Defense and the National Interest

William S. Lind
August 18, 2008
Despite the recent drop in the price of oil, the world economy is still sailing into troubled waters. The U.S. credit crisis is intensifying and spreading to Britain. Europe is moving toward recession. The international financial system continues to depend on mountains of debt. If the financial panic the Federal Reserve [...]

Bret Stephens has an editorial in today’s Wall St. J. justifying the war.  He makes the point that if we hadn’t invaded, we (meaning, I guess, his fellow neocons) would still think that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction.  I am not kidding:
Saddam is dead. Had he remained in power, we would likely still believe [...]

By William S. Lind
July 28, 2008
Senator John McCain’s position on the situation in Iraq is wrong on two counts, which means his criticism of Senator Obama is also wrong.  The twin pillars of McCain’s assessment of the war are a) the surge worked and b) because the surge worked we are now winning.  Neither of [...]

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 [...]

By John P. Sullivan and Adam Elkus
Washington is overflowing with foreign policy proposals for the next administration. Think-tankers of all political stripes are looking for a big idea to revolutionize American foreign policy. Missing from the equation, however, are new solutions for America’s problems with counterinsurgency (COIN) and stabilization operations. The goal of these military [...]

Finally, a decline-of-the-state book that not only doesn’t depend on Martin van Creveld’s work, but doesn’t even mention it. And it’s a pretty good one.
FROM THE NEW MIDDLE AGES TO A NEW DARK AGE: THE DECLINE OF THE STATE AND U.S. STRATEGY, by Phil Williams. Dr. Williams is Visiting Research Professor at the [...]

By William S. Lind
As the U.S. remains fixated on two Fourth Generation wars half a world a way, in Iraq and Afghanistan, 4GW is knocking at our back door. The death spiral of the Mexican state appears to be accelerating. To quote just one illustrative bit of evidence, the Cleveland Plain Dealer recently reported that
Seven [...]

By William S. Lind
I spent last week with the Royal Marines in Plymouth, England, at a conference where they were trying to prepare intellectually for deployment to Afghanistan’s Helmand province. Inspired perhaps by the atmosphere of historic Stonehouse Barracks, where Marines who served at Trafalgar once drilled, I came up with an approach to [...]

In the “how did I miss this?” category:
“Learning the Right Lessons from Iraq,” by Benjamin H. Friedman, Harvey Sapolsky and Christopher Preble, The Cato Institute, Policy Analysis no. 610, February 13, 2008.

“The Continued Existence of the State: The Clausewitzian Concept of Cohesion,” by seydlitz89 (189 KB PDF)
The second of two articles contrasting the views of Martin van Creveld and Carl von Clausewitz.
Author seydlitz89 continues where he left off “The Decline of Strategic Theory.” Whether you buy into his critique of van Creveld, there’s a lot of [...]