February 2012
9 posts
1 tag
Intervention Podcast, Part 2
Yes. Number 2 has dropped. Robert Caruso, Dan Trombly, Hayes Brown, Rei Tang, and Daniel Solomon talk with me on my couch about liberation technology, the international relations of the Syrian conflict, and Jessica Biel (yes, really).
Here’s the link for Part 2, and be sure to check out Part 1 if you haven’t already.
Future segments will likely be more formalized (akin to the AWACS...
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Intervention Podcast, Part 1
Orchestrated by the one and only Robert Caruso, I sat down with Dan Trombly, Rei Tang, Daniel Solomon, and Hayes Brown to discuss Syria. Rob and Alex Olesker (who is currently traveling) have had an idea for a while about a “mixtape” type series, recorded raw and featuring special strategic content.
At heart, the Intervention series is a bunch of friends who blog, tweet, study, and...
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APT Musings
The concept might actually be useful…
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Strategy and Cliches
Writing blog posts and articles about the nature of strategy can sometimes seem as tedious as rappers rapping about…rapping. If it were not for the need to sometimes clarify, for those not particularly well-versed in the neo-Clausewitzian canon, the structure of strategic relationships I would probably not type “war is a duel” or “remember the policy” as often as I do...
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Hearts and Minds Redux
The concept of “hearts and minds” is fairly controversial within the discussion of counterinsurgency. Let’s lay down a few ground rules.
First, contrary to this recent Kings of War post, the concept of “hearts and minds” is not an eternal aspect of warfare but a recent invention. It cannot be removed from the context of the early Cold War. Military and political...
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The Challenge of Riot Control
I tackle the strategic challenges of riots and crowd power with John P. Sullivan in a new essay for SWJ.
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Guest Post: The Legality of Drones
This post below is from Zachary P. Novetsky. Zach has a legal background and wants to share his take on evolving legal codes and norms about unmanned weapons, non-state actors, and the use of force. Disclaimer: all guest posts do not necessarily reflect my opinion and are offered for commentary, analysis, and education.
The public debate about drones that we apparently are not having reared its...
Admin Note
Changing my Twitter name to AElkus, and my logo. If you’re wondering what the previous account name meant (along with the cyberpunk image), you’ll have to come to one of the frequent occasions that me, Dan Trombly, Robert Caruso, Rei Tang, and Alex Olesker convene in order to talk about strategy and gangster rap at Medaterra.
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Covert Operations And Policy: Pakistan Edition
Robert Caruso and Spencer Ackerman have both offered sharp takes on the issues of classification and secrecy in the drone war over Pakistan. I find Robert’s take especially compelling, as is Dan Trombly’s argument that capabilities like drones for discrete, under-the-table power projection have existed throughout American history and don’t really pose such a threat to democracy...
January 2012
22 posts
3 tags
Death from Above
At the new SWJ, I take on the morality of drone warfare. Spoiler: I think most of the debate grossly neglects military history.
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Politics Will Be Politics
A doubler-header here.
First, read Trombly on drones and bad history.
Second, read Fouche on the problem with grand strategy.
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Force Works
To listen to the National Strategic Narrative’s Mr. Y and others, we’re in an 21st era of “credible influence,” where no one country can “direct global outcomes.” Instead, it credibly influences others with various aims of military power. However, the US is certainly “directing a global outcome” and doing so the 20th century way: with raw military...
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America Needs Sound Policy, Not Grand Strategy
Every few months since 1991, there is a new op-ed calling for a new grand strategy or bemoaning the fact that the US doesn’t have one. I’ve written a few blogs/articles to this tune myself. But it’s time to realize that the problem lies with the very conception of grand strategy itself.
In Foreign Policy, Rosa Brooks argues that the US needs a grand strategy:
Though different...
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The Dynamics of Self-Help
An American has been sentenced to die, under trumped up charges, by a fanatical authoritarian foreign government. And few seem to care:
Former U.S. Marine Amir Hekmati, caught up in the conflict between Washington and Tehran, has been portrayed by Iran as a spy, a suspicion fueled by his prior military service and past employment with defense contractors. …Iran announced Monday its...
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Covert Commentary
The world of espionage is impossibly murky. We still, for example, know little about Sidney Reilly, the steampunk-era British superspy and consummate master of deception who may have inspired the James Bond series. It was only last year that MI6 let an official historian give us an inkling if it what it was doing in 1909. When writing about covert activities—even heavily documented...
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Major Conflict Persists, Just Not On CNN
John Campbell has an post looking at the prospect for new violence in the Congo:
To recap: the incumbent, Joseph Kabila, defeated challenger Etienne Tshisekedi in elections characterized as “too flawed to be credible” by international and domestic observers, including the Roman Catholic Church, which had some thirty thousand observers in the field. The DRC supreme court, seen as in...
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Peacenik Profession Or Poor Survey Design?
The Duck of Minerva has an interesting blog on the professional orientation of IR academics, using data taken from a recent survey:
Asked “Would you approve or disapprove of the use of U.S. military forces in the following situations?”, scholars responded: War between North and South Sudan: 84.6% disapprove. If it were certain that Iran had produced a nuclear weapon: 79.9% disapprove...
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Critiquing the Strategic Corporal
Anyone with even the most passing interest in military history knows that atrocities in war are commonplace—even during “good” wars. This is why the analogies to the WWII Pacific Campaign are coming out in droves during the commentary cycle about Marines desecrating the corpses of dead Taliban fighters. Already, the debate is bogging down into extrapolations of the incident into...
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Drone Landscapes
Very cool stuff here from the always fascinating BLDGBLOG on the beginning of a possible: “drone landscape”
To speculate a bit here, if TenCate’s GeoDetect is basically a 2D computer or sensor network, then, given further processing power and mechanically augmented with servomotors, a future version of this system could perhaps not only engage in locally autonomous...
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Operational Maneuver from the Sea, 1950s edition
Not a new concept, by any means…
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THE SWARM!!!
For CTOVision, I talk about swarms and what they mean for the CTO.
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Drone Chic
The next new cool thing may be drone chic. No, I’m not talking about Twitter celebrities like the infamous Drunken Predator or the Sexy Raven UAV, although they’re pretty hip themselves. I’m talking about a culture change in a world when even your friendly (or not) Williamsburg hipster may have a flying robot of his own. Yes, dear readers, hipsters with drones. A dystopian...
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The Problem With Credible Influence
Having dealt with the question of victory in future war, I now turn to the other part of Ann-Marie Slaughter’s op-ed on “The End of Twentieth Century Warfare” that should give those versed in strategic history pause: the increasingly popular notion of “credible influence.”
When I spoke at Quantico months ago, I had a section of my speech that dealt with the...
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Cartel Tactics in Infantry Magazine
Late notice, but if you have access to Amy Knowledge Online (AKO) and/or subscribe to the print version, John P. Sullivan and me have a piece on Mexican cartel small unit tactics in Infantry Magazine’s September-October 2011 edition.
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Cyber, Escalation, and Deterrence
Very interesting new paper out of NDU, and takes the right approach. Quoting from the summary:
Manzo concludes that attacks that strike targets in space and cyberspace and affect capabilities and events in other domains should be judged on the basis of their real-world effects. This approach would help decisionmakers determine whether responses in different domains are proportionate or...
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Libya: A Strategic Assessment
Roland Paris has perhaps the most fair-minded look at the legacy (in Jan 2012) of the Libya intervention, although little of it probably will be new to many.
Some key points from his piece:
Libyan rebels would not have prevailed without air power. While this fact may seem banal, it explains the reason why the “no-fly” zone turned into the “no-drive” zone. Without NATO...
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Distance and War
The above map is of Napoleon’s Jena Campaign. Kind of strange how small it seems, compared to operations a century and a half later in Continental Europe—or even the Corsican’s later expedition to Russia.
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Old School
It is without reservations that I state that The Sovereignty Solution was the most important book of 2011 that most of you never read.
Anna Simons and her co-authors at the Naval Postgraduate School have crafted the national security equivalent of a religious revival. Like the Great Awakening, it contains a heavy undertone of conservatism (although thankfully no fire-and-brimstone moments akin...
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The Caruso Doctrine
My friend Rob Caruso has been adapting and achieving for a while as national security Twitter provocateur, defense contractor, and a constant voice for innovative practices in defense (like making the Intelligence Community take a look at how gangs practice operational security). However, most are unfamiliar with Rob’s newest role: blogger. They shouldn’t be—Rob brings an...
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There Is No Substitute, Part 2.
Svenn Ortmann has written a critique of my most recent blog. While it is interesting, we appear to be talking past each other. Hence I will re-state my arguments in greater depth.
Ortmann argues that the “classic definition of victory” in today’s environment is impossible:
This kind of opposition cannot be defeated once and for all with conventional recipes. You may disarm...
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There Is No Substitute For Victory
Why you would you fight a war if you didn’t want to win? While this seems may seem to be a silly question, we must delve deep into this issue as the tangled debate on American strategy grows even more confusing.
Anne-Marie Slaughter wrote a piece in September that has since begun to get some attention in the blogosphere that argues, in essence, that victory is outdated:
No country,...
December 2011
8 posts
1 tag
If You're Not Reading Dan Trombly on Drones,...
Dan cuts through the pearl-clutching that passes for analysis on military robotics.
Rise of the Narcohackers
At CTOVision, I explore narcohacking.
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The Enigma of AirSea Battle
Over at Japan Security Watch, I summarize the evolving debate on ASB.
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Towards a Counterterrorism Net Assessment
My latest piece explores the use of Andrew Marshall and others’ technique of Net Assessment for American counterterrorism policy.
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Greatest Hits, Part 2.
Robert C. Jones has published a short rebuttal to my short blog. While William F. Owen can undoubtedly speak for himself, I will make a few general observations. As I think this conversation would illuminate other matters of importance, I have replied at length.
The basic problem with discussions of counterinsurgency is the idea that the use of military force is necessarily equivalent to a...
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Greatest Hits
In July, William F. Owen published one of the few essays that provided a workable solution for how the United States could optimize its forces for counterinsurgency warfare. It’s actually a lot more simple than it appears. Some central ideas:
Victory is produced by combat, and the goal of operating forces should be to break the enemy’s will.
The rule of law, governance, and other...
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Covert Operations and Policy
I have a new piece at Infinity Journal on covert operations as a state policy. Also see Simon Anglim’s essay in the same volume for a more military-strategic approach.
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Drones and the Nature of War
Drones don’t change the nature of war, I argue at Democracy Arsenal. Keep your CvC handy with your flying killer robots.
November 2011
7 posts
2 tags
Mexico and Morality
With John P. Sullivan, I’ve written on Mexico for a while, but this recent piece by the always excellent Sylvia Longmire is wonderful:
It’s the phone call every Mexican immigrant in America dreads—the anonymous, vulgar, and threatening voice demanding ransom for a family member’s release. Such an event can throw an entire family into distress, calling distant relatives, friends,...
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Repaying in Kind
Covert operations are now the newest topic to be graced by the epidemic of pearl-clutching, brow-furrowing, and hand-wringing that seems to have descended on the American national security debate. It seems people really are surprised that “containment” and “special forces and intelligence” touted as alternatives to Iraq and Afghanistan involves “containing”...
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COIN-Ish Thoughts
Gian P. Gentile, Paul Olsen, and others are debating over whether counterinsurgency is dead. Elsewhere, Colin Clark reports that COIN is being “scrapped” by the military. Gentile and Douglas Ollivant has written about the formation of a dominant COIN narrative, and it’s clear that at for a combination of material, academic, and political reasons this narrative is no longer...
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Some Propositions Regarding Cyberwar
1. Most of what is described as cyberwar is not “war” but espionage, crime, or covert operations.
2. Cyberwar in the strictly military context is command and control warfare. Being able to disable a crucial logistics hub with the virus is impressive, but we were already able to do it with a JDAM.
3. Much of information operations theory over-emphasizes cyber and propaganda and...
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It Takes a Network...Sometimes
It looks like Occupy Wall Street is beginning to reach an impasse. Adam Martin reports that coverage of the movemen’s political message has ceased to be the story. Rather, the various escapades going on Zucotti Park have become the story. The story of OWS, in a way, is also the story of how theories about network organization (in both war and peace) have run into some hard realities:
On...
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Civil-Military Relations: Not a Buffet
Abu Muquwama perfectly expressed my discomfort with Peter Beinart’s article on the Israeli military-intelligence structure apparently resisting war with Iran:
If anyone noticed Sam Huntington spinning in his grave, that’s because Beinart is arguing that in a democracy, a military that actively resists the policy preferences of its elected leaders is a more responsible military...
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OODA and Oil
For CTOVision, I describe what the OODA is and what it’s not.
And for Small Wars Journal, I describe how the cartels are taking control of Mexican energy.
Check ‘em out!
October 2011
4 posts
1 tag
Secret Agent Man: A Strategic Parable
So, both Pakistan and Iran have been carrying out a combination of Unconventional Warfare (in the SF doctrinal definition) and covert operations against the US and its allies and clients. By now, Pakistan’s hand has simply become impossible to ignore.
What this represents largely is the triumph of cumulative strategy and the West’s failure to adapt to it. As Lukas Milevski notes,...
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"The Net is Vast and Infinite"
I’m buried under lots of work, including a substantial research project on information warfare (major cases are Operations Desert Storm, Allied Force, and Bagration) but the drama of Occupy Wall Street is interesting to me from the perspective of both organizational design and the recurring question of the impact of network technologies on social movements.
First, let’s establish...
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Al-Awlaki and International Order
Most of the debate over the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki has focused on the legality of the action and its effect on al-Qaeda. But what does it mean for international order? Will it lead to states deciding to use forces against overseas dissidents more freely?
Understanding the killing of al-Awlaki within the long frame of history suggests that it is banal rather than exceptional.
I wrote a guest...
4 tags
Spectrum of Intervention and the Indirect Approach
I have mostly resolved to leave R2P-blogging to Gulliver, Dan Trombly, Mark Safranksi, and Anne-Marie Slaughter. However, Safranski linked to an op-ed by Simon Adams on the Responsibility to Protect that I find illustrative of some of the issues with talking about R2P: the prevention/intervention distinction, non-military coercive prevention measures, and strategy in intervention.
Adams writes...