Jul.04.2009
by Chet
As officers, we are sworn to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. But what if the Constitution is already dead?
Fabius Maximus examines the health of the Constitution in a brilliant post, a revision of one that he did three years ago. Whether you agree with his thesis or not, he raises important issues and concludes on an optimistic note.
If the Constitution is dead, then we, as officers, have failed in our most fundamental duty, and all we can do is hope that his optimism is justified. I fear, however, that the result may be that we get to try out COIN theory in the one arena where it has historically worked.
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Filed in 4GW - Theory, Constitutionality | 4 responses so far
Jul.04.2009
by Chet
According to a paper on the Small Wars site:
Six Reasons Insurgencies Lose: A Contrarian View, by Donald A. Stoker.
Insurgencies generally lose, not win. The Dupuy Institute, using a database for an ongoing research project that includes 63 post-World War II insurgencies, found that the insurgents only win 41% of the time.
I would have thought that they lose more often than that because they often lose against a government that either accommodates them or eliminates them. Remember, this is the war of the weak against the strong, so the fact that they win better than two times out of five should be sobering.
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Filed in 4GW - Theory, Boyd and Military Strategy | 3 responses so far
Jul.02.2009
by Chet
Would be a Sun Tzu Seminar. Looks like there’s going to be a good one late next month in New York:
Transforming Chaos and Conflict– James Gimian and Barry Boyce, of Shambhala Sun magazine and the Denma Translation Group.
Jim and Barry gave an abbreviated version of this program at the Boyd 2008 Conference last December. Although I’ve studied this stuff for well over 30 years, their approach gave me new insight into the Sun Tzu material and by extension, on Boyd’s place in the Sun Tzu lineage. I’m finishing my second (in some places third and fourth) reading of their new book, The Rules of Victory, and if I can put it down long enough, will post a review.
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Filed in Boyd Conference 2008, Boyd and Military Strategy | No responses yet
Jun.29.2009
by Chet
William S. Lind
29 June 2009
The advent of General Stanley McChrystal as America’s overall commander in Afghanistan appears to be good news. He seems to understand that in this kind of war, the rule must be, “First, do no harm.” Associated Press recently reported him as saying that his measure of effectiveness will be “the number of Afghans shielded from violence, not the number of militants killed.” Unusually, he seems to include American and NATO violence in his calculation, since he has ordered a drastic cutback in airstrikes. Heavy American reliance on airstrikes has probably done more than anything else to win the war for the Taliban.
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Filed in 4GW - Articles, Iraq and the Middle East, William S. Lind | 10 responses so far
Jun.29.2009
by Chet
On MotherJones.com:
Shock and Audit, by Rachel Morris
I’ve skimmed the series and it seems worth a more detailed read. In the meantime, the opening paragraph contains this checklist, which reads like a manifesto of the Defense Reform Movement (of which Boyd was a founding member):
But although the press touted the proposals as bold and ambitious, they sounded suspiciously like the basic budgeting tips a financial adviser would dispense if you’d lost total control of your personal expenses. The essential principles were:
- Keep track of money that comes in and goes out
- Don’t buy things you don’t need
- Don’t buy things that don’t work
- If you do buy something that doesn’t work, don’t order 200 more of them
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Filed in Defense Economics and Acquistion Reform, Fixing the Financial Systems | 5 responses so far
Jun.22.2009
by Chet
William S. Lind
22 June 2009
The current crisis in Iran is not 4GW. It is a struggle for control of a state, not an attempt to replace the state with something else. However, it could prove a harbinger of 4GW in Iran, because what is at stake is the legitimacy of current Iranian political system.
In a manner that was cynical, blatant and remarkably stupid, the Khamenei/Ahmadinejad regime in effect toyed with its own legitimacy. Nightwatch for June 19 quotes Iranian Supreme Leader Khamenei as saying in his Friday public sermon, “There is 11 million vote difference. How can one rig 11 million votes?”
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Filed in 4GW - Articles, Iraq and the Middle East, William S. Lind | 6 responses so far
Jun.17.2009
by Chet
William S. Lind
17 June 2009
Secession is in the air. In Texas, a Republican governor has dared breathe the word. Vermont has an active and growing secessionist movement. Oregon, Washington and British Columbia already call themselves Cascadia. Last weekend’s Wall Street Journal led off with a piece on secession. The author, Paul Starobin, wrote that:
The present-day American Goliath may turn out to be a freak of a waning age of politics and economics as conducted on a super-sized scale - too large to make any rational sense…
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Filed in 4GW - Articles, William S. Lind | 18 responses so far
Jun.08.2009
by Chet
Some of you may recall that a while back, October 2006 to be exact, DNI ran an op-ed by Steve Pressfield on tribalism. Now, the novelist (Gates of Fire, The Afghan Campaign, Killing Rommel, etc.) has a new video blog series about tribalism.
He maintains that “The enemy in Afghanistan today (and in Iraq and Pakistan) is not Islamism or jihadism. It’s tribalism. Think of this series as a crash course on tribalism.”
Retired Marine Colonel T.X. Hammes, author of The Sling and the Stone and who has a number of pieces on this site, notes:
Steven Pressfield is known to a generation of Marines for his book The Gates of Fire. In that work, he captured the essence of why western soldiers fight. With this video series, Pressfield draws on his research for The Afghan Campaign to provide essential insights into why tribal warriors fight. He discusses the unchanging aspects of two millenniums of western experiences fighting Afghan tribal warriors. He explains why, for very good reasons, western ideas about government simply do not apply to these tribal peoples.
DNI Reviews of Steven Pressfield:
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Filed in 4GW - Articles, Iraq and the Middle East | 5 responses so far
Jun.02.2009
by Chet
by William S. Lind
June 2, 2009
The recent fire/counterfire between President Obama and former Vice President Dick Cheney over Guantanamo, the prisoners held there and techniques used in their interrogation revealed a distressing ignorance in the White House. Specifically, it revealed that Obama and his advisors are ignorant of military theory.
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Filed in 4GW - Articles, 4GW - Theory, Boyd and Military Strategy, Global and Strategic Issues, Uncategorized, William S. Lind | 11 responses so far
May.26.2009
by Chet
More precisely, near me:
“Quiet Atlanta suburbs draw drug cartels”
The Mexican cartels responsible for transporting 99 percent of illicit drugs into the United States are “studiously low-key,” said Jack Killorin, director of the Atlanta High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area task force.
“They are trying not to interact in the communities in a way which draws attention,” Killorin said. … Cartel operatives find it easier to “hide in plain sight” among the county’s large Hispanic immigrant population, Killorin said.
Killorin said Mexican drug trafficking organizations are running an estimated $28.5 billion-a-year business, and yet the U.S. government only intercepts about $1 billion of it. …
Bill Lind suggests that the defining characteristic of 4GW is “a crisis in the legitimacy of the state.” This is sometimes simplified to “the decline of the state,” but it does not mean that states everywhere are going away. That is patently not the case.
What does appear to be happening, however, is that in some areas, large numbers of people are transferring their primary loyalties to organizations other than the state to which they happen to be citizens. There is nothing new about this: Organized crime is as old as the species itself, and many state boundaries, particularly in areas affected by European colonialism, are arbitrary and don’t reflect ethnic or tribal composition.
Within the last several decades, however, factors have arisen that have accelerated this trend in some areas. These factors include:
- transportation systems, particularly airline travel
- the Internet
- the huge amounts of money produced by global drug trafficking
- the fall of the Soviet Union and the bipolar world system along with it
The question you might ask is not whether these trends are real but whether the type of conflicts they create should be considered as “war.” Does 4GW represent an evolution of war or of crime?
Filed in 4GW - Theory, William S. Lind | 10 responses so far