Professor Brenner gave me permission to distribute and post the attached essay. Without saying so, he describes a way that seems tailor-made to systematically violate just about all the criteria for a sensible grand strategy.
NSA returned to center stage last week thanks to revelations that it has tapped the phones of European leaders. The resulting ruckus raises three questions: why? how far will the targeting governments go in demanding redress? how will Washington respond? In considering them, I look at the political/psychological underpinnings of the Euro-Americans relationship.
– Downsize, transition, and then sustain a smaller, but ready and capable Total Army that provides Joint and Combined forces with expeditionary and enduring landpower for the range of military operations and features unique competencies such as operational leadership, mobility, command and control, and theater logistics at all echelons.
Raymond T. Odierno
Phi Beta Iota: To downsize effectively you have to have ethical evidence-based decision-support immediately applicable to strategy, policy, acquisitions, and operations. This does not exist. NGIC once upon a time had Tim Hendrickson and GRAND VIEW but they never made the leap to holistic analytics and true cost economics. Army flags — including the very best of them — simply do not know what they need to know to demand of the intelligence “professionals” what the latter have no clue how to produce. We have not seen a single useful strategic, policy, or acquisition document come out of DIA in the past twenty years…nor CIA. All these people are still in the cut and paste fluff mode that Col Mike Pheneger, USA (SOF) blew the whistle on in 1988. Nothing has changed in substance — just more people, more money, more (retarded) technology, and much less useful thinking.
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[ENABLERS; EXPEDITIONARY; UNIFIED ACTION PARTNERS (UAPs)] – Support the Joint Force with critical enablers such as aviation, intelligence, engineers, logistics, medical, signal, and special operations, both while enroute to, and operating within, expeditionary environments alongside Unified Action Partners.
Phi Beta Iota: The Marine Corps led the way with Planning and Programming Factors for Expeditionary Operations in the Third World, and then lost its integrity and started chasing money instead of producing ethical evidence-based decision-support relevant to what General Al Gray wanted in the first place, compelling support for honest light-footprint low-cost acquisition (something the other four services need but refuse) along with strategic and operational support to what he called “peaceful preventive measures.” The Navy has imploded — as many Admirals as ships, and the whole lot of them are not worth anything in terms of rapid precision response, this leaves the Marine Corps both 4-6 days away from anywhere, and totally exposed (e.g. no Naval Gunfire, rotten CAP) once they get there. Army cannot do what it wants to do without an honest long-haul Air Force and a complete make-over of close air support (to include transfer of CAS to the Army) as well as reconnecting to reality at the geospatial, cyber, and cultural levels.
My friend Bill Polk, a well-known historian with extensive experience in the Middle East and Central Asia and author of many books on these areas, has written a backgrounder on how to make sense out of the Syrian chemical weapons issue. He has given me permission to distribute it. Herewith is his most interesting primer on the Syrian chemical weapons issue.
Chuck Spinney
Reflections on the Syrian Chemical Weapons Issue and Beyond
William R. Polk
September 15, 2013
1.The Variety of Weapons and Their characteristics
2 A Short History of Chemical Weapons
3 The Russian Intervention
4 Why the Syrians Have Accepted the Russian Proposal
5. The Prospects for Ridding The Area of Weapons of Mass Destruction
6 The Possibility of Ending the Civil War
7 Who Are the Insurgents and What do they Want?
8 Predictable Results of a Collapse of the Syrian State
Most readers of this list should be familiar with the name, if not the ideas, of the late American strategist Col John R. Boyd (USAF ret). Boyd was my mentor and closest friend, and I am deeply indebted to him for the knowledge he so generously bestowed on me. While no short essay can capture the entirety of Boyd's thinking, attached below is an excellent introduction to what some might call John Boyd's art of war. It is written by my friend and colleague Bill Lind, a leading contributor to the Military Reform Movement in the 1980s. Of particular importance is Bill's concluding point about ‘open systems.' But you need to understand Boyd's work to understand the centrality of this point in strategy and grand strategy.
Lind's essay is very timely, given that Republicans and Democrats alike have driven America into a grand-strategic cul de sac that is weakening our position abroad, while wrecking our democracy at home. IMO, this grand-strategic trap is a self-inflicted wound and is well summarized by Lind. (Boyd's criteria for a sensible grand strategy can be found here.) Hopefully, Lind's essay will tweak your interest in Boyd's important work.
Exiting America's grand strategic mess will not be easy because the Military – Industrial – Congressional Complex and its wholly owned subsidiaries in academia, the thinktanks, the pol-mil apparat, and the mass media have a vested interest in continuing down what has become a clearly a self-destructive evolutionary pathway. A parasitical “faction” is now exploiting the interplay of chance and necessity to benefit itself at the expense of the “whole.” Boyd's ideas — particularly those relating to his moral design for grand strategy — offer a way to begin thinking about how to get off this pathway and return to one where the interplay of chance of necessity leads more naturally to salutary growth at home and abroad.
If you are not familiar with Boyd and his ideas, my advice is to start with Robert Coram's superb biography, (about 100,000 sold and still in print). It is by far the best general introduction to the man and his work. Those interested in heavier lifting can dive into James Fallows', Chet Richards,' and Franz Ozinga's analyses of Boyd's strategic thought. For the truly masochistic, a complete compendium of Boyd's briefings slides can be downloaded from this link. But beware, these briefings are long, albeit highlycondensed, idiosyncratic, and a bit didactical. Nevertheless, determined readers will find their study to be infinitely rewarding, because like the writing of Sun Tzu, their essence is one of ever expanding timelessness.
Chuck Spinney
Cannes, France
John Boyd’s Art of War
Why our greatest military theorist only made colonel.
I think this story is quite extraordinary, but not for the reasons given in the report. This year we will spend approximately $682.5 billion on the military budget and by the best unclassified estimates about $80 billion on the intelligence apparat. Hundreds of thousands of men and women work for these vast entities. Yet 19 young jihadists and about $500,000 created 9/11, and after over a! decade of expenditures, a few dozen jihadists still have the power to massively disrupt the U.S. There is something deeply wrong with this picture, and the current SR poll shows that over three-quarters of you feel less safe than you did 15 years ago. So what have we achieved, beyond making a small number of corporations obscenely rich, and killing and maiming a lot of people? One can only wonder if the choices made by first the Bush and, then, the Obama Administrations were the right ones. What would have happened, for instance, if instead of drones and war we had put our money into schools, libraries and hospitals in Islamic countries?
There are 249 sovereign territories, one sovereign military order, and a few bits of terra nullius that remain unclaimed for obscure reasons. The foreign policy challenges the U.S. faces can be separated into three broad geographic zones – Central & South America, The Muslim World, and the Pacific Rim & Southeast Asia.
I had a good reading background and I spent the first quarter of 2013 focused on The Muslim World. Having sorted out the good news sources and collected a bunch of maps in the process, I determined that simply staying on top of happenings is a full time job. I have not done the same with the other two regions, but I am going to assume that the Pacific Rim & Southeast Asia is roughly the same volume of work, while Central & South America is slightly less busy.
