars. War is not a military activity conducted by soldiers, but rather a social activity that involves entire nations. Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz noted that passion, probability and policy each play their role in war. Any understanding of war that ignores one of these elements is fundamentally flawed.

The passion of the people is necessary to endure the sacrifices inherent in war. Regardless of the system of government, the people supply the blood and treasure required to prosecute war. The statesman must stir these passions to a level commensurate with the popular sacrifices required. When the ends of policy are small, the statesman can prosecute a conflict without asking the public for great sacrifice. Global conflicts such as World War II require the full mobilization of entire societies to provide the men and materiel necessary for the successful prosecution of war. The greatest error the statesman can make is to commit his nation to a great conflict without mobilizing popular passions to a level commensurate with the stakes of the conflict.

Popular passions are necessary for the successful prosecution of war, but cannot be sufficient. To prevail, generals must provide policymakers and the public with a correct estimation of strategic probabilities. The general is responsible for estimating the likelihood of success in applying force to achieve the aims of policy. The general describes both the means necessary for the successful prosecution of war and the ways in which the nation will employ those means. If the policymaker desires ends for which the means he provides are insufficient, the general is responsible for advising the statesman of this incongruence. The statesman must then scale back the ends of policy or mobilize popular passions to provide greater means. If the general remains silent while the statesman commits a nation to war with insufficient means, he shares culpability for the results. …

(Frederick the Great’s) innovations had made his army the terror of Europe, but he knew that his adversaries were learning and adapting. Frederick feared that his generals would master his system of war without thinking deeply about the ever-changing nature of war, and in doing so would place Prussia’s security at risk. These fears would prove prophetic. At the Battle of Valmy in 1792, Frederick’s successors were checked by France’s ragtag citizen army. In the fourteen years that followed, Prussia’s generals assumed without much reflection that the wars of the future would look much like those of the past. In 1806, the Prussian Army marched lockstep into defeat and disaster at the hands of Napoleon at Jena. Frederick’s prophecy had come to pass; Prussia became a French vassal.

Iraq is America’s Valmy. America’s generals have been checked by a form of war that they did not prepare for and do not understand. They spent the years following the 1991 Gulf War mastering a system of war without thinking deeply about the ever changing nature of war. They marched into Iraq having assumed without much reflection that the wars of the future would look much like the wars of the past. Those few who saw clearly our vulnerability to insurgent tactics said and did little to prepare for these dangers. As at Valmy, this one debacle, however humiliating, will not in itself signal national disaster. The hour is late, but not too late to prepare for the challenges of the Long War. We still have time to select as our generals those who possess the intelligence to visualize future conflicts and the moral courage to advise civilian policymakers on the preparations needed for our security. The power and the responsibility to identify such generals lie with the U.S. Congress. If Congress does not act, our Jena awaits us.

Whole article

William Lind (who teaches at Quantico) has a column at Military.com discussing why the Kesselschlacht is not part of the US Army’s modern battle repertoire.

It occasionally happens that a reader’s e-mail is translated into dots and dashes and sent to me over Mr. Morse’s wonderful electric telegraph. The sounder on my desk, opposite the inkwell and under the flypaper scroll, recently tapped out the following, from Jim McDonnell of Baton Rouge, Louisiana:

“Could you please explain what’s meant by the remark about U.S. forces being unable to fight battles of encirclement? Is it that there are too few of them in Afghanistan or are you saying that our forces are constitutionally incapable of that kind of operation? If the latter is the case, that would make a column all by itself.”

It would, and it does. The problem is not numbers but tactical repertoire, or lack thereof. That deficiency, in turn, is a product — like so much else — of the American armed forces’ failure to transition from the Second Generation to the Third.

Second Generation tactics, like those of the First Generation, are linear. In the attack, the object is to push a line forward, and in the defense it is to hold a line. As we saw in so many battles in and after World War I, the result is usually indecisive. One side or the other ends up holding the ground, but the loser retires in reasonably good order to fight again another day.

Usually, achieving a decision, which means taking the enemy unit permanently out of play, requires one of two things, or both in combination: ambush or encirclement. Modern, Third Generation tactics reflect an “ambush mentality,” and also usually aim for encirclement. To that end, Third Generation tactics are sodomy tactics: the objective is to get in the other guy’s rear.

On the defense, that is accomplished by inviting the enemy to attack, letting him penetrate, and then launching a counterattack designed to encircle him, not push him back out. This was the basis of the new, Third Generation German defensive tactics of 1917, and also the German Army’s standard defense in World War II.

On the offense, the rule is not “close with and destroy” but “bypass and collapse.” The goal is to penetrate deep into the enemy’s rear, by stealth or by force (the Germans used a three, not two, element assault, and the largest element was the exploitation element), then roll up the enemy’s forward units from the flank and rear while overrunning his artillery, headquarters and supply dumps. The same approach was used by the Panzer divisions on the operational level, leading to vast encirclements of hundreds of thousands of Soviet troops on the Eastern Front in 1941.

The U.S. military today knows little or nothing of this. It did attempt an operational encirclement of the Iraqi Republican Guard by 7th Corps in the First Gulf War, but that attempt failed because 7th Corps was too slow. On the tactical level, most American units have only one tactic: bump into the enemy and call for fire. The assumption is that America’s vast firepower will then annihilate the opponent, but that seldom happens. Instead, he lives to fight again another day, like Osama and his al Qaeda at Tora Bora.

While the central problem here is conceptual – sheer ignorance of Third Generation tactics — there is a physical aspect to it as well. On foot, American soldiers are loaded down with everything except the kitchen sink, and they will probably be required to carry that too as soon as it is digitized. To use tactics of encirclement, you need to be at least as mobile as your enemy and preferably more so. The kind of light infantry fighters we find ourselves up against in places such as Iraq and Afghanistan are just that, light. They can move much faster on their feet than can our overburdened infantry. The result is that they ambush us, then escape to do it again, over and over. Flip-flops in the alley beat boots on the ground.

As the students in my seminar at Quantico discovered early in the year, the decisive break, both in tactics and in organizational culture, is not between the Third and Fourth Generations but between the Second and Third. It is little short of criminal that the American military remains stuck in the Second Generation. The Third Generation was fully developed in the German Army by 1918, almost a century ago. It costs little or nothing to make the transition. To those who understand how the Pentagon works, that may be the crux of the problem.

Arthur Herman, in Commentary, finds defeatism shaping our outlook on the war at home.

To the student of counterinsurgency warfare, the war in Iraq has reached a critical but dismally familiar stage.

On the one hand, events in that country have taken a more hopeful direction in recent months. Operations in the city of Najaf in January presaged a more effective burden-sharing between American and Iraqi troops than in the past. The opening moves of the so-called “surge” in Baghdad, involving increased American patrols and the steady addition of more than 21,000 ground troops, have begun to sweep Shiite militias from the streets, while their leader, Moqtada al Sadr, has gone to ground. Above all, the appointment of Lieutenant General David Petraeus, the author of the U.S. Army’s latest counterinsurgency field manual, as commander of American ground forces in Iraq bespeaks the Pentagon’s conviction that what we need to confront the Iraq insurgency is not more high-tech firepower but the time-tested methods of unconventional or “fourth-generation” warfare.

In Washington, on the other hand, among the nation’s political class, the growing consensus is that the war in Iraq is not only not winnable but as good as lost—Congressman Henry Waxman of California, for one, has proclaimed that the war is lost. Politicians who initially backed the effort, like Democratic Senators Hillary Clinton and Joseph Biden, and Republican Congressmen Walter Jones and Tom Davis, have been busily backing away or out, insisting that Iraq has descended into civil war and that Americans are helpless to shape events militarily. A growing number, like Congressman John Murtha, even suggest that the American presence is making matters worse. The Democratic party has devoted much internal discussion to whether and how to restrict the President’s ability to carry out even the present counterinsurgency effort.

In short, if the battle for the hearts and minds of Iraqis still continues and is showing signs of improvement, the battle for the hearts and minds of Congress, or at least of the Democratic majority, seems to be all but over.

But the war is not yet lost, and a new approach to dealing with the insurgency is actually underway, and it is still possible for America to win.

on August 1, 1956, a French lieutenant colonel of Tunisian descent named David Galula had taken command of the mountainous and rebel-infested Aissa Mimoun area of Kabylia. To the FLN’s unconventional mode of warfare, Galula responded with unconventional methods of his own. These proved so successful so quickly that they were soon adopted by French commanders in other parts of Algeria. …

By January 1960, the war that many had considered lost three years earlier was virtually won.

Galula’s subsequent book, Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice, laid out the blueprint for success in this form of warfare. From the start, Galula had discarded the assumptions governing conventional conflicts. A decisive battlefield victory of the kind familiar from World War II, he saw, would never work against indigenous, loosely organized, but deeply committed insurgencies …

Galula grasped that the new form of warfare had reversed the conventional relationship in war between combatant and civilian. No longer bystanders or useful adjuncts to the war effort, as in World War II, civilians were the critical determinants of success or failure. Without the help or at least the passive acquiescence of the local population, the government would be doomed. In a crucial sense, it did not matter how many guerrillas were killed, or how many regular soldiers were on the ground; the center of gravity was the opinion of the local community.

Thus, the key to success lay in bringing to the surface the portion of the populace that hated the guerrillas, and then turning that minority into a majority by a combination of political, social, and cultural initiatives …

As recently as two years ago, Galula’s book was virtually unknown in Pentagon circles. Today it has become the bible of American counterinsurgency thinkers like General Petraeus.

Highly recommended. Read the whole thing.

Hat tip to John R. Finch.

Robert Tracinski thinks Bush needs to widen his approach beyond the insurgents in Iraq and go after their state sponsors.

Going wide means recognizing that Iraq is just one front in a regional war against an Islamist Axis centered in Iran–and we cannot win that war without confronting the enemy directly, outside of Iraq.

Going wide means recognizing that the conflict in Iraq is fueled and magnified by the intervention of Iran and Syria. One of the reasons the Iraq Study Group report flopped was that its key recommendation–its one unique idea–was for America to negotiate with Iran and Syria in order to convince these countries to aid in the “stabilization” of Iraq. This proposal wasn’t so much argued to death as it was laughed to death, because it is clear that Iran and Syria have done everything they can to de-stabilize Iraq, supporting both sides of the sectarian conflict there.

It is obvious that both regimes have a profound interest in an American failure and retreat in Iraq. After all, if America can successfully use force to replace a hostile dictatorship with a free society, then the Iranian and Syrian regimes are doomed. So as a matter of elementary self-preservation, they have done everything they can to plunge Iraq into chaos, supporting guerrillas and militias on all sides of the sectarian conflict. Just today, a US official confirmed new evidence “that Iran is working closely with both the Shiite militias and Sunni Jihadist groups.” Most ominously, Iran has brazenly provided training and weapons to the Shiite militias–who carry rifles straight off the assembly lines of Iranian weapons factories–and these militias have emerged in the last year as the greatest threat to US troops and to the Iraqi government.

How can we quell the conflict in Iraq, further suppress the Sunni insurgents, and begin to dismantle the Shiite militias–if we don’t to anything to stop those who are funding, training, and supporting these enemies? Just as we can’t eliminate terrorism without confronting the states who sponsor terrorism, so we can’t suppress the Sunni and Shiite insurgencies in Iraq without confronting the outside powers who support these insurgents.

Every day, we see the disastrous results of fighting this war narrowly inside Iraq while ignoring the external forces that are helping to drive it. To fight one Shiite militia tied to Iran–Sadr’s Mahdi Army–we have recently signaled our support for an Iraqi political coalition that includes another Shiite militia tied to Iran, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim’s Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq and its Badr Brigades. And so it should be no surprise that a US military raid on Hakim’s headquarters last week netted two Iranian diplomats and members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards–the outfit responsible for supporting global terrorism. That’s what happens when we fight the symptoms in Iraq rather than fighting the disease.

Going wide also means recognizing that more is at stake in this war than just the fate of Iraq. This is a war to determine who and what will dominate the Middle East. Will this vital region be dominated by a nuclear-armed Iran, working to spread Islamic fascism? Or will America be able to exert its military influence and political ideals in the region?

He’s clearly right, but he isn’t going wide enough.

Behind Syria and Iran, you find China fishing in troubled waters in order to thwart American “hegemony.” China is Iran’s arms supplier (often via North Korea) and soon to be leading trading partner. But we are China’s number 1 trading partner.

We have a far more powerful weapon to use against China to force her to withdraw support from her surrogates operating against the US than arms. We can threaten to deny China our trade.

David Lai, at the Army’s Strategic Studies Institute, published a thought-provoking paper in 2004 comparing the differences between Chinese and Western Strategic thinking to the differences between the Chinese game of Go and such Western games as chess, poker, and football. Learning From the Stones is now available online, and makes for very interesting reading.

With over 2,000 years of inï¬u201auence from Sun Tzu’s teaching, along with the inï¬u201auence of other signiï¬cant philosophical and military writings, the Chinese are particularly comfortable with viewing war and diplomacy in comprehensive and dialectic ways and acting accordingly. Indeed, many of these observations have become proverbial components of the Chinese way of war and diplomacy. The most notable ones are bing yi zha li (war is based on deception), shang-bing fa-mou (supreme importance in war is to attack the enemy’s strategy), qi-zheng xiang-sheng (mutual reproduction of regular and extraordinary forces and tactics), chu-qi zhi-sheng (win through unexpected moves), yin-di zhi-sheng (gain victory by varying one’s strategy and tactics according to the enemy’s situation), yi-rou ke-gang (use the soft and gentle to overcome the hard and strong), bishi ji-xu (stay clear of the enemy’s main force and strike at his weak point), yi-yu wei-zhi (to make the devious route the most direct), hou-fa zhi-ren (ï¬ght back and gain the upper hand only after the enemy has initiated ï¬ghting), sheng-dong ji-xi (make a feint to the east but attack in the west), and so on. All of these special Chinese four-character proverbs are strategic and dialectic in nature. All bear some character of ï¬u201aowing water. This Chinese way of war and diplomacy is in striking difference to the Western way of war from ancient Greece to the United States today. In the Western tradition, there is a heavy emphasis on the use of force; the art of war is largely limited to the battleï¬elds; and the way to ï¬ght is force on force.

Travis Patriquin, an Army Captain serving in Iraq, who was killed last Wednesday by the same IED which killed Marine Corps Major Megan McClung, previously prepared a Powerpoint presentation outlining a different strategy for success from that currently being employed.

His “”How to Win in Al Anbar” is reported by ABC News to have achieved a large informal circulation.

Patriquin killed.

While retired Marine Colonel T. X. Hammes’ Sunday editorial in the Washington Post doesn’t really fulfill its title promise of telling us The Way to Win a Guerrilla War, it does identify precisely how we lose them, by describing how we lost in Vietnam, an experience we are unfortunately repeating at the present time.

While Mao was able to confront his opponent on the Chinese mainland, Ho Chi Minh and Giap had to defeat the French and the Americans without ever being able to threaten their home bases. They expanded on Mao’s concept by using the media and peace activists to convince the American people that we couldn’t win the war. They won not by defeating our armed forces but by breaking our political will.

Arthur Herman, in Commentary, has a plan for dealing with the Iranian nuclear threat.

The first step would be to make it clear that the United States will tolerate no action by any state that endangers the international flow of commerce in the Straits of Hormuz. Signaling our determination to back up this statement with force would be a deployment in the Gulf of Oman of minesweepers, a carrier strike group’s guided-missile destroyers, an Aegis-class cruiser, and anti-submarine assets, with the rest of the carrier group remaining in the Indian Ocean. The U.S. Navy could also deploy UAV’s (unmanned air vehicles) and submarines to keep watch above and below against any Iranian missile threat to our flotilla.

Our next step would be to declare a halt to all shipments of Iranian oil while guaranteeing the safety of tankers carrying non-Iranian oil and the platforms of other Gulf states. We would then guarantee this guarantee by launching a comprehensive air campaign aimed at destroying Iran’s air-defense system, its air-force bases and communications systems, and finally its missile sites along the Gulf coast. At that point the attack could move to include Iran’s nuclear facilities—not only the “hard” sites but also infrastructure like bridges and tunnels in order to prevent the shifting of critical materials from one to site to another.

Above all, the air attack would concentrate on Iran’s gasoline refineries. It is still insufficiently appreciated that Iran, a huge oil exporter, imports nearly 40 percent of its gasoline from foreign sources, including the Gulf states. With its refineries gone and its storage facilities destroyed, Iran’s cars, trucks, buses, planes, tanks, and other military hardware would run dry in a matter of weeks or even days. This alone would render impossible any major countermoves by the Iranian army. (For its part, the Iranian navy is aging and decrepit, and its biggest asset, three Russian-made Kilo-class submarines, should and could be destroyed before leaving port.)

The scenario would not end here. With the systematic reduction of Iran’s capacity to respond, an amphibious force of Marines and special-operations forces could seize key Iranian oil assets in the Gulf, the most important of which is a series of 100 offshore wells and platforms built on Iran’s continental shelf. North and South Pars offshore fields, which represent the future of Iran’s oil and natural-gas industry, could also be seized, while Kargh Island at the far western edge of the Persian Gulf, whose terminus pumps the oil from Iran’s most mature and copiously producing fields (Ahwaz, Marun, and Gachsaran, among others), could be rendered virtually useless. By the time the campaign was over, the United States military would be in a position to control the flow of Iranian oil at the flick of a switch…

Obviously, no plan is foolproof. The tactical risks associated with a comprehensive war strategy of this sort are numerous. But they are outweighed by its key advantages.

First, it would accomplish much more than air strikes alone on Iran’s elusive nuclear sites. Whereas such action might retard the uranium-enrichment program by some years, this one in effect would put Iran’s theocracy out of business by depriving it of the very weapon that the critics of air strikes most fear. It would do so, moreover, with minimal means. This would be a naval and air war, not a land campaign. Requiring no draw-down of U.S. forces in Iraq, it would involve one or two carrier strike groups, an airborne brigade, and a Marine brigade. Since the entire operation would take place offshore, there would be no need to engage the Iranian army. It and the Revolutionary Guards would be left stranded, out of action and out of gas.

In fact, there is little Iran could do in the face of relentless military pressure at its most vulnerable point. Today, not only are key elements of the Iranian military in worse shape than in the 1980’s, but even the oil weapon is less formidable than imagined. Currently Iran exports an estimated 2.5 million barrels of oil a day. Yet according to a recent report in Forbes, quoting the oil-industry analyst Michael Lynch, new sources of oil around the world will have boosted total production by 2 million barrels a day in this year alone, and next year by three million barrels a day. In short, other producers (including Iranian platforms in American hands) can take up some if not all of the slack. The real loser would be Iran itself. Pumping crude oil is its only industry, making up 85 percent of its exports and providing 65 percent of the state budget. With its wells held hostage, the country’s economy could enter free fall.

Read the whole thing.

Carl Philipp Gottfried von Clausewitz (June 1, 1780 — November 16, 1831)

Tony Corn, in Policy Review, waltzes dazzlingly through the Strategy curriculum in the course of a hyper-caffeinated diatribe quarreling with the ascendancy in contemporary American military culture of the viewpoint of that old rascal Carl von Clausewitz.

Some samples:

Strategism is synonymous with “strategy for strategy’s sake,” i.e., a self-referential discourse more interested in theory-building (or is it hair-splitting?) than policy-making. Strategism would be innocuous enough were it not for the fact that, in the media and academia, “realism” today is fast becoming synonymous with “absence of memory, will, and imagination”: in that context, the self-referentiality of the strategic discourse does not exactly improve the quality of the public debate. At its worst, strategism confuses education with indoctrination, and scholarship with scholasticism; in its most extreme form, it comes close to being an “intellectual terrorism” in the name of Clausewitz.

and

With its unresolved tensions between its theologia speculativa and theologia positiva parts, On War, to be sure, is ideally suited for endless, medieval-like scholastic disputatio. But while Clausewitz-Centered Chatter (ccc) can be entertaining (how many ayatollahs can dance on a Schwerpunkt?), there are undeniable opportunity costs for an officer corps already “too busy to learn.”

A decade ago already, U.S. Army War College professor Steven Metz remarked: “Like adoration for some family elder, the veneration heaped on Clausewitz seems to grow even as his power to explain the world declines. He remains an icon at all U.S. war colleges (figuratively and literally) while his writings are bent, twisted, and stretched to explain everything from guerilla insurgency (Summers) through nuclear strategy (Cimbala) to counternarcotrafficking (Sharpe). On War is treated like holy script from which quotations are plucked to legitimize all sorts of policies and programs. But enough! It is time to hold a wake so that strategists can pay their respects to Clausewitz and move on, leaving him to rest among the historians.”

and

For the neutral observer, then, the problem with the “neocon chickenhawks” is not so much that they lacked an understanding of irregular warfare13 as that they seriously underestimated the sterilizing effect, on the American military mind and over a generation, of three dozen Clausewitzian cicadas for whom counterinsurgency was synonymous with “derisive battle.” A contrario, the intellectual agility since the end of the Cold War of a Marine Corps largely exempt from the Clausewitz regimen (from General Krulak to General Mattis) would tend to prove that the problem is not with the officer corps itself, but with the (largely civilian) Clausewitzian educators. If the Clausewitzian text is indeed so filled with fog and friction, if On War is so hard to teach from that even most educators can’t teach it properly, then surely thought should be given to retiring Clausewitz, or the educators — or both.

The “cognitive dissonance” among Clausewitizians consists in maintaining the most dogmatic approach concerning Clausewitz as the True North, while deploring — like Gray — that “American military power has been as awesome tactically as it has rarely been impressive operationally or strategically…. the German armed forces in both world wars suffered from the same malady” (as if the two were somehow unrelated). If, as Gray rightly points out, “strategy is — or should be, the bridge that connects military power with policy,” what kind of a bridge is On War, which devotes 600 pages to military power and next to nothing to policy? Between the “strategy for strategy’s sake” of the Clausewitzians, and the “tacticisation of strategy” of Network-Centric Warriors, genuine strategic thinking seems to be forever elusive — missing in action as much as in reflection.

Why such an irrational “resistance” (in the Freudian sense) on the part of military educators? After all, it does not take an Einstein to realize that, from Alexander the Great to Napoleon, the greatest generals for 20 centuries had one thing in common: They have never read Clausewitz. And conversely, in the bloodiest century known to man, the greatest admirers of Clausewitz also have had one thing in common: They may have won a battle here and there, but they have all invariably lost all their wars. One suspects that the Prussian Party is in fact not so much interested in meditating Clausewitz (their endless exegeses of Clausewitz in the past 30 years has yielded no new insight beyond the interpretations of a Raymond Aron and a Carl Schmitt) as such, as in maintaining a “Prussian folklore” in the U.S. military. One can understand their hostilite de principe to the idea of teaching irregular warfare: from Marshall Bugeaud to General Beaufre, from Marshall Gallieni to Marshall Lyautey, from Colonel Trinquier to Lieutenant Galula, the majority of the leading theoreticians on the subject happen to be, not Prussian but — horresco referens — French. And as is well-known by anyone who gets his military history from Hollywood rather than Harvard, the French, since 1918 at least, have proven utterly incapable of fighting.1

Ironically, and Prussian fantasies notwithstanding, what the post-Gulf War American Army has come to resemble is the post-World War i French Army: In both cases, victory breeds complacency, and this in turn can lead to a solid but unimaginative army capable of holding its own against an equally solid but unimaginative opponent — but is not necessarily a match for an innovative military, be it in the form of the German “blitzkrieg” yesterday or Chinese “unrestricted warfare” tomorrow. No wonder that a particularly bold usmc colonel felt compelled recently to argue that the “Shock and Awe” doctrine could prove to be America’s twenty-first-century Maginot Line.

Read, and savor, the whole thing.

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Hat tip to Karen Myers.