Potpourri CXXXI

I have a bit of a backlog on my "stuff," but I've been trying to put stuff out on Twitter as I get it. In any case, it's time for another dose of Potpourri. As the memos at Disney World used to say, "Read, react, toss."

I subscribe to Foreign Affairs magazine, and they occasionally have some pretty good articles. This one is about universities in Asia, and the efforts by China and India especially to develop "world class" universities to compete with those in Europe and the States. You need a subscription to read the whole thing, but if you have an interest in what foreign policy experts are saying about what our country should be doing, it might be worth the subscription.

This one is a little sad, but a young lady in Vancouver decided to do a blog while she was dying from cystic fibrosis. This isn't too unusual. My pal D2 blogged while undergoing treatment for breast cancer, and Dar referred me to the blog of a friend of hers whose daughter has been fighting leukemia. I'm definitely a believer in writing as catharsis. However, I keep my medical issues off of this blog and out of the general topics of conversation at work or even with the family, if need be, because that's nobody's damn business unless it becomes terminal, and then I'd have to think very hard about what to share and when. (I recall having an argument with a manager about this issue--he asked me what he should say to the troops if I died. I said, "Tell 'em there's a technical writing job open!" I get this from my mother, who's got serious attitudes about privacy.)

The lawyer of a passenger who was behaving erratically on an airplane blamed the man's behavior on Ambien.

Need help starting or funding a new creative project? Consider the Kickstarter site! (This is not to be confused with the MyKickStart site run by my buddy Hu.)

My buddy Dar and her cohorts--who have been trying to increase citizen participation in science and technology decision-making and reviving the Office of Technology Assessment with a citizen component to it--have released a paper, presentation, and new web site to advance their cause. Dar has an excellent blog discussing some of the ins and outs of this effort. The official citation of the paper is:

Richard Sclove, Reinventing Technology Assessment: A 21st Century Model (Washington, DC: Science and Technology Innovation Program, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, April 2010).

I think I got this link from Joanne Manaster: a list of "brain science blogs." You know: because everyone should have some.

From D2: A Leia-in-slave-girl-outfit car wash. I think Hooters has met its match.

Speaking of D2, NASA has big plans for its R2 humanoid robot. At the rate our nation's space policy is going, robots are about all we'll have in space in a few years.

Water has been found on an asteroid. Why should you care? Well, if we want a civilization beyond this planet, it'd be nice if we didn't have to take all our water with us. Just sayin'.


This sounded kind of fun: using solar sails to pick up space junk.

William Shatner as Governor-General of Canada? I don't think he'd want to take the pay cut.

Can you force yourself to dream? Maybe.

From the Down Under Defense Expert (DUDE): What's Deutsch for AIIIGHHHHH!!!!!?

Might there be a ban on burqas in Europe? That would prove an interesting clash of civilizations and priorities: which virtue wins out? Cultural integrity or women's rights? Guess it depends on what's being done to the women wearing said burqas.

From Kate Down Under: A forum on the Battle of Midway. Midway might not be taught in American schools anymore, but it's still a major deal in Australia. During this battle, Japan lost four of its front-line aircraft carriers and afterward lost the initiative in the Pacific, which included plans for invading Australia.

Along these same lines, Father Dan forwarded a YouTube video of a newsreel covering the surrender of Japan on September 2, 1945. Huzzah!

Speaking of NASA's space policy, my buddy George Whitesides has left the agency. No word on the why, but it'll be interesting to see how things change, if at all, at NASA HQ. And along those same lines, here's an article on public reaction to the change in NASA's direction.

Feel like helping to pick a jingle for a science and engineering festival? Try this site.

From Doc: "A little late for LCROSS, but still..." (Warning: language)

Random link from LinkedIn.com: a site on eliciting the future you want...or something like that.

For those of you concerned about the Zombie Apocalypse, May is Zombie Awarness Month.

The Huffington Post caught the Washington Post confusing our President with Malcolm X. Whups.

From Yenie: A new vineyard to try if/when I ever get out to Oregon.

How fast is Google's new Chrome search engine? Check this out.

Plan to be near Big Ben or the Houses of Parliament in London tomorrow? You could watch the election returns live, projected on the side of the bell tower. Cool!

Need a boost? A walk outside might improve not just your mood, but your self-esteem.

Ever want to be in a Star Wars movie? A JibJab video? Now you can do both.

And as a last note on this post, I have decided to deactivate my Facebook account completely, much to the consternation of a couple of friends. I appreciate the concern, all, but really: I need to walk away from the forum for a bit. There's a lot going on in my life, and FB is a serious distraction right now. I'm getting old, and my bandwidth/ability to handle multiple things at once is just going to heck in a handcart. I'll return when the propitious moment arrives; but that moment is not in an hour, in a day, in a week, or maybe even in a month. Furreal.

Book Review: Strategy

Following closely upon my reading of The First World War by John Keegan, I decided to read B(asil) H. Liddell Hart's book, Strategy. Hart, an English army captain, was a military historian and strategist who had a great influence upon the military campaigns of Germany and the Allies during World War II.

World War I demonstrated the problematic nature of direct assault upon one's enemies, especially in the era of automatic weapons and industrialized warfare--in short, if you're an attacker, and you aim for the direct approach in going for your target, you make it easier for the enemy to defend against you and cut you to pieces because he knows exactly what you want and where you're going, and so can concentrate all of his forces in that one particular spot.

Here's how Hart puts it in his preface:

When...I first came to perceive the superiority of the indirect over the direct approach, I was looking merely for light upon strategy. With deepened reflection, however I began to realize that the indirect approach had a much wider application--that it was a law of life in all spheres: a truth of philosophy. Its fulfillment was seen to be a key to the practical achievement in dealing with any problem where the human factor predominates, and a conflict of wills tends to spring from an underlying concern for interests. In all such cases, the direct assault of new ideas provokes a stubborn resistance, thus intensifying the difficulty of producing a change of outlook. Conversion is achieved more easily and rapidly by unsuspected infiltration of a different idea or by an argument that turns the flank of instinctive opposition.

The first three parts of the book uncover examples of successful indirect warfare throughout European history, starting with the Greeks, and moving forward to World War II. For instance, the conquest of Sparta by the Theban general Epaminondas is covered, as is the overall military work of Alexander the Great. One of the most interesting and entertaining sections is the history of the career of the Byzantine general Belisarius. Belisarius managed to achieve many victories under less-than-ideal conditions, for example, when the Emperor Justinian deprived him of reinforcements for fear that the general might become too popular or a political rival, or on more than one occasion when he was outnumbered, but still managed to overcome his enemies. One of the few times Belisarius lost was when he allowed himself to be persuaded by his officers to attack the enemy directly.

Unlike Victor Davis Hanson, a civilian, Hart is more concerned with describing strategic or tactical victories and is not so concerned with the particular moral codes advanced by said victories. For instance, Hart offers up his admiration for Hitler's strategic and tactical insights--which are obvious, given his initial successess, while Hanson is more concerned about the victory of "the good."

One thing that was curious to me, as a civilian, was Hart's de-emphasis on battle per se. This differs from Clausewitz, one of the great European theorists of war, who believed the primary canon of military doctrine was "the destruction of the enemy's main forces on the battlefield." Instead, as part of his indirect approach, Hart's idea is that "the true aim is not so much to seek battle as to seek a strategic situation so advantageous that if it does not of itself produce the decision, its continuation by a battle is sure to achieve this."

Hart also addresses matters of "grand strategy," which is the bigger picture of national policy, of which military force is but a part. He describes the aim of war as simply "to attain a better peace," meaning your nation ends up in a better situation (however you care to define it) after the war than you were before it. This view of grand strategy includes such no-duh ideas as not wearing yourself out so badly from war that you're unable to enjoy the peace once the war is concluded. Another bright idea Hart advances is not engaging in acts of war so egregious that they are bound to backfire on you once the peace is settled. He cites as one example the "strategic" bombing of civilian targets like Tokyo and Dresden, which did not necessarily advance the Allies' cause, break the will of the enemy, or leave the devastated populations in a state of civilization after the conflict.

Hart was writing in the midst of the Cold War, but his views on strategy are as relevant today as they were then. For instance, he devotes a chapter to "guerilla war," which is for all practical purposes what we've been fighting in Iraq for the last five years. Hart seems to have been particularly interested in this aspect of warfare, as he was friends with T. E. Lawrence ("Lawrence of Arabia"), and Lawrence's tactics were taught and spread throughout the world by Winston Churchill as a means of combatting the Axis. Hart's comments are prophetic for our own times:

[T]he prospects and progress of a guerrilla movement depend on the attitude of the people in the area where the struggle takes place--on their willingness to aid it by providing information and supplies to the guerrillas by withholding information from the occupying force while helping to hide the guerrillas.

Since 2003, the U.S. military had to overcome the willingness of the Iraqis to hide and support the insurgents. New tactics, plus "the surge," have done much to reduce violence in that country. When the population trusts the "occupying force" more than the insurgents, the insurgency crumbles.

So who is the "audience" for Hart's work? I would recommend it--though I doubt he'd read it--to Barack Obama or any other incoming U.S. President. Generals, of course, should read it, as should the officer corps, and perhaps NCOs and the whole frickin' army, so they know what their leaders are getting them into. Hart offers direct advice for the military man in clear, non-bureaucratese sentences. For instance,

In general, the nearer to the force [a cut in the enemy's communications] is made, the more immediate the effect; the nearer to the base, the greater the effect...while a stroke close in rear of the enemy force may have more effect on the minds of the enemy troops, a stroke far back tends to have more effect on the mind of the enemy commander.

There are also a couple of appendices regarding the Allied campaign in North Africa during World War II and the Arab-Israeli War of 1948 that would probably be of practical benefit to the battlefield commander. Even if al-Qaeda's leaders have not read Hart's work, it's clear that they've grasped the essence of his "indirect approach," as may be seen by the recent attacks in Mumbai. It is equally clear that al-Qaeda suffers serious losses when they engage in direct attacks, as they have done in Iraq. It remains to be seen who will win the long war between the West and fundamentalist Islamism. If the West is to win and remain true to its military and political traditions, it will have to give Strategy more serious thought.

Book Review: The Soul of Battle

Victor Davis Hanson made a name for himself as one of the intellectuals of the neoconservative movement. His best-known work is probably Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise to Western Power. In that book, Hanson explained how men of the West became the dominant military power on Earth through the use of heavy infantry capable of direct, vicious clashes with other troops. This "shock" type of warfare allowed everyone from Greek hoplites to American GIs to overcome enemies as varied as the Persian Empire and the Japanese Empire. What's interesting about his 1999 The Soul of Battle: From Ancient Times to the Present Day, How Three Great Liberators Vanquished Tyranny is that it seems to undermine the 2002 thesis of Carnage and Culture. Why? Because while Carnage and Culture focuses almost exclusively on "shock" warfare and concentration of power, The Soul of Battle, written before 9/11, focuses on indirect methods of warfare.

What, then, is The Soul of Battle about? Starting with a little-known Greek general, Epaminondas, the book covers two other generals--William Tecumseh Sherman and George S. Patton--and their careers as leaders of democratic armies.

Let's start with Epaminondas. If you were asked who was the first general to destroy a slave-holding society by attacking that society's infrastructure--the homes and fields--you might think first of the Union Civil War General Sherman. However, 2,300 years before Sherman, a Theban named Epaminondas ravaged the Spartan countryside, ended the Spartan practice of holding fellow Greeks as slaves (helots), and ensured the Peloponnese a generation of peace before Alexander the Great's father Philip II of Macedon destroyed Greek democracy forever.

We tend to remember and glorify Sparta's gallant stand of the 300 against the Persians and overlook their rougher, more imperialistic behavior before, during, and after the Peloponnesian War. After Athens was defeated in that war, Sparta continued its domination of Greece, until a general of Thebes, Epaminondas, conceived of the idea of invading Sparta, burning its farms and homes, and destroying its vicious form of slavery. With a force of around 30,000 hoplites, the newly democratic city-state of Thebes destroyed the slave-state of Sparta, established the free city of Mantinea, and ensured the safety of another democracy, the city of Megalopolis.

Most of this military activity, performed over the winter of 370-369 B.C., occurred with few pitched battles. Instead, this army of farmer-warriors mostly just ravaged the countryside, pillaging and burning Spartan homesteads while freeing helots, who often joined their assault. By the time the Theban army reached Sparta itself, the once-proud warriors were hiding on the high ground, hoping that pitched battle would not come to them, even as Epaminondas and his troops challenged them to direct battle. The Spartans would not leave their walls, and the Thebans continued their ravaging of the Laconian countryside, freeing even more slaves, and helping them build a city before returning home. Epaminondas was eventually charged with treason and other crimes for keeping an army in the field beyond its appointed time, and yet the general's army eventually fought again, until Epaminondas was killed in action. After that, the army's soldiers returned to civilian life. It would be nearly 2,300 years before another army repeated the social and political circumstances of this forgotten Greek army of liberators. Sparta never mounted another serious attack within the Greek world.

William T. Sherman is a renowned and (in the part of the United States where I live) infamous general who fought along the Mississippi River, in Tennessee, and Georgia before beginning his famed "March to the Sea" from Atlanta to Savannah, Georgia, then a further march up through South and North Carolina. He engaged in few pitched battles after conquering Atlanta. Instead his army, consisting mostly of Midwesterners (my folk--people from Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois), took it upon themselves to destroy the plantation homes and culture of the rich slaveholders who advocated for secession from the Union. Sherman's theory was that these Southern planters were most responsible for goading the Confederacy into war, and so must bear the brunt of punishment for starting that war. Along its way, Sherman's army destroyed property, took food and provisions, and freed slaves on the plantations it encountered along a 100-mile-wide track through the South.

While Ulysses S. Grant was engaged in direct confrontation with the Army of Northern Virginia and the 19th century version of immobile trench warfare, Sherman was performing a war of rapid maneuver that involved little direct confrontation with Confederate troops. As the author puts it, there was little in the way of civilian killing, raping, or the usual mayhem that might be expected during a typical "sack" by an invading army. Instead, this ideologically minded army was focused on destroying the infrastructure and martial spirit of its Confederate enemies. And, come the day when the war ended (in no small part due to Sherman's approaching General Lee's flank), Sherman's army of 65,000 marched triumphantly down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, DC, before disbanding into the civilian populace.

The third general discussed in The Soul of Battle is perhaps the most famous American general of modern times, George S. Patton. Having been immortalized in a motion picture, the details of Patton's story tend to get lost. For instance, Hanson reveals some of the petty jealousies and outright sabotage that occurred within the American Army to prevent Patton from achieving even greater fame. The section on Patton is written somewhat differently from the other two sections, as it is written in reverse chronological order, focusing on the various places where Patton had (five!)opportunities to wipe out the armies of the Third Reich and was denied by more cautious superiors, namely Omar Bradley and Dwight Eisenhower.

Patton comes across as somewhat of a dramatic figure compared to the more "bureaucratic" Bradley and Eisenhower. While we think of political correctness as a function of the present day, the practice of softening language to cover up ugly behavior (e.g. killing) was already well underway in the 1940s. Patton was determined to turn his Third Army into a cadre of ideological killing machines, determined to destroy the German Nazis. And yet, after the Third Army's amazing drive from Normandy to Czechoslovakia ended in 1945, it was dissolved six months later, and its commanding general was dead by the end of the year.

What is the point of this narrative? Why focus on these three generals? Hanson is trying to teach an important lesson about the armies of democracies in time of war. He wants to demonstrate the lethal destructiveness that democratic armies are capable of under military geniuses like Epaminondas, Sherman, and Patton. More importantly, he wants to explain for a modern audience the need for such generals and armies in the current day. Once upon a time, men of the West would gather and fight to destroy evils like sadistic helotage in Sparta, a similar slavery in Confederate America, or the cold-blooded genocide of Nazi Germany. Patton's Third Army, indeed, might be the most recent and last example of an army of free people going forth to destroy a pernicious ideology. Hanson references Gulf War I (Soul of Battle was written in '99), and points out that all three generals of his narrative would not have stopped short of Baghdad, as Schwarzkopf did in '91.

The Soul of Battle, however, while it does not cover Gulf War II, anticipates the rapid thrusts and quick victories that armies of liberating democracies are capable of, such as General Tommy Franks' assault on Baghdad in 2003. It also points out that

democratic armies do not fight well when they are not attacked, when they are stationary with nowhere to march, when they fight to preserve privilege or empire, when they are not supported at home, when they are led by careful clerks and bureaucrats who command by consensus--in short, when they are not moving forward with every means at their disposal to destroy the enemy in the cause of freedom.

On the other side of these weaknesses, Hanson encapsulates the heart of warfare in the democratic age, as articulated by William T. Sherman:

He perceived that the resisting power of a modern democracy depends more on the strength of the popular will than on the strength of its armies, and that this will in turn depends largely upon economic and social security. To interrupt the ordinary life of the people and quench hope of its resumption is more effective than any military result short of the complete destruction of the armies.

This is, in short, what terrorists are trying to do without the benefit of massive forces or logistical tails. The question remains: how does one counteract such destabilizing strategies in the new era of fourth generation warfare? We'd best learn that lesson quickly, as Americans were pioneers in this type of warfare. That, I suppose, is the lesson Hanson teaches most clearly in this informative and highly philosophical work on war.