New York for Kyiv? Boston for Taipei?

Now that the United States doesn't have bodies coming home from the lesser paved parts of the world (the bodies we're generating tend to be locals and remain where we drop them...) the U.S. public can go back to sleep regarding it's foreign policy doin's around the world whilst the foreign policy nabobs can go back to the sort of stuff they enjoy; pondering Great Power rivalries.

And current events have had a way of bringing those rivalries up in the nightly news. 

First back in October we had worries that the People's Republic of China was - at least - thinking about forcibly re-uniting the island of Taiwan with the Motherland.

Now the focus has shifted to eastern Europe, where Russian military moves appear to be directed against Ukraine.

The larger questions that arise from these potential conflicts are the same ones that have been in place since the end of WW2, namely that 1) as the Western hyperpower the United States is, effectively, the Western "big stick" in Great Power confrontation, but 2) there is always the question of the degree to which a United States would be and will be willing to risk escalation with the other big nuclear powers - Russia and China - over threats to the U.S.'s non-nuclear allies.

Some "allies" don't believe the U.S. is willing to do this at all; one of the prime drivers of the Israeli nuclear program was the desire to be independent of U.S. political will. France much the same (with a heaping helping of post-1940-defeat-shame). 

My understanding is that the U.K. was the only Western nuclear power who hung on to the "special relationship", developing their nukes purely as a way to avoid sitting at the geopolitical kid's table.

There's also the issue of diplomatic linkage.

The European nations are militarily bound up with the U.S. in NATO. You nuke Berlin, it's going to cost you. Israel, too, has always had a (in my personal opinion an unhealthily) close relationship with the U.S. 

In theory those polities can depend on U.S. military power to back their integrity if threatened. They can act as if they had a portion of that power, which gives them a certain degree of geopolitical freedom and international influence beyond their inherent military strength.

(At least that was the c.w. until Trump; now the GOP is full-on ethno-nationalist and "America First" and, frankly, if I was Berlin or London I'd be hesitant to make plans based on the notion that Uncle Sammy had my back 24/7/365. President Trump 47 (or Tom Cotton or Marjorie Taylor Greene) may very well be most unwilling to go to the mat for latte-sipping socialist Eurotrash.) 

Smaller states with relations short of full alliance like Ukraine and Taiwan don't have those options. They pretty much have to design their relationships with their larger neighbors based on their assessment of the willingness - or, particularly, potential unwillingness - of the Land of the Big PX to risk a bigger fight rather than give their rivals the win.

And that means that the U.S. itself has to - or, at least, should - think hard about the degree to which it's willing to risk that fight for those polities. 

After twenty years of lies, damned lies, and delusion the current U.S. administration finally admitted that there was nothing in Afghanistan worth the bones of a West Virginia grenadier. 

Will a non-America-First administration be willing to risk that, and more, to ensure that Taipei remains free of PRC occupation? To keep the Donbass as part of the Ukraine?

What frustrates me about this, and the only reason that I'm writing this post, is because of the combination of indifference, stupidity, and hubris that seems to characterize the U.S. public and most political discussion about these topics.

The U.S. press spends about five or six more times the amount of talking nonsense about "critical race theory" than it does these potential collisions. The degree of public literacy about the risk-versus-rewards of an aggressive Taiwan policy in the linked article above is appalling; if damn near 70% of the U.S. public want their government to recognize Taiwan as an independent nation? 

They've been face-down in the edible weed far too long.

There's discussion to be had - and, potentially, arguments to be made - for resisting Chinese and Russian aggression in places like the West Pacific and eastern Europe. 

Those discussions are difficult and complex...and are not going on. 

Instead the public and, it appears, most media and political talking heads, are trying to reduce the issues to simple us-versus-them jingoism.

Yes. I realize that's how a lot of "geopolitics" gets done here in the Land of the Freedumb.

But, frankly, after the twenty-year-long disaster that has been the Phony War on Terror?

It's really time that We the People grew up and started putting away these childish things.

A collision with China or Russia may, indeed, be inevitable (or, as Andy will remind you in the case of China, is already happening...)

But I'd like to think that if it happens it will happen for sound geopolitical reasons. For U.S. national interests. 

I'd like to think that the systems of supposed self-government - the "free press", the representatives of the People in Congress, the foreign specialists in the Departments of State and Defense - would have conducted a thorough discussion and analysis of the potential gains and risks before it happens.

But.

That would mean thinking geopolitical strategy and, as former friend of the blog Seydlitz would tell you, the United States don't do "strategy".

We do the shit out of "critical race theory", though, so there's that.

Jesus wept.

Blind Man's Bluff

Fred Kaplan at Slate has a fairly decent summary of the problems facing the current U.S. administration's conduct of the legacy wars in the Middle East and southwest Asia. The tl:dr is that 1) for all his bluster about "dealmaking" Trump has no geopolitical knowledge or understanding, and 2) the flag officers that comprise his geopolitical team are deeply sunk in the sunk-cost views of those wars.

The black hole at the center of this mess is that the U.S. policy- and decision-making apparatus has been and remains exceptionally poor at analyzing strategic situations, teasing out what the U.S.'s actual "vital interests" are in them, and then formulating approaches to those situations that have a genuine potential for succeeding in advancing those vital interests.

Instead, that apparatus seems to latch onto whatever short-term enthusiasm dominates the U.S. domestic political scene. In the Middle East it started with enthusiasm for Israel in the Forties, graduated to suppression of what looked like local "Communist" impulses in the Fifties and Sixties (that led to steps like the Iran coup in 1953), then to support of local dictators like Saddam in the Seventies and Eighties to counter the "Iranian menace", then to a fixation on Saddam's Iraq in the 90's and Oughts. Since then, of course, it has been the "War on Terror" with the sort of nonsensical geopolitical decisions that a conflict based on "fighting" a tactic implies.

One thing I should note from the Kaplan piece is that when he asks "...one wonders what happened to the Donald Trump who decried the former war as a “total disaster” and bellowed over and over “It’s time to come home”—and who pledged to do nothing in the latter war but “bomb the shit out of ISIS.” Kaplan, like an unfortunately large group of other citizens, is taking the Tangerine Toddler's mouth noises seriously, which is always a mistake.

Remember, Trump remains what he always was; a real estate grifter and Ponzi schemer whose "brand" depended on distracting the rubes while he mulcted his cut out of whatever enterprise he was running into the ground. I mean, the guy went bankrupt running a fucking casino, a "business" where people give you their money. It takes a special breed of schmuck to do that.

So Trump's blather about "coming home" and those wars being "total disasters" were the distraction, simply his usual bullying towards his Democratic opponents and especially Obama and Clinton whom he loathed personally. He had no particular geopolitical conviction on the subject; he just wanted to mulct domestic political advantage by convincing the rubes he did. How could he? He barely knew enough to find the places on a map. He believed that thousands of Muslims had danced on rooftops as the Twin Towers fell. He hated and feared all foreigners outside of nice white Norwegians as he is supposed to hate and fear sharks and germs. He was, and remains, a bloviating fool.

So on the subject of Middle Eastern wars he is a toddler, being fed and diapered by the same sort of people who ran with the Bushies when they went into Iraq thinking that they could create their own reality. Trump, for all his bluster, is monstrously ignorant of the world outside his Twitter feed. His mind, as we have seen over the past year, is rutted into a handful of vindictive, white-nationalist, egotistical tracks that make it nearly impossible for him to gain the sort of knowledge, let alone the wisdom, that would allow him to climb out of those tracks and assist in remaking the U.S. foreign policy apparatus into something less shortsighted.

How can a blind man teach blind men to see?

These mess-o-potamias are not of Trump's making. But it is long past the time to abandon the idea that somehow Trump will "tell it like it is", will "shake things up".

He can no more see his way out of these disasters than a child blind since birth. In this sting he's not just the con man; he's the mark. He's conning us as he's getting conned by both his generals and his enemies. He's hustling us while he's being hustled, by the East and by his own people.

So, nope. Unless We the People stop kidding ourselves about electing these sorts of people - and by that I mean not just Trump but the sorts of people who think that fighting a "war on terror" is an actual good idea - we will remain as we are now; so, so, so, SO fucked.

The Second Great Pacific War..?

From Future Warfare in the Western Pacific (Biddle and Oelrich, 2016):

"This article thus provides a more systematic assessment of the potential military effectiveness of Chinese A2/AD (anti-access area denial). We ask not whether ASB would be escalatory, but whether it is necessary. That is, to what extent will ongoing technology trends allow either side to deny freedom of movement to the other, and over what area? Will China be able to push U.S. forces far enough from its shores to threaten U.S. alliances? If so, which ones, and how gravely? And what, given this, represents the best military strategy for the United States to adopt for the long term?"

One of the most common complaints I've heard, both here and from other former military types, is that the exclusive concentration of resources on "little war" expeditionary-force and internal defense of client-state governments has left the United States armed forces unable to successfully respond to a peer foe in a conventional war.

Biddle and Oelrich (2016) is an attempt to analyze one element of what may be one of the two potential peer-foe conflicts; a predominantly naval/air war between the United States and its allies against the People's Republic of China (PRC); specifically, what potential does the PRC's pursuit of A2/AD systems - "...missile launchers, command posts, sensors, supply networks, and communication systems..." - have for creating a "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere" centered around mainland China, one that is robust enough to control the West Pacific rim in the face of a United States assault?

This seems like an interesting enough question to suggest reading the linked paper and discussing in the comments section. So...hopefully you will enjoy the exercise and come in weapons free.

Grand Strategy: The View from 1923 . . .

After every war there is a period of analysis and appraisal which deals with the history and issues brought forward by that war. The greater the war, the greater the tendency for this to expand and include all the issues that the war engendered. Epoch changing wars do this to a great extent, even to establishing a new art of war for the epoch in question. We've seen this to an extent after the Napoleonic wars, the Civil War, and World Wars I and II. There is something of a "weak" reappraisal going on now in regards the two lost wars the US involved itself in subsequent to the attacks of 11 September 2001.

Professor Hew Strachan, the premier historian of the First World War and the Director of the Leverhulme Programme on the Changing Character of War at Oxford, has a recent article out on Grand Strategy. This article will be the subject of a future post, but first I would like to have something historical to compare it with, the work of an earlier writer on military subjects who was perhaps the most influential theorist of his day, that being Colonel J.F.C. Fuller of the Royal Army Tank Corps. Fuller published a book entitled The Reformation of War in 1923 which was one of, or perhaps even the first treatment of what Fuller described as "Grand Strategy".

Strachan mentions Fuller has having developed the term "grand strategy" along with Basil Liddell Hart, but Hart's contribution he lists was written over 20 years after Fuller's, and in 1944, towards the end of the Second World War. Fuller for me thus takes pride of place. Not that he was the only theorist writing about what we could call "grand strategy" at the time. There was also Alexander Svechin of the Red Army and Erich Ludendorff of Germany. More on them later.

Let's start with Fuller's concept of "Grand Strategy":

During peace time this spirit (the spirit or the national will to exist; it is the driving force of all warlike activities) is ever present, and though its nature, during war, does not change, the resistance offered to its progress is greater, and the relationship between this resistance and the will to win gives to any particular war its specific character. During peace or war, our object is to conserve and control this spirit; consequently, we must understand the probable resistance to be met with, for otherwise we shall not be able to gauge the character of war, and not being able to gauge the character we shall not know what type of warfare will prove the most efficient and economical. This control and direction of the will to win and all the means whereby this will may be expressed I will call grand strategy. The Reformation of War, Chapter XI, page 214

To get more of an idea of this spirit that Fuller is talking about lets consider an earlier quote from the book:

Ultimately, from acts of chivalry on the battlefield do we soar to those acts which form the ethics of grand strategy, the fuller meaning of which I will discuss in Chapter XI. To damage a nation morally during days of peace is not good enough; it is but a poor endeavour, which normally must bring but little profit. Ethically, during war, as I will show, grand strategy does aim at demoralizing the enemy, yet also does it consist in the enhancement of a nation's worth in the eyes of its actual or potential enemies. Integrity, honour, justice and courage are the weapons of the grand strategist, which not only demonstrate a nation's moral worth but its martial power. The cultivation of these in peace time forms the backbone of success in war. The Reformation of War, page 72

The essence of grand strategy in Fuller's view is the cultivation of soldierly qualities in the general population, including especially the willingness of the individual to offer themselves in the interests of the state. This requires a high level of what I have described in the past as material and moral cohesion. Notice that Fuller has a dubious view of the use of negative propaganda against an potential enemy, since it is more by enhancing our own prestige and values that we convince the enemy of our own superiority.

So, the strength of "the national will to exist" was not only the basis of a successful grand strategy, but a lesson learned from the First World War. What other lessons had Fuller learned from that conflict?

To answer that question it is important to point out that Fuller's view of that conflict is quite different from the general view today, and different from Hew Strachan's as well. That view is firmly rooted in Fuller's view of humanity:

Though the desire of man is peace, the law of life is war; the fittest, mentally or bodily, survive, and the less fit supply them with food, labour and service. Life lives on life . . . page 8

War exists because humans, men especially, are warlike and see domination as part of life. This would include economic interests, "conquest" not being limited to seizing territory, but economic advantage as well. This of course is a very general condition, hardly specific to the First World War.

More specifically, Britain and Germany went to war due to commercial interests, Britain hoped to destroy her main commercial rival in Europe. With the establishment of the Entente, Britain tied her interests to those of Russia and France, both of which required the defeat of Germany to gain their national goals. Russia's goals especially were extensive including the expulsion of Turkey from Europe and the conquest of Constantinople as well as domination of the Balkans which required the destruction of Austria-Hungary. Fuller provides the most extensive summary of his views in his The Conduct of War 1789 - 1961, pp 143-154, so it is apparent that they did not change over time.

This leads to his very Clausewitzian conclusion that given the nature of the extensive alliances and the wide range of interests, it was impossible to come up with a common policy, for instance, a singular Anglo-French point of view, let alone a unified Entente point of view:

But in August 1914, there was no Anglo-French political point of view, therefore the military point of view was subordinated to a vacuum, which it at once filled to become the sole point of view: in other words, the means monopolized the end." (Ibid, p. 153).

So military strategy had to step in and fill the void left by the absence of a coherent political purpose on the Entente side. This in part due to the inability of the various Allied governments to formulate clearly what is was they were actually fighting for, rather their domestic need to "sell the war" as "defensive", defending civilization against the "Hun" became the basis of the stated political purpose. This necessity to match policy with military means is also brought up by Svechin in regards to German strategy:

The internal weakness of a state is evident more quickly in an offensive than a defensive. The tragedy of the Germans' conduct of the war from 1914 to 1918 lives in the fact that under the conditions Germany could have won this war only as a politically defensive war. Incidentally, the Germans realized this only in August 1918 after all their forces had been exhausted and they were faced with capitulation. German strategy had gone beyond the bounds of the political defensive when they violated Belgian neutrality in August 1914, when they penetrated too deep into Russia 1n 1915 . . . Strategy p 93

For both sides, the military aim displaced the political purpose. Given this view, Fuller comes up with an interesting conclusion:

The importance of grand strategy and all that it includes cannot be over-estimated at the present time, for in the whole course of history the necessity for economy has never been more vital; further, in its true meaning, efficiency cannot exist without it. At any time and irrespective of prosperity, a nation can only afford to spend a certain sum of money as an insurance against war and ultimately, when war occurs, as a safeguard against defeat. For this sum to be economically spent, not only must all obsolecence be weeded out of the defence forces, but no overlapping can be tolerated.

During war, nothing is so uneconomical as improvization ; consequently, our peace strategy must formulate our war strategy, by which I mean that there cannot be two forms of strategy, one for peace and one for war, without wastage — moral, physical and material, when war breaks out. The first duty of the grand strategist is, therefore, to appreciate the commercial and financial position of his country; to discover what its resources and liabilities are. Secondly, he must understand the moral characteristics of his countrymen, their history, peculiarities, social customs and system of government, for all these quantities and qualities form the pillars of the military arch which it is his duty to construct.

Unlike the strategist of the past, the grand strategist of today must no longer be a mere servant of his ever-changing government, but a student of the permanent characteristics and slowly changing institutions of the nation to which he belongs, and which he is called upon to secure against war and defeat. He must, in fact, be a learned historian and a far-seeing philosopher, as well as a skilful strategist and tactician. Today such men are rare to come by, because nations understand practically nothing of the science of war.

Understanding nothing, there is no incentive without or within an army to produce a breed of strategists who may be classed as men of science. In this respect the Germans went further than all other nations, and, during the Great War, it was the firmness of their grand strategy which formed the foundation of their magnificent endurance. The Reformation of War, pp 218-219

Fuller concludes with a proposed massive re-organization of not only British but Imperial governments, all planning coming under the authority of a Generalissimo who serves as the minister of defense, or in any case as a member of the cabinet. This position would be supported by the formation of a General Staff. These staff officers would be trained in a new war college encompassing all three services.

As a recap of his concept of grand strategy, perhaps this quote suffices:

The transmission of power in all its forms, in order to maintain policy, is the aim of grand strategy, its actual employment being the domain of grand tactics. While strategy is more particularly concerned with the movement of armed masses, grand strategy, including these movements, embraces the motive forces which lie behind them both — material and psychological. From the grand strategical point of view, it is just as important to realize the quality of the moral power of a nation, as the quantity of its man-power, or to establish moral communication by instituting a common thought — the will to win throughout the nation and the fighting services. The grand strategist we see is, consequently, also a politician and a diplomatist.

Comparison of Fuller's Concept with that of Svechin and Ludendorff

It is interesting to note that all three treatments of grand strategy were based on assumed strategic incompetence displayed by all sides during the First World War. Ludendorff's was more tempered in his criticism of course since he himself carried the blame for some of the actions Fuller and Svechin criticized.

Of the three, Fuller is the most all encompassing, whereas Svechin comes across as the most "modern" in that he avoids the social darwinism present in the other two, and sees states developing according to historical trends from of course a Marxist perspective.

All three see democracies as sordid affairs with the actual elites operating behind a curtain of propaganda and distortions to hide their actual narrow goals. As Svechin writes, "The ruling class in a state is inclined to regard its own interests as state interests and resorts to the aid of the state apparatus to defend them." Democracies are also most likely to fire up high levels of passionate hatred towards the enemy in order to mobilize the masses to fight.

Conclusions? What can this view from 1923 indicate to us about the concept of grand strategy today?

First, I think it important with any concept, especially strategic theory concepts, to consider their origins which influence not only their inspiration but also development. All three theorists I've mentioned saw the First World War as a strategic disaster run by incompetents, especially in terms of political purpose, which is different from the way we see the First World War today (the generals are the "donkeys" rather than the politicians). In Ludendorff's case this was more the nature of avoiding responsibility for his own actions imo, but that does not explain Fuller's or Svechin's view.

Second, all three saw war as essentially something intrinsically human and unavoidable. Given the right set of historic circumstances, wars simply happen, nobody is to blame generally, although specific acts of political or military incompetence are to be condemned as we have seen. "Stability" in the sense of eternal peace is death, something hardly to be yearned for.

Third, grand strategy required a high level of control and manipulation and had to be specifically organized/designed/fitted to the political community in question. What is needed is a military dictator to implement such a policy, at least during wartime. We see here the totalitarian side of grand strategy as it was originally conceived.

Fourth, the nation state in question required a driving force to succeed, some all-encompassing value set to give meaning to not only the war waged, but especially the sacrifices called for and willingly offered. Simple patriotism, universal ideals, humanist notions, or even Christianity, would not suffice, rather Nationalism as in a historic destiny of the race, or class consciousness (in the case of Svechin) were needed. Ludendorff stressed that his Total War could only be fought defensively against an existential threat. Notice the link between this and the second point above. This opens the door to genocidal wars for existence between nation states, since Enlightenment notions of basic equality among peoples (which Clausewitz for one assumed) have been put into question.