War & Face of Battle – Page 28 – Public Intelligence Blog

2001/03/312009/12/04

Review: Resource Wars–The New Landscape of Global Conflict

5 Star, Congress (Failure, Reform), Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Military & Pentagon Power, Politics, War & Face of Battle, Water, Energy, Oil, Scarcity

Ground Truth That Will Be Ignored,

May 31, 2001

Michael T. Klare

This is a very thoughtful and well-documented book that has been 20 years in the making–although it was actually researched and written in the past three years, the author is on record as having discussed water wars in 1980, and should be credited with anticipating the relationship between natural resources, ethnic conflict, and great power discomfort well before the pack.

He covers oil in particular, energy in more general terms (to my disappointment, not breaking natural gas out from oil, a very relevant distinction for commodities brokers), water, minerals, and timber. His footnotes are quite satisfactory and strike a very fine balance–unusually good–between policy, military, and academic or industry sources.

Sadly, I believe that this book, as with Laurie Garrett's book on the collapse of public health, will be ignored by the …Administration, which appears to have decided that real war is only between states, that energy is something to be increased, not moderated in use, and that real men do not concern themselves with ethnic conflict, small wars, or scarcity of any sort in the Third World.

As I reflect on this book, and its deep discussion of the details of existing and potential resources wars (it includes a very fine illustrative appendix of oil and natural gas conflicts, all current), I contemplate both my disappointment that the author and publisher did not choose to do more with geospatial visualization–a fold out map of the world with all the points plotted in color would have been an extraordinary value–and the immediate potential value of adding the knowledge represented by this book on resources and the Garrett book on public health threats–to the World Conflict & Human Rights Map 2000 published by PIOOM at Leiden University in The Netherlands.

What I really like about this book is its relevance, its authority, its utility. What I find frustrating about this book is that it is, like all books, an isolated fragment of knowledge that cannot easily be integrated and visualized. How helpful it would be, if US voters could see a geographic depiction of the world showing all that the author of this excellent work is trying to communicate, and on the same geographic depiction, see the military dollars versus the economic assistance dollars that the U.S. is or is not investing. The results would be shocking and could lead to political action as the community level, for what is clear to me from this book is that there is a huge disconnect between the real threat, our national security policies, and how we actually spend our foreign affairs, defense, and trade dollars from the taxpayers' pockets.

A trillion dollar tax cut, or a trillion dollar investment in deterrence through investments in natural resource stabilization and extension? Which would be of more lasting value to the seventh generation of our children? The author does not comment–one is left to read between the lines.

2001/01/102009/12/04

Review: Intelligence Power in Peace and War

5 Star, Diplomacy, Information Society, Intelligence (Government/Secret), War & Face of Battle

The Ultimate Graduate/Policy Text on Intelligence,

January 10, 2001

Michael Herman

This is the textbook for the best and the brightest of both the academic world and the policy world. It is not an easy read, between the British language form and the deep thinking, but it is, as Christopher Andrew says, “the best overview” and “surely destined to become a standard work”. I especially liked its attention to components and boundaries, effects, accuracy, and evaluation. Perhaps most usefully within the book is the distinction between long-term intelligence endeavors that rely primarily on open sources and serve to improve state understanding and state behavior, and short-term espionage that tends to be intrusive and heighten the target state's feelings of vulnerability and hostility. No intelligence library is complete without this book–it provides a rock-solid foundation for serious thinking about the intelligence in the 21st Century.

2000/08/292009/12/04

Review: Deliver Us from Evil–Peacekeepers, Warlords and a World of Endless Conflict

5 Star, Crime (Government), Crime (Organized, Transnational), Diplomacy, Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Force Structure (Military), Humanitarian Assistance, Insurgency & Revolution, Justice (Failure, Reform), Military & Pentagon Power, Security (Including Immigration), Stabilization & Reconstruction, Threats (Emerging & Perennial), Truth & Reconciliation, United Nations & NGOs, War & Face of Battle

Fundamental Primer on Real-World Security Challenges,

August 29, 2000

William Shawcross

EDIT of 23 Feb 08 to add links. This remains a priceless reference work.

This book is serious, scholarly yet down to earth, compassionate, insightful, terribly relevant and most useful to any citizen, overseas practitioner, or policymaker. By the books own rendering, “good will without strength can make things worse.” Most compellingly, the author demonstrates both the nuances and the complexities of “peace operations”, and the fact that they require at least as much forethought, commitment, and sustainment as combat operations. Food scarcity and dangerous public health are the root symptoms, not the core issues. The most dangerous element is not the competing sides, but the criminal gangs that emerge to “stoke the fires of nationalism and ethnicity in order to create an environment of fear and vulnerability” (and great profit). At the same time, humanitarianism has become a big part of the problem-we have not yet learned how to distinguish between those conflicts where intervention is warranted (e.g. massive genocide campaigns) and those where internal conflicts need to be settled internally. In feeding the competing parties, we are both prolonging the conflict, and giving rise to criminal organizations that learn to leverage both the on-going conflict and the incoming relief supplies. Perhaps more troubling, there appears to be a clear double-standard-whether deliberate or circumstantial-between attempts to bring order to the white western or Arab fringe countries and what appears to be callous indifference to black African and distant Asian turmoil that includes hundreds of thousands victim to genocide and tens of thousands victim to living amputation, mutilation, and rape. When all is said and done, and these are my conclusions from reading this excellent work, 1) there is no international intelligence system in place suitable to providing both the global coverage and public education needed to mobilize and sustain multi-national peacekeeping coalitions; 2) the United Nations is not structured, funded, nor capable of carrying out disciplined effective peacekeeping operations, and the contributing nations are unreliable in how and when they will provide incremental assistance; 3) we still have a long way to go in devising new concepts, doctrines, and technologies and programs for effectively integrating and applying preventive diplomacy, transformed defense, transnational law enforcement, and public services (water, food, health and education) in a manner that furthers regionally-based peace and prosperity instead of feeding the fires of local unrest.

2000/08/222009/12/04

Review: War and Anti-War–Making Sense of Today’s Global Chaos

5 Star, Diplomacy, Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Intelligence (Government/Secret), Intelligence (Public), Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, War & Face of Battle

3rd best of his works, absolutely essential,

August 22, 2000

Alvin Toffler

Alvin & Heidi Toffler have always written and spoken as a team, but this is the first book where Heidi has been included. Future Shock and PowerShift remain their two most important works, this one comes in third. They start off with a compelling reason for buying the book, a quote from Trotsky: “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.” Today, right now, there are 26 conflicts going on around the world killing more than 1000 people a year; 78 “low intensity” conflicts killing more than 100 but less than 1000 people a year; and 178 violent political conflicts causing fewer than 100 deaths per year–source is the PIOOM project in The Netherlands. There are also 16 genocidal campaigns ongoing as we speak, and another 18 emerging–from Rwanda and Burundi to Sri Lanka to East Timor to obscure sections of China and Russia. This is a serious book by serious researchers who had the good fortune to be prescient and to become world-renowned futurists. The book is strongest on Third Wave wars and niche wars, does a very creditable job of covering a wide range of unconventional forms of conflict, and ends, somewhat disappointingly, with a useful but less than gripping discussion of “peace forms”. Fun to read, including the chapter on “The Future of the Spy.”

2000/08/192009/12/04

Review: Zones of Conflict–An Atlas of Future Wars

4 Star, Atlases & State of the World, Future, Strategy, War & Face of Battle

Great Approach, Missed Some Big Ones, Still a Real Value,

August 19, 2000

John Keegan

Zones of Conflict has not yet been surpassed by other published works, mostly because others focus on specific regions. This is still a valuable work, largely because of the process and the framework it provides for thinking about geographically and culturally based sources of conflict. Published in 1986 it missed some big ones: Somalia, Rwandi-Burundi, the Congo, the break-up of Yugoslavia with the Kosovo aftermath. We'll give them credit for the Gulf flashpoint. What's the point? No one can predict with any certainty where major humanitarian conflicts will emerge, but if one combines Keegan and Wheatcroft's approach with environmental and economic and social overlays (such as are offered by several other “States of the World” endeavors), then a useful starting point is available for asking two important questions: what kinds of conflicts will we be dealing with, under what kinds of terrain and cultural conditions; and second, given those realities, what kinds of forces and capabilties should we be developing? Against this model, the U.S. Joint 2020 vision falls woefully short, and the NATO alliance appears equally unprepared for a future that will be characterized by “dirty little wars” well out of NATO's area but highly relevant to the well-being of the NATO population. One might also make the somewhat puckish point that it does not take a $30 billion dollar a year spy community to create a common-sense strategic document such as this–it can be had for under $20.

2000/04/082009/10/24

Review: The Future of War–Power, Technology and American World Dominance in the Twenty-first Century

5 Star, Future, War & Face of Battle

Smart Thoughts Important to Future of National Security,

April 8, 2000

George Friedman

The authors begin by noting that there is “a deep chasm between the advent of technology and its full implementation in doctrine and strategy.” In their history of failure they note how conventional wisdom always seems to appreciate the systems that won the past wars, and observes that in the U.S. military there is a long history of transferring power from the political and military leadership to the technical and acquisition managers, all of whom have no real understanding of the current and future needs of the men who will actually fight. They address America's vulnerability in both U.S. based logistics and in overseas transport means-“Destroying even a portion of American supply vessels could so disrupt the tempo of a logistical build-up as to delay offensive operations indefinitely.” They have a marvelous section on the weaknesses of U.S. data gathering tools, noting for example that satellites provide only a static picture of one very small portion of the battlefield, rather that the wide-area and dynamic “situational awareness” that everyone agrees is necessary. They go on to gore other sacred oxes, including the Navy's giant ships such as the carrier (and implicitly the new LPH for Marines as well as the ill-conceived arsenal ship) and the largest of the aircraft proposed by the Air Force. They ultimately conclude that the future of war demands manned space stations that are able to integrate total views of the world with control of intercontinental precision systems, combined with a complete restructuring of the ground forces (most of which will be employed at the squad level) and a substantial restructuring of our navel force to provide for many small fast platforms able to swarm into coastal areas.

2000/04/082009/10/24

Review: Firepower In Limited War

5 Star, Force Structure (Military), Insurgency & Revolution, War & Face of Battle

Best examination of intelligence-firepower disconnects,

April 8, 2000

Robert H Scales

Major General Bob Scales may well be the Army's brightest light and this generation's successor to General Don Starry and Dan Morelli (who inspired the Toffler's book on War and Anti-War). First published by the National Defense University Press in 1990, this book reflects deeply on the limitations of firepower in limited war situations, and the conclusion is a telling indictment of our national intelligence community and our joint military intelligence community, neither of which is willing to break out of their little boxes to find a proper response to this statement: “The common theme in all five case studies presented here is the recurring inability of the side with the firepower advantage to find the enemy with sufficient timeliness and accuracy to exploit that advantage fully and efficiently.”