Defense and the National Interest

The standard description of Tet is that we won tactically but somehow this didn’t get through to the American people. Unfortunately this misses the main point.
It’s true that tactically we and our South Vietnamese allies won. The Viet Cong and North Vietnamese were pushed out of all the areas they had captured and [...]

Seydlitz89 has contributed the attached critique (170KB PDF) of Martin van Creveld’s

William S. Lind
Most wars move not at a steady pace but in a series of fits and starts. For about half a year, we have been enjoying something of a lull in the war in Iraq. Anything that reduces casualties is to be welcomed. But the bulletins’ claims that the downward trend [...]

The fighting in the south bears watching. Some news reports paint it as a confrontation between the national forces of a legitimate Iraqi government and armed street gangs allied with Iran. As James Glanz and Anahad O’Connor report in today’s New York Times:
An American military official said Tuesday that coalition forces had supported Iraqi [...]

By William S. Lind
March 17, 2008
Admiral Fallon’ s (forced?) resignation was the last warning we are likely to get of an attack on Iran. It does not mean an attack is certain, but the U.S. could not attack Iran so long as he was the CENTCOM commander. That obstacle is now gone.
Vice President Cheney’s Middle [...]

Last week I mentioned an article by a US Army sergeant serving as part of the surge in Baghdad. Today, I’d like to post a letter from an anonymous “junior officer” whose experiences have led him to an entirely different set of conclusions [the letter was not sent to me so I cannot verify [...]

He’s got it up and running.
Visit with him at http://donvandergriff.wordpress.com.

At the Adaptive Leadership Conference, Col Mike Wyly, USMC, Ret., shared his thoughts on why the USMC was able to adopt maneuver warfare — incompletely perhaps, but more than any other service. Mike, who is often called the “Godfather of Maneuver Warfare” in the Corps, began teaching the strategy in the mid-1970s. [...]

Shawn Brimley has a new post on this subject at Small Wars Journal:
The Bush administration has pursued a foreign policy that is narrow in its view, negative in its purpose, and has produced negligible results. Americans deserve a grand strategy that is panoramic in view, positive in its purpose, and persuasive as a basis for [...]

The schedule was: Don Vandergriff leading off with a couple of adaptive leadership games designed to illustrate, not just talk about, the factors that produce leaders who can thrive in unpredictable situations. I did a Boyd briefing, which I’ll post later. Mike Wyly told about his experiences in the campaign to get maneuver [...]