Long War, soft power

ARTICLE: Study Calls for 'Soft Power' Tactics, Virginian-Pilot, March 19, 2008

When you have Chet Richards out in front of the study, arguing its logic, then that's pretty impressive.

I've been briefing the SysAmin and Dept. of Everything Else ideas for years, sometimes 4-5 times to the same audiences. In many stretches, I'd think to myself that it had gotten old and I should just give up, especially when you see people whine--with real righteousness--about the extreme costs associated with Iraq.

The smart ones say to themselves, "We've got to do better."

It's not the globalization of COIN to fight a global insurgency so much as it's making globalization truly global in a reasonably fair and sustainable manner. When you see the rise of Sovereign Wealth Funds, you realize, things have changed and so allies must change if we're going to ride with history's tides instead of insisting on swimming against them by planning a defense posture that tries to counter ALL threats--the very essence of non-strategic thought.

The Brits under Blair and now Brown give us big hints as to the look and feel of what we should be after. The "Beijing Consensus" tells us much about the cluster of positions we'll inevitably be forced to accommodate.

You can fight all these things and say, "it's the American way," or you can remember your own nation's history better and realize that the world is following the American way right now--just not today's version.

We can help that process along or we can obstruct it in the name of 20th-century definitions of threat.

(Thanks: Endre Lunde)

Comments

[historyguy99]

"Our defense establishment has suffered some 4,000 fatal casualties, forced the Army into offering enlistment bonuses of $40,000 to raw recruits, begun a program of buying armored jeeps that cost a million dollars each, and run up a generational spending obligation" likely to top $2 trillion, writes military theorist Chet Richards, a retired Air Force colonel.

"We did all this not while engaging some worthy foe armed with tanks, missiles and aircraft similar to ours, nor while contending with massed armies of skilled troops on fields of battle. No, we incurred these costs while trying to suppress resistance to our occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, resistance by lightly armed civilians and poorly equipped militias."

Drop the mention of tanks, missiles, ect. and change the location to North America, and this could be a conversation that the British military would be having about the American rebels in 1780.

[Anonymous]

good point. but our King George is more stubborn than theirs ;-)

[Louis Heberlein]

There were many English political and academic equivalents of Dr. Barnett before, during, and just after our Revolution. They all indicated non-pressure economic and social connectivity would draw us back to what eventually became the Commonwealth.

It still took 100 years and special economic investment incentives like American continental railroads and commercial agriculture for the English establishment to consider those 'radical' ideas. It took about the same time for it to grasp the domestic insights from Adam Smith's 1776 book.

It wasn't just George. The Merchant Adventurers of Elizabeth's time had devolved into the narrow interest political/economic British East India Company. There are many stories of the dumb actions and long term consequences.

[Ted O'Connor]

Skinny little guys with AK 47s are going to be a problem for the next 25 years. But they do not always have to be our problem. No other country has as many troops scattered all over the world. It is time to stop and ask ourselves what are we receiving in return. I was just a cocktail party with some folks who had retired from the military and were now in the defense industry. When the conversation turned to the possibility of an all out withdrawl from Iraq, one of the Navy alums immediately volunteered China as our next dire threat. "No" another one said, "It's Iran". All I could think of was...here we go again.

[Galrahn]

We are in a war where results are difficult to measure empirically and the suggested alternative is a soft power approach where results would be difficult to measure empirically.

All we really measure are costs, not gains or losses, and costs are realistically not a very good benchmark for success or failure. It would be nice if we had better measurements for success and failure, but I guess that requires a stated objective to have gains and losses from, an objuective of which I'm not sure exists.

From my perspective, the 20th-century definitions of threat are the only ones defined, I don't get the impression the 21st century definitions of threat are well defined yet, and the war objctives, or lack of, reflect that reality.

My 2 cents.

[Bill C.]

We must stop and consider that many primary and central threats to United States national security today emanate -- not from external sources -- but, instead, from within.

Consider as evidence in this regard our current self-imposed vulnarabilities, for example: (1) the war in Iraq, (2) the debt to and dependence upon China, (3) the current housing/financial/credit crisis, and, (4) our declining reputation and loss of influence throughout the world. Consider also that each of the above items would seem to jeopardize rather than enhance globalization.

No external source would seem to have held a gun to our head and made us act so as to incur these new national security/globalization vulnerabilities.

Instead, these vulnerabilities look to have been incurred simply by bad judgment and by way of novel, untested and excessively risky ideas on how to take advantage of "opportunities" presented by the post-Cold War.

Accordingly, it is unclear how military and/or civilian "medicine," directed at external sources, can cure us of what seem to be largely internal ills.

[Bill C.]

David Gompert, principal author of the Rand report says: "Violent extremism in the Muslim world is the gravest national security threat the United States faces." Thus, an external source.

My contention #1: This may not be true. My contention #2: The gravest nation security threat that the United States faces -- and that globalization faces -- may, instead, be from those that would profit from advocating this and/or other conflicts/cures and from those that would profit from other risky financial ventures. Thus, largely an internal source.

I believe this position supports some of the points made by certain commenters above.

[Anonymous]

Bill C: my reading of Tom is that the issues you cite are not the major threats to US national security or to globalization. rather, i think he represents them all as problems which can and will be corrected, some naturally through economic processes. in fact, he has often praised novel risks like SWFs.

reminder: i don't speak for Tom. but i don't see him finding anything majorly wrong, internally, with the US. the system keeps working, growing, correcting, and spreading virally, with appropriate mutations, to other countries and regions.

further, Tom is on the record that the biggest danger to us and the world and globalization is a bad relationship between us and China. i think he would agree with you v. the Rand report b/c Tom often says we're going to beat Islamic extremism. but i think he'd disagree on your assessment of internal threats.

[Bill C.]

Thanks Sean.

I guess my central theme/premise is:

In the days of the Cold War, we had a clear and significant external enemy we could blame.

Today, if we blow it, we can only blame ourselves.