Fifth Generation of Warfare (5GW) is "indistinguishable from magic"

[don]

Re: General Bolger

from magic . . .


"I am a United States Army general, and I lost the Global War on Terrorism," Lieutenant-General Daniel Bolger begins his history of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. "It's like Alcoholics Anonymous; step one is admitting you have a problem. Well, I have a problem. So do my peers. And thanks to our problem, now all of America has a problem, to wit: two lost campaigns and a war gone awry."

By this, Bolger means that United States generals, notably David Petraeus, sold short-term fixes to baffled political leaders and hatched even worse problems for the future.

Bolger's point was lost on most reviewers, for example Andrew Bacevich in the New York Times and Mark Moyar in The Wall Street Journal. They protested that civilian leaders deserve at least some of, and perhaps the lion's share, of the blame.

Bacevich and Moyar have no sense of humor, let alone an ear for irony. By placing the blame on the military, Bolger portrays presidents George W Bush and Barack Obama as woefully misguided. The mission was impossible from the outset. Announcing the 2007 "surge" in response to a Sunni insurgency, president Bush said that the US wanted to turn Iraq into "a functioning democracy that polices its territory, upholds the rule of law, respects fundamental human liberties, and answers to its people."

The trouble, Bolger explains, is that majority rule in Iraq meant permanent war: "The stark facts on the ground still sat there, oozing pus and bile. With Saddam gone, any voting would install a Shiite majority. The Sunni wouldn't run Iraq again. That, at the bottom, caused the insurgency. Absent the genocide of Sunni Arabs, it would keep it going."

Bolger's book should be rushed into Russian and Chinese editions. A substantial current of opinion in those countries, supported by some respected foreign-policy specialists, holds that the US has chosen to destabilize the region intentionally. Now that America is nearly self-sufficient in oil, it wants to interrupt oil supplies to China and others in order to assert global hegemony.

That reflects the incredulity of Russian and Chinese observers at the seeming self-destruction of America's world role. How could the Americans be so stupid? We could, and were. Bolger's insider explanation of the chain of blunders that led to the present situation in the region is convincing and should be circulated as an antidote to the paranoia.

Proof that America has set out to destabilize the Persian Gulf region, a well-regarded Chinese specialist argued recently before a Beijing foreign-policy seminar, is that the Islamic State is led by Sunni officers armed and funded by General David Petraeus, the US commander during the 2007-2008 "surge". The observation is correct, to be sure: ISIS shows impressive leadership capacity and mastery of large-unit tactics involving sophisticated equipment, and it learned much of this from the Americans.

America did not have to choose the wrong mission, Bolger argues:

Bush's war began narrowly, knocking out al-Qaeda and its Taliban backers in Afghanistan. Within weeks of 9/11, the basic goals were fulfilled, not perfectly, not completely, but probably close enough. Had we stopped there and reverted to the long, slow Clinton-era squeeze of terror cells and Islamist supporters , it might have done the job. ... Again, as after the fall of Kabul, the swift seizure of Baghdad offered another opportunity to close out the conventional military phase and go back to the slow, steady, daily pressures of global containment of Islamist threats. That moment passed. Instead ... with minimal domestic debate - and, notably, no known military objection - the administration backed into two lengthy, indecisive counterinsurgency campaigns.

Careful what you wish for: by 2006, the US had sponsored national elections in Iraq and brought to power the Shi'ite leader Nouri al-Maliki, who promptly purged Iraqi's security forces of Sunnis. Fearful of Shi'ite vengeance, Iraq's Sunnis revolted and Iraq dissolved into violence. In response, junior officers operating in Sunni-dominated Anbar province devised the stratagem that lay at the heart of the "surge". The commitment of 20,000 additional combat troops helped suppress the Sunni insurgency, but paying the Sunnis not to fight for the time being was more effective. As Bolger reports,

The Anbar tribes had always helped AQI [al-Qaeda in Iraq]. ... When individual tribal sheikhs objected, the elders lost their heads. Families were attacked. Houses were demolished and cars burned. The AQI men began to impose Wahhabi discipline - no gambling on horses, no drinking alcohol, and no smoking. The AQI leaders had crossed the line at last. The Persian-influenced sheruggis in Baghdad were far away from Anbar Province. The Americans were right there, and they had little interest in what sheikhs did with their tribes. Forced to choose between the AQI boot on their necks and the US military, [tribal leaders] decided to try the Americans.

That did the trick. Petraeus, lobbying for the Iraq command from his post at the staff college in Leavenworth, Kansas, took careful note of the junior officers' proposals. Bolger has no patience for Petraeus' politicking. "Junior soldiers wondered about his real motivations. Service or self? With Petraeus, you never knew for sure, but you often suspected the latter, and it meant trouble."

With the whole of the senior Army staff opposing the surge, president Bush looked for an officer who would improve the optics in Iraq, and Petraeus was his man. Bolger adds:

Combined with the troop surge in Baghdad, the Sunni Awakening effectively ended the sectarian bloodshed by the summer of 2007. It split the Sunni resistance, and they stayed fragmented during the remainder of the U.S. campaign. It was not a victory, not by any of the criteria the optimistic Americans set for themselves back in 2003, seemingly in another lifetime. But it was something like progress.

... The Sunni Awakening expanded rapidly ... Ever conscious of marketing, [Iraq commander Gen David] Petraeus and his inner circle settled on a more inspirational name. With the approval of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, the Sunni became the Sons of Iraq.

Although the troop surge made the news in America, in country, the Sunni Awakening delivered the real and lasting difference in the rate of attrition. ... The Sons of Iraq proved overwhelmingly loyal. Nearly a hundred thousand strong, half of that number in and near Baghdad, the Sahwa movement allowed the Sunni to carry weapons lawfully and get paid, effectively removing much of the incentive for the "honorable resistance." It was by far the most successful and widespread jobs program in Iraq ...

The Sahwa, however, paid tens of thousands of Sunni Arabs to kill each other, not Americans. Cynical it might seem, but you couldn't argue with the results. The Sons of Iraq fielded some six times as many Sunni with firearms as the highest estimate of enemy strength. It showed the potential depth and resiliency of the Sunni insurgency.

One might put the matter even more forcefully: by funding and training the "Sons of Iraq", Petraeus and his team assembled the elements of the new Sunni insurgency now using the name of Islamic State (also known as Islamic State of Iraq and Syria). Andrew McGully's 2007 report in Agence France-Presse describes the first meeting of Sunni tribes near Baghdad with Petraeus and his team.

"Tell me how I can help you," asks Major-General Rick Lynch, commander of US-led forces in central Iraq ... One [tribal leader] mentions weapons, but the general insists: "I can give you money to work in terms of improving the area. What I cannot do - this is very important - is give you weapons."

The gravity of the war council in a tent at the US forward operating base at Camp Assassin is suspended for a few moments as one of the local Iraqi leaders says jokingly but knowingly: "Don't worry! Weapons are cheap in Iraq."

"That's right, that's exactly right," laughs Lynch in reply.

"Having armed all sides of the conflict and kept them apart by the threat of arms," I wrote in a 2010 essay on Asia Times Online, titled "Gen Petraeus' Thirty Years' War", "the United States now expects to depart leaving in place governments of national reconciliation that will persuade well-armed and well-organized militias to play by the rules. It is perhaps the silliest thing an imperial power ever has done. The British played at divide and conquer, whereas the Americans propose to divide and disappear. At some point the whole sorry structure will collapse, and no-one knows it better than Petraeus."

In 2010, General Stanley McChrystal commanded US forces in Afghanistan with the same nation-building objective. Bolger has a particular dislike for McChrystal's insistence on "courageous restraint", that is, accepting a higher level of US casualties to reduce Afghan civilian casualties that might cause a "loss of popular support".

To tough Pashtun tribesmen, that smacked not of discipline or kindness, but weakness. It wasn't clear that any significant portion of the Afghan population would ever embrace thousands of infidel foreigners. The locals often hated the Taliban, but those insurgents were natives, and ISAF [International Security Assistance Force] troops were not. As for "strategic defeats," McChrystal mistook [Afghan President Hamid] Karzai's daily bleatings for the views of Afghan villagers. Many of the average Pashtuns proved to be made of sterner stuff and accepted that in a war, innocent people sometimes got killed. Afghans would never love ISAF, but they might well fear and respect the occupiers. Now, with this kind of guidance, even that was unlikely.

Counterinsurgency only works, Bolger observes, when the occupying power is ready to stay in place indefinitely, as the US did on the Korean peninsula. Otherwise, the guerrillas will bide their time. America had no stomach for another dozen years of war. The Maliki government, which owed its existence to American string-pulling, wanted no American presence, and marked the Americans' final departure with a national holiday.

Unexceptionably sensible and cleverly written, Bolger's book deserves attention as the considered view of a soldier-historian who also was a participant in the story. It is likely to figure in the wider political debate as to what went wrong in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Spengler (Asia Times)

[vt]

Re: General Bolger

Very good points Astonas, Thank you.

[astonas]

Re: General Bolger

As people become more educated and understand how they are governed, they will start to resist control by governments and corporations. They will support neither communism, socialism, or elite capitalism. They will support freedom: free speech, free markets, freedom of association.

Any institution, public or private, that tries to control the population will be short lived.

The idealist in me, which does at times step forward, almost agrees. Placing both socialism and free markets in the same category as the rest does seem to me a rather bold oversimplification, but one can argue that point at length, and not expect to find consensus, since that likely boils down to a distinction based on personal identity.

But even setting that distinction entirely aside, I think there are valid reasons not to rely too much on the idealistic perspective. When I go through my daily life, one thing that is conspicuously absent is a throng of people striving in pursuit of an abstract ideal. One frequently finds that on television, and in the news, so it is understandable to extrapolate, and project these drives onto the wider world. But in general, I find such extrapolation unsupported.

Instead, what I see is a great number of people who are going through life, earning their paychecks, paying their bills, raising their children, and in general doing the best they can, while keeping their heads down.

This is true in nations we consider "virtuous." And it is similarly true in the nations that oppose them.

This doesn't mean that there is no such thing as "good" and "evil." But I do think it means that both good and evil can be the aggregate consequence of the most banal and innocuous of activities.

And that's why I question the inevitability of the drive toward freedom. Not because I think people don't desire it, but because I think most people don't spend much time seriously considering the question of how their personal desires, votes, and actions roll up in the aggregate.

I suspect that the vast majority don't really think about it at all. It is a luxury that most simply don't have.

This is why the Baltic states, and Poland must be allowed freedom and not control by any side. Hungary seems to be evolving in a peaceful way towards Russia. So be it; that's their choice.

The Ukraine is a more difficult situation as a portion wants Russia while the rest does not. Hopefully a peaceful outcome is in store.

An independent person who understands the history of Russia can see how she fears encirclement, but she must also accept that Eastern Europe does not want to go back to the Soviet days. With it's control of vast energy sources Russia will be an economic power until fusion is achieved (which my be sometime).

I don't pretend to have any particular expertise on Russia, either the culture or the present leadership. I do agree, however, that the states of eastern Europe should be permitted the choice you describe, purely buy virtue of their sovereignty. But it is also crucial to remember that no such choice can ever be made in a vacuum. Adjacent states will always have both an interest, and influence, in the decision, regardless of that theoretical ideal.

I suspect that is a particularly easy reality to forget, here in the United States, where so few borders exist, and none at all with a stronger and antipathetic neighbor.

The smaller central European states will always feel the tug-of-war between the large and powerful blocks to their west and east. The only real question is the one Kissinger describes: Will it be the peaceful pressures of trade and diplomacy, or the chaotic pressures of open aggression?

If I were also in danger, I too would want to be free at the same time.

I am glad we are in agreement! Of course, I am still struggling with the question of how best to translate such sentiments into positive and meaningful actions. That seems to always get tripped up by more minor differences in interpretation.

I suppose that is one of the many productive conversations that can be had, here on these forums.

[lakedaemonian]

Re: General Bolger

I certainly can't do more than speculate, but maybe you can. You've piqued my interest. Might you be tempted into taking this speculation a little further?

As a separate post, how's this for speculative alternate history/development:

Saddam Hussein DOESN'T invade Iran in 1980 and therefor DOESN'T invade Kuwait in 1990.

Iraq is held together like a Middle Eastern Yugoslavia with a high(relative) quality of life and standard of living, albeit with high volumes of unfortunate souls through Mukhabarat secret police prisons.

Iran's revolution lacked the existential imperative of external invasion to solidify and fuel it's unquestioned authority.

Both nations have an additional trillion+ dollars each in cash and infrastructure NOT destroyed in war used for productive national development.

What would the Middle East geopolitical tapestry look like without the 1980 Iran-Iraq war, therefore no 1990 Desert Storm, and no 2003 Desert Storm 2.0?

Saddam could have been an Iraqi Pinochet(doubt it.....Iraqi dictatorship was FAR harsher than Chile's from day 1)

Without Iraqi invasion, Iran's Ayatollah and Mullahs could have been far easier/quicker for Iranians to push into an emasculated "Theocratic House of Lords" type of government role.

Woulda, coulda, shoulda........just speculation on my part.

Late 1979-1980 was a VERY crazy year.

[lakedaemonian]

Re: General Bolger

I'd certainly like to think that it is inevitable in today's world. But the driving forces toward that reform also appear to me weaker than I once imagined. I'm curious if yours is a general sense, or if you have specific thoughts on why it is inevitable. Perhaps I am simply in a dark mood today, but occasionally I wonder if human nature isn't such that given perfect freedom, we would build ourselves a prison to live in.

I reckon too many in the west have a distorted world view in terms of how those in the developing world value a vote. You can't eat a vote. But you can oppose a dictatorship that is too malignant and is failing to achieve enough development. Whether that opposition is open and/or successful is another story. But the stories of South Korea and Chile represent two dictatorial systems that weren't TOO malignant and succeeded in offering substantial development and quality of life improvement for the little guy over the long term.

I certainly can't do more than speculate, but maybe you can. You've piqued my interest. Might you be tempted into taking this speculation a little further?

My speculation on alternate histories for South Korea and Chile are just that speculation.

South Korea was under very serious unconventional threat from North Korea well into the 1970's(with incidents occurring thru the 1990's) that included a very serious near miss attack on the Blue House in 1968. Early liberalization of South Korean political reform could have possibly led to increased efforts and intensity by North Korea to undermine it, with the possibility of success well before South Korea's economy started to accelerate well away from North Korea.

It could be argued that North Korean(and Soviet/Chinese by proxy) supported efforts to shape a liberalized SK political arena thru covert political party support and protest group funding could have disrupted South Korean development substantially. It could have hindered eventual SK political/economic development due to disruption and destabilization coming from NK(and via Soviet/Chinese proxy).

In Chile, allowing Allende's continued rule and policies of quite assertive nationalization, expropriation, and collectivization would have likely led to a much closer aligned by choice and by obvious default due to choices made by Chilean government(choice of system, choice of debt default, choice of expropriation of foreign owned property, etc). I would hazard a guess that Chile would have traveling down a hybrid trajectory of something akin to a mashup of Cuba and modern day Argentina. Likely providing for some beneficial outcomes for the vast majority of the population for some time before hitting a wall of inaccessibility to international credit/markets and eventual failure of geopolitical block failure(Soviet Union). And that's before considering the downside to the strong likelihood of the US taking an assertive(but delayed) unconventional warfare approach to disrupting/destabilizing a consolidated Allende government/regime.

I think in both cases South Korea and Chile broke a whole lot of eggs, but they managed to make some decent omelets.

It doesn't mean there couldn't have been some other possible outcomes that could have performed higher, but I believe that all things considered the outcomes have been above average. Which leads me to believe that the majority of speculative outcomes regarding alternative histories for modern South Korea and Chile would have performed more poorly than the real outcomes.


I, too, wonder whether it makes sense to trust in rather vague concepts of openness and freedom, when one is evidently under assault. But in my mind these are still, for the moment at least, offset by the vivid pictures of Orwell and Huxley, which seem less fictional with every passing year.

The darker side of humanity is not a mere figment of fiction. If we enter too far into the grey areas of democracy, who is to say there will be a light to return to when we are done?

More than one republic has elected a dictator to rule them, when sufficient "threat" real or imagined, was shown them.

I would be of the realpolitik belief that a high performing democracy, when under genuine external and unconventional attack, may need to have a plan to effectively defend itself.

The hard part is you can't execute such a plan unless you have a clear, concise and irrevocable map to get back on the high performance democracy track(including sufficiently empowered "navigators" to lead us back on track).

If you can't effectively plan and execute the hard part, then you can't really do it without taking risks that may be too substantial.

I'm fascinated by this concept. It seems so sensible in the abstract, and yet, I am having great difficulty imagining what such a pill might look like. My dark mood again causes me to wonder, can there even be such a thing, short of the literal reading? How might you make a nation so unappealing to attack, without making it simply ... unappealing.

Post WWII Cold War, NATO(and Non NATO countries) developed "stay behind" organizations which were trained, equipped, and discretely integrated into war plans for the perceived invasion by Soviet/Warsaw Pact forces to act as guerillas/partisans.

It's a valid, proven, and very affordable defensive measure. Unfortunately, as a result of poor vetting, perceived need to build these underground networks too quickly, and/or alternative motivations....some of these organizations were implicated directly/indirectly in some nasty domestic political scandals in Italy/Turkey. Where there's smoke, there is likely fire.

Precisely the slippery slope I fear. It's why I think it is worth re-examining the premise of the first question. Has it been adequately established that a nation DOES need to compromise its principles? That the risk hasn't been exaggerated? That the value of total safety is worth the cost?

I don't claim to have solid answers to these. But I suspect those who want to feel safer than they do today don't either.

I'm definitely in the realpolitik box to strongly consider assertive defensive measures, but contingent upon effective control measures to ensure a clear path back out of the gray.......which is the hard part....and unless the hard part is answered effectively, it's not a reasonable risk option.

Interesting indeed! But I'm not sure that Queensbury Rules is the best analogy here. Those are artificial, and only work when everyone plays by them.

I suppose I'm still hoping that there are some natural rules, having to do with the makeup of the human mind, that are to some extent self-reinforcing.

It is in this category that I attribute the fall of the Soviet Union. That flavor of communism failed, not because it broke any agreed-upon rule, but rather demanded that people act counter to their own nature. That their motivation not flag, given a lack of control, and a lack of reward.

Have we really eliminated the possibility that a more open society is in fact the answer, rather than the problem?

Estonia may be a bit of a test case for "more open society" along with the other Baltic States of Latvia/Lithuania.

Measures such as the self-organized Estonian Cyber Defense League and an internet enabled "flash mob-ified" Singing Revolution update 25 years later provide some hope at reasonable responses for high performing democracies:

http://blogs.ft.com/beyond-brics/201...ng-revolution/

There is certainly a line of reasoning that supports the requests for increased powers and authorities. Whether that line of reasoning is either the most legitimate, or the most sound, of all the other conceivable options, is a question that I think is very far from being adequately explored.

And yes, I do think that humans have demonstrated a remarkable inability to limit abuses of power. So much so, in fact, that I think the criterion of what is a "necessary" power, should be significantly adjusted to take into account that fact.

When you give the government a power, you are not simply trading freedom for safety. You are in a very real sense trading one danger for another. For this reason, it is a valid, perhaps even necessary debate, whether either option can ever actually make you safe at all.

I haven't done the risk/reward calculus on the subject, though it's possible that others have. I'm willing to bet, however, that those in power significantly underestimate the danger that they themselves pose to the system they run.

For this reason, based on what I know today, I do have a predilection.

If I am to be in danger either way, I'd rather be in danger while free.

I reckon there will be a whole lot of shifting in focus towards the darker history of the Cold War.

For all the trillions of dollars in conventional "tools" spent on millions of soldiers, 100,000 tanks, and 10,000 combat aircraft ....the Cold War "tools" actually implemented assertively and repeatedly were almost exclusively unconventional.

So we are clearly looking at a return to the unconventional Cold War with two clear differences:

1) "Near overt" use of "deniable-ish" unconventional forces....Russia's "little green men" example
2) Zero marginal cost one-to-zillions instant mobile/global communications

-----

I would agree that the odds of a small illicit network(I have a hard time using the overused word terror, even when applicable) harming mine/me and/or 1/2 orders removed is pretty slim and I will STRONGLY PREFER to take my chances instead of seeing civil liberties and freedoms dangerously eroded.....especially WAY down here in little ole' NZ.

But I would certainly be thinking a bit differently if I were a citizen of say Estonia for example.

I think as an Estonian it will be a much, much harder decision. Estonians will surely be trying to effectively answer the question of how a high performance democracy can more effectively defend itself from unconventional opposition("attack" as we know it may be too strong and "fast" a word to appropriately describe modern unconventional warfare between sovereign states) by a far stronger sovereign state that just 25 years ago effectively controlled it.

Post 2007 cyber attacks, NATO set up it's Cyber Defense Centre of Excellence....in of all places Estonia:

https://www.ccdcoe.org/

Maybe the Estonians will find some effective answers.

Every system has it's inherent strengths/weaknesses......trying to enhance strengths and mitigate weaknesses is perfectly logical

How do you defend yourself from something you despise, without becoming that very thing you despise?

Who knows....maybe the Observer Effect in Physics applies a bit.

Maybe you can't defend yourself without changing yourself.

[astonas]

Re: General Bolger

I just ran into this:

Interview with Henry Kissinger: 'Do We Achieve World Order Through Chaos or Insight?'

Henry Kissinger is the most famous and most divisive secretary of state the US has ever had. In an interview, he discusses his new book exploring the crises of our time, from Syria to Ukraine, and the limits of American power. He says he acted in accordance with his convictions in Vietnam.

It kind of relates to the present theme, if only in parts. At the very least it touches on the connected question of limited national power.

I have very mixed feelings about Kissinger. On the one hand, he certainly does have some deep insights at times, and his tenure within the circles of power make him one of the world's best-informed diplomats. On the other hand, his moral compass (if it ever existed) has been shattered by his cold-blooded calculations over time. I have come to believe that he is likely guilty of the war crimes of which he has so frequently been accused.

For this reason, I tend to use his thoughts and the facts he provides as starting points, but do my best not to accept any conclusions without aggressive vetting. I submit this link in that spirit.

[vt]

Re: General Bolger

As people become more educated and understand how they are governed, they will start to resist control by governments and corporations. They will support neither communism, socialism, or elite capitalism. They will support freedom: free speech, free markets, freedom of association.

Any institution, public or private, that tries to control the population will be short lived.

This is why the Baltic states, and Poland must be allowed freedom and not control by any side. Hungary seems to be evolving in a peaceful way towards Russia. So be it; that's their choice.

The Ukraine is a more difficult situation as a portion wants Russia while the rest does not. Hopefully a peaceful outcome is in store.

An independent person who understands the history of Russia can see how she fears encirclement, but she must also accept that Eastern Europe does not want to go back to the Soviet days. With it's control of vast energy sources Russia will be an economic power until fusion is achieved (which my be sometime).

If I were also in danger, I too would want to be free at the same time.

[astonas]

Re: General Bolger

Thanks, lakedaemonian, for your thoughtful consideration. There's some awfully big questions in here to chew on. Almost every paragraph could spawn a thread.

I'll just pick out a few of my favorites, though.

I wonder if China(and other totalitarian states inevitably compelled to reform in the future) will be looking at South Korea and Chile as two examples of how to conduct political/economic reform to make a substantial shift from an extreme end of the spectrum towards the middle.

I'd certainly like to think that it is inevitable in today's world. But the driving forces toward that reform also appear to me weaker than I once imagined. I'm curious if yours is a general sense, or if you have specific thoughts on why it is inevitable. Perhaps I am simply in a dark mood today, but occasionally I wonder if human nature isn't such that given perfect freedom, we would build ourselves a prison to live in.

But they both dealt with a whole lot of local/regional instability and unconventional conflict involving both regional and global participants, retained stability and strong performance improvements in average standard of living, quality of life, and eventually civil liberties/freedom....albeit at substantial human cost along the way.

I certainly don't condone the horrible things that occurred under the totalitarian governments of South Korea and Chile, but I wonder what the quality of life and standard of living would be for the average South Korean and Chilean today IF things went differently?

Mere speculation of alternate possible outcomes and not a historical performance comparison.

I certainly can't do more than speculate, but maybe you can. You've piqued my interest. Might you be tempted into taking this speculation a little further?

I have genuine doubts in the ability of a country facing unconventional threats to adequately defend itself from them without running into the problem of delving into the darker grey areas of what is considered permissible for a high performance democracy.

How willing are you to hurt your country, in order to "save" your country?

I, too, wonder whether it makes sense to trust in rather vague concepts of openness and freedom, when one is evidently under assault. But in my mind these are still, for the moment at least, offset by the vivid pictures of Orwell and Huxley, which seem less fictional with every passing year.

The darker side of humanity is not a mere figment of fiction. If we enter too far into the grey areas of democracy, who is to say there will be a light to return to when we are done?

More than one republic has elected a dictator to rule them, when sufficient "threat" real or imagined, was shown them.

There are some on this forum who appear to be passive but vocal supporters of Russian policy towards Ukraine......I'm trying my best to sit back and watch it like a lab experiment.

Where I will be far more biased towards the "little guy" is in the Baltic States, and how they may(or may not) choose to defend themselves from Russian influence/control.

Estonia seems to be a fairly high performing democracy during it's fairly short-free history.

In 2007, Estonia suffered well coordinated cyber attacks of Russian origin....coinciding with declining relations between Estonia/Russia.

A self organized citizen group(IT professionals) mashed themselves up to defend Estonia's online infrastructure(Estonia is one of, possibly THE, most connected country in the world) in the form of a Cyber Defense League as an analog to Estonia's long history of "social/community militia organizations".

I reckon it was a great example of citizens coming together themselves in the bets interest of the country as the organization has gained official legitimacy and it's founder is now the Cyber SME for Estonian senior leadership.

But how will Estonia respond to continued aggressive Russian subversion?

Countries will need to develop the sovereign state version of 1980's M&A "poison pill" strategies.

I'm fascinated by this concept. It seems so sensible in the abstract, and yet, I am having great difficulty imagining what such a pill might look like. My dark mood again causes me to wonder, can there even be such a thing, short of the literal reading? How might you make a nation so unappealing to attack, without making it simply ... unappealing.

And that's where the questions start along the lines of:

Does a country have to compromise it's principals in order to defend itself from being externally and aggressively subverted?

If so, then what effective control measures can be implemented to prevent turning into what you despise?

Precisely the slippery slope I fear. It's why I think it is worth re-examining the premise of the first question. Has it been adequately established that a nation DOES need to compromise its principles? That the risk hasn't been exaggerated? That the value of total safety is worth the cost?

I don't claim to have solid answers to these. But I suspect those who want to feel safer than they do today don't either.

All competent combatants seek to shape the most unfair fight(competitive advantage) they can.

This renewed and growing emphasis on brazenly open unconventional warfare represents a trend towards a type of warfare where the aggressors possess a clear advantage against "high performance democracies" in that Estonia(as an example) will likely be "playing" by the Queensbury Rules of Boxing, while Russia will likely be playing by 1 Rule(there are no rules).

It will be interesting to see how Estonia as a democracy responds to external threat.

Interesting indeed! But I'm not sure that Queensbury Rules is the best analogy here. Those are artificial, and only work when everyone plays by them.

I suppose I'm still hoping that there are some natural rules, having to do with the makeup of the human mind, that are to some extent self-reinforcing.

It is in this category that I attribute the fall of the Soviet Union. That flavor of communism failed, not because it broke any agreed-upon rule, but rather demanded that people act counter to their own nature. That their motivation not flag, given a lack of control, and a lack of reward.

Have we really eliminated the possibility that a more open society is in fact the answer, rather than the problem?

There are legitimate and sound reasoning behind some requests for increased powers and authority when under external unconventional threat.

Sadly, humans don't seem to be too good at controlling the abuse of those necessary and unnecessary extensions of government power.

There is certainly a line of reasoning that supports the requests for increased powers and authorities. Whether that line of reasoning is either the most legitimate, or the most sound, of all the other conceivable options, is a question that I think is very far from being adequately explored.

And yes, I do think that humans have demonstrated a remarkable inability to limit abuses of power. So much so, in fact, that I think the criterion of what is a "necessary" power, should be significantly adjusted to take into account that fact.

When you give the government a power, you are not simply trading freedom for safety. You are in a very real sense trading one danger for another. For this reason, it is a valid, perhaps even necessary debate, whether either option can ever actually make you safe at all.

I haven't done the risk/reward calculus on the subject, though it's possible that others have. I'm willing to bet, however, that those in power significantly underestimate the danger that they themselves pose to the system they run.

For this reason, based on what I know today, I do have a predilection.

If I am to be in danger either way, I'd rather be in danger while free.

[lakedaemonian]

Re: What magic, what technology?

I still don't see what it has to do with "magic" or high technology. It seems more like some variation of "divide and conquer", strategies that Britain and other colonial powers have been using for centuries.

I think of it more along the lines of what GRG55 has posted about...not so much divide and conquer....but destabilize.

Maybe the new divide and conquer is disrupt and destabilize.

When you look at how very quickly the non Soviet-aligned Allies relied upon de-Nazified Germans to begin looking after their own basic stability/security in order for the Allies to demobolize(and that's WITH a truly massive allied military manpower footprint on the ground to ensure it), then it's nothing short of gross and intentional negligence to have a mere 175,000 US/Coalition personnel involved in the invasion of Iraq combined with the nearly instantaneous disbandment of the Iraqi military.

That's a "one, two punch" textbook example of disruption and destabilization.

[lakedaemonian]

Re: General Bolger

and the ccp survived by doing the perestroika without the glasnost'.

Totalitarian states seem to come unglued in the glasnost phase....when what they set free, comes back to undermine and kill it.

I'm sure the Chinese have the Soviet attempt at reform as the model for "what NOT to do".

I wonder if China(and other totalitarian states inevitably compelled to reform in the future) will be looking at South Korea and Chile as two examples of how to conduct political/economic reform to make a substantial shift from an extreme end of the spectrum towards the middle.

There's LOTS of stuff NOT worth repeating in the South Korean, and especially the Chilean model as it relates to this forum(lots of FIRE).

But they both dealt with a whole lot of local/regional instability and unconventional conflict involving both regional and global participants, retained stability and strong performance improvements in average standard of living, quality of life, and eventually civil liberties/freedom....albeit at substantial human cost along the way.

I certainly don't condone the horrible things that occurred under the totalitarian governments of South Korea and Chile, but I wonder what the quality of life and standard of living would be for the average South Korean and Chilean today IF things went differently?

Mere speculation of alternate possible outcomes and not a historical performance comparison.

I have genuine doubts in the ability of a country facing unconventional threats to adequately defend itself from them without running into the problem of delving into the darker grey areas of what is considered permissible for a high performance democracy.

How willing are you to hurt your country, in order to "save" your country?

There are some on this forum who appear to be passive but vocal supporters of Russian policy towards Ukraine......I'm trying my best to sit back and watch it like a lab experiment.

Where I will be far more biased towards the "little guy" is in the Baltic States, and how they may(or may not) choose to defend themselves from Russian influence/control.

Estonia seems to be a fairly high performing democracy during it's fairly short-free history.

In 2007, Estonia suffered well coordinated cyber attacks of Russian origin....coinciding with declining relations between Estonia/Russia.

A self organized citizen group(IT professionals) mashed themselves up to defend Estonia's online infrastructure(Estonia is one of, possibly THE, most connected country in the world) in the form of a Cyber Defense League as an analog to Estonia's long history of "social/community militia organizations".

I reckon it was a great example of citizens coming together themselves in the bets interest of the country as the organization has gained official legitimacy and it's founder is now the Cyber SME for Estonian senior leadership.

But how will Estonia respond to continued aggressive Russian subversion?

Countries will need to develop the sovereign state version of 1980's M&A "poison pill" strategies.

And that's where the questions start along the lines of:

Does a country have to compromise it's principals in order to defend itself from being externally and aggressively subverted?

If so, then what effective control measures can be implemented to prevent turning into what you despise?

All competent combatants seek to shape the most unfair fight(competitive advantage) they can.

This renewed and growing emphasis on brazenly open unconventional warfare represents a trend towards a type of warfare where the aggressors possess a clear advantage against "high performance democracies" in that Estonia(as an example) will likely be "playing" by the Queensbury Rules of Boxing, while Russia will likely be playing by 1 Rule(there are no rules).

It will be interesting to see how Estonia as a democracy responds to external threat.

There are legitimate and sound reasoning behind some requests for increased powers and authority when under external unconventional threat.

Sadly, humans don't seem to be too good at controlling the abuse of those necessary and unnecessary extensions of government power.

[Polish_Silver]

What magic, what technology?

While a COIN operation executed by the government might be weak and ineffective due to bumbling or subverted due to ethical insiders, the thought of the same tools in corporate hands is truly scary. Remember, "black market" is in the eyes of the beholder and a community that chose to provide some of its own food/material goods would definitely become a target. Simply substitute megacorporation for state, and, I think, you will see my point.

I guess I will have to pony up the bucks and buy the book.

I still don't see what it has to do with "magic" or high technology. It seems more like some variation of "divide and conquer", strategies that Britain and other colonial powers have been using for centuries.

[jk]

Re: General Bolger

If there are ANY Machiavellian lessons to be learned from the fall of the Shah, the falling of Assad's Syria, and the regime continuity of Zimbabwe's Mugabe and Cuba's Castro is that you do not offer any real substantive improvements in mass communications freedom and civil liberties or any reductions in regime violence to ensure continuity..

and the ccp survived by doing the perestroika without the glasnost'.

[lakedaemonian]

Re: General Bolger

Right ho! In confusion there is profit. And which country depends on Gulf oil the most?

I wonder if Rhodesia/Zimbabwe is a relevant example of what may happen over the next 25-50 years?

When Souther Rhodesia declared Universal Declaration of Independence in the 1960's, the Rhodesians were left with one major ally(apartheid South Africa concerned about it's northern buffer ally).

The US, Israel, and even Iranian money from the Shah helped in very small ways until the inevitable collapse against two distinct and massively funded Communist(Soviet and Chinese) backed insurgencies...especially after the opening of the Mozambique front when Portugal folded up and quit it's colonial properties virtually overnight.

Fast forward 5-6 years after and the world celebrated a free Zimbabwe.

The Shona(Chinese backed ZANLA) slaughter the Matabele people(Soviet backed ZIPRA) turning a 3 way war into a short 2 way domestic dispute the world conveniently ignores to this day.

Fast forward another 34 years and the clear winners of the last 34 years have been in place since that first 1980 election.

Mugabe and his close regime continuity players...and China.

China won Rhodesia/Zimbabwe.

Yet nearly all view the conflict as black and white........they completely miss the broad range of quite relevant grey.

A Chinese backed Mugabe has lasted 34 years.

US backed GCC regimes have lasted even longer.

How technological change with one to billions instant communication will combine with the full spectrum of structural stresses in the region to effect change is hard to gauge.

If Iran imploded from a combination of sycophantic and egregious financial mismanagement, increasing freedom for the opposition to distribute millions of Ayatollah audio tape messages, and external pressure(President Carter) to reduce violence to ensure regime continuity it seems safe to say that a future situation involving the risk of GCC regime failure will be met with decisive efforts to prevent internet/mobile networks becoming tools for the opposition as well as increasingly harsh reprisals on domestic opposition with virtually no limit on regime violence to maintain control.

If there are ANY Machiavellian lessons to be learned from the fall of the Shah, the falling of Assad's Syria, and the regime continuity of Zimbabwe's Mugabe and Cuba's Castro is that you do not offer any real substantive improvements in mass communications freedom and civil liberties or any reductions in regime violence to ensure continuity.

Once past the point of no return, once you step off the throat of the oppressed the results are pretty consistent.

The US has some history of encouraging regimes to improve freedom of the press, civil liberties, and a reduction in regime continuity violence.......much to the regret of regimes that follow it.

I would think a similar pattern of US behavior towards the GCC states in the near future could act as a catalyst to accelerate the shift in superpower sponsorship from the US to China.

"There will be blood" may not only be a movie with Daniel Day Lewis in it, but a quite blunt and accurate title for a near future documentary on the GCC regimes.

[lakedaemonian]

Re: General Bolger

Dan Bolger is not looking to add to the debate over the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. The retired three-star army general, out of patience with unresolved conflicts, means to end it.

Bolger, a senior officer responsible for training the Iraqi and Afghan militaries, includes himself in the roster of failed generals.

If General Bolger feels this strongly about it, why did he wait until retirement to go against the grain? Where was the intestinal fortitude to speak truth to power when he still held active rank?


The post-Vietnam army was built, deliberately, for short, conventional, decisive conflicts, yet the post-9/11 military leadership embraced – sometimes deliberately, sometimes through miscalculation – fighting insurgents and terrorists who knew the terrain, the people and the culture better than the US ever would.

“Anybody who does work in foreign countries will tell you, if you want long-term success, you have to understand that culture. We didn’t even come close. We knew enough to get by,” Bolger said.

General Bolger is both right and wrong. The US conventional army was built to destroy the Warsaw Pact in a short and sharp full spectrum combined arms conventional war(as seen briefly in Desert Storm 1.0 the Prequel).

US Army Special Forces, a US Army Branch that General Bolger appears unfamilar with, are custom built to train foreign forces specifically trained in their language and culture and unlike any other resource available as an effective US foreign policy tool.

As the lead for training host nation forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, a lack of knowledge, experience, or even acknowledgment of this capability is telling for those with experience.

for disaster to use a sledgehammer(hastily retrained US conventional forces) when the appropriate tool is an adjustable wrench(US Army SF).


More controversially, Bolger laments that the US did not pull out of Afghanistan after ousting al-Qaida in late 2001 and out of Iraq after ousting Saddam in April 2003. Staying in each conflict as it deteriorated locked policymakers and officers into a pattern of escalation, with persistence substituting for success. No one in uniform of any influence argued for withdrawal, or even seriously considered it: the US military mantra of the age is to leave behind a division’s worth of advisers as insurance and expect them to resolve what a corps could not.

I would agree completely with Afghanistan in late 2001 being a light footprint domain of specialist forces(US Army SF/SMUs) and we failed when we went full retard conventional heavy foot print allowing the Pakistanis(who have the ability to cheaply prevent Afghan success) to gain a crazy amount of leverage over the US. It still would have been a very long term commitment, but a much more compact and cheaper(lives/treasure) commitment.

Iraq in 2003, once committed...should have seen the instantaneous support of regular Iraqi Army/Police(instead of their disbandment by Bremmer) and the quick transition to a palatable strong man.

The objection, which proved contemporaneously persuasive, is that the US would leave a vacuum inviting greater dangerous instability. “It would be a mess, and you’d have the equivalent of Isis,” Bolger conceded.

I reckon why President Bush Senior didn't push straight into regime change against Saddam in 1991 is because of the sectarian instability risk combined with the influence/control opportunities it would offer to Iran(as seen post 2003).

“But guess what: we’re in that same mess right now after eight years, and we’re going to be in the same mess after 13 years in Afghanistan.” The difference, he said, is thousands of Americans dead; tens of thousands of Americans left with life-changing wounds; and untold hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans dead, injured, impoverished or radicalized.

“Moreover, you’d be doing a real counterinsurgency, where they’d have to win it. That’s what the mistake is here: to think that we could go into these countries and stabilize their villages and fix their government, that’s incredible, unless you take a colonial or imperial attitude and say, ‘I’m going to be here for 100 years, this is the British Raj, I’m never leaving,’” he said.

It is there that Bolger plants his flag in an interminable debate within the army about the wisdom of counterinsurgency. He savages its proponents, chiefly Generals David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal, for overpromising and under-delivering in Iraq and then recycling the formula to brew a weaker tea in Afghanistan. It leads Bolger’s book to some dubious places, like comparing the pre-Petraeus Iraq commander George Casey to Ulysses S Grant, the savior of the union, even though Casey under-promised and under-delivered.

It's quite interesting to read General Bolger savaging General McChrystal. While McChrystal made an incredibly rookie mistake in terms of media relations and managed to get himself fired like a modern day MacArthur, McChrystal developed and executed an incredibly successful modern urban warfighting doctrine that effectively destroyed the Hydra headed insurgency by ruthlessly targeting middle management and effectively disrupting insurgent operations enough to allow capacity building efforts to gain traction.

McChrystal changed the game by developing the fusion teams that were able to consistently kill the bad guy middle management faster than it could be replaced. Even McChrystal critics often agree to his clear successes. What exactly has Bolger done, besides having a whinge post retirement?

Some in military circles view Bolger’s book as the first shot of an internecine fight to purge the army of counterinsurgency, much as the post-Vietnam generation attempted. It is an uphill struggle. While many officers of Bolger’s generation share his views, the Iraq surge saw the greatest tactical results of either long war past the invasion phase. Repudiating it is difficult without conceding the futility of either conflict, as Bolger has done, which, for much of the contemporary military, is a psychological step too far.

What's truly frightening is that there isn't a single mention of the positive effects and outcomes delivered by one of the smallest branches of the US Army, US Army Special Forces. The very branch who conducts the training of host nation forces and foreign internal defense as two of it's core missions. US Army SF are operating in over 100 countries around the world continuously......mostly in training roles, capacity building, and relationship building. But receives little to no notice for what has been a huge bang for the buck return on investment over the last 62 years.

John Nagl, a retired army lieutenant colonel and prominent counterinsurgency advocate, praised Bolger as a “smart, dedicated army officer” while rejecting his thesis.

“While I haven’t yet read his new book, I don’t agree with him that we lost, and find it hard to believe that he does,” Nagl said.

But if the wars succeeded, Bolger said, “how come two or three years later, everything’s a pile of crap?”

One of the reasons was an “unstated assumption” that undergirded the American construction of the Iraqi and Afghan militaries, supposedly the US ticket out of both wars.

Bolger, who led the training of Afghan soldiers and held a senior post training the Iraqis, said US trainers banked on being present alongside their foreign charges for decades, guaranteeing their performance and compensating for weaknesses.

One of the most telling problems of General Bolger holding the most senior post for training foreign forces is his complete lack of ANY training to conduct that highly specialized role. The same goes for nearly everyone who worked under his command.

“The thought was to leave a conventional division, Korean-type model and you’d be there for 40 or 50 years with a mutual defense treaty and all that kind of stuff. Hey, the Korean army in 1953 was not very good. It takes a generation to build a good army: you need to retrain leaders, you have to build a non-commissioned officer corps,” he said.

Once again with the conventional force hat squarely on an insider the box thinking head. Asian culture lends itself to highly rigid and large formation military formation/indoctrination as often seen in western force structures as well. Arab cultures do not lend themselves to effective performance when mimicking traditional/conventional western force structure models. Quite telling, but in an unintended way.

The anticipated length of the US training helps explain the immaturity of both forces. The collapse of entire divisions of the Iraqi military against the Isis advance this year sent shockwaves through Washington. The Afghans are judged to lack critical air support, medical evacuation, intelligence and other capabilities, which helps explain how 9,000 soldiers have died in two years, as a US general revealed last week.

One of the main reasons why Iraqi forces folded would be due to the fact that many soldiers and Marines were literally annointed trainers of Iraqis(and Afghans) with little to no specific vetting for the role and little to no cultural/language training for the role. Again, using sledgehammers that can't communicate and can't seem to avoid cultural faux pas.....instead of using an adjustable wrench that speaks the language with intercultural training on how to avoid blue on green attacks.

Yet never has an administration official or senior military officer – to include Bolger – told the American people to expect a half-century stay in a hostile foreign country. Instead, officials vaguely discuss a “long war”, leaving the actual anticipated duration unstated, to say nothing of the price in money and blood.

The day boots hit the ground in Afghanistan and Iraq BEYOND just SF/CIA/SMU/Support light footprint operations is the day they both became multi decade investments.

Surveying the latest war against Isis, Bolger sees the same pattern repeating.

“Here’s what wasn’t said: we never had the discussion where we said, ‘Hey, Mr President, you realize you’re signing up for a 50-year commitment, or plus, in Afghanistan and Iraq. Where was that discussion? We talk about surges, but those are all short-fuse things. We’re still not having that.

“Has President Obama come to the American people and said, ‘By the way, this fight against Isis is going to last 30 or 40 years. You guys good with that?’”

General Bolger raises some valid points.

But the MOST telling are the ones he fails and/or chooses not to raise....I suspect a bit of both.

Anyone who sees the world for what it is knows that Afghan and/or Iraq wars or not.......there is a multi-layered "forever war" going on in the region.

Ask an Afghan Pashtun and they will tell you stories of British loss in Afghanistan in the 1800's as if it happened more recently than the Soviet forced entry on Christmas Eve 1979.

Ask certain folks in certain places in the GCC/ME and you'd think the days of TE Lawrence, the creation of the state of Israel, and the Battle of Karbala occurred last week, 3 days ago, and 4 months ago respectively.

The wars that already happened, have happened.

General Bolger might have some relevance if he were to actually put it on the line and talk about how technological advancement and peer/peer mass communication play to the historical success/strengths of Arab cultural in irregular warfare and how the risk of repeating another regional "fall of the Shah 1979 Iran" is rising quickly in recent years.

But then General Bolger has clearly shown his comfort staying inside the box, rather than outside of it.

Just my 0.02c

[sutro]

Re: General Bolger

MAP OF THE NEW MIDDLE EAST

Nationalist states always bad, puppets best.

Right ho! In confusion there is profit. And which country depends on Gulf oil the most?