Defense and the National Interest

An impassioned yet well-researched plea by E. E. Riccioni, a veteran AF fighter pilot and charter member of the Fighter Mafia (99 KB PDF).

About the author:  I first met Rich Riccioni about 35 years ago, when I was a junior staffer doing grunt work for a tac air shop in the Office of the Secretary of Defense and Rich was an Air Force colonel running the flight mechanics division at the Flight Dynamics Lab.  After a career as a fighter pilot, Rich had became a designer and advocate for air-air systems.  He played a critical role in initiating the Lightweight Fighter Program, which led to both the F-16 and F-18, and organized the first conference on the then-radical concept of supercruise (i.e., sustained supersonic cruise without afterburner), a key characteristic of the F-22.

Although no fan of the F-22 itself, Rich continues to advocate for characteristics like stealth and supercruise in more affordable systems.  He retired from the Air Force in 1976 and from Northrop Grumman in 1993.

Comments are welcome; please observe our comment policy.

A greatly expanded version (95 pp. / 2.5 MB PDF) is now available from our 4GW Manuals page.

Written by the 4GW Seminar at Quantico, this edition also includes Red Team games and potential solutions to problems.

As an aside, and perhaps someone with experience could comment, but after editing this manual, I feel like I’m gaining more insight into what our troops are going through in Iraq and Afghanistan.

For the occasional visitor to DNI who isn’t also reading Fabius Maximus, I suggest a quick trip over to “The Last Opportunity for Effective Action Before Disaster Strikes.” As he points out, the government has tried at least 15 initiatives to contain the escalating financial crisis since it began in December 2006. You can tell from today’s headlines how well they’ve worked.

We’ve now reached the point of no return:

Now the US financial system is seizing up. The machinery remains, but the gears no longer turn. Most of you have no idea to what I am referring, but you will learn over the next few weeks. To use a bad medical analogy, the financial system has had a cardiac arrest. Rather than describe the problem, this post describes solutions.

This is serious stuff, even for Fabius:

The recession is coming, and the current financial crisis has exacerbated it. We should prepare for something longer and deeper than 1973-75 or 1980-82 (the worst since the 1930’s). Let’s not wait to begin mitigation efforts. Anyone asking “Dude, where’s my recession” should be banned from the Internet for life.

What this means is that the national security policies of the presidential candidates are irrelevant.  A country that has to borrow on our scale just to keep the bare machinery of commerce going isn’t going to be spending hundreds of billions of that money on foreign adventures or even on maintaining our current posture in Iraq. The candidates might as well be debating plans to colonize Jupiter.

Readers tempted to blow off Fabius might look back over his posts on our financial crisis and judge his track record for themselves.

John has most kindly agreed to keynote the 2008 Boyd Conference, December 6 and 7, at the University of Prince Edward Island. As most visitors to this site are well aware, John is the author of the acclaimed book, Brave New War, which makes a compelling case for increasing resilience at the local level. For more information on the conference and to register, please visit the conference web site, and to get a headstart on the discussion, check out the ning community.

As co host Rob Paterson explains, John is one of the most respected resources on the concept of resilient communities. People have been talking about increasing local resilience for years, although in the past, economies of scale often trumped the need for resilience. With the advent of large-scale non-state conflict, sometimes called “fourth generation warfare,” however, the concept of relying on large and efficient but potentially vulnerable single points of failure must be re-examined.

Some of the most innovative work on local resilience has been done on Prince Edward Island, which is logical, given its geographical location. As our other featured guest, we will have John MacQuarrie, who is the Deputy Minister for Environment, Energy and Forestry for Prince Edward Island.  Rob explains the significance of Mr. MacQuarrie’s background and initiatives for all communities going forward.

The purpose of the conference is to explore the latest concepts on the future of conflict that could affect local communities and to share ideas for and experiences with implementing measures to deal with them.  If you are in any way involved with community resilience efforts, please join us on PEI for this ground-breaking conference.

By William S. Lind

September 30, 2008

One way to look at the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is to see them as one war with two fronts.  Germany fought two-front wars twice in the 20^th century, and it was almost able to prevail because it had the advantage of interior lines.  The German Army could quickly shift divisions and corps from the Eastern to the Western front or vice versa, using the superb German rail system.  Unfortunately, the U.S. lacks the advantage of interior lines in its ongoing two-front war.  No railways run from Baghdad to Kabul.

U.S. commanders in Afghanistan have reportedly requested an additional 10,000 troops.  Secretary of Defense Robert Gates was recently quoted in the Washington Post as telling the Senate Armed Services Committee, “I believe we will be able to meet that commanders’ requirement, but in the spring and summer of 2009…we do not have the forces to send three additional brigades to Afghanistan at this point.”

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Tags: Afghanistan War, iraq war, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, U.S. Military, US Army, US Marine Corps

Global Security Newswire
Sept. 26, 2008

The U.S. Air Force is considering the addition of significant new features to many of its B-61 nuclear gravity

bombs, such as the one shown above (Center for Defense Information photo).

U.S. Air Force Might Modify Nuclear Bomb

By Elaine M. Grossman
Global Security Newswire

WASHINGTON - For the first time in more than a decade, the U.S. Air Force is studying the option of adding significant new features to one of its aging atomic bombs, according to a senior service official (see GSN, Sept. 12).
The proposed modifications to the B-61 gravity bomb - which service officials are dubbing the “B-61 Mod 12″ - would exceed the extent of parts repair or replacement typically performed to increase a weapon’s service life.

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Tags: B-61, Nuclear Bomb, US Air Force

Predicting Future Military Threats: Implications of the Black Swan

COL Bob Toguchi, US Army
26 September 2008
Special to Defense and the National Interest

[Robert M. Toguchi is an active duty Army colonel in the Initiatives Group, Army Capabilities Integration Center, US Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC), Fort Monroe, Virginia. In his previous assignment, he served as the Chief, Strategic Plans, at the U.S. Pacific Command. He is a former instructor at the National War College and has a PhD in History from Duke University.]

…

In his best-selling book The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, author Nassim Nicholas Taleb introduces a compelling thesis that we often predict the wrong future, miss the Black Swans of our time, and rationalize their existence to make it appear that these events were predictable.

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Cyber War, Blitzkrieg, and John Boyd’s Patterns of Conflict

David A. Shunk
Col, USAF, Ret.
25 September 2008

[Editor's note:  Dave Shunk is a retired USAF Colonel, B-52G pilot, and Desert Storm combat veteran whose last military assignment was as the B-2 Vice Wing Commander of the 509th Bomb Wing, Whitman AFB, MO. Currently he is an Army government civilian working in the Army Capabilities Integration Center (ARCIC) Initiatives Group, Fort Monroe, VA.]

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“Be quiet, friend Sancho,” said Don Quixote. “Such are the fortunes of war, which more than any other are subject to constant change.”

Cervantes, Don Quixote

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The latest in the series of manuals for fourth generation warfare is now available from our 4GW Manuals page.

The authors, the Fourth Generation Warfare Seminar at Quantico, observe that:

The light infantryman characterizes himself by his mental resourcefulness and physical toughness. Light infantry’s inborn self-reliance (the reason they were chosen to join Light Infantry units), reinforced by hard training, convinces them that they are able to overcome the most difficult situations that combat could present. Light infantrymen do not feel defeated when surrounded, isolated or confronted by superior forces. They are able to perform their duties for long periods of time without any type of comfort or logistical support, obtaining what they need from the land or the enemy. They are neither physically nor psychologically tied to the rear by the necessity to maintain open lines of communication. This attitude of self-confidence provides LI a great psychological advantage over its enemies. Thanks to its decentralized command philosophy, LI operates at a high tempo. An unpredictable ambush mentality and reluctance to follow a specified method is the essence of LI.

By William S. Lind

All of Martin van Creveld’s books are worth reading, but a few are “big books,” books so important that anyone interested in war must read them.  To date, his big books include The Transformation of War, The Rise and Decline of the State and Fighting Power.  Van Creveld’s latest book has just come out, and it is a very big book indeed.  Titled The Culture of War, it targets, hits and obliterates Clausewitz’s assertion that war is merely the continuation of politics by other means.

Like John Boyd, van Creveld has engaged in a running feud with Clausewitz.  I happen to think Clausewitz still offers much of value, as do many things Prussian.  But as Boyd often said, we have learned a few things since Clausewitz’s day.

The Culture of War offers one of the most important lessons.  War exists not to serve the interests of states, it argues, or anything else.  Rather, it is a fundamental part of human nature and culture.  No human culture is imaginable that excludes war.  At the same time, war and those who fight it develop their own cultures, cultures which shape how war is carried on far more powerfully than do rational calculations of military effectiveness.

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