Defense and the National Interest

By William S. Lind
July 23, 2008

Two recent news stories added important evidence to issues raised in On War columns.  The first concerns a Fourth Generation war taking place on America’s doorstep, that between the Mexican state and drug gangs.  The July 14 Financial Times, one of the world’s best newspapers, reported that the head of Mexico’s intelligence agency

Told a small group of foreign media recently: “Drug traffickers have become the principal threat because they are trying to take over the power of the state.”

Mr. Valdes said the gangs…had co-opted many members of local police forces, the judiciary, and government entities….

Those efforts, he said, could now also be targeting federal institutions such as Congress itself.  “Congress is not exempt…we do not rule out the possibility that drug money is involved in the campaigns of some legislators,” Mr. Valdes said.

The news here is not the “possibility” that some Mexican legislators are on drug traffickers’ payrolls.  The news is that a prominent Mexican official, one whose position gives him a good look at what is going on, was willing to go public about the threat to the state itself.  The fact that he took that risk suggests the cancer is far advanced.  For intelligence officers, going public is usually an act of desperation.

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Tags: al Qaeda, fourth generation warfare, Hamas, Iraq, Mexican Drug Gangs

In that department this week, two items stand out:

• First, the ACLU announced that the terrorist watch list now contains over 1 million names.  Your first reaction might be that if the number of terrorists is into seven figures we are truly doomed — it only took 19 plus a support organization of perhaps a few dozen to carry out 9/11.  The ACLU’s assessment is well worth reading.

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By William S. Lind
July 15, 2008

The war as in life, the secret to success is having a wide range of options. That was the basis of von Moltke’s approach to operational art, as opposed to the Schlieffen school’s myopic focus on one option. The list of commanders and nations whose single option failed is a long one.

Regrettably, whoever takes over as America’s President and Commander in Chief next January will face a rapidly narrowing range of options. With the fall of Communism and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, America was given an almost limitless range of options. A series of bad decisions since that time have reduced that range to a paltry few, none of them particularly attractive. Running the narrows with a ship of state is a perilous enterprise.

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By William S. Lind
July 14, 2008

The war between the Colombian state and the Marxist FARC is not a Fourth Generation conflict, because it is fought within the framework of the state. The Colombian government seeks to maintain control of the state, while the FARC want to replace it. It’s all about who runs the state, not offering alternatives to the state.

Nonetheless, some lessons for Fourth Generation wars may be drawn, because the way in which the war is fought — a guerilla-style insurgency — similar to many (not all) Fourth Generation conflicts. The recent successful rescue of hostages long held by the FARC is a case in point. It was a brilliant victory for the Colombian government and armed forces, on all levels, including the moral level. What might the U.S. Armed Forces learn from it that they could apply in Iraq, Afghanistan, and (we fear) elsewhere?

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About grand strategy:  What it is, why we need it, why we don’t, and how to tell if we have a good one.

All playing now on Fabius Maximus’s blog!

Be sure to read his latest installment, on peak oil.  You may wonder how this plays into grand strategy, but how we deal with the unprecedented ramp up in the cost of this most basic of commodities (as close to a tax on breathing as is humanly possible) will affect Boyd’s four elements of grand strategy:

• Improve our morale and that of our allies
• Degrade that of our opponents
• Attract the uncommitted
• Without setting the stage for future (unfavorable) conflict.

Comments are welcome (although you might consider placing them on FM’s blog); please observe our comment policy.

Perhaps Boyd’s greatest contribution wasn’t EM Theory or Patterns of Conflict.  It might have been that he exemplified what it means to be a professional in this day and time.

Retired USMC Colonel Mike Wyly, a guiding force behind the Marines’ efforts to instill maneuver warfare, was also a close associate of Boyd’s.  He writes about Boyd and the ethos of professionalism in the current edition of the Armed Forces Journal:

Professionals have to listen, too; the physician to his patient, the lawyer to his client, the clergyman to his parishioners, the officer to his men.

Boyd embodied these traits and held to them uncompromisingly. I learned from him, and I never offered an idea that he did not hear out in detail. The many, many ideas he injected or tried to inject into the military intellect he had invariably studied, thought out, footnoted and referenced. He did his homework - as a professional.

Mike now runs the Bossov Ballet Theater in Maine and is the author of “Thinking Like Marines,” posted on chetrichards.com.

Comments are welcome; please observe our comment policy.

by Chuck Spinney

A recent article by Thomas Powers in the New York Review of Books is a very good analysis of why Mr. Bush’s impulse to attack Iran before he leaves office is sheer madness. And at a deeper level, it well illustrates how perverted the militarization of US grand strategy has become at the dawn of the 21st Century.

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By William S. Lind
July 2, 2008

Pat Buchanan’s new book, Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World, is causing a stir, which is a good thing. Buchanan argues that both World War I and World War II were unnecessary wars; that Britain bears at least as much responsibility for both as Germany; that Winston Churchill was “the indispensable man” in reducing Britain from a world-encircling empire to “a cottage by the sea-to live out her declining years;” and that the consequence of the Western civil war that encompassed both World Wars (I would add the Cold War as well) has been the fall of the West.

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is, of course, paved with good intentions. And who has better intentions than the ban-the-bomb crowd?

Carla Anne Robbins has an editorial today in the NYT advocating such a course and lining up impressive supporters:

Two decades later [after Reagan and Gorbachev had floated the idea], a who’s who of the national security establishment - George Shultz, Henry Kissinger, William Perry and Sam Nunn - is calling on the United States to lead a global campaign to devalue and eventually rid the world of nuclear weapons. …

[George Schultz] says the goal is to give the next president the political space and the technical support to launch a major initiative to reduce and eventually eliminate the world’s arsenals. “We are increasingly able to answer the question, ‘If I do this how will other people react? Will they think I’m crazy?’ ” he says.

Senator Barack Obama has embraced their proposal.

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That would be today, the 100-year anniversary of when a small (maybe 40m) something exploded over  Siberia, devastating several hundred square miles. Andrew C. Revkin blogs in the NYT on the status of efforts to protect us from collision with asteroids, comets, and meteors.  Duck-and-cover:

To a person, they said the lawmakers they worked for were convinced of the threat and need to invest more in protection. And to a person, he recalled, they apologized that new money was unlikely because making the deflection of asteroids a priority might backfire in reelection campaigns.

As I noted in a post last month, the threat from space objects is real and much more worthy of defense funding than preparations for large-scale conventional war.

Comments are welcome; please observe our comment policy.