Center for a New American Security

I've always admired USMC general General James Mattis. I first encountered him when I read his scathing takedown of Effects-Based Operations (EBO) in 2008, and soon became familiar with his operational record in Iraq and endlessly entertaining quotables. Most of all, I've always admired Mattis' deep interest in his own profession, as evidenced by the countless news stories about his personal library of military history books. Thus, I wasn't surprised to find that one of Mattis' emails about his military professional reading is now making waves.

Why would a reading list go viral in the national security blogosphere (besides Mattis being awesome)? Mattis addressed this message to a colleague who asked for advice about reading for officers that found themselves "too busy to read." Mattis' response was swift, and worth quoting at length because----well, its GENERAL MATTIS. Would you ever not blockquote Chuck Norris or Mr. T? I deeply, deeply pity the fool that paraphrases General Mattis. 

The problem with being too busy to read is that you learn by experience (or by your men’s experience), i.e. the hard way. By reading, you learn through others’ experiences, generally a better way to do business, especially in our line of work where the consequences of incompetence are so final for young men. Thanks to my reading, I have never been caught flat-footed by any situation, never at a loss for how any problem has been addressed (successfully or unsuccessfully) before. It doesn’t give me all the answers, but it lights what is often a dark path ahead.

 

With TF 58, I had w/ me Slim’s book, books about the Russian and British experiences in AFG, and a couple others. Going into Iraq, “The Siege” (about the Brits’ defeat at Al Kut in WW I) was req’d reading for field grade officers. I also had Slim’s book; reviewed T.E. Lawrence’s “Seven Pillars of Wisdom”; a good book about the life of Gertrude Bell (the Brit archaeologist who virtually founded the modern Iraq state in the aftermath of WW I and the fall of the Ottoman empire); and “From Beirut to Jerusalem”. I also went deeply into Liddell Hart’s book on Sherman, and Fuller’s book on Alexander the Great got a lot of my attention (although I never imagined that my HQ would end up only 500 meters from where he lay in state in Babylon).

 

Ultimately, a real understanding of history means that we face NOTHING new under the sun. For all the “4th Generation of War” intellectuals running around today saying that the nature of war has fundamentally changed, the tactics are wholly new, etc, I must respectfully say… “Not really”: Alex the Great would not be in the least bit perplexed by the enemy that we face right now in Iraq, and our leaders going into this fight do their troops a disservice by not studying (studying, vice just reading) the men who have gone before us. We have been fighting on this planet for 5000 years and we should take advantage of their experience. “Winging it” and filling body bags as we sort out what works reminds us of the moral dictates and the cost of incompetence in our profession

It's a wonderful email, and any soldier serving under a commander wise enough to write such magisterial words of wisdom and generous enough to take the time and effort to express them is truly blessed. Mattis wonderfully encapsulates the value of military history: getting a feel of the experiences of those who came before, and thinking about the commonalities inherent across the temporal and typological spectrum of warfare. Such deep study prepares the mind for action, unleashing creativity and drive that otherwise may not have been enabled by technical training and socialization. Mattis' own famously eclectic reading is also in full force here, with books on everything from T.E. Lawrence to the storied campaigns of Alexander.

Mattis also rightly argues that lethal mistakes that might have been otherwise made can be prevented by learning from the misfortunes of others. Lastly, a finely honed BS radar can help stave off the episodic military fads and buzzword bingo games that proliferate every few years in the Pentagon, doctrinal shops, and think-tankdom. These are all important things that Mattis has masterfully illustrated. If that's all there was to it, I'd end the entry here. "Moral of the story? Read military history and train hard so you can reach Mattis' level of awesomeness." But there's a lot more to it than that.

The argument that follows should not in any way be construed as a criticism of Mattis himself, who has gone well above and beyond the intellectual chops of many tenured university professors. However, it is a word of caution to those who may be reading his email and thinking about their own way to approach war. What works for Mattis may not work for you, much in the same way that your tears---unlike those of Chuck Norris--cannot cure cancer.

First, let's start with some of the books themselves. I know that Mattis has impeccable taste in books from the biographical articles I've read about him. But there are some real clunkers mentioned in the email. There's a very big gulf between what Lawrence said he did in Seven Pillars and what historians later concluded. Likewise, J.F.C Fuller and Basil Liddell-Hart were known for their own substantial distortions of history. In particular, Basil Liddell-Hart tortured the military historical facts until the facts, just like a waterboarded CIA detainee, gave up. In the eyes of Liddell-Hart, every single significant victory in military history was a result of the indirect approach. Every major defeat resulted from the lack of indirectness. Every significant Great Captain of history was great because he commanded as Liddell-Hart would have. And this goes without mentioning the SLA Marshall-like academic fraud Liddell-Hart is accused of having indulged in. Finally, the less we can say about the reliability of a Thomas Friedman book ("From Beirut to Jerusalem"), the better.

This is by no means a knock on Mattis. I am not making an argument that reading Liddell-Hart made Mattis a poorer commander. Mattis knows what combat is like, how to synchronize forces, and has what Clausewitz dubbed the coup d'œi--a natural feel for what creates military advantage. Mattis doesn't need Liddell-Hart to kick ass and take names.  He likely pruned the most useful ideas and disregarded the rest when it didn't fit his experience. Mattis' reading is part of a larger process that produced an general understanding of the nature of the military profession. Mattis' own experience would surely cast doubt on Liddell-Hart's fantasies of indirection, deception, and dislocation as a generally reliable defeat mechanism. And if not that, then its statistically unlikely that someone with as gigantic a personal military history library as Mattis would be fooled by Liddell-Hartisms.

But while gaining an understanding of the nature of war is useful, there are a lot of things it won't do. This becomes most apparent in the section of the email where Mattis makes specific claims. Mattis repeatedly states that nothing is new under the sun, makes comparisons across big temporal zones (Alexander the Great in Persian Iraq vs. 2004 iraq), and advances specific analytical arguments about military theories. He does so on the basis of a sweeping generalization that 5,000 years of warfare tells us in aggregate that war has not changed. While this makes for a rousing line, it is also a fairly problematic statement. How do we really know that the nature of war has not changed in 5,000 years?

We should recognize that this is an isolated quote, and strive to not take out of context what was a heartfelt letter to a colleague in need of guidance. But the argument itself---as the cumulative product of a process of self-education in the nature of warfare, does merit some critical analysis. It is part of a humanistic conception of war that stresses the unity of military experience across the ages, and puts the fighting man's will first. What Mattis dashed off in an email has been repeated by others in journal articles, blog posts, essays, and books. The military historian Brian McAllister Linn, in his seminal study of the Army's cultures, dubbed it the "heroic" style of war. Linn constrasts this humanistic style this with technocratic Managers, defensive Guardians, and other military tribes with differing values and approaches.

So what do we know about 5,000 years of constant violence?

Often times the answer is that it depends. As my Fuller and Liddell-Hart examples illustrate, the quality of historical accounts is extremely uneven. Military history as a modern discipline only started with Hans Delbruck, a civilian who did some basic math and discovered that many of the most prominent chroniclers of pre-modern warfare were flat-out wrong about ancient history's greatest battles and campaigns. Anthropologists still argue today about the nature of violence in the evolutionary state of nature and whether it can be mapped to violence in settled states. Second, it may be true that war is war in the Clausewitzian sense. But while it is technically true that Alexander's Iraqi opponents and Sadrist mobs are both humans seeking to use force to impose their will, this in and of itself is not very useful. There are fairly prominent shifts in the character of politics, the international system, techology, wealth, and societ that matter too. 

Consulting history alone makes it difficult to make general arguments about the current or future state of warfare without devolving into dueling anecdotes. Take for example, the perennial argument between landpower, seapower, and airpower partisans, all based on non-falsfiable and poorly operationalized theories that generally have not been systematically tested or formalized for logical consistency. Lastly, without having solid parameters and standards of comparison, debate over future war trends just degenerates into pop-futurism no more rigorous than Silicon Valley's dreams of Singularity. Once you go beyond the historical particular and begin making general claims, arguments, projections, and comparisons, you enter into a different world that is fraught with potential pitfalls.

The biggest problem with reading military history alone is the problem of induction. A drastically oversimplified explanation of induction: the number of times a given event repeats does not guarantee that it will always repeat. Disruptive shifts that create a new reality are an empirically observed regularity in military history. Lack of any explicit method to formalize and systemize history, make relevant comparisons or properly evaluate generalizable and commonly held notions about war produces false analogies like the continued trotting out of Munich and Vietnam during every foreign policy crisis. And as Joshua Foust has often blogged, it creates a situation in which security analysts rely on Churchillian 19th century British sagas as a guide to understand modern Afghanistan.

Thinking about how we can evaluate and judge generalizable theories and trends is what prevents us from having to develop substantial, granular expertise on a new security subject every time it is considered. Given the multiplicity of threats inherent in modern American national security, the ability to think deductively in a rigorous fashion is extremely important. It is impossible to make any context-independent decisions about war otherwise. We all hold implicit ideas about how the world works that guide our behavior and choices, so why not bring them into the open?

This is not an argument that the only way to think about war is a statistical model tested against a giant dataset. Even the best war data is messy and statistical modeling can be, under some circumstances, just as pseudoscientific as (if not more than) bad historical analogy. There are many others ways to think about getting at the general and making comparisons, from sociology to abstract formal models and ideal-types. Rigorous and structured reading of strategic history like Colin S. Gray's corpus can also help.

But unless you are Mattis or the rare non-Mattis mortal that can naturally conceptually order that crazy mixture of forces known as war, you probably should take Mattis' reading philosophy as a starting point rather than an terminus. Yes, read deeply in history. But also think about how to formalize, model, test, and evaluate specific ideas that move beyond the temporal, spatial, and political particulars seen in those books. Be suspicious of sweeping claims that do not control for relevant variables. Understand the problems with historical analogies. As the likely apocryphal quote goes, "In God we trust; all others must bring data."

I will stress again, the reincarnation of Chesty Puller and Albert Einstein that is General James Mattis can do all of these things effortlessly in his own mind. But 99% of the rest of us can't. Gen Mattis' brain was designed by the same people who formulated the Marine Air-Ground Task Force (MAGTF)---a rapidly deployable combined arms unit that packs immense combat power. But the rest of us need more explicit signposts to direct the analysis we write and the decisions we make, particularly when they require comparison, the evaluation of theory, and prediction into the future.

Richard Betts on the difference between policing and war:

Some attempts to use force in this multilateral and limited manner – such as in the second phase of the Somalia intervention in 1993, “pinprick” punishments in Bosnia before 1995, or the initial assault on Serbia in 1999 – proved ineffectual and surprisingly costly. This was because the U.S. and NATO forces found themselves acting not as police suppressing individuals or small groups, but in acts of war, confronting organized mass resistance by force of arms. This was discomfiting to those who unleash force for humanitarian reasons because they do not like the idea of killing people and breaking things even for good purposes. They hope for clean application of force without casualties, or at least combat in which only the guilty are destroyed and large numbers of civilian deaths are an aberration.

 

War, in contrast, inevitably hurts the innocent as well – and as anyone who has studied or experienced war will insist to those who hope otherwise, the stress is on inevitably. Deliberate targeting of civilians may be prevented, but the nature of real war is that accidental collateral damage is a regular cost of doing business. …

 

Law enforcement aims to protect the rights and interests of individuals by apprehending transgressors and holding them to account for their crimes, and letting the guilty go free rather than unfairly harm an individual innocent. In war, the ultimate communitarian enterprise, the priorities are reversed; many individual interests are sacrificed for the nation’s collective interests. Soldiers die for their countrymen, not themselves, and civilians caught in cross fires are simply out of luck. This fundamental empirical difference between policing and war is not easily grasped by people of good will. Before unleashing force they need to recognize that war by its nature entails terrible injustice to many individuals, and that acceptance of that injustice as the lesser evil is implicit in any decision to send the military into combat.

Buy his excellent new book American Force: Dangers, Delusions, and Dilemmas in National Security here.

The video of U.S. Marines urinating on dead Afghan fighters is horrific. The images reflect a breakdown in discipline and an appalling absence of supervision from the noncommissioned and commissed officers charged with making sure these kinds of things do not happen. These Marines have embarassed themselves and have disgraced their country and the U.S. Marine Corps.

We should not be shocked by this kind of thing, though. Just look at the official propaganda from the Second World War, a conflict most Americans have seen only through a sanitized Spielbergian lens. Look at the lengths to which the United States and Japan went to dehumanize the other. Now imagine how that translated down at the platoon and squad level in heavy combat. One big difference today is the diffusion of camera phones and other media allow the ugly dehumanizing effect of war to go viral. In a way, I am glad. Since so few Americans actually fight in our wars, it's good that Americans see the effect war can have on other people's sons and daughters.

War is an awful human experience. It is sometimes necessary, but it is never sanitary.

(Oh, and this is not a new phenomenon in Afghanistan. This cannot be explained away as the result of ten years of war taking their toll. I witnessed an allied soldier get punished and sent home in 2002 for posing for pictures with a dead, partially beheaded Talib around whose neck he had hung a sign reading "Fuck Terrorism.")

"The Iliad is ever mindful that war is about men killing or men killed. In the entire epic, no warrior, whether hero or obscure man of the ranks, dies happily or well. No reward awaits the soldier's valor; no heaven will receive him. The Iliad's words and phrases for the process of death make clear that this is something baneful: dark night covers the dying warrior, hateful darkness claims him; he is robbed of sweet life, his soul goes down to Hades bewailing its fate. Again and again, relentlessly, the Iliad hammers this fact: the death of any warrior is tragic and full of horror. Even in war, death is regrettable."

- Caroline Alexander, The War That Killed Achilles

Don't tell anyone that a journalist let you into this little (sort of) secret.. but everyone (that means British media outlets) are trying desperately to figure out how they are going to cover 2009's big story - Pakistan.

There isn't too much coming out of Pakistan because 1) No British news organisation understands the place 2) No British organisations have proper journalists there. (ie. not local stringers who are paid slave wages to go to dangerous places and point a camera).

The result is that the sheer mess of the place is being overlooked. It also helps that the government is keen to try and persuade everyone that things are pretty much OK since the horrible dictator Musharraf was made to leave. Things would be even better, they say, once the Americans butt out. Londonstani wasn't a big fan of the Americans butting in, but doesn't think that's the summation of the very serious problems there.

Anyway, William Dalrymple has a good review in the New York Review of Books of Ahmed Rashid's Descent into Chaos that covers the present situation, while also adding much needed background.

There's definitely a lot in it that many will disagree with on a ... well "world outlook level" would probably be a good way of describing it.. so why not just get it out of the way first.

"Eight years of neocon foreign policies have been a spectacular disaster for American interests in the Islamic world, leading to the rise of Iran as a major regional power, the advance of Hamas and Hezbollah, the wreckage of Iraq, with over two million external refugees and the ethnic cleansing of its Christian population, and now the implosion of Afghanistan and Pakistan, probably the most dangerous development of all."

Dalrymple says he agrees with Rashid's view that the Bush administration's portrayal of the terrorism as some sort of illogical, unthinking, sudden outburst of blind hatred only served to make the problem worse. This point, in one form or another, is often debated on this blog (particularly for some reason on the comment threads of Londonstani's postings). So, maybe there's no point dragging it up again, but here it is so we can read, digest and move on.

"...terrorism was presented by the administration as a result of a "sudden worldwide anti-Americanism rather than a result of past American policy failures." Bush's speech to Congress, claiming that the world hated America because "they hate our freedoms—our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote," ignored the political elephant standing in the middle of the living room—US foreign policy, especially in the Middle East, with its long history of unpopular interventions in the Islamic world and its uncritical support for Israel's steady colonization of the West Bank and violent repression of the Palestinians. As the Department of Defense Science Board rightly pointed out in response to Bush's speech: "Muslims do not 'hate our freedom,' but rather they hate our policies."

In the same vein, we also often visit the idea that the problem lies with Islam. Rashid makes a good point as to why this is not only inaccurate, but also counter productive.

"the intense hostility to Islam emanating from both the press and the government of the United States that made it so difficult for moderates in the Islamic world to counter the propaganda of the extremists. How could the moderates dispute the notion that America was engaged in a civilizational war against Islam when this was clearly something many in the administration, and their supporters in the press, did indeed believe?... as Rashid puts it:

"If they hated us, then Americans should hate Muslims back and retaliate not just against the terrorists but against Islam in general. By generating such fears it was virtually impossible to gain American public attention and support for long-term nation building."

Londonstani has read Rashid's book and does recommend it to anyone who hasn't. He likes that Rashid doesn't shy away from blaming Pakistan's military rulers but also explains what they are thinking:

"Many in the army still believe that the jihadis make up a more practical defense against Indian dominance than even nuclear weapons. For them, supporting a range of jihadi groups in Afghanistan and Kashmir is not an ideological or religious whim so much as a practical and patriotic imperative."

So, if you can't read the book, read this.

Update: Abu Muqawama here. Goodness. I just read that Dalrymple article. One of the more depressing things I have read since breakfast.

A week out of internet range means that Londonstani is doing a lot of his Gaza catch up and blog reading this weekend.

As ever, AM has been on the case and hit the nail on the head. Londonstani has been quite surprised by the way the British government has reacted to Gaza '09 compared to Lebanon '06.

Instead of backing Israel come what may, the government has been careful to show that is unhappy with Israel's actions. By the by, that stance has been mirrored in the media, where even usually quite pro-Israel publications have run articles critical of Israel's policies in general and its actions in Gaza in particular.

Londonstani did wonder whether the sands had shifted because of the obviously high death toll, or whether a certain sensitivity for British Muslim sensibilities had suddenly kicked in.

Then, government officials issued statements that basically said, "hey, didn't you all notice how we've changed our tune."

For example: "Ms Blears said the UK has called Israel's bombings "disproportionate", but added: "We're not all brilliant at [expressing this] and I think we have to really, really try now to explain that so that people don't feel that there's hypocrisy and double standards."

And another: "Speaking to the Guardian, Malik expressed alarm that the vast majority of British Muslims were drawing no distinction between current UK government policy and that held by Tony Blair when he failed to condemn immediately an invasion of Lebanon by Israel in 2006."

The online and real world campaigns over Gaza launched in the UK (specifically in London) built upon an infrastructure that had its foundations laid in the anti-war demonstrations of 2003. With every new incident to whip up anger, Londonstani has noticed an upgrade in capability and capacity.

The comments show that the point being made by the British official AM spoke with has been realised on the highest political levels. Londonstani can imagine that if a lynching-happy rag like the Daily Mail got hold of AM's info, there would be all sorts of furious headlines claiming "Government changes foreign policy to appease Muslims" or some such other crap. But this totally misses the point. In the real world, it seems to Londonstani like a threshold moment with short term and long term effects.

In the short term, the unsaid fear seems to be that the government might be pushed into pulling out of Afghanistan, for example, because that's what newly politicised Muslims in Britain want. Now, it maybe true that is indeed what British Muslims want in a knee-jerk sort of fashion. But it in reality, despite the newly squeaking voice, British Muslims have little of the cash, organisation and contacts that translate into real political clout. The F1 racing lobby has much more influence. It's much more likely that the British government uses British Muslims as a fig leaf to do something they would really like to do anyway (like pull out of Afghanistan).

However, in the long-term, there is a good chance that the British Muslim community (or communities) will have a bigger voice in foreign policy. Now, before anyone gets all worked up about "benefiting from terror", remember that it wouldn't be the first time a community pressure group to say "of course, we are trying to control our angry young people. but, if you don't give us X, they will do something silly that we can't control". In fact, Londonstani has had conversations with the fluffy secular Polisario people in southern Morocco/Western Sahara that sound very similar.

In the long run, the process can't be a bad thing. Feeling that your anger will be heard and registered forestalls the sense of angry hopelessness that extremism feeds off.

Londonstani just wishes someone had reminded the American official that it wasn't too long ago that tensions in N. Ireland affected immigrant groups in the U.S., which reciprocated by funding terror in Britain.

Update: Abu Muqawama here. Let me just add to that last sentence that Rep. Peter King (R, NY) -- after 9/11, one of the most outspoken public officials against Islamist terrorism -- was, pre-9/11, one of the IRA's most enthusiastic supporters in the U.S. Congress. Sigh.