Ralph Peters' latest
Saturday, January 28, 2006 at 2:33PM One of the people around here who advises Tom sent in this new article by Peters from the Weekly Standard, The Counterrevolution in Military Affairs, under the email title 'Good Ralph Peters'. Tom didn't think so:
And it still makes me want to puke. All are out to get us, or are too weak to help fight. All intellectuals are fools. It's all blood and guts from here out. Warriors are supreme, the rest are nothing. We are losing and can't even realize it. The future will be full of blood and gore and war.What is there to do with this stuff but be afraid? Being secular or quietly religious isn't evil. It does not make you weak. It is the strength of our civilization. Extending that is all, not climbing into the gutter. That job we leave to professionals, and none of them do it so their world back home can come to approximate Peters' advice.
But our fearless co-reader was not to be dissuaded, and came back with this worthy reply:
I guess it is what you focus on.What I hear him saying is that a lot of expensive weapons are not the answer to our problems. True.
He specifically says that the fanatics are a minority within Islam, so it is not "everybody is against us". But he goes on to say that we do ourselves no favors by failing to understand them as they understand themselves. This is also true.
As to China, he makes a case parallel to yours -- a war with them would be insanity, and our people are not taking seriously what it would mean or how it would go. This is true.
I think he overstates the case as to "intellectuals", but Peters is Peters and you expect him to be over the top. I think the monopoly of the group he discusses is disintegrating due to the Internet. But I think there is an element of truth to what he says.
Tom closed with:
Yes. But he does so in such a depressing, with-fear-for-all kind of way.For the average reader, they do indeed focus on the fear. What Peters does is the equivalent of what Frey did: he always jacks it up to the point of scaring people from useful action by making the struggle seem far worse than it really needs to be--or is.
And there is real harm in a call to arms than dissuades and depresses more than it persuades and inspires.
I truly believe that, FWIW.
What do you think?
Reader Comments (11)
This was very hard to read. I could not tell which voice was which. Can you make the font or marks more clear and understandable.
I've found a lot of intersection points between Tom's ideas and Peters', and I think Tom exaggerates their differences. The main difference between them is a matter of tone more than anything else -- both men tend toward deliberately provocative prose, but Peters' tone is mostly negative where Tom's is mostly positive. Tom's optimistic instincts bristle at Peters' grisly and bloody-minded tone, which makes him view the man's substantive points in a more hostile light. (I'm not being judgemental here; this is something we all do to some extent.) Which is a shame really, but so it goes.
the blockquote indentation doesn't work for you, aye John? does bolding the attributions help?
Mr. Barrett,
Never ask a Marine what he thinks unless you make plans to close the bar with him and then go to some unknown dive open til sun-up! (Next day: repeat...)
Ralph Peters could have co-authored Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus!
I got real confused reading him for everything was mixed up with the GWOT and war with China. Last time I checked there were no plans afoot for the latter.
Peters opines that the suicide bomber (according to him, a new phenomena)trumps technology in the hands of a highly trained and motivated man at arms. As a former military man, he might have been well served to scan a little history.
Homo-Sapians has a record for fighting fiercely when motivated for a cause (it could be religion or religion equivalent). Not enough hard drive to account for all; just a few samples...
*A zillion Aztecs, religious one and all, succumbed to a handful of hi-tech Spaniards.
*The American Civil War. A fanatic South could not make it against Northern Railroads and manufacture.
*A Madhi in Sudan could not make it against British railroads and iron gunboats in young Winston Churchill`s time.
*Japanese pilots, zealots one and all, could not make it with Kamikaze strikes for the Emperor in WWII.(The 1st EID)
*Zealous Syrian pilots could not make it against Israeli technology in the Bekaa Valley.
*Counterpoint. Old Russian technology could not make it against mujahadeen in Afghanistan. (Operative word: Old tech...)
Have faith, Mr. Peters, about a zealous thing called variously American ingenuity. Russian soldiers in the Great Patriotic War were facsinated when they saw American privates repair jeeps! They also thought SPAM was an elite entee!
In the hands of an American highly trained man, the following are not to be erased by an opposing suicidal faith:
*F-22
*JSTARS
*JDAMS
*GLOBAL HAWK
*PREDATOR
*BLUE FORCE TRACKERS
*HELLFIRE
*SATELLITES
*TOMAHAWKS
*LAZERS
*AIRCRAFT CARRIERS
*YOUR NAME ON IT MISSILES
*WIRE-GUIDED RPGs
*HELO-CO-PETERS
*LOGISTICS THAT MAKE YOU GAIN WEIGHT
*AMERICAN WOMEN JACKING YOU UP;CAUSE THEY KNOW HOW...
And so on...................................
Doubt American problem solving at your peril.
THE GOOD NEWS: Ralph you and your kindred will die in a free country and perhaps a whole lot of other homo-sapiens will to.
Tom: Meet as agreed at the Sanitary Napkin Grill in Rockport,Indiana and I will enlighten you some more.
MARINE
After seeing another critical analysis of Ralph Peters, I was going to basically write exactly what Matt McIntosh wrote above....I've been meaning to send Dr. Barnett an email saying so for some time!
I read both Dr. Barnett and Ralph Peters whenever and whereever I can. I don't see the inherent conflict in doing so. From my viewpoint, Peters provides somewhat of a "worst case" view, and Tom provides somewhat of a "best case" view. But the larger view isn't really all that different, and both should be studied for what they bring to the debate.
I don't think either Peters or Barnett is 'leading' in the rhetorical war....Peters is obviously over-the-top once in a while - that's basically just the way he is, and I think he pulls it off, usually. However, I've increasingly noticed Dr. Barnett writing in similar styles, and frankly, I don't think it's as flattering. Maybe I expect more sobriety here, or less name-calling. Maybe that's unfair. And also, perhaps it's just me; but I've noticed it in, say, the last six months. I really picked up on it with the critique of the Kaplan article on China
Matt, the bolding helped. Thank you, in a complex give and take, I keep hoping that our technology will help us understand each other and argue more fruitfully. I think you are doing a good and useful thing and I need to work at the structure of the interaction...I very much appriciate the strong argumentative and open discussion. This is hard work and worth doing.
A Marine in my class in sociology last week spoke at length about how thinking about how the people in Iraq thought about Americans in their land helped keep him and his men alive but allowed him to keep from killing more people. The dream of a better future and the reality of a solder deciding whom to kill and how to survive are very important and well worth communicating about...keep up the good work, Matt and Tom
I always begin every Peters piece determined to like it, just like when I've seen him in action. And if he would just keep it within some limits, I would find it easy to praise his provocative thinking, which exists in abundance.
But Peters always throws in so much, including the kitchen sink, into every argument. I stay with it as long as I can, hoping he'll tie it off at some point, but the further I go, the more it looks like just about everyone is an enemy and just about anyone who doesn't see that is a fool--or worse.
There is no doubt we make many similar arguments, but knowing where to stop is as important as knowing where to start, and I fear comparisons to Peters for the same reason I fear those to Friedman: I simply don't want to be identified with going that far down the path of either pessimism or optimism. I want the mix that keeps both the soldier and the businessman listening.
Strangely enough, I like it that I'm criticized so vehemently as both a naive idealist and bloodthirsty war monger. You want a big tent, you have to accomodate criticism from all 360 degrees.
I find that I never capture the decideds, but I also find that no one else does either. Working the middle is everything, so the tone is just optimistic enough to seem hopeful, but just scary enough to seem realistic.
Managing expectations over the long haul is complex, but incredibly worthwhile.
Peters is boring. Maybe the jingo ate his baby. 61 journalists killed since invasion.
John Whitehouse -- Thanks, but it's not me! Sean Meade is the webmaster around here!
Sean -- You might want to look into monkeying with the MT layout and inserting dividers between comments so people don't get confused with the names above/below comments.
I actually interviewed Ralph Peters at a conference on Open Source Intelligence a few weeks ago -- click on my name below for the link to the 3 hours worth of audio interviews from the conference.
I certainly think that Peters is a bit pessimistic and overblown rhetorically, but I do think that he has some interesting points when it comes to the "Battle of Ideas." He told me that to us it's a battle of ideas, and to the terrorists it's a battle of faith -- which is a theme that runs throughout his article.
How to you counter the passion and faith of a fundamentalist suicide bomber? With Information operations? PSYOPS? Propaganda? Media? Eduacation? Culture? Theological Dialogues? Or Military Technology?
Maybe it's some combination of all of the things above, but I prefer Robert Steele's concept of Information Peacekeeping which is communications technologies to create indigenous wealth, education and socially stable societies. Steele talks more about his vision in the interview that I conducted that is also linked from my name below.
He says the goal of regime change in Iraq was noble, but that the administration and SECDEF Rumsfeld's war-planning team was FUBAR. He praises Army COS General Shinseki, and states that while we seem to be getting the strategy right only recently, that things would have been much smoother if we had listened to more Shinsekis and ledd to the neocons. What do you think?