The Security Paradox

Saturday

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Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin E. Dempsey spoke at the John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum, Harvard University, Boston, Massachusetts on Thursday, 12 April 2012. In his speech he formulated what he called a security paradox. I was made aware of this by a piece in Foreign Policy magazine, This Week at War: The General’s Dystopia by Robert Haddick.

The chairman’s formulation of one of the central strategic dilemmas of our time in the form of a paradox gives us a concise motif for the discussion of this dilemma. Here is the passage of the speech that first formulates the paradox:

…I believe I’m chairman at a time that seems less dangerous but it’s actually more dangerous. That’s the essence of what I describe as a security paradox. Although geopolitical trends are ushering in greater levels of peace and stability worldwide, destructive technologies are available to a wider and more disparate pool of adversaries. Highly accurate ballistic missiles are prevalent in every theater. Bombs made out of fertilizer can defeat and destroy our toughest mine-resistant vehicles. A cyberattack could stop this society in its tracks. And these are real threats that we face today.

What truly concerns me as chairman is that these lethal and destructive technologies are proliferating in two directions. They’re proliferating horizontally across advanced militaries in the world, and they’re proliferating vertically, down to nonstate actors, especially insurgents, terrorist groups and even transnational organized crime. As a result, more people have the ability to harm us or deny us the ability to act than at any point in my life. And that’s the security paradox.

The international system is more stable than at any time in the past, and there is less peer-to-peer war than throughout much of history, but the possibility of technologically sophisticated violence is more pervasive than at any time in the past. This summarizes the paradoxical coincidence of two of the most important strategic trends of our time. we have long known that major peer-to-peer wars are becoming less frequent in the international system, and we have long known that rapidly technological process is democratizing advanced technological capabilities. It is the virtue of the Chairman’s security paradox to bring these two strategic trends together.

It might sound a bit odd to say that war has been made less frequent by the contemporary international system, since there are seemingly interminable conflicts all over the world, and this is partly a semantic question of how “war” is to be defined. If we place the threshold of war rather low, and include non-state actors, we can say that war is pervasive in the world today. But if we place the threshold high, and disallow non-state actors are participants in war sensu stricto, war can be seen as rare. In fact, if we define war as peer-to-peer conflict between major military powers, there has not been a war since 1945. Subsequent larger conflicts have been proxy wars between Cold War adversaries that did not rise to the level of peer-to-peer (or near-peer) conflict.

I have expressed this strategic trend of the decreasing frequency of all-out war as the devolution of war, noting that this devolution involves the weaponization of eliminationism, which keeps depredations below the threshold of atrocity in order to forestall international intervention (and thereby avoid a “war”).

Another way to express this is to employ the acronym OOTW, which stands for “operations other than war” (also MOOTW, military operations other than war). Chapter 9 of Field Manual 100-15 – War and Operations Other Than War details military operations other than war, which may include (but are not necessarily limited to) arms control, attacks and raids, antiterrorism, counterterrorism, disaster relief, humanitarian assistance, security assistance, foreign internal defense, COIN, noncombatant evacuation operations, peace operations, and recovery operations. It is no secret that the military forces of major powers have been much more involved in OOTW than war itself for some time, although all of these OOTW can escalate into conflicts indistinguishable from war.

I don’t know of any acronym that sums up the devolution of technology as neatly as OOTW sums up the devolution of warfighting powers to conducting operations other than war, but the historical phenomenon of technology becoming less expensive and more widely available is familiar to all. I dealt with the technological devolution after a fashion in Power to the People, in which I discussed the electronic intelligence possibilities now available to non-state entities and indeed to individuals. Anyone today using Google Earth knows what it is like to have available on their desk top satellite intelligence once reserved for a handful of nation-states capable of launching a satellite into earth orbit.

We have every reason to believe that major military engagements will continue to be avoided in favor of military operations other than war, and we similarly have every reason to believe that advanced technology, including the technology of weapons systems, will continue to disperse more widely and cheaply. Thus the security paradox will not only continue to describe the global security situation, it will likely be exacerbated by high technology weapons systems devolving further down the continuum of actors and agents.

These developments are not smooth and continuous; there continue to be some technologies like nuclear weapons that require the resources of a nation-state to develop and to deploy (although, I might point out, not to steal). Computer technologies are very widely available, and wherever computer technologies inform weapons technology, we can expect such high technology weapons systems to eventually devolve to the level of the individual. Ideologically motivated groups, like terrorist groups, making a concerted effort to acquire such high technology weapons systems, will have them much sooner.

How are we to manage a world in which high technology weapons systems are in the hands of strongly ideologically motivated groups who are willing to kill in order to attain their objectives? That is the question that will shape security thinking for the remainder of the twenty-first century and beyond.

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The Nature of Viking Power Projection

Wednesday

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After the collapse of Roman power in Western Europe, the most formidable instrument of force projection to emerge in Western Europe was that of Viking Civilization. The naval force projection capabilities of the Vikings were unique in the historical period, and this achievement counts alongside the great instruments of force projection in human history. The next great instrument of force projection to emerge in human history — the Mongol horse archer — was neither naval nor Western European. (I wrote about the Mongol instrument of force projection in The Power of Mobile Fire.) The next capable naval instrument of force projection in Western Europe did not emerge for another five hundred years, as Western Europe fell into the lassitude of an inland and almost purely agricultural civilization.

As with the Mongols, whose power projection abilities grew directly out of a way of life of nomadic pastoralism that involved horsemanship from an early age, the Norse power projection ability also grew directly out of a way of life, that of a people dependent upon shipping. Life in Scandinavia is difficult. If you can imagine the difficulty of life in early medieval Europe, and then multiply this difficulty by colder temperatures, shorter growing seasons, and more difficult overland transportation, you get an idea of the difficulty of life in early medieval Scandinavia. The coastline of what is today Norway in rocky, bleak and cold, and it faces the inhospitable North Sea, but it is deeply indented by fjords. What is a fjord? A fjord is a sunken mountain range whose valleys are filled with frigid waters and whose peaks tower above the narrow waterways. What little farming there is in Norway takes place on a very narrow strip of alluvial deposits between the water’s edge and the steeps sides of the walls of the fjords.

This is a hard land in which to make a living, and people here would have been unimaginably poor were it not for waterborne commerce — raiding and trading by ship gave the medieval Norse peoples what little wealth they possessed. Without shipping, the peoples of Scandinavia would be limited to what little produce can be coaxed from their northern soils. With shipping, the Vikings made themselves a power to be reckoned with, whose influence stretched from the British Isles to Constantinople, where Swedish Vikings became the Varangian guard who were the special detail of the Emperor of Byzantium.

The geography of the fjords was the key to Viking power projection in the same way that the grasslands of Central Asia, capable of pasturing horses but not suitable for settled agriculturalism, were the key to Mongol power projection. The fjords open directly onto the North Sea, but they are not mere harbors. The waterways of the fjords penetrate deep into the interior of the Scandinavian landmass, and these waterways are lined with trees that cover the sides of the fjords. Since a fjord is a sunken mountain range, the tops of the mountains (at least at the coast) do not rise above the timberline. (It is quite beautiful to see Norway in the fall since the autumn colors reach to the top of the walls of the fjords.) Deep waterways plus lots of timber plus quiet inland spots long the fjord far from the storms of the North Sea mean that you can build a boat virtually anywhere along the edge of the fjord.

Shipbuilding technology, while sophisticated, is a skill that one man can acquire from participating in a few projects, after which the experienced shipwright can set himself up at the quiet end of a fjord. His family homestead can supply him with enough to eat while he builds a ship, and once the ship is built the neighbors can all jump on board, leaving their wives at home to care for the farm. Since there were no raiding parties coming from elsewhere in Europe, probing the coast of Scandinavia for unguarded farmsteads, these farms would be safe for the weeks or months that a raiding party was away. Also, there was little wealth here for any foreign raiders to steal. Like the Vikings, they would be attracted to soft targets that had something worth taking and little ability to defend it — like monasteries.

At this point in European history, there was little competition for raiding and trading. The Vikings mostly had the sea lanes to themselves; their free hand on the water meant many opportunities, and the many opportunities lured the ambitious and the adventurous to improve their lot, in the course of which they improved their knowledge of seamanship and the communities upon which they preyed. Communities were isolated. Communications were poor. There was no strong central authority that could be mobilized to systematically counter the Viking threat. Little changed. A soft target might well remain a soft target for generations.

The farms along the fjords were a base and a supply depot; the inhospitable terrain functioned like a natural citadel in which these bases of operations remained safe for generations; the same terrain necessitated shipping as a way of life, and the knowledge of shipping meant a people intimately familiar with life on the water. Ships came out of Scandinavia like horses came out of Mongolia. The success of raiding and trading was a strong incentive for others to iterate the successful model, drawing upon the same knowledge rooted in the same way of life. Moreover, the mythology of the Norse peoples before Christianization was remarkably similarly to the Homeric ethos celebrating the life of the warrior, in which battle is honorable and honor more important than life, and this mythology was the source of a vigorous tradition of poetry that was equally part of the lifeway of the people. One suspects that famous lines of Skaldic poetry were repeated under the breath of Vikings as they approached their targets and prepared themselves to loot and pillage, or perhaps, in the spirit of the genre, lines were improvised as the men went about their brutal work.

Power projection before the industrial revolution was always about a way of life. Some ways of life lent themselves more effectively to power projection than others. Many peoples led peaceful histories in so far as their neighbors would allow them to live in peace without taking up arms, but in an age that respected strength and the right of conquest, the narrative of armed conflict was socially necessary and leaves the impression that all peoples were equally warlike.

The calculus of power projection has not necessarily changed with the advent of industrialization. Still, some things have changed. Earlier, in Marcuse on the Post-WWII settlement, I identified a technological threshold, marked by the Industrial Revolution, that is crucial to the development of power projection:

Before the revolution in mechanical technology — of which the Industrial Revolution was a moment within a larger development — the contests between peoples could be decided by vigorous exertion. Virtually any people could establish an empire by expending sufficient effort. This is parallel to the fact that before the Technological Revolution the interest prohibition was no great impediment to peoples or individuals, since most of that to which peoples or individuals aspired could be secured through sufficient effort (i.e., largely independently of any technical expertise in finance). This is no longer true. In those regions of the world most affected by the Technological Revolution, the age old calculus of ambition has been utterly transformed. Will, effort, and exertion alone are not sufficient for a people to found or expand an empire or for an individual to attain social status.

While I still agree with this, I would point out now that, although ambition and effort could tip the balance in a contest between peoples, as a matter of historical fact the great instruments of power projection have been rooted in the lifeways of a people. This is less about imperial ambition than about the ordinary business of life. The difference for power projection, then, between before and after the Industrial Revolution, is that before the Industrial Revolution an Ozymandian figure could cajole his people to imperial conquest through sheer feats of will, whereas now this is probably no longer possible.

Perhaps it could be said that the essence of power projection has not changed, but certainly its appearance has changed. And here is the sense in which the essence of power projection has not changed, despite the technological threshold: those peoples most adept at the lifeways of industrial-technological civilization are those that can most effectively wage industrialized warfare, and which will then be most effective in industrial age power projection.

It sounds odd to speak of the “lifeways of industrialized peoples,” but it is necessary to begin to think in such terms if one is going to be able to make sense of contemporary history in the same spirit that one brings to the understanding of earlier history. The lifeways of industrialized people do not at all appear similar to the lifeways of pre- and unindustrialized peoples, but the relation of these lifeways to effective power projection remain essentially unchanged.

The first great manifestation of industrial-technological power projection was that of the British Navy, in service to the worldwide British Empire, and with its coaling stations around the globe. Ships crewed by hundreds or thousands of men required coal, fresh water, and food; an entire global infrastructure was necessary to support such a navy. Thus the Royal British Navy both made the British Empire possible as well as the infrastructure created by this Empire made the global reach of the Royal Navy possible.

The second great manifestation of industrial-technological power projection was the success of German land forces during the First and Second World Wars (and the Luftwaffe as well, in so far as it participated in combined arms operations by providing air support For the Wehrmacht’s armored advance). The German mastery of industrial-technological lifeways was apparent in the excellence of German military hardware (both in terms of design and construction), the care and expertise with which German soldiers employed this hardware (British soldiers in North Africa reported that the Germans always made an effort to recover as many of their tanks as they could after dark), and the ability of the German economy to continue to supply its war machine despite the pressures of fighting a two-front war.

The third great manifestation of industrial-technological power projection was the nearly seamless US replacement of the British Navy after the end of the Second World War. The world’s oceans, once patrolled by the Royal British Navy, are now patrolled by the US. The totality of US global control of the sea lanes is nearly unprecedented in history; it continues to this day, though it is under threat (cf. U.S. Confronts an Anti-Access World), and it has played no small role in the growth of global commerce. The Pax Americana has held on the world’s oceans if it can be said to have held anywhere.

The forth great manifestation of industrial-technological power projection was and remains overwhelming US air superiority, with its global infrastructure of airbases (analogous as they are to coaling stations). An air force must have fuel, spare parts, mechanics, and must meet the needs of aircrews. It takes the largest economy in the world to support this infrastructure. And, as with the symbiosis of the Royal Navy and the British Empire, US global influence makes worldwide airbases possible, while the worldwide airbases make US global air superiority possible, and thereby secure continuing US global influence. Continued economic productivity is necessary to support the upkeep and operations of such a force. Should the US economy seriously falter, the US would prove itself unable to remain a competitor in industrial-technological power projection. The fact that the US has managed to maintain and expand its global network over a period of almost seventy years, through good economic times and bad, and has at present no peer force to challenge it globally (though it can be challenged locally), demonstrates the US ability so far to maintain its dominance. Neither more nor less. We cannot extrapolate this dominance into anything beyond the immediate future because there are too many unknown parameters.

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Maintaining the Distinction Between Strategy and Tactics

Saturday

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What is called “losing” in chess may constitute winning in another game.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, in a discussion of Gödel’s incompleteness proofs

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I have for quite some time been intending to wade into the COIN debate (that’s “counter-insurgency,” for those among you without an absolute command of inherently ambiguous acronyms), and while this post is not going to be that post which takes COIN as the leitmotif, I will here approach COIN indirectly by taking a bit of the debate on the margins of COIN. To paraphrase Wittgenstein’s well known remark about Gödel — “My task is, not to talk about (e.g.), Gödel’s proof, but to pass it by.” — I can say that, in the present context, my task is not to talk about COIN, but to pass it by.

And I will pass by COIN by way of a detour through SoT. Now we have another acronym, so I must tell you that “SoT” means “strategy of tactics.” I found this on the Ink Spots blog, in a piece by Jason Fritz titled be-SoT-ted: COIN tactics and strategy through the lens of ends, ways, means. Fritz makes several interesting assertions that I would like to review. Fritz notes that Gian Gentile originated (or popularized) the notion of “COIN is the strategy of tactics,” implying that COIN has no true strategic content, and that a military force that makes COIN its central doctrine is a force essentially without a strategy.

Fritz links to several interesting pieces by Gian Gentile, who has written an excellent essay on this idea. Here are a couple of excerpts from Gentile:

Nation-building using population-centric COIN as its centerpiece should be viewed as an operation. It should not be viewed as strategy, or even policy for that matter. But what is occurring now in Afghanistan, for example, at least for the American Army, is a “strategy of tactics.” If strategy calls for nation-building as an operational method to achieve policy objectives, and it is resourced correctly, then the population-centric approach might make sense. But because the United States has “principilized” population-centric COIN into the only way of doing any kind of counterinsurgency, it dictates strategy.

…the most damaging consequence to the American Army from the new zeitgeist of COIN is that it has taken the Army’s focus off of strategy. Currently, US military strategy is really nothing more than a bunch of COIN principles, massaged into catchy commander’s talking points for the media, emphasizing winning the hearts and minds and shielding civilians. The result is a strategy of tactics and principles.

GIAN P. GENTILE, “A Strategy of Tactics: Population-centric COIN and the Army,” Parameters, Autumn 2009

Of Gentile’s dismissal of COIN as a “strategy of tactics” Fritz has this to say:

My main beef with COIN as a strategy of tactics (I’m going to go ahead and call it SoT from now on) is that all military strategy is made up in part as a summation of its tactics. In the ends-ways-means calculus of strategy, a large chunk of the “ways” section is the aggregation of tactical actions based on operational concepts and/or TTPs… This is an elegant way of saying it, but all military strategies are in part SoT, in a non-pejorative sense. You can’t have strategic success without tactical successes. COIN, IW, UW, maneuver warfare are all common in this regard.

And,

…for now I disagree that COIN is inherently a strategy of tactics any more than any category of tactics can be labeled a strategy. Those tactics may be part of a military strategy that logically connects ends, ways, and means. On the other hand, COIN tactics may be the commander’s ways in an illogical or inaccurate strategic equation and thus we may see COIN as a SoT.

While I am in complete agreement that you cannot have strategic success without tactical successes, it is important to point out that tactical objectives can be antithetical to strategic objectives, so much so that a “successful” tactical move may involve a local defeat in the interest of a global strategic victory (and here I mean “global” not as “worldwide” but simply as a contrast to “local”). If your skirmishers can flush out an ambush before that ambush can be sprung on the main body of your troops, the skirmishers may lose this engagement but in so losing they may have saved the day for the force on the whole. What is called “losing” in tactics may be called “winning” in another game, namely, the game of strategy.

Still, both Gentile and Fritz are on to something (though they seem to take distinct positions) in the analysis of a collection of tactical methods and principles that are thrown together as an ad hoc strategy without the benefit of what might be called strategic vision (for lack of a better term). Gentile is somewhat dismissive of a “strategy of tactics” cobbled together on the local level, while Fritz seems to suggest that all strategies are ultimately strategies of tactics, since, “all military strategy is made up in part as a summation of its tactics.”

The problem here (if there is a problem) can be neatly illuminated by interpolating a distinction into this discussion, so I am going to make a distinction between formal and informal strategy, or formal and material strategy (either set of terms will do). Although I am introducing my own terminology, the idea is not at all new.

Actually, I’m going to make two distinctions. Among strategies of tactics we can distinguish those that add up to more than the sum of their parts, and those that fail to add up to anything. A number of tactics thrown together in an operational context may only apparently have little or nothing to do with each other, but it emerges in time that they do in fact function coherently as a whole. This whole turns out to be a strategic whole. This is when tactics add up to more than the sum of their parts, and this is what Adam Smith called the “invisible hand” and what Hegel called the “cunning of reason.” Sometimes, things get done quite without our knowing how they get done.

Fritz, in suggesting that all strategies may be strategies of tactics comes close to this idea that strategy is emergent from a coherent body of tactics. But this, as we know, is not the only possibility. A number of tactics thrown together for an operation may reveal their essential incoherence by ignominiously falling to pieces under the extraordinary stresses of combat. Tactics combined without any overarching idea of what is to be accomplished may be pursued at cross-purposes to each other and become self-defeating. This would be an instance of tactics turning out to be less than the sum of their parts (what I have elsewhere called negative organicism and submergent properties). This seems to be Gentile’s primary concern.

History provides adequate examples both of strategy emergent from tactics and strategy failing to emerge from tactics, so we can’t really say that Gentile is right or Fritz is right, because they are both right — just in different circumstances. So here’s where we come to formal strategy and material strategy.

A formal strategy is an explicitly formulated doctrine of strategic objectives distinct from the tactical objectives that may be employed to achieve the aims of the strategy. When a formal strategy is formulated, those who are formulating it know that they are formulating it, they know what they want to accomplish, and if any time lines are given for the strategy they will be able to say eventually whether that strategy was successful or a failure.

An informal or material strategy is that strategy that emerges in the absence of a formal strategy. A material strategy may be grasped intuitively or instinctively by military commanders on the ground or by politicians in their negotiations in smoke-filled rooms. It is probably the case that most US strategies are informal strategies, which is why US military forces must so often get by with strategies of tactics, because no one can explicitly formulate exactly what is going on. Even when such an explicit statement of a strategy is lacking, however, we should not sell informal strategy short, because in some cases everyone understands, from the Commander-in-Chief to the foot soldiers slogging through the mud, what it is all about. When men die for freedom and democracy without being able to define either freedom or democracy (or the tactics that are consistent with a free and democratic society) they are dying for an informal strategy.

Given this distinction, then, between formal and informal strategy, the distinction between strategy and tactics is maintained; in other words, it is not the case that all strategies are strategies of tactics, but rather that informal strategies are strategies of tactics when these tactics do turn out to be coherent and to accomplish something. When strategies of tactics fall apart and a fiasco ensues, then there was no strategy at all — not even an informal one.

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What is strategic trust?

Thursday

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We have all heard the slogans of contemporary diplomacy — “peaceful rise,” “responsible stakeholder,” and the rest — and now it seems that we have a new diplomatic euphemism: strategic trust. Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping gave a speech shortly after his arrival in the US for an official visit in which he prominently employed the phrase. I have not been able to find a reliable full text of the speech online, but here are some excerpts:

“For us, strategic trust is the foundation for mutually beneficial cooperation, and greater trust will lead to broader cooperation.”

And,

“We in China hope to work with the U.S. side to maintain close high-level exchanges. We hope to increase dialogue and exchange of views with the United States by making full use of our channels of communication, including the Strategic and Economic Dialogues, cultural and people-to-people exchanges, and military-to-military exchanges…”

And,

“By doing so, we can better appreciate each other’s strategic intentions and development goals, avoid misinterpretation and misjudgment, build up mutual understanding and strategic trust, and on that basis, fully tap our cooperation potential.”

And this from Chinese VP calls for deeper strategic mutual trust with U.S.:

“The development of cooperative partnership could be guaranteed only when the two sides view each other’s strategic intention and development path in a correct and objective way, respect each other’s core interests and accommodate each other’s major concerns, avoid making troubles for each other and do not cross over each other’s bottom lines…”

It might be unwise to read too much into these statements, since this was, after all, a highly publicized political speech. There was an interesting sketch of Xi Linping at Foreign Policy, Empty Suit: Xi Jinping is just another Communist Party hack by Yu Jie, that gives some context, and some weeks earlier, also on Foreign Policy, there was this highly entertaining piece, Hu Jintao on China losing the culture wars by Isaac Stone Fish, in which the author quotes this from Hu Jintao:

“Only if we resolutely follow the guidance of Marxism, and let the advanced culture of socialism guide the way, will we be able to lay the foundation for the cultural development of socialism with Chinese characteristics.”

And then notes:

“Every year Chinese press wonders why their country can’t seem to win a Nobel Prize in literature or peace; ironically, in most cases banned from mentioning dissident writer Gao Xingjian, who won in 2000, or Liu Xiaobo, who won last year.”

We have, of course, seen this before. During the Cold War, the Soviet Bloc countries placed a great deal of emphasis upon winning medals at the Olympics, since this is politically non-controversial, even while the greatest writers and artists were harrassed, jailed, and sent to gulags. Every authoritarian state that seeks to control expression runs into this same difficulty.

Nevertheless, the idea of strategic trust is interesting on its own merits, whatever Xi Linping may have meant by it. Vice President Linping gave a fairly detailed sketch of how he would go about cultivating strategic trust, and I will certainly agree that maintaining both broad and deep communication over the long term will likely achieve something like this — although one may well wonder how broad and deep communication can be maintained with the Great Firewall of China intervening between the two countries, and with a vigorous Chinese censorship regime empowered to unilaterally delete content (sort of like Twitter has now empowered itself to act).

Some time ago, in On a Definition of Grand Strategy, I examined a conception of grand strategy has a certain amount of currency, and then went on to suggest that one of the functions of grand strategy is to make certain policies and practices thinkable or unthinkable:

Grand strategy, like ethics, not only both forbids and enjoins certain actions and classes of actions, but it also shapes our thinking, making certain options unthinkable while making other options possible. Alternative grand strategies may pick out different courses of action as unthinkable or possible. We recall that throughout the latter half of the twentieth century, all-out nuclear war was often simply referred to as “the unthinkable,” but there were people who did not see things that way at all. Castro is supposed to have urged Khrushchev to launch a nuclear strike, even if it meant the annihilation of Cuba, rather than back down in the Cuban missile crisis. For Castro, at this point in his life, nuclear war as in no sense unthinkable (I have read somewhere recently that he has since changed his mind).

With this sense of grand strategy in mind, we could characterize two distinct nation-states (or, more generally, political entities, whether state or non-state) as sharing a grand strategic vision if they share common conceptions of what is thinkable and that is unthinkable. Another way to put this would be to say that political entities share a grand strategic vision if they share political presuppositions.

Now, it is true that Xi Linping spoke in terms of strategy rather than grand strategy, so we need to take a step own in generality toward greater specificity to do justice to his remarks. I don’t think very many people would suppose that China and the US, representing profoundly different traditions of civilization, would ever substantially share a grand strategic vision on the level of common political presuppositions. Indeed, this is precisely what divides China and the US, and makes communication difficult — not impossible, but difficult, which means that an effort must be made, and even when an effort is made, misunderstanding will persist and can only be address by further communicative efforts.

It is, however, entirely possible (and, moreover, possible by the concrete means that Linping suggests) that China and the US could share substantial presuppositions on a strategic level short of grand strategy: mutual economic growth, rule of law, global political stability, avoidance of catastrophic military conflicts, the restriction of conflict to localized proxy wars conducted below the nuclear threshold, and so forth. All of these same elements were present during detente with the Soviet Union.

Such an arrangement is not only possible, but mutually beneficial. Strategic trust, then, would be a trust of each nation-state in the other that the other recognizes the mutually beneficial condition of shared strategic presuppositions, and will seek to perpetuate this arrangement.

What are the challenges to maintaining such strategic trust? Under the above-named conditions, there will always be a tension between strategy and grand strategy. Part of strategic trust would be trust in your strategic partner to remain focused on strategy and to allow grand strategy to take a distant second place. This is all about maintaining a mutually agreeable status quo, and maintaining a mutually agreeable status quo would be all about de-emphasizing, and perhaps even suppressing, revolutionary movements and macro-scopic social change that could upset the strategic apple cart.

Under these conditions, the US would continue to talk about Tibet and Taiwan, but would take no action beyond its existing commitments to Taiwan, while China would be careful not to use its growing economic influence to push the US out of its established positions of power. Like detente with the Soviet Union, all of this is doable, and perhaps it even represents the most like short- and medium-term future, but it leaves open certain difficult questions like, for example, the Pacific theater…

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Geopolitics and Biopolitics

Thursday

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Geopolitics has been a focus of this forum since its inception, but it was always my intention to supplement a purely geopolitical approach with an attempt to take account of the role of ideas in history — past, present, and future. I have even attempted a precisification of some of the concepts of geopolitics in a few posts on theoretical geopolitics. Thus while I cannot call myself an unqualified geopolitical thinker, I certainly have geopolitical sympathies. If you like, you could call me a fellow traveler of those who practice geopolitics sensu stricto.

It would be easy to find weaknesses in the geopolitical perspective, and many are the critics who have dismissed geopolitics as geographical determinism (that is, when it is not otherwise being roundly condemned as a pseudo-science). In fact, geopolitics should be understood in parallel to any form of abstract thinking: it brings a certain clarity of focus to a tightly restricted domain of concerns, but this focus and clarity is purchased at the cost of excluding certain considerations. The same is true of mathematics or logic or theoretical physics. Every abstract theory incorporates ellipses directly derivative of its abstractions; this being said, we usually get farther with our abstractions than without them. And I have argued many times that any theoretical grounding for one’s thought is probably better than no theoretical grounding at all. Geopolitics is simply one such theoretical grounding for thought.

There are many schools of geopolitics. Karl Haushofer perhaps represents the origin of explicitly thinking in geopolitical terms (there are other earlier geopolitical thinkers I will mention below), but Haushofer’s geopolitics is grounded in Germany’s terrestrial perspective as a land power of Eurasia, and Haushofer’s theories revolved around the control of the Eurasian continent. Not usually called a geopolitician, but standing in diametrical opposition to Haushofer is Alfred Thayer Mahan, whose book The Influence of Sea Power Upon History: 1660-1783 was disproportionately influential during the period when the great powers of Europe were engaged in an arms race based on dreadnaught class battleships, which eerily foreshadowed the nuclear arms race of the Cold War. As Haushofer was the the terrestrial realm, Mahan was to the world’s oceans.

Perhaps the preeminent practitioner of geopolitics today is George Friedman, founder of Strategic Forecasting (keep in mind that I am talking about people who are real thinkers, and not celebrity politicians such as get named to Foreign Policy’s list of Top 100 Global Thinkers). I have referenced Freidman’s work many times in this forum, so my readers should be well familiar with him. There are some echoes of Alfred Thayer Mahan that occasionally surface in Friedman’s work, but Friedman’s focus upon and dedication to the geopolitical perspective — almost to the exclusion of all else — is a remarkable exercise in coherent and consistent strategic analysis. Thomas P. M. Barnett is another geostrategic thinker whom I have referenced, but he is less tightly focused on geography than Friedman.

Alfred Thayer Mahan – 27 September 1840 to 01 December 1914

There is something else that unites these strategic thinkers other than their dedication to a geopolitical perspective. At their best, all of these strategists stand above politics. William James once called philosophy an unusually stubborn attempt to think clearly (my personal favorite among the many definitions of the discipline). By the same token we could call strategy an unusually stubborn attempt to think clearly about politics, and, in the same vein, I recently wrote on Twitter that The one unforgivable sin in strategy is to allow objectivity to become compromised by ideology. Everyone who thinks in strategic terms knows this — if they have not formulated it explicitly, they know it in their gut.

However. Indeed, however. There is a kind of political unity to the geopolitical school of thought that transcends geography. It is not an ideological politics, but rather a scholarly politics, if there is such a thing. One can guess what books geopolitical strategists read, and they probably read pretty much the same books (mainstream works of political science) as they probably look at the same maps. Just as importantly, they probably also have in common the books that they do not read. One suspects that they read mainstream works of scholarship, and that if they have taken the trouble to delve into alternative viewpoints, they probably haven’t understood very well what they were reading. It would be difficult to imagine, for example, Samuel P. Huntington, George Friedman, or Thomas P. M. Barnett reading Heidegger, Foucault, Delueze, or Derrida. (Few can be expected to master multiple domains of knowledge, especially when those domains involve incommensurable features.)

What do I mean by “alternative” viewpoints? There is a term of art if ever there was one. I am being a bit elliptical about this because I am trying to avoid political stereotypes, especially a distinction between left and right, since the left/right distinction is as antipathetic to geopolitical strategists as it is to their unsung alternatives. The closest we can come to identifying the distinction without falling back on political cliches is to invoke the distinction between analytical philosophy (which I sometimes call “Anglo-American analytical philosophy”) and continental philosophy. It is important to note that, while the distinction has its origins in geography, it is no longer a geographical distinction. There are analytical philosophers on the European continent, and there are continental philosophers aplenty in the US, Canada, and the UK.

Sometimes the analytical/continental distinction is treated as a mere accident of history, and that we group certain thinkers together because they went to the same schools or spoke the same language. Others treat the distinction as essential, and in making the distinction recognize an essential core of presuppositions shared on both sides of the divide. Of course, the distinction is a little of both — part accident of history, part essential to the thought. This distinction being made, then, I can say that geopolitical strategists stand in relation to their unsung alternatives as analytical philosophy is to continental philosophy.

Now, when I write that the alternatives to mainstream geopolitical thought are “unsung,” I only mean this in so far as strategy extends, because some of the thinkers I will mention are very well known, though not usually thought of as intellectual rivals to the tradition of geopolitics. Chief among those who offer a counter-veiling vision to that a geopolitics is Foucault, and what Foucault offers as an alternative is biopolitics (sometimes called bio-power). Foucault originated and elaborated biopolitics, though it appears as a mode of analysis and a way of understanding, never as a political doctrine or an ideology. In this, biopolitics is parallel to geopolitics, which is understood by its practitioners to be non-ideological.

Michel Foucault

The fons et orgio of biopolitics (and perhaps, for the moment, also the locus classicus) is “Right of Death and Power over Life,” which appeared as Part Five of Foucault’s The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction. Here Foucault wrote:

“…starting in the seventeenth century, this power over life evolved in two basic forms; these forms were not antithetical, however; they constituted rather two poles of development linked together by a whole intermediary cluster of relations. One of these poles-the first to be formed, it seems–centered on the body as a machine: its disciplining, the optimization of its capabilities, the extortion of its forces, the parallel increase of its usefulness and its docility, its integration into systems of efficient and economic controls, all this was ensured by the procedures of power that characterized the disciplines: an anatomo-politics of the human body. The second, formed somewhat later, focused on the species body, the body imbued with the mechanics of life and serving as the basis of the biological processes: propagation, births and mortality, the level of health, life expectancy and longevity, with all the conditions that can cause these to vary. Their supervision was effected through an entire series of interventions and regulatory controls: a biopolitics of the population. The disciplines of the body and the regulations of the population constituted the two poles around which the organization of power over life was deployed.”

Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction, Part Five, “Right of Death and Power over Life,” Vintage, 1980, p. 139

It was actually a Swede, Johan Rudolf Kjellén, who coined the term “geopolitics.” Kjellén is not so well known as Friedrich Ratzel, Mahan, or Haushofer, but he did first formulate some of the seminal ideas of geopolitics, so much so that we might say that Kjellén stands in relation to geopolitics as Foucault stands in relation to biopolitics. Kjellén was also instrumental in formulating the organic conception of the state, which we will consider below.

There is something fundamental about geopolitics in so far as its theses are founded on the brute facts of the geography of the world (and these brute facts are also the source of the abstractions of geopolitical thought). There is also something fundamental about biopolitics, with its theses founded on the intimately familiar facts of life itself (which, taken out of geographical and historical context also involves abstraction). Foundationalist thought (and strategy is foundationalist thought in politics) may or may not be politically radical, but it is usually theoretically radical (in the sense that I attempted to formulate in Radical Rigor), and it is in this theoretical sense that both geopolitics and biopolitics are radical.

Radicalism (like abstraction) has its limits, and the radicalism of geopolitics as well as that of biopolitics is limited by the abstractions employed in the formulation of each discipline. How so? Let me try to explain. Geopolitics is, in large part (although not in its entirety), apologetics for the nation-state and the international order based upon the nation-state system. I have repeatedly emphasized in many contexts that, while the nation-state is putatively defined in terms of nationalism — implying a kind of ethno-socio-cultural unity) in actual fact the nation-state is geographically defined, and more particularly it is defined in terms of the territorial principle in law, with Weber’s legal monopoly on violence holding (ideally, though not always in fact) within the territorial boundaries of a given nation-state.

Here is how George Friedman has recently characterized the nation-state:

“A nation state… rests on two assumptions. The first is that the nation represents a uniquely legitimate community whose members share a range of interests and values. The second is that the state arises in some way from the popular will and that only that popular will has the right to determine the state’s actions. There is no question that for Europe, the principle of national self-determination is a fundamental moral value. There is no question that Greece is a nation and that its government, according to this principle, is representative of and responsible to the Greek people.”

George Friedman, Germany’s Role in Europe and the European Debt Crisis, January 31, 2012

Formulations in terms of a “uniquely legitimate community” and popular sovereignty leave a lot to be desired, but Friedman is not here writing a theoretical treatise; he is only setting the stage for a geopolitical analysis in which the nation-state is central. There are shades here of the organic theory of the state, and I say this not to try to cast aspersions on Friedman’s analysis (because of the unsavory use to which the organic theory of the state has been put), but only to bring out important implicit features in the nation-state system. Geopolitics as apologetics for the nation-state system marks the limit of the radicalism of geopolitics, and its acceptance of conventional, mainstream political thought such as you would encounter in any political science curriculum.

There are few if any explicit ideological defenses of the nation-state system. The nation-state system — its value and its validity — is an assumption, almost to the point of the very inability even to think of any alternative to this central assumption (other than well-known historical examples no longer at issue today, such as the city-state or the empire). For the theoretician who thinks within the assumptions of the nation-state system, alternatives are literally unthinkable.

Biopolitics operates with a different set of assumptions. Biopolitics has assumptions, but it does not share these assumptions (at least, not all of them) with geopolitics, and for biopolitics different scenarios are literally unthinkable because different theoretical foundations render different states of affairs incoherent. Whatever biopolitics is — and we cannot yet say in any detail what it is — it is not apologetics for the nation-state system.

While we cannot say much about biopolitics, we can say something about biopolitics, and one of the most interesting things that we can say is that, like geopolitics, it has certain debts to the organic theory of the state. Because biopolitics comes out of a loosely defined tradition that is sympathetic to collectivism, it tolerates the idea of the state as a whole that is greater than its parts, and in so far as the parts are individuals citizens of the state, these parts are subordinated to the whole. (While Foucault himself was scrupulous in maintaining his distance from the communists — unlike Sartre and, to a lesser degree, Merleau-Ponty, who allowed themselves to become apologists for Stalinism — others who have taken up the idea of biopolitics and bio-power have not been so scrupulous.) It could even be argued that bio-regionalism is an organic theory of the state purged of nationalist ideology.

We cannot say that the organic theory of the state is a common “core” to both geopolitics and biopolitics, but it is something in common, although the way in which the idea of state organicism is implemented is very different in these two diverse traditions of thought. Geopolitics would tolerate (or endorse) different compromises to individual freedom of action than biopolitics would tolerate (or endorse). The point is that there is a shared tolerance for the abridgement of liberty, though where that tolerance falls is different in each case.

The formulation of biopolitics as an explicit tradition of thought and analysis is a strategic trend of the first importance. It is, in fact, an event in metaphysical history — not so far reaching as the Copernican Revolution, but easily as far reaching as the idea and implementation of the nation-state system itself. While there is as yet no clear sign that those loosely unified protesters who feel both thwarted and disenfranchised by the contemporary institutions of the nation-state (which comprises all conventional and mainstream political activity) recognize in biopolitics a theoretical articulation of views that they didn’t even know that they held (until their “consciousness raising”), this joining of idea of implementation may yet come about.

The authentic sign of a grass roots movement (and perhaps also of a mass movement) is when the practice and theory emerge independently and only later recognize each other as both emerging from some more fundamental and shared impulse, one as the intellectual justification of a practice or set of practices, and the other as the implementation of one and the same existential orientation. This has not yet occurred with biopolitics, but it could occur, and, I would argue, it is likely to occur, because the kind of person who enters into street protests is likely to be eventually introduced to the kind of scholarship that is loosely affiliated with biopolitics, and not likely to be introduced to some other, alternative tradition.

We do not yet know if biopolitics has an historical destiny commensurate with that of geopolitics — we do not yet know if this is an idea that has legs — but we do know that it is loosely related to a perennial tradition of thought. The question then becomes whether biopolitics is a passing and evanescent expression of a perennial human point of intellectual reference, or if it is, in the contrary, the next transformative event that will take this perennial attitude in a new direction, and possibly also to new heights, extending the perennial tradition in new and unexpected ways.

It is entirely possible that one of the great ideological struggles of the coming century (and perhaps also the coming centuries) will be between geopolitics and biopolitics — or, rather, between the representatives of geopolitics and the representatives of biopolitics. In this case, biopolitics would come to represent what Fukuyama called, “a systematic idea of political and social justice” that differs from that of liberal democracy. It could be argued that we are already beginning to see the early signs of this struggle, as peoples increasingly find themselves in conflict with the nation-state the putatively represents their interests, and as a people they struggle against the nation-state.

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Weapons Systems in an Age of High Technology: Nothing is Hidden.

Tuesday

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Zeppelin-Staaken r.vi

Recently I have become fascinated by the development of early bombers during the First World War. Driven by the exigencies of the world’s first large-scale industrialized war (the Russo-Japanese War was an industrialized war, but not on the scale of the First World War), aircraft developed rapidly. I have focused on the same rapidity of technological development previously emphasizing the modernity of weapons systems during the Second World War. In The Dialectic of Stalemate I wrote:

“When the Second World War ended, there were operable jet fighters, ballistic missiles, electronic computers, and atomic weapons. None of these existed when the war began.”

True enough, but the essential ideas behind these weapons systems were already in play. An idea can be implemented in any number of ways (admittedly some more efficacious than others), and exactly how an idea is implemented is a matter of technology and engineering — in other words, implementation is an accident of history. As soon as the idea has its initial implementation, we are clever enough to usually see the implications of that idea rather quickly, and thus technology is driven to keep up with the intrinsic potentiality of the idea.

Once the proof of concept of heavier-than-air flight was realized, the rest fell into place like pieces of a puzzle. Aircraft would be armed; they would seek to destroy other aircraft, and prevent themselves from being destroyed; and they would seek to destroy targets on the ground. Hence the idea of aircraft in warfare rapidly moves to fighters and bombers. The pictures above are of the Zeppelin-Staaken r.vi — not the first enclosed bomber, but among the first (the Russians, I believe, made the first enclosed bomber, the Sikorsky Ilya Muromets).

The Zeppelin-Staaken r.vi was an enormous craft with a wingspan almost equal to that of a B-29 and a crew of many men. In fact, these early German bombers were called Riesenflugzeug (or R-planes) — gigantic aircraft. An early testimonial from a Zeppelin-Staaken r.vi crew member vividly conveys the sense of flying the R-planes:

“Inside the fuselage the pale glow of dim lights outlined the chart table, the wireless equipment, and the instrument panel. Under us, the black abyss.”

Trenches: Battleground WWI, episode 5, “Fight On, Fly On”

The technology and engineering of flight during the First World War was not sufficiently advanced to make a decisive strategic difference, but they had the idea of what was possible, and they attempted to put it into practice. The idea of bombers, coordinated by radio, executing a strategic precision airstrike was already present during the First World War.

During the Second World War, the technology had advanced to the point that strategic bombing was decisive, and, in fact, it was at one point the only possible war that the UK could wage against Germany. The evolutionary development continues to the present day. Contemporary precision munitions are finally beginning to converge on true precision air strikes that were first imagined (and attempted) during the First World War.

The point here is that, once the idea is in place, the rest is mere technology and engineering — in other words, implementation. The corollary of the essential idea coupled with with contingent implementation is the fact that the wars of industrial-technological civilization, there are no secrets.

William Langewiesche in his book Atomic Bazaar: The Rise of the Nuclear Poor emphasized that the early atomic scientists knew that there were no “secrets” per se, because the atomic bomb was the result of science, and anyone who would engage in science, technology, and engineering on a sufficiently large scale can build a nuclear weapon.

This thesis should be generalized and extrapolated beyond the science of nuclear weapons. Precision munitions, aviation, targeting, and all the familiar line items of a current military budget are refined and perfected by science and technology. For all practical purposes, all war has become science, and science is no secret. Any sufficiently diligent and well-funded people can produce a body of scientific knowledge that could be put into practice building weapons systems.

One might suppose, from the regimes of state security that have become so prevalent, that secrecy is of the essence of technological warfare. While this impression is encouraged, it is false. Secrecy is no more central to competition in technological warfare than it is central to industrial competition. That is to say, secrecy has a role to play, but the role that secrecy plays is not quite the role that official secrecy claims might lead one to believe.

Wittgenstein in his later work — no less pregnantly aphoristic than the Tractatus — said that nothing is hidden. And so it is in the age of industrial-technological civilization: Nothing is hidden. Everything is, in principle, out in the open and available for public inspection. This is the very essence of science, for science progresses through the repeatability of its results. That is to say, science is essentially an iterative enterprise.

Wittgenstein also said in his later period that philosophy leaves the world as it is. That is to say, philosophy is is no sense revolutionary. And so too with the philosophy of war, which in its practical application is strategic doctrine: strategic doctrine leaves the world as it is.

The perennial verities of war remain. These are largely untouched by technology, because all parties to modern, scientific war have essentially the same technology, so that they fight on the same level. Military powers contending for victory seek technological advantages when and where they can get them, but these advantages are always marginal and temporary. Soon the adversary has the same science, and soon after that the same technology.

The true struggle is the struggle of ideas — the struggle of mind against mind, contending to formulate the decisive idea first. As I said above, once the idea is in place, everything else follows from the idea. But it is the idea that is the necessary condition of all that follows.

War, then, is simply the war of ideas.

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Will the “strategic pivot” to Asia face toward or away from Taiwan?

Monday

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The center of the Cold War was Europe, and, by extension, the North Atlantic, which latter geographical feature lent its name to NATO. The Age of Atlanticism extended from Columbus’ voyage in 1492 to the end of NATO’s relevance in 1991, or almost exactly five hundred years.

The Pacific was always a Cold War backwater. After the US defeated Japanese sea power in the Pacific, there was no force to rival US dominance of the Pacific, even though the USSR had ports on the Pacific. This is related to the fact that although the East was once Red, the Cold War with China was always different from the Cold War with the USSR. In fact, in the midst of the Cold War China and the USSR fought a war, the Sino–Soviet border conflict of 1969 (like many recent wars, it was not called a war), the underlined the bitter divisions within the so-called “communist bloc.”

Now there is a power rising in the East — several of them, in fact — and as the Atlantic-centered world order of the post-WWII era passes into history, we enter into a Pacific-Centered World Order. While this Pacific-centered world order will not be as closely wedded to the Cold War as events in the Atlantic theater, but will not be utterly divorced from Cold War antecedents either.

While the Cold War with China (if there was one) was never quite the Cold War that was fought with the Soviet Union, it was nevertheless serious business, as Chinese support for North Korea and North Vietnam (later to be Vietnam simpliciter) demonstrated. And while Chinese support for national liberation movements in Southeast Asia mirrored Soviet support for national liberation movements in Africa and Latin America, the US had leverage against China: not only Japan, transformed from an enemy into an ally and soon afterward sporting the second largest economy in the world (a status since ceded to China), but most especially Taiwan.

The island of Taiwan is the fly in China’s ointment. Taiwan has been an irritant to China not unlike the way in which communist Cuba was been a near-offshore irritant to the US. Through the late Cold War, moreover, Taiwan had become wealthy, with a growing economy that set it apart from the moribund command economies largely found throughout the region, and its economic dynamism coupled with its position as a trading hub in East Asia gave Taiwan connections throughout the industrialized world.

I bring up Taiwan as one of the major unresolved points of conflict from the Cold War in the Pacific (I have elsewhere called the divided Korean peninsula an ember of the Cold War that periodically flares up) because of the recent talk about the “strategic pivot” of the US in the direction of the Asia-Pacific Region. Hilary Clinton wrote in Foreign Policy magazine in “America’s Pacific Century”:

As the war in Iraq winds down and America begins to withdraw its forces from Afghanistan, the United States stands at a pivot point. Over the last 10 years, we have allocated immense resources to those two theaters. In the next 10 years, we need to be smart and systematic about where we invest time and energy, so that we put ourselves in the best position to sustain our leadership, secure our interests, and advance our values. One of the most important tasks of American statecraft over the next decade will therefore be to lock in a substantially increased investment — diplomatic, economic, strategic, and otherwise — in the Asia-Pacific region.

Clinton used the word “pivot” three times in the piece, and although she never actually used the phrase “strategic pivot,” she did use the phrase “strategic turn” three times in this piece. More interesting yet is that Clinton did not once mention Taiwan in this article. China is mentioned throughout the article, and in very moderate if not conciliatory terms. China is called an “emerging power” and a “partner” and even an “ally.”

The President, presumably the architect of these strategic turn, and who has emphasized from the beginning of his Presidency that he would orient US strategic posture toward the Pacific, gave a speech is Australia in November 2011 that underscored this emphasis.

The President’s full speech in Australia can be viewed at Changing fortunes dictate another presidential pivot and can be read in full at Remarks By President Obama to the Australian Parliament. “China” is mentioned only three times in the President’s speech, and Taiwan, as in Clinton’s article for Foreign Policy, is not mentioned at all. Here are a few quotes from the speech:

Our new focus on this region reflects a fundamental truth — the United States has been, and always will be, a Pacific nation. Asian immigrants helped build America, and millions of American families, including my own, cherish our ties to this region. From the bombing of Darwin to the liberation of Pacific islands, from the rice paddies of Southeast Asia to a cold Korean Peninsula, generations of Americans have served here, and died here — so democracies could take root; so economic miracles could lift hundreds of millions to prosperity. Americans have bled with you for this progress, and we will not allow it — we will never allow it to be reversed.

Here, we see the future. As the world’s fastest-growing region — and home to more than half the global economy — the Asia Pacific is critical to achieving my highest priority, and that’s creating jobs and opportunity for the American people. With most of the world’s nuclear power and some half of humanity, Asia will largely define whether the century ahead will be marked by conflict or cooperation, needless suffering or human progress.

As President, I have, therefore, made a deliberate and strategic decision — as a Pacific nation, the United States will play a larger and long-term role in shaping this region and its future, by upholding core principles and in close partnership with our allies and friends.

The strategic turn to Asia and the Pacific has been the topic of much comment. Obama’s Pacific Pivot by Joseph Nye (of “soft power” fame) has been quite widely distributed. The “Strategic Pivot” to Asia Now Committed, Pentagon Can Float Allegedly Deep Cuts by Thomas P. M. Barnett is an interesting analysis that ends with the provocative line, “These are delusions stacked upon delusions.”

I find myself rather surprised that Taiwan has been nearly ignored in this discussion. The administration has had nothing to say about Taiwan in the process of executing this strategic turn. A year ago, the U.S. – China Joint Statement (released 19 January 2011) includes a short but explicit passage about Taiwan:

6. Both sides underscored the importance of the Taiwan issue in U.S. – China relations. The Chinese side emphasized that the Taiwan issue concerns China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, and expressed the hope that the U.S. side will honor its relevant commitments and appreciate and support the Chinese side’s position on this issue. The U.S. side stated that the United States follows its one China policy and abides by the principles of the three U.S.-China Joint Communiqués. The United States applauded the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement between the two sides of the Taiwan Strait and welcomed the new lines of communications developing between them. The United States supports the peaceful development of relations across the Taiwan Strait and looks forward to efforts by both sides to increase dialogues and interactions in economic, political, and other fields, and to develop more positive and stable cross-Strait relations.

Since then, I haven’t been able to find anything. One must say that the strategic turn to the Pacific, where Taiwan was once a central issue, is deeply if not systematically ambiguous when it comes to Taiwan. The ambiguity is further driven home by on-again, off-again arms sales to Taiwan. Taiwan has been repeatedly rebuffed in its attempts to upgrade and update its fighters, as well as its attempt to acquire diesel-electric submarines from the US. More recently, however, it has been announced that Taiwan will purchase AH-64D Apache helicopters with Block III Longbow Fire Control Radar (FCR), becoming the first political entity outside the US with this particular hardware. This is what we call “mixed signals.” In other words, ambiguity.

In an interesting blog with a Taiwan defense focus, The Far-Eastern Sweet Potato, the author, J. Michael Cole, concludes his excellent essay, “Facing Reality in the Cross-Strait Balance of Power: What Can and What Can’t Be Done,” with this advice:

Rather than waste their time exploring the idea of waging a doomed guerrilla campaign against the PLA, thinkers should instead focus their energy on the means by which war in the Taiwan Strait can be rendered unthinkable. Unable to compete dollar-for-dollar with China, Taiwan has one option left: An asymmetrical deterrent backed by a modern Air Force.

This is a sober and sensible conclusion. The ambivalent of the US toward Taiwan in its strategic turn to the Pacific underlines the need for Taiwan to attend to its own interests, since those interests do not seem to figure prominently in US plans for Asia and the Pacific.

In its relative isolation and its need to pursue asymmetrical and nonconventional deterrence in the face of a powerful adversary, Taiwan’s strategic situation resembles the strategic situation of Iran, and, to a lesser extent, Pakistan. Recently in A Review of Iranian Capabilities I once again looked at a number of innovative and distinctive weapons systems that Iran has pursued in quest of backing up its threat of A2/AD (anti-access/area denial) in the Strait of Hormuz. Many of these possibilities would be open to Taiwan itself, even while A2/AD strategies are more commonly associated with China itself in the Taiwan Strait.

The obvious track for Taiwanese security would be to go nuclear, and given Taiwan’s relative wealth, advanced technology, and robust industrial plant this would be possible, but it would then lose whatever remaining goodwill it has with its sponsors at present. Ideally this would be done is utter secrecy until the deterrent was fully operational, at which time Taiwan could afford to alienate its sponsors, but the resulting damage to relations with the US would be so great that it is difficult to predict what the US would do in this circumstance. The more we consider the scenario, the more it looks like the above quote about a “doomed guerrilla campaign.”

The remaining strategy for Taiwan, then, is A2/AD in the Taiwan Strait. What happens when two A2/AD strategies collide? The answer to this question may determine the future of Taiwan.

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Revisiting Exercise Anatolian Eagle

Saturday

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F-16 Fight Falcons operated by the PAF.

In the discussion that resulted from my post Air Superiority in South Asia, one comment posted brought my attention to rumors that Pakistani F-16s had humbled Eurofighter Typhoons at the Anatolian Eagle Exercises. After receiving the comment I did some reading about this, and in my response to the comment tried to sum up what I had discovered. At that time, I regarded the issues raised by the comment and what has been written about the episode as an open question, and to a certain degree matters like this will always remain an open question. However, I have learned a few things since I last wrote about this, and what I have learned reveals a pattern. While a single incident can always be an outlier, a pattern reveals reveals something more than this. One expects a pattern to repeat. If a pattern repeats, measures can be taken ameliorate the repetition if desired. On the other hand, if we discern a pattern and fail to take action, we are culpable for the consequences of such repetition if it is unwelcome.

The incident in question was at Exercise Anatolian Eagle 2008. Anatolian Eagle exercises have been taking place for ten years now, several times per year, at Konya, Turkey. The website for the exercises bills them as the “#1 Tactical Training Center of the World.” After the 2008 exercises a PAF (Pakistani Air Force) pilot was quoted as follows:

“NATO pilots are not that proficient in close-in air-to-air combat. They are trained for BVR (Beyond Visual Range) engagements and their tactics are based on BVR engagements. These were close-in air combat exercises and we had the upper hand because close-in air combat is drilled into every PAF pilot and this is something we are very good at.”

Much has been written about this since, and there has been no definite identification of whose Eurofighter Typhoons the Pakistanis engaged. Originally they were reported to be RAF jets, then Italian jets, and then others. And it has been claimed that there were no times when the Pakistanis engaged any of these Eurofighter Typhoons. I am not in a position to settle the various accounts that are to be found on the internet, but other matters can shed some light on the reported incident.

I previously cited The DEW Line blog, which included a comment that sought to place the Pakistani claim in context:

“The PAF and RAF aircraft were conducting DACT – Dissimilar air combat training. PAF were the Blue force. RAF were the Red force. Red force was meant to die and was representing a particular threat for the purposes of the exercise, this threat was not the RAF and the Eurofighter’s full capability or even their tactics.”

And another comment reiterated some of the points of the earlier comment:

“Just to build on Aussie Digger’s comments, a well-placed source has told me the following: ‘None of the RAF Typhoon pilots involved in Ex Anatolian Eagle recalls undertaking Basic Fighter Maneuvers with Turkish air force F-16s flown by Pakistan exchange pilots.’ So if a ‘kill’ is claimed, it took place under exercise conditions where it was supposed to happen, and from distance but within visual range; not dogfighting!”

These seemed like reasonable claims to me, but there is a larger context that I mentioned above, which suggests a pattern. That pattern is a tension between technology and training. Although in historical terms, jet fighters are very young, with only about sixty years of operational experience, the design and operation of fighters has already gone through several cycles. At one point in the cycle, technology is emphasized, and at another point in the cycle real-world experience in training is emphasized.

The USAF has long emphasized technological solutions to combat problems, and this is to be expected because US technology gives the USAF an advantage over other forces. However, this advantage admits of exceptions. USAF desire to push the technological envelope led to the F-4 being fitted with missiles (the Sparrow and the Sidewinder) and no gun at all when air-to-air missile technology was still rather new and not yet robust or entirely dependable, especially when you are depending upon it for your life. These F-4s fought against Soviet MiGs of the North Vietnamese air force and often found themselves at a disadvantage in dogfighting as a result of their lack of guns. Part of the problem were rules of engagement that required visual identification of targets, which defeats the purpose (and advantage) of non-line of sight missile technology.

There is a detailed monograph on this by Steven A. Fino, formerly available on the internet, but now unaccountably unavailable. Fortunately, I downloaded it while it was available (I don’t always remember to do so). I will only quote a few sentences, but the whole document is a revelation:

As MiG activity increased during the remainder of April and May 1966, several American pilots continued to follow the Feather Duster advice and tried to avoid entering a turning engagement with the MiGs. Sometimes, though, they could not; during the course of an engagement, multiple MiGs could often force the F-4 to turn to defend itself, forcing the Phantom crews to discard their approved combat solution. Despite this emerging combat reality, many pilots let their faith in missile technology and published tactics unduly influence their opinions of air-to-air armament. Most continued to categorically dismiss the potential value of a gun on the F-4.

And a page later:

Because the F-4C did not have a gun, nor were there any plans to add a gun to the platform, the Air Force focused its efforts on improving the “poor” performance of the F-4‘s missile armament. The substandard results were difficult to ignore. From April 1965 through April 1966, the primary armament of the F-4, the AIM-7 Sparrow—the weapon that had guided the aircraft‘s design and development—had accounted for only one kill, downing a MiG-17 on 23 April 1966. To address the problem, the Air Force appointed a special team of USAF and F-4/Sparrow specialists to travel to Southeast Asia to personally review the weapon system‘s combat performance and “recommend the required actions necessary to enhance success of future Sparrow/Sidewinder firings.”

“ALL THE MISSILES WORK” TECHNOLOGICAL DISLOCATIONS AND MILITARY INNOVATION: A CASE STUDY IN US AIR FORCE AIR-TO-AIR ARMAMENT, POST-WORLD WAR II THROUGH OPERATION ROLLING THUNDER by Steven A. Fino (p. 85 and following)

Fino isn’t the only one to cover this ground. Fino cites Clashes: Air Combat over North Vietnam 1965-1972 by Marshall L. Michell III. I first learned of this indirectly from Chasing Shadows: A Special Agent’s Lifelong Hunt to Bring a Cold War Assassin to Justice by Fred Burton and John Bruning. This book also cites Marshall L. Michel’s book.

Burton and Bruning also tell the fascinating story of lack of US success against Soviet MiGs, and the skullduggery involved in transporting a captured MiG-21 from Israel to the US for study. The disproportion in kill ratios was so great that there was very real fear that the NATO-Warsaw Pact confrontation in Europe would be lost by NATO because of the apparent impunity with which Soviet MiGs defeated the best technology of the US. While both the USAF and USN did rather poorly against MiGs initially, USN aviation opened their Top Gun school, made changes to pilot training and began to score significantly better kill ratios against Soviet MiGs than the USAF. A mission by the USN to “help” the USAF failed miserably due to inter-service rivalry.

At about the same time as the USAF was doing miserably against Soviet MiGs in southeast Asia, the Israelis were doing quite well against Soviet MiGs operated by Egypt, Iraq, and Syria — Soviet client states in the region armed with the latest and greatest MiG-21s. The same MiGs that were disproportionately killing USAF jets in SE Asia were in turn being disproportionately killed by the Israeli Air Force (IAF) mostly operating French Mirage III fighters.

Dassault Mirage III at the Israeli Air Force museum.

I can’t do justice to this interesting story here — the reader is encouraged to follow my references and get the details for yourself — and we can’t narrow the complexity of these diverse situation to a single cause, but there is a common thread that distinguishes the successful forces in air combat, and this is (not surprisingly) doctrine that emphasizes air-to-air combat and pilot training that puts this doctrine into practice. This may sound too obvious to even to say, but at this crucial time (late 1960s to early 1970s) in the development of the supersonic fighter jet, US pilots were being taught and trained to depend on missiles, and their jets didn’t even have guns to engage enemy fighters in close air-to-air combat.

The F-4 with its weapons load: lots of bombs and no bullets.

Disproportionate fighter kills, moreover, are not historically unprecedented. In fact, fighter kill ratios can be so one-sided that it is shocking to see the numbers. If you look at the list of fighting aces from the Second World War, it would be rather understating the obvious to note that it is dominated by Germans. The number one fighting ace of all time, Erich “Bubi” Hartmann, had 352 recorded kills to his credit. The highest scoring US Ace of the war, Richard I. Bong, had 40 kills.

While part of the German dominance of fighter aces in the Second World War may be due to engagements on the Eastern Front, where it could not be expected that what remained of Soviet industrial plant could produce anything close to the technical mastery of German fighter planes, but this cannot be the entire explanation. German fighters were also engaged on the Western Front. it would be an interesting project to break down kills ratios on the Eastern and Western Fronts. Probably someone has already done so.

An interesting footnote to Erich “Bubi” Hartmann’s career, after he spent ten years in Soviet gulags after he refused to fly for newly communist GDR, coincides with the period discussed above. Hartmann opposed the adoption of the US F-104 Starfighter by the Bundesluftwaffe and was forced into retirement in 1970. His warnings about the F-104 technology proved to be well-founded, as it killed 115 German pilots in non-combat missions. Again we see a pattern: US hubris over its technological advantage turns to tragedy with the same sad inevitability that upotian dreams result in dystopian nightmares when put into practice.

With these lessons and examples in mind, I have a completely different perspective on the statements made by the unnamed Pakistani pilots. Western air forces, with the money for new jets and their technological advantage, continue to rely disproportionately on this advantage, while other air forces invest in their human capital, not least because that is their advantage, and that is what they can do given their financial limitations.

Much has been made of the on-board technology of the F-35, which promises to be the most technologically advanced fighter ever built. It is especially proficient in delivering precision weapons to a distant target beyond line of sight. But we have seen this before. The USAF does not have a good record in preparing close in air-to-air combat doctrine and training its pilots to engage in such combat, and US pilots have not distinguished themselves in the disproportionate ways that some peoples have distinguished themselves in close air-to-air dogfighting. One suspects that the familiar pattern is being repeated.

It now seems to be entirely creditable to me that the Pakistani pilots, drilled in close air-to-air fighting were entirely capable of humbling western fighter pilots whose training and equipment has diverged from the nitty-gritty of air combat. Of course, none of this would matter if you could engage and destroy your target when it is still over the horizon and you never have occasion to engage in close air-to-air combat. But can this be done so reliably that air-to-air combat can be consigned to history, like chariot races?

The question now becomes precisely parallel to the question I asked when considering the vulnerability of carriers given the developments in carrier technology and doctrine since the great carrier engagements of the Pacific Theater during the Second World War. In that case I answered that developments in carrier technology have been evolutionary rather than revolutionary, so that while the accidents (and I use this term in the sense of Aristotelian metaphysics) of combat engagement between carrier strike groups will change over time, the essence of such conflict nevertheless has remained invariant over time. Since carriers were vulnerable then, if the essence of the combat situation is invariant over time, carriers are vulnerable today. Q.E.D.

I make the same judgment here: the changes in fighter technology from the introduction of fighter aircraft in the First World War to their current iteration today has been a gradual and evolutionary development without revolutionary breaks in technology, despite the naming of fighters in “generations” which contributes to an image of revolutionary technological change with each new generation of fighter aircraft. Because of the evolutionary development of fighter technology, tactics, and doctrine, accidental features of air combat (like air speed) will change, but the essential features of air-to-air combat will be retained despite accidental change.

For the record, I do not deny the possibility of a game-changing technology that would result in revolutionary change and an essential change in air combat, and I will go so far as to say that precision weapons systems are close to attaining this status, but they are not there yet. Any air force that relies on technology to the detriment of drilling in close air combat will find itself at a disadvantage despite its technology.

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Non-Lethal Weapons Systems

Thursday

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It has been widely reported that Public Intelligence has released a 108 page document from the U.S. Department of Defense Non-Lethal Weapons Program, the Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate (JNLWD), titled Non-Lethal Weapons (NLW) Reference Book and published in 2011. There isn’t much shocking or surprising in the document, and anyone who follows these things will recognize most of these NLWs as programs that have been under development for some time. However, the document is interesting to look through as an overview of such weapons systems, as it is heavy on pictures and descriptions and without much detail.

The document defines NLWs as:

“Weapons, devices and munitions that are explicitly designed and primarily employed to incapacitate targeted personnel or materiel immediately, while minimizing fatalities, permanent injury to personnel, and undesired damage to property in the targeted area or environment. Non-lethal weapons are intended to have reversible effects on personnel or materiel.”

JROCM 060-09, Initial Capabilities Document for Counter Personnel Joint Non-Lethal Effects and Initial Capabilities Document for Counter Materiel Joint Non-Lethal Effects

And in the “frequently asked questions” there is this nice summary:

“NLW provide another ‘option’ to the force. In past operations, the effective employment of NLW resolved escalation of force situations. Specifically, the NLW created the right ‘direct effect’ on the personnel/materiel targeted. The use of NLW has also generated positive ‘psychological effects’ on others in the area and helped to contribute to mission accomplishment. The perceptions associated with the use of NLW have been a positive and powerful influence in local communities on ‘winning the hearts and minds’ of the local populace. The employment of NLW has helped reduce the loss of life and collateral damage.”

Implied but not explicitly expressed in this document is the danger of NLW being employed in such a way as to cause permanent injury or disfigurement to its targets. From the perspective of public diplomacy, the old “dead men tell no tales” adage holds: while I suspect most people would prefer to be alive even if injured to being killed, the fact remains that bodies are buried and forgotten, while an injured individual would likely enter into the 24/7 news cycle and could conceivably cause more damage to the political image of a nation-state employing NLW than outright killing of targets. The human interest angle here is impossible to avoid.

As interesting as this possibility is, it is not the most interesting thing about NLW. The most interesting thing about NLW is their paradigmatic role in the political constraints on weapons systems that are increasingly driving defense thinking. These political constraints on weapons systems are in turn a manifestation of a fundamental shift in warfighting away from major conventional engagements between peer powers to low-level, chronic unconventional and asymmetrical warfare.

Unconventional and asymmetrical warfare is the new reality for nation-states, and this poses a fundamental challenge to the nation-state system, since the nation-state itself is a consequence of the early modern socioeconomic organization of peoples in order to mobilize military forces for precisely those conventional engagements between peer powers that are now being overtaken by the events of history. There are so many aspects of this shift in warfighting that they cannot be easily summarized.

It is possible that NLW will play an increasing role in unconventional and asymmetrical warfighting (really, fighting that is no longer subject to the warfighting paradigm, to be more accurate about it), and at some time in the future NLW may well dominate military engagements. If you can simply shut down an adversary’s ships, tanks, and planes from a distance, that is both less costly and less dangerous than engaging them with live fire. Similarly, if you can stop a riot by incapacitating the crowd without killing large numbers of people, this is preferable.

One form that this continuum of violence will take is what I have previously called the weaponization of eliminationism, and by the responses of political entities to ongoing depredations kept below the threshold of atrocity.

In this context, warfighting comes to approximate peacekeeping, if not policing. This, too, is a challenge to the nation-state system, as in liberal democratic political theory the distinction between military forces and police forces has been an important one, but as police forces become more robust and military forces become less lethal, the operations of each will approximate the other, and they will tend to meet in the middle.

The pacifist’s dream of a world without war may well become true in the not-too-distant future, but a world without war will not be a world without violence. Instead of peer and near-pear powers engaging in discretely separated wars, there will be a constant backdrop of violence to most political events — a continuum of incident rather than a declaration of war — and the most effective (and most responsible) way to respond to this will be with NLW.

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The Secret Garden of Strategy

Tuesday

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Day before yesterday in Philosophies of the Secret Garden I discussed a passage in Nietzsche where he compared his philosophical efforts to tending a secret garden, and I suggested that there are “secret gardens” in both science and philosophy that fall between Kuhnian normal science (or philosophy) and revolutionary science (or philosophy). Some of what I said applies to military doctrine, though the intrinsic properties of an essentially social experience make it a slightly different case that the essentially solitary activity of philosophy. This makes the example of science particularly interesting, since it occupies a position between philosophy and doctrine.

A philosopher and a mathematician can work in near isolation. Most, as a contingent matter of fact do not work in complete isolation, but prefer the stimulus afforded by interaction with like-minded thinkers, but some do in fact isolate themselves, and often this is purposeful. Descartes reputedly moved his residence repeatedly in order to avoid unannounced callers. Even today there are some well known thinkers who work in near isolation. Perhaps the most famous example in the present age is Grigori Perelman, the mathematician who proved the Poincaré conjecture.

Some creative undertakings demand the contributions of many persons and many talents. One cannot produce a show on Broadway or a film in Hollywood without the collective efforts of a great many people. One can write a screenplay in isolation, but it will never be produced as a film without the participation of others. Similarly, a visionary architect can design a building in isolation, but without the efforts and cooperation of a great many others, his buildings will never get built. The isolated novelist or philosopher or mathematician can hope that their work will survive and resonate with future ages, even if it falls flat in their own time, but the more that a creative expression is communal, like film or architecture, the less likely this will happen, or, if it does happen, that it will resemble the vision of the isolated visionary.

Military doctrine — whether strategic, operational, or tactical — is a social art, like film or architecture. As a social art, military doctrine is less open to the work of an isolated genius. There certainly is normal doctrine and revolutionary doctrine, parallel to normal science and revolutionary science, but there is far less latitude for a secret garden of strategy. Furthermore, doctrine is not only a social art, it is also an overwhelmingly contingent art that has little to do with necessary, a priori truths. Doctrine is learned from particular, empirical states of affairs. This knowledge can, of course, be acquired in isolation, like a knowledge of philosophy of literature, but the most recent developments are not likely to be widely available, and in fact most of the relevant details may be classified, or, if not classified, certainly difficult of access.

Having made the case for doctrine as a social art, and acknowledged the difficulty of acquiring knowledge of doctrine in isolation, not to mention the near impossibility of attracting any interest in such an effort, it remains to point out that, while difficult and rare, it still remains possible for there to be a secret garden of strategy, and the very possibility of this, as slim as it is, presents the possibility of a game-changing confrontation with established doctrine. No one can afford to neglect the possibility, since it presents the aspect of a strategic shock that could upset accepted calculations.

As I noted above, individual pursuits like literature present no great difficulties to the individual enthusiast. Science was once like this, and science was once primarily the pursuit of gentlemen amateurs. Some of these gentlemen amateurs made great contributions, and the greatest of them — Charles Darwin — not only made contributions, but probably changed the way that science is done and effected a conceptual revolution as profound as that of Copernicus. Elsewhere I have called this the heroic conception of science — an individual, working alone, on a project that would transform the world, knowing that if the project is made public precipitously, it will certainly invite ridicule rather than foment revolution. Darwin knew well, as Nietzsche counseled, how to keep silent long enough.

Today science is mostly Big Science, but it isn’t all Big Science. There remains the possibility of the heroic individual scientist going against the establishment, which pursues the iterative conception of science with an army of scientists, organized in a top-down hierarchical structure that resembles military organization more than it resembles the discoveries of Galileo, Newton, and Einstein.

One could say that the more institutionalized science becomes, the more resources it will have at its command, and therefore the more difficult it would be for any individual to make a meaningful contribution to science outside this structure. But at the same time as institutionalized Big Science has many resources and an army of contributors jointly pursuing the same end, the spirit of individual initiative is weakened and the institution becomes vulnerable to group think that simply dismisses anything outside its purview as irrelevant and uninteresting. Institutionalized power carries with it the ability to pursue and attain ends that lie far beyond the ability of the individual, but it also carries with it the risk of stifling innovation.

To return to my distinction above between social arts and solitary arts, what could be more of a social art that politics? And is not politics the very soul of institutionalized power, being institutionalized power in its purest form, unencumbered by any desire other than power? As a nearly perfect exemplification of a social art, it ought to be the case that only those with extensive knowledge and experience within the social milieu that defines the art of politics would possess the particular epistemic background that it would make it possible for such an individual to make innovations within the field. But what we find in fact is that politics is the most uncreative arts, in fact, nearly hostile to innovation, and those who have been in it the longest are the most impervious to new ideas. Thus in the case of the social art of politics, institutionalized ossification so dominates political discourse that trying something new has become a near impossibility — indeed, as I have observed elsewhere, it literally takes a revolution to effect political change.

Just as the intensely social milieu of political thought takes a revolution even to implement small changes, so too the intensely social milieu of military thought requires the military equivalent of a revolution in order to effect changes. However, while in politics social conflicts are primarily resolved within a single social system, military conflicts primarily resolved in a contest between different social systems, except in the case of civil wars. This is an important distinction. The political life of a political entity may become so institutionalized that change becomes unthinkable, but the military life of a political entity can be decided from without, but those who have no stake whatsoever in the welfare of that political entity, and may even seek the dissolution of that political entity.

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