Outflanking the Left

A commenter posting here about my essay On Strategy posed the a highly pertinent question that I have not yet attempted to address: What if anything can be done to outflank as it were the Leftist opposition that persistently attempts and to no small extent has succeeded in dividing this nation over the war. [I do not include loyal principled opposition to the war or it conduct in with these Leftists. I trust reasonable people will recognize the difference.] The intent of my piece is to help clarify what I see as key issues for supporters of the war, not to convince those who oppose it, so I only considered these latter peripherally. But to try to get an at answer on how to out-flank the Left do present a threat to our national will, it is first necessary to understand the nature of their influence and its degree. As I have thought about this from time to time, the answers to that don’t seem to me to be quite as clear cut as they first appear.

For one thing, we seem to have a problem with the moderates apparently be missing in action. Oddly — and I ask forbearance for making a widely disproportionate analogy — we hear a lot about the silence of moderate Muslims in the face of terrorism, but we don’t hear nearly as much about the silence of American moderates in the face of repeated determined efforts by the Left to undermine our resolve to fight those same terrorists. Yet the terrorism and the antics of the Left, abetted by the MSM, have exactly the same immediate goal: to get us to retreat from the war.

But outside the right half of the Blogosphere we don’t see much evident outrage about this. People continue to spend vast amounts of money to send their children or themselves to universities dominated by Leftist academics; they continue to buy the NYT, and watch ABC news. They are doing it somewhat less to be sure, but so far not enough to be corrective. This cannot not be completely explained by their being dependant on the MSM for their world view. On more than one occasion, the MSM itself has reported on its own disregard of basic journalistic principles, as when CNN admitted to kowtowing to Saddam and effectively allowing themselves to become his mouthpiece; and their intent to manipulate the news to benefit their ideological position, as when the editor of Newsweek boasted the MSM could use biased reporting to boost Kerry by 15 or so points and sway the 2004 election, and in fact they were trying to do so. I don’t recall either of these stories creating much a stir outside of the blogs.

A similar disparity exists between anti-war demonstrations, which have been frequent and quite large, and demonstrations of support, which are neither. A variety of factors surely influence this — for example, some have suggested that war supporters tend to have jobs — but it also applied to bumper stickers and lawn signs during the 2004 election. The paucity of visible support for Bush was according to the testimony of many because of fear of vandalism and because pro-Bush lawn signs were often stolen. Kerry supporters clearly had neither of these concerns.

But Kerry lost, and the democrats did not capture either house of Congress. Moreover, the prospect that they will this year is generally assessed to be due more to republican disaffection that the democrat’s strength. So if the moderates are not expressing outrage, they aren’t being swayed [yet] either. So what the Left has managed to accomplish with all their efforts is, to me, a bit obscure. It gets even more obscure when one considers that the strength of the Left’s position — that is, the metric they seem to rely on to measure it — is based on manufactured data. The MSM conducts polls which it tweaks in an effort to affect … polls. So they manufacture artificiality low approval rating for Bush and artificially high opposition to the war, present this not only as truth use it as evidence of their influence, not just to us but also internally, all the time aware of what they are doing. It gets very circular, but they keep doing it, so it must not be working well enough. Sometimes it makes me wonder who is getting wrapped up in whose propaganda.

But before one can address how you might limit or contain the damage the Left is attempting to inflict I think you have to get a handle on all this, and frankly I don’t have a good one. In general, a few things I think would be useful can be mentioned.

First, the actions you can undertake fallen broadly into three categories: Coercive, Corrective, and Inspirational.

Coercive is doing things like canceling your LA Times subscription or organizing an ad boycott (not emailing bizarre threats to people, which is counterproductive as well as uncouth).

Corrective is literally that but also includes providing additional information that completes the picture and counteracts bias.

Inspirational is exactly what it sounds like, but the most inspiring thing of all is success. If we are succeeding, that has to be stated and supported by convincing evidence and testimony. Exhortations to strengthen our resolve and emphasize the long haul are fine, but if they don’t rest on foundation of success they don’t work very well. (The alternate foundation is desperation but let’s try not to go there, especially since we are making progress.)

Each of these needs an appropriate medium for it’s expression. Effective coercion I think is basically a viral grassroots type of thing that acts when people get fed up with shoddy or manipulative behavior. The MSM seems to be feeling the brunt of this; the educational system does not seem to be, protected as it is from serious competition. Perhaps the single most important coercive action that could be taken, though it is very long term, would be to pass legislation that would introduce real competition through vouchers or the like. In the shorter term, alumni pressure or anything that affects grant money might begin to get some college’s attention. But I think this is a result or other methods. Trying to organize coercive actions — boycotts for example — I think have great potential backfire and make the organizers look foolish or ineffective, which in turn undermines their credibility.

In terms of corrective action, blog to a great job to calling attention to and correcting MSM mistakes. But so far, they have been primarily reactive. While blogs do emphasize a great deal of underreported information, the blog swarm approach that works so well to correct errors does not seem work as well to get balancing information into general circulation. I think much of the problem is that they are also somewhat ephemeral and they operate on too fast a cycle for persistence. That great post on UNSCAM rapidly gets buried and who’s going to go to the trouble to dig it out? The internet is still a minority medium so even a dedicated persistent blog is probably going to have minimal effect. (This may be changing but it not clear to me how fast.) What is needed is to establish or utilize an independent credible means of conveying information with a persistent memory. Personally, I like paper for this but I’m sure there are options.

As far as inspiration goes, of course nothing beats TV for reaching people. But the example of newsreels as used in WWII bears some thinking on. Newsreels were excellent because they were short enough to be digestible, but long enough to be informative and interesting, and they came out in cycle with Op cycle of the war. That meant they weren’t constantly having to report trivialities because the news cycle was faster than the progress being made, and they could take the time to be decently written and produced. If that sounds like one of those gawdawful infomercials, I’m sorry.

So if I had my choice and no constraints, I think I’d engineer a series of 30-min or 1-hr specials along the lines of the History Channel or the Discovery Channel wherein some two or three charismatic intrepids — Yon or Totten types perhaps? — went about Iraq talking to folks, interviewing soldiers, reviewing the nature of the conflict in this town or that one, as much after the fact as possible, but not too much after. Not big sweeping stuff of the kind we hear from generals in press conferences but small victories — we helped build this guy’s house or fixed this well; we ran these bad guys out or arrested or killed them. Put that on the air every week, with some minimal context, in a decent time slot and let the doom-sayers try to complete with it.

On a different, minor, and possibly out-of-tune note, I recall how Bill Mauldin’s cartoons had a salutatory effect during WWII, both within the military and out it. Does anything like this still exist? Do people still read? These sorts of things humanize the conflict in ways that are affecting but not so depressing people will avoid it. Humor is a special and important type of empathy and if soldiers’ humor could be reintroduced into circulation I think their credibility and support would increase. The same might be said of their letters, if these could be collected and gotten into wider circulation. All these things have the potential for cumulative effect.

The underlying theme of Inspirational efforts is that people are not as likely to believe in a war if they don’t see it. They are not as likely to support it if they don’t feel they know the people fighting it. In my opinion, these functions cannot be done well by proxies — the President or the Joint Chiefs. Virtues are best communicated by example; this includes fortitude and resolve. All the great speeches in the world I do not think have the impact of a couple of grimy spec-ops guys with their rifles slung, sitting on ridge in Afghanistan protecting a few dozen farmers from the Taliban while cracking jokes, telling tall tales, bitching about the food the and the lousy internet access. (I have to believe they still do these things — soldiering is the most conservative of professions.) Maybe I’m old-fashioned, but get this on cable somehow and I think it would make a world of difference.

That is long menu of off-the-cuff thoughts. Someone else can undoubtedly do better. But perhaps it is at least a place to start.

Beslan — Two years later

It was brought to my attention this morning that today is the second anniversary of the terrorist attack on the school at Beslan. Other bloggers are offering their retrospectives, which are certainly worth a read. Mine is of a different nature, perhaps because I am naturally contrarian, but I hope it will not be perceived as heartless or insufficiently aware of the magnitude of the tragedy. My retrospective, which is uncharacteristically brief, is a reflection on the trap that, with the death of Basayev reported earlier this year, I believe we have avoided. My original post, written shortly after the attack, about my concerns along this line is here.

Whether or not there was the trap I wrote about I hope we shall never know. Whether I was right or wrong in my analysis does not concern me much; either I was right and we were clever, or I was wrong and either my concern was foolish or we were lucky. Either way, I am relieved that something worse thing has not — and I must I suppose add so far —followed up that atrocity. That relief tempers the memories even as it reminds me of duality that crowds my thoughts whenever I think about the current war: Things can always get worse, but they don’t always get worse. So in reflecting on the atrocity and what it may portend, I do not think it ignoble to also entertain some small degree of hope.

On Strategy

The first part of an essay I wrote on our strategy for fighting the GWOT has been posted over at Shrinkwrapped. My sincere gratitude to him for allowing me to use his venue for my piece.

Can we win?

A couple of weeks ago, in a comment over at ShrinkWrapped, I made the offer to try to explain what our strategy was in the GWOT, whether or not it was realistic, and whether or not it was working. The central question of course is can we fight this war as we currently are and win it, or are we facing the prospect of a large and extremely bloody general war with, perhaps, Islam itself? A war that most would argue we are ill-prepared as a culture to fight, much less to win.

ShrinkWrapped himself took me up on the offer and although I took me about a week and over 11,000 words to frame my answer, I have done so. I’m sending it to him and if he finds it worthy, I’ll be posting all or part in his blog. I don’t have to worry about worthiness, so I’m going to all of it here in bits. If it gets shredded by insightful comments, here or over there, I will learn something, and I’ll adjust my thinking and conclusion accordingly. Right now I’m having the whole mess proofread. So check back in a couple of days, if you’re interested in what I have to say.

What will it take to militarize the West?

TigerHawk posed the question above and invited comments on it. I decided to take up the challange but to do it here as the answer ran rather long. Of course thta has something to do with the fact I decided to digress a bit to discuss the rationale behind the question itself. So if you're interested, read on, but be sure the check the comments in the original post.

To try to answer the question posed, it is tempting to say that a successful WMD attack on the US would do it, and one would hope that our threshold is not that high. But I’m not at all sure. For one thing, the time scale is important — are we talking 2010-2015 or 2015-2020? The US is a very different place than it was in 1940; life expectations are radically different and the people develop is quite differently as well.

Recalling an earlier post on child raising, it is hard for me to see how this country could support as massive a mobilization as proposed in the question because the extended adolescence our culture has imposed on the last two generations has unfitted them to be soldiers. Personally I do not believe that the two absolutely necessary qualities in a soldier — discipline and physical courage — are common enough in the people of military age [both those now the population and those that will be entering it in the next 10 years] to support the kind of militarization suggested in the question. These ideals have been so heavily disesteemed for so long and take so long to instill to make me question the whole exercise, all the more so because these factors have been disproportionately applied to young men, who will still make up the vast bulk of the combat soldiers for the next several generations at least. [Whatever people with little understanding of war might think, our culture is nowhere near ready to accept mass casualties of young women, even if the demonstrated problems of mixed combat units could be adequately reduced, which it is almost absolutely certain they cannot.]

But that said, I agree with the other comments that any such mass mobilization is very unlikely to be necessary; in fact, I can conceive of no circumstance whatsoever that would require it between now and at least 2050. As Mark [above] very cogently points out, mass mobilization is only required under conditions of parity. Between now and 2050, no nations or group of nations will be able to approach parity with the US in conventional symmetric warfare, and nuclear weapons do not require mass mobilization for effect. In fact, for at least the next 20 years, and possibly longer, the parity gap will widen, so that the man power requirements to maintain to our current overwhelming strike potential will actually decrease. There are a couple of reasons for this:

First is our advantage in information technology, which is the current foundation of most of our advantage in warfighting potential. Throughout the 90s the US military actually innovated faster than other militaries, including European militaries, could assimilate the technologies they got at the beginning of the decade. The US military actually moved about 2 generations further ahead relative to other militaries. [Note: for the sake of brevity I’m leaving out caveats to my understanding in following. I saw things from the developmental side, not the ops side, though I was aware of and talked to the warfighters. But as to how exactly some of the development concepts actually were implemented, especially after 2001, I don’t know. Hence the vagueness of what follows. I don’t think that vagueness undermines the point I’m making, but if you have operational experience and know otherwise, correct me in a comment.]

In other words, during the First Gulf War, US and European units could interoperate fairly well, as NATO shared a basic technological baseline that most developed counties adhered to whether part of NATO or not. Even Egyptian, Saudi, and other Middle-Eastern units could be brought up to speed, or close, fairly quickly.

By Kosovo, the gap was wide enough that the US was basically running a dual infrastructure so the NATO allies could keep up and foreign NATO ministers were complaining that if we wanted to — if we decided to fight on our terms — we’d essentially sideline them because they had nothing on the scale our military information technology and, what was more important, had no plans to invest in getting it.

By the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the gap was so wide, the question had basically been rendered moot. NATO forces had pretty much become irrelevant in terms of trying to interoperate with the US military. We are still capable [I think] of dumbing down our systems to work with theirs, but what the point of doing that would be is extremely unclear. The wideband nature of our sensor-to-shooter networks and the degree of processing power we applied is now such that we don’t just do things faster than with the older technology, we do them differently. Operations are possible for us that simply are not with the older technology most NATO allies still use. Exceptions are the Brits, I’m pretty sure the Japanese, and I think the Aussies, whom we keep up to speed by virtue of their strategic locations and/or our special relationships with them.
[Note: I’m most familiar with naval and air forces; I gather that similar advances have been with land forces, but I know much less about them. I did hear about a laptop revolution in small unit actions back in the late 90s, but apart from some tank improvements, that’s about it. Again, if anyone with operational experience cares to enlighten me, please do.]

So to summarize, our increase in combat efficiency and strike power over the last 15 years has been largely do to improvement in information technology. Strike technology itself hasn’t changed that much: we still use tanks, ships and aircraft dating from the 80s or even early, mounting with guns that fire the same kinds of rounds in the same way. Missiles have gotten more accurate and cheaper — an information function — but still fly about as fast and blow up the same way they have for decades. [I’m aware of some remarkable advances in shaped-charge technology and "smart" warheads, but I don’t know to what extent these are operational. I also lost track of AAM technology some years ago, just as it seemed a whole new generation of vectored-thrust airframes with very wide acquisition sensors was coming on-line. How these have fared I also don’t know since there doesn’t seem to the been air force out there that will take to air against us.]

But now, a new generation of weapons is under development: new aircraft, new ships, new artillery, including entirely new technologies such as the rail gun that is reported to be under development. Nor should BMD and space be neglected, although I hesitate to say anything about the latter. Thus, the weapons technology is coming along to match the information technology and extend our advantage even further because almost all of this remains an American monopoly: other militaries either can’t match our capabilities [China] or have chosen not to [Europe].

The combination of these factor will keep the US the sole unchallenged super-power in conventional and — and as BMD improves, which it seems to be fairly rapidly — nuclear warfare. And by the nature of the technology, will have decreasing manpower requirements. So if our only threats were conventional forces challenging us in symmetric warfare, our military could actually shrink while maintaining the same advantage.

But because this is the case, the only challenges that can be mounted against the US for the coming decades will be heavily asymmetric, and asymmetric will [very likely] actually have a greater relative manpower requirement. But it will not have a huge manpower requirement; perhaps a modest augmentation of the current levels.

So in a sense — not in the sense of appeasement psychology — the current situation is maybe more like the mid-1800s than 1938: a sole superpower engaged in a series of small sharp conflicts with a relatively small, highly trained, and adaptable force. Of course the differences are that the small sharp conflicts are all part of a larger strategic conflict and the enemy has the potential to inflict tremendous harm by any number of methods. But that is a different point, apart from the question being addressed here.


A quick note on China, as it always seems to be brought up as a potential adversary for the US in something approaching a conventional war [mainly for lack of another conceivable candidate]: no chance. Not only is China technologically backward and doctrinally challenged, the Chinese have managed to recreate almost the exact conditions that allowed the British to conquer them with a tiny army on the mid-1800s. A war between China and the US would result in a Chinese defeat very quickly, potentially a matter of days, especially if our BMD system effectively neutered the Chinese ICBM threat [which isn’t that great and will have to come a long way before it is.] For those that are thinking of the Chinese SLBM threat, don’t. It wouldn’t last 5 minutes.

Bait & Switch?

With all the news this week — Lebanon, the UK airline plot — I feel the need for a little fun.
I mean all those folk over at DU, to say nothing of some member's of Congress have been doing the conspiracy theory thing and I see know reason why they should have a monopoly on it. So I’m exercise a little conspiracy-theory logic of my own. So this is in no way a prediction — though that doesn’t mean I won’t take credit for it if it turns out to be right! — and readers take it seriously at their peril, as I have not made any attempt to verify a single fact and my memory ain’t what it used to be. But here goes:

Did Israel, Bush & Rice just engineer the Mother of All Bait & Switch routines? [I feel that since we’re getting blamed for this deal, we should also get the credit just in case I’m right.] Let’s review the bidding.

For years — since Oslo if not before — Israel is stuck in a nasty tit-for-tat not-war with Hamas and Hisbollah [mainly]. Israel needs to break out of this untenable situation, but suffers from porous extended borders and exposed lines of communication. Enter the Sharon plan: Give up land, build a fence, secure the border, shorten and secure the interior lines. This not only helps security, but puts a clear demarcation between Israel and the bad guys. This give clarity to the situation, which is a great advantage to Israel from the diplomatic point of view.

Two things happen, one predicable and one not: the Palestinians elect terrorists into power and Sharon suffers a stroke. Olmert, who seems to be considered by many to be something of a lightweight, become PM, mostly by default. At this point, not just +Hamas, but Hisbollah, takes the bait, attacks Israel with rockets and then crosses the border, thereby providing an unmistakable casus belli.

Olmert responds with bold words and somewhat vacillating action. Hisbollah is significantly, if not severely, degraded nonetheless but not to the point where it can’t still claim to be standing up to Israel, and therefore winning. Hisbollah make brave noises but in reality is being faced with having to adjust to a variety of possible attacks. Having already opted to dig in, its solution is to fire more rockets, depleting it stocks. However, because of digging in, it’s lost much [most? all?] of it’s maneuver capability, allowing itself to be cut off by Israel’s destruction or interdiction of roads, bridges, airports etc. This doesn’t mean just no more rockets - it means food, medicine, blankets, etc are also harder to come by. [By fixing themselves, Hisbollah has made it hard for them to "live off the land." ]

As the conflict "drags on" — that means two or three weeks these days — pressure mounts for a diplomatic solution. Olmert waffles about the solution, Bush and Rice run hot and cold, play France for a sap, make lots of noise. Pressure from various international cowards and malefactors mounts. Meanwhile Hisbollah gets hungrier and uses up more stocks; the IDF gets better mobilized; logistics are firmed up, plans are refined.

The US and France?! produce a plan at the second go, right as Olmert announces a major escalation of the ground war. Olmert accepts; put a stay on his invasion order. Hisbollah rejoices and prepares to resupply and regroup. Europe and the UN rejoices that the triumph of diplomacy and humiliation of Israel and the prospect that when Hisbollah rearms it resume can killing Jews. The Israelis are furious at the "sellout", demand a change of government; a no-confidence motion is raised and carried and Olmert is out on his ear, all in less than a week. The interim government removes the stay on the invasion order, the IDF is unleashed; Hisbollah is caught flat-footed not only with a new attack, but a new leadership with new ideas, for which — their planning be based on Olmert’s policies — they are unprepared. The international cowards and malefactors howl and shriek and shaking their fingers; Bush shrugs and says "Hey, I did what you wanted,"; France looks completely asinine, the UN looks impotent; Syria looks about the fold; the Arabs scramble to reverse themselves, and with any luck the IDF catches Hisbollah half out of their holes, looking for rockets and food, and bags the lot.

Realistic? Probably not. Half or two-thirds realistic? Could be. Blind luck or fiendish design? Who cares? If I can’t get one, I’ll take the other…

Pundit’s Disease

It seems to me that every outbreak of war occasions an serious outbreak of Pundit’s Disease. Pundit’s disease is an affliction of the nerves that causes the suffering to have to say something, anything, even when there — or especially when — there is nothing useful to say. Acute episodes of Pundit’s Disease seems to be triggered by exposure to noise, and since war generates more noise than anything else, especially in its early stages, outbreaks are very common under such conditions.

By noise here, I mean noise in the information sense. What we are getting and have been getting since the current fracas in Lebanon began is pretty much noise — filtered noise, still largely devoid of actual information content. The signal characteristic of noise is, of course, that you can find anything in it; whatever you are looking for, it will be there; not a lot of course — in fact just as much as anything else — but definitely there. So pundits looking for signs of defeat will find signs of defeat; those looking for signs of victory will find that as well. Weak leadership, strong leadership, dithering and inconsistent leadership — yes, yes, yes, and yes.

How do you know that you are looking at noise [well, I should say absence of signal]? Technically, you look at a broad spectrum sample and long time sample or both; practically, if you are knowledgeable, you know that given situations generate a whole lot of noise and not much else. So you wait until the noisy period shows signs of damping out. But Pundit’s Disease makes this impossible. Pundit’s Disease suffers are driven by the news cycle or the Blog cycle and the shorter that is — getting down to hours these days, the more acutely they suffer. That’s why it’s a disease.

For those who attempting to figure out what’s going on right now but are having trouble because of the recent outbreaks of Pundit’s Disease, I’m afraid I can’t be of much help. I don’t see the signs yet that the noise is damping down much. But taking the broadest possible view [and therefore the most imprecise] what I do see is that Israel and the US seem to be getting what they want so far. It appears to me that they have pretty successfully relegated the rest of the world to where they should be: the Little Kids table over at Turtle Bay. The Little Kids are over there squabbling and fussing and fighting and preening and hectoring and pontificating and wailing, and we’ve sent two adults — the US and Israeli ambassadors — to watch over them and lecture them as needed [thankless work, that!]. In the meantime, the Grown Ups are doing what they think needs to be done.

Now I can’t say if the Grown Ups are doing things especially well or not, as I’m not privy to IDF briefings or relevant diplomatic communiqués. But they are doing something, and they have managed to keep the Little Kids’ attention focused elsewhere enough that they aren’t too much under foot. I think the Grown Ups are being a bit manipulative here with there "yes that’s interesting" or "we could consider" and similar statements — basically the current diplomatic version of "Hey, look! A new shiny thing!" and "There’s a big purple dinosaur! See the big purple dinosaur? He’s singing! Oh, clap your hands!". But hey, what parent hasn’t resorted to these ploys; they often work.

So I think we’re just going to have to wait. The outbreak of Pundit’s Disease has to run it’s course and it will. I recall the much bigger outbreak when we took out the Taliban. Went on for weeks and weeks and reached hysterical proportions; hordes of Chicken Little clones were loose upon the land and then all of a sudden, it was: "What? Huh? Whaddya mean collapsed? Whaddya mean, the Taliban are routed? Who’s in charge now? Who? Karzai who? Wait. Wait! We were just getting staaarrrtedddd!" And then silence.

It’s happened before. It could happen again.

Fallujah Update

In response to a well-reasoned comment by SharplyShiloh on my Fallujah post, I've posted some additional supporting thoughts. It seemed to me more sensible to make these an update to the original post, rather than a new post, so that is where you will find them.

Comments - Oh My!

Wow! There are comments and some very good and thoughtful ones, too. I will be doing my best to address them in the coming days - especially the question of Iran, which I think is critical at this time.

Until I am able to do so, I extend my thanks to everyone who has taken time to read my poor missives and even more who took the time and effort to share their thoughts.

And so to sleep, perchance to dream and damn me I forget the rest...