Center for a New American Security

I arrived back in the States to some sad news: Jean Lartéguy, author of The Centurions and The Praetorians, has passed away in Paris, and the publisher of his books in America, my friend Jamie Hailer, has passed away in Florida. I imagine the two of them are having one incredible conversation with Marcel Bigeard right now.

I will be traveling for the next two weeks in Europe and the Middle East. I suspect I will be able to post material to the blog during that time, but have patience if a few days go by without any updates.

I'm taking Jon Sumida's Decoding Clausewitz (per Gian Gentile's suggestion) and David Grossman's Someone to Run With with me on the trip, but as far as recommendations for the readership are concerned, let me recommend both Peter Bergen's The Longest War and Bing West's The Wrong War. I reviewed the latter on assignment and should not say too much about it until the review is published, but I can whole-heartedly endorse the former, which I finished a few weekends ago and feel bad for not having mentioned on the blog just yet. It is really excellent.

I will leave you, meanwhile (and in honor of the soon-to-be-released defense base budget), with the following dissenting opinion on USAID, which I solicted from a Hill staffer who took offense to an earlier post I had written. I stand by what I wrote, but I'm always willing to entertain thoughtful dissent:

A few weeks back, Abu Muqawama criticized the proposal to defund USAID as a part of a larger package of cuts to federal spending introduced by the Republican Study Committee (aka the conservative wing of the House Republicans).  It should be noted that although there are 165 members of the RSC, only twenty or so actually cosponsored this bill, and no vote was taken--merely a bill introduced and press releases sent around.  This was a marker in the ongoing debate about how to deal with our staggering federal debt.  And while the readers of this blog are probably very aware of this fact, it should also be noted that CBO's recent estimate for the FY2011 single year budget deficit is $1.5 trillion, which is more than the total cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001 combined.  We are borrowing more this year than we have spent in ten years of two wars.  

 

The argument Abu Muqawama put forward is that conservatives don't realize that USAID has a role in national security.  I think this is largely true.  However, I'm not sure that USAID's role in national security is all that vital.  Go read USAID's budget justification for FY2011 [pdf].  It leads with USAID's request for $646 million to fight global climate change. Not only does this drive up the blood pressure of the Fox News crowd, but also, when we're borrowing 40 cents of every dollar we spend, should we really spend over a half a billion dollars helping other countries with "sustainable landscaping" and clean energy?  And while I understand the argument that climate change could have long term geopolitical consequences, if this is USAID's contribution to national security, I'm not sure it's worth it.  Of the $39 billion requested in FY11 in the Foreign Ops accounts, only $7 billion of it is under the category of "International Security Assistance", most of which USAID itself doesn't even manage.  Yes, avoiding wars over resources or clean water would be nice, but our financial situation is unsustainable, and that has to trump lower priority efforts... which is most of what USAID's money goes to.

Secondly, while some specific types of aid can produce clear national security benefits (Haiti, Afghanistan, Pakistan), even these are easily overplayed or misused and often do not lead to the long term results we are hoping for.  The question is effectiveness, and others can have this debate at a much deeper level than I, but the perception is that most of our foreign aid is not a good investment.

Lastly, and probably most importantly, the conservative desire to sunset USAID is a philosophical one.  Conservatives believe that the federal government should only do what the federal government alone can do and is allowed to do by the Constitution.  Most of the work that USAID is doing is also being done by various other NGO's around the world.  Americans are a very generous people, but we should encourage their generosity via good NGO's rather than require it via taxation.

So while I agree that most conservatives don't understand the national security components of foreign aid, I'm not sure that canning USAID would really hurt our nation's security all that much.  And in financially tough times like these, we need to be serious about cutting anything that isn't truly vital.

The continued willingness of pundits with no previous experience in or expertise on Egypt to opine about what is taking place there continues to impress. As CNN's Ben Wedeman tweeted from Cairo, "If I had a dollar for every silly statement made by instant-Egypt experts in newspapers, TV, I could retire tomorrow."

If, however, you are an intellectually curious American looking to make sense of either Egypt or currents in Political Islam, here are two great books to get you started. The first is Max Rodenbeck's Cairo: The City Victorious. Rodenbeck is the Economist's longtime Middle East correspondent and grew up in Egypt. His book on Cairo is really just lovely. The second -- an antidote to all the ill-informed ravings about Islam and the Muslim Brotherhood -- is Albert Hourani's Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age 1798-1939, probably the best single-volume introduction to the main currents of thought in the Arabic-speaking world since Napoleon routed the Mamluks at the Pyramids.  

Or you could just watch Glenn Beck explain all of this, as I did while stuck in the airport in Jacksonville, NC yesterday. Beck was, needless to say, akin to the love child of Leszek Kołakowski and William Montgomery Watt in explaining how political Islam and Marxism will combine to create a Muslim caliphate in Europe. (If, you know, that love child was high as a kite on PCP.) Having successfully scared his viewers s***less, he predictably broke for a commercial for one of those gold funds he endorses. Success!

Update: Yes! Thanks to the YouTube, you can now watch Glenn Beck's lecture yesterday. This is amazing. I watched this with 20 other people, and you could see the way in which we were collectively growing dumber as this went on.

When not drinking whisky with relatives, watching college football, or sitting in a deer blind -- or, uh, drinking whisky with relatives while sitting in a deer blind and getting updates on bowl games via text messages* -- I read some great essays and books over the holiday season. Here are a few of them to kick off your new year:

1. "Counterinsurgency as a Cultural System," by David B. Edwards. This is a gem of a paper published by the author of this magisterial book on Afghanistan. (And this one as well.) The U.S. military should welcome such constructive criticism from a leading anthropologist and Afghanistan expert.

2. "Solitude and Leadership," by William Deresiewicz.

3. "Quartered Safe Out Here," by George MacDonald Fraser, author of another classic, must-read book on, um, Afghanistan. (I bought this handsome edition of the latter for my brother-in-law for Christmas.)

4. "The Generals' Victory," by Peter Bergen.

Enjoy, and leave your own suggestions in the comments section.

*I did not actually drink whisky while in a deer blind, though I did sit with relatives and receive bowl game updates. Alcohol and firearms don't mix, kids. And stay in school while you're at it.

I have searched and searched my libraries both here and in Tennessee for the following books, all four of which I read in 2004 and 2005 and thus probably lost in moves from Beirut to Cairo and from Cairo to Washington, DC. 'Tis a pity, as these are all four classics. And expensive to replace.

Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age 1798-1939

A Political Economy of the Middle East: Third Edition

Going All the Way: Christian Warlords, Israeli Adventurers, and the War in Lebanon

The Vanished Imam: Musa Al Sadr and the Shia of Lebanon

My review of the great new C.J. Chivers book on the AK-47 is now out from behind the Wilson Quarterly's paywall. You can read it here.

I have a review of the new C. J. Chivers book, The Gun, in the newest Wilson Quarterly. In brief, I really enjoyed the book and was glad to get the opportunity to review it since it was one of those big books that I really do not have the spare time to read these days. This assignment gave me the excuse, which I welcomed because Chivers has written an engaging treatment of not only the AK-47 -- the "gun" in the book's title -- but small arms in general.

One funny story from the review process: I have always really admired the reporting Chivers has done for the New York Times, but I was looking for things to criticize in the book and found something on page 170 of my review copy. Chivers wrote that a decision made by then U.S. Army chief of staff Douglas MacArthur to reject the .276 Pederson round in favor of the tried and true .30-06 round "ensured that American rifle design efforts fell decades behind those of the USSR."

I've got him, I thought to myself. Because that claim struck me as a bit of a stretch. As a veteran of the 31st Infantry, I'm all in favor of criticizing Doug MacArthur when he deserves it. But you can't blame failures in U.S. rifle design on a single variable, much less one decision by one general officer. So I criticized that in my review.

The problem was, sometime between the publication of the review copy and publication of the hardcover, Chivers struck that offending line from the text. Perhaps he too realized it was a bit of a stretch. So I was left to revise my review and discovered, going through my marked-up review copy, that the one line about MacArthur was the only problem I had discovered with the book. The rest was really quite excellent. On the one hand, some of the material in the first 150 pages is also covered in that great John Ellis book, The Social History of the Machine Gun. But as a whole, the Chivers book is well-researched, well-written, and knowing in the same way that Chivers' blog posts on marksmanship are knowing -- and reveal the author's past life as a Marine officer.

So buy the book. It's just very solid work that will very much appeal to readers of this blog.

***

This has nothing to do with the above post, but if there are any Liverpool supporters out there, you should know that you will never have as good an owner of your club as you will have if John Henry buys your team. As even a Yankees fan would concede, he is one of the real class acts in U.S. sports.

I had a really busy week at work and was only able to finish Bob Woodward's new book this morning. I must say, I really enjoyed it. It is almost impossible to dispassionately judge the winners and losers of the book, in large part because your view on who is a hero and who is a villain will be informed by your opinion regarding the outcome of the policy debate in the fall of 2009. Folks who believe the president was wrong to commit 30,000 new troops will have sympathy for Doug Lute, Dick "Richard" Holbrooke and Joe Biden. Folks who argued for a more robust committment, meanwhile, will cheer along Bob Gates, Hillary Clinton, and Dave Petraeus.

For my part, I can see why the White House was not too concerned about this book. I think the president comes out of it looking really good. I was having a discussion last spring with a very distinguished retired intelligence officer who happens to think the president made the wrong decision in the fall of 2009. But, like me, he agreed that the national security decision-making process, unlike the one that led to the invasion of Iraq, worked well. You saw the formulation of policy and strategic objectives, the input from the various departments and agencies, an ongoing examination of assumptions, and a robust debate between policy-makers, diplomats, and military officers. All of the raw emotions on display in the Woodward book -- and your opinions about whether or not the decision was the right one -- should not obscure the fact that the system itself worked. And I, for one, actually admire the way the president ran the process, asked hard (and good) questions, and coolly analyzed his options in his Spock-like manner.

And I think the president got things about right in his own personal analysis: this was 2009, not 2003, and a robust time-and-resource-intensive counterinsurgency campaign was simply not in the best interests of the United States given fiscal realities and U.S. interests elsewhere (both home and abroad). The United States and its allies should instead focus on limited counterinsurgency operations designed to buy time and space to rapidly build up Afghan security forces and allow a transition to something that looks more like a security force assistance mission with a counterterrorism component. (You'll note, though, that the president deemed the words "counterinsurgency" and "counterterrorism" so loaded he simply banned them.)

If I had to fault anyone in the narrative it would be the uniformed military in Washington, DC. I don't think the uniformed military conspired to box in the president, but I do think they failed to provide credible alternate strategies until too late in the process. (The only credible alternative was provided by McChrystal, late in the game, after he was asked what he would do if he did not get the additional 30,000 troops.) I think there was both a failure of imagination and an all-too-familiar bureaucratic inflexibility in the Pentagon that did not serve the president well. (Even after he made his decisions, when the Pentagon simply couldn't wrap its head around the fact that no, 30,000 really does mean 30,000.)

Speaking of Stan McChrystal, is he a surprise winner in all of this? Doug Lute is quoted as believing that McChrystal did not have a conspiratorial bone in his body (I agree) despite plenty of nonsense from the Left to that effect, and after a U.S. Army inquiry cleared him of any wrong-doing in the L'Affair Rolling Stan, Eliot Cohen asked the following:

"I don't get it. The president fired one of our truly great commanders not for things that he said but for tolerating indiscretion, disloyalty and disrespect among his subordinates -- but do these people apply anything remotely like that standard to themselves?"

I'm not as upset by the book as Eliot is, obviously. I think the disagreements and emotions aired in the book are normal for any group of men and women trying to wrap their heads around a very difficult war and determine whether or not the addtional committment of U.S. lives and other resources is worth it. I'm glad the debate was so intense and would have been disappointed if it had not been. And maybe I'm too sanguine about these things, and I'm almost certainly in the minority in the following conclusion, but I finished the book with a higher degree of confidence about the national security decision-making process than I had at the beginning.

Update: For what it's worth, Steve Coll's take on the book largely mirrors my own.

***

On a completely unrelated note, four veterans killed themselves last weekend at Fort Hood alone. My fellow veterans, if you are in a bad place this weekend and don't think you can make it until Monday, please call the following number before you do anything you can't take back: 1-800-273-8255 (and press 1). Please, brothers and sisters, the world and the United States are both better places with you in them.

Regular readers of this blog know how much I enjoyed my friend Mike Horowitz's ground-breaking new book on military innovation and diffusion, a field of inquiry in which I have a lot of interest. Mike is a professor at my alma mater and one of the brightest young American thinkers in security studies. When he visited CNAS a few weeks ago to walk the staff through his new book, I asked him if he would mind sitting down to discuss the book, political science in the United States, and the future of warfare with the blog. Since I once managed to get the two of us into the Red Sox dugout to chat with Terry Francona for an hour before a game against the Orioles, Mike, a Massachusetts native, agreed.

1. Okay, briefly, explain your adoption-capacity theory. What is it, and what does it explain?

Adoption capacity theory is the term I use to explain the way that financial and organizational constraints shape the realm of the possible for both national militaries and non-state actors, thus influencing the strategies they choose when facing a new military innovation. Drawing on research from the business world, economics, and political science, I argue that you can use the relative financial and organizational requirements for adopting new innovations to explain both the way a particular innovation is likely to spread throughout the international system and the way individual states will respond. So what’s the takeaway for the real world? New military innovations that require high levels of financial investments to adopt tend to help the rich get richer – if adoption means integrating new, expensive capital platforms, pre-existing powerful actors will do very well. In contrast, innovations requiring a large degree of organizational change can be profoundly disruptive to existing powers. The organizational routines they’ve developed to help them master previous technologies or methods of force employment can become a virtual albatross that holds them back while newer and more nimble actors take advantage. These are the types of innovations more likely to usher in dangerous power transitions or devastating military campaigns (think blitzkrieg and the Battle of France).

2. Talk us through your methodology (because we are nerds). You use a variety of methods across a number of case studies. How did you test your theory?

I used what political scientists call a “multi-method” approach. I did research on specific militaries and non-state actors, sometimes including archival work. I also used regression analysis when there were enough observations that I could look for patterns of behavior that could shed light on my argument. For example, when studying which groups adopted suicide terrorism – a military innovation for non-state actors – you have a large enough universe of terrorist groups and adopters of suicide terrorism that you can usefully employ statistical analysis (though of course you also have to do the research). On the other hand, the organizational practices associated with using aircraft carriers to project power only spread to a very small number of countries over time. Thus, for that chapter I focused on case studies and simple descriptive statistics. For me, the key is trying to ask an interesting question and then figuring out which methods or methods will work best to answer that question, rather than picking the method (quantitative, game theory, qualitative, etc.) first.

3. You argue at the end of the book that your theory explains the behavior of non-state actors as well. A few questions related to that conclusion and motivated by my own curiosity and interests:

a. Violent non-state actors are necessarily secretive. They do not publish a QDR or a budget, much less a task organization chart. So how can we describe them in terms of your theory if we cannot answer basic questions about their finances and organizational dynamics?

b. You argue that ties between violent non-state actors helps determine the spread of suicide tactics. But how do we explain groups who have contact with non-state actors which employ suicide tactics who do NOT themselves adopt suicide tactics. So a connection between Hamas and Hizballah helps explain the migration of suicide tactics to the Palestinian territories -- I understand that. But how do we explain why other groups that have had contact with Hizballah -- the PFLP, Amal, FARC, etc. -- have in large part NOT adopted suicide tactics?

c. Individuals rarely serve in multiple armies of nation-states these days. So a guy in the U.S. Army is unlikely to have served in, say, the French Army as well. But that's not the case with non-state actors. Imad Mughniyeh got his start in Fatah. Hassan Nasrallah got his start in Amal. Are the divisions between violent non-state actors in a place like southern Lebanon not less clear than the divisions between state militaries? And does that then complicate the effect of "ties" between groups?

Hey, great question(s) – and you bring up a lot of key issues I try to think about. One of the goals of my book is to take topics that are often studied in isolation – nuclear weapons, naval warfare, and suicide terrorism, and explain how some common processes actually govern the way new military innovations spread (or don’t spread) and what that means. Terrorist groups, like national militaries, face budgetary pressures and have organizational hierarchies. They have ways of doing business that invest prestige in particular members and create organizational veto points if someone wants to change things up. Thus, at a conceptual level, adoption capacity constraints influence how terrorist groups behave. Whether we can get enough evidence to actually observe that, which your first question gets at, is a different story. Some factors, such as whether a group uses suicide terrorism or how long it has been in existence (organizational age), are observable. There are also some groups, such as the PIRA, where we have a lot of information about their organizational dynamics. In other cases, it’s more difficult, and harder to make a definitive ruling about whether the theory holds. I’m ok with that, though, since my theory seems to work pretty well for the cases where we do have enough information.

I argue that two factors primarily explain who adopted and who failed to adopt suicide terrorism. First, those groups that lacked established operational profiles prior to the beginning of the suicide terror era found adopting suicide terror much easier than more experienced groups. “Younger” groups did not have pre-set critical tasks and organizational veto points that would have made adoption more organizationally challenging. Second, those groups that were plugged into what amounted to a religiously-motivated network of terrorist groups were also significantly more likely to adopt suicide terror. Clearly, other factors matter as well, which is why some of the groups exposed to Hezbollah did not adopt suicide bombings (though even Amal did at one point). In my case studies and statistical analysis, I try to control for some of the other ideological, geographic, and contextual factors that explain why some groups decided to use suicide bombings but others did not. Essentially, being plugged into groups like Hezbollah that have adopted suicide terror makes a group significantly more likely to adopt, but that doesn’t mean it’s determinative. By the way, the FARC is fascinating in this regard. Kalyvas, who you have been known to reference, and Sánchez-Cuenca argue that the FARC did, in fact, use suicide terror once. Others are not so sure.

You make a great point about the possibility for individuals to serve in several different violent non-state groups. Tracking individuals like that is one way to evaluate ties between groups – or evidence of splintering within a group. That raises the bar for doing research on links between terrorist groups. There is a lot of uncertainty out there, so the best you can do is be honest when describing the limitations of your work and places where others can build on it to do a better job.

4. What does your research say, if anything, about the future of war? It's going to be all counterinsurgency, all the time, isn't it?

Absolutely. Nothing to see here. All COIN all the time. Right up until the time when an adversary UCAV shoots an F-22 out of the sky. Adoption capacity theory actually suggests that the United States military may face some serious challenges over the next generation. If innovations come about that undermine the importance of capital intense platforms such as carriers, fighters, and bombers, the United States will have its work cut out for it. The organizational expertise the US built up over time to fight based on those platforms could make it harder to shift towards, for example, UCAVs (unmanned combat aerial vehicles), war in the cyber realm, or other new areas. The trick is maintaining a high level of organizational capital, through acts such as funding basic research & development and encouraging experimentation, so that the US military is able to adapt rapidly when necessary. Fundamentally, I’m optimistic about the ability of the United States to do what is necessary to maintain its conventional military edge; I just think we can’t take it for granted.

5. You're one of the leading young lights in the field of security studies. How do you feel about the way in which your academic field is interacting with the policy community? Is your relevance increasing or decreasing in terms of policy?

Aww, shucks. In all seriousness, many people worry a lot about the irrelevance of political science to the policy community. I tend to be reasonably bullish about it in the medium-term, actually. I think there is a great deal of interest among the rising generation of scholars in doing methodologically sound social science on international security topics with policy relevance. The more that occurs—and I think it will occur in greater numbers over time—the more “relevant” international relations scholarship will become. On the other side, there is the question of the willingness of the policy community to listen when scholars do more policy relevant work, but I’ll leave that one to you.

6. Born on the gritty streets of Lexington, Massachusetts, you now live in my second American hometown of Philadelphia. What are the five best bars in Center City and in West Philadelphia?

I’m a proud son of the birthplace of American liberty, but Philadelphia is a pretty awesome place to live. There are so many good bars and restaurants that it is hard to choose, but my personal favorite is run by some bartenders who got sick of taking orders and decided to hang out their own shingle. It’s called Jose Pistolas and it’s on 15th between Locust and Spruce. It has solid food, a great micro-brew beer selection, and terrific bartenders—ask for Casey. My favorite bar for cocktails is Southwark, down at 4th and Bainbridge. It’s the best place I’ve found for classic cocktails in Philly (think Aviation or Old Fashioned, not Appletini). Smith’s, which is on 19th between Market and Chestnut, has to be on the list. It’s one of the only places in Philly where degenerate New England Patriots fans like myself can get together on Sunday’s to cheer on the Pats. The Resurrection Ale House, in my new neighborhood (Graduate Hospital), offers a great beer selection and tremendous fried chicken (don’t believe me, ask Bon Appétit). I’ll wrap up the list with Monk’s, a Philly institution at 16th and Spruce featuring an enormous selection of Belgian beers. And now I’m hungry.

Thanks for all of the questions and the opportunity to get the word out about my book!

Thank you, Mike. DC readers can see Mike talk about his new book on Monday at the CSIS. Details can be found via Mike's website or by following the hyperlinks. And you can buy the book itself here in paperback and here on Kindle.

I am off to Indiana today to give a talk on the conflict in Afghanistan, but last night, I met counterinsurgency non-enthusiast Gian Gentile for a few rounds of beer at Kramerbooks, and before we parted, we exchanged book recommendations. Here are the two that he recommended:

1. Jim Wilbanks, Abandoning Vietnam: How America Left and South Vietnam Lost Its War

2. Jon Sumida, Decoding Clausewitz: A New Approach to On War

My recommendations included S.C. Gwynne's Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History and Mike Horowitz's new book.

Oh, and the Belhaven Scottish Stout? Yes.