Shield of Achilles, Intro

The eras during which the nation-state grew and thrived saw many different types of states and a continual reconditioning of the triad relationship between law, strategy, and history. There were many different revolutions in military affairs, for example: which one led to the modern financing system which required a state to support it? The state, in essence, has been continually restructured and organized.

How to law, strategy, and history combine to make the state? The state exists, mainly, because it was the most efficient way to accomplish a number of elements – as Bobbitt says, it exists by virtue of its purposes. These elements are:

a) drive for survival and freedom of action (strategy)

b) authority and legitimacy (law)

c) identity (history)

These three factors do not simply provide the basis of a pyramid for which the top is the state; they also flow into each other, making them intertwined to a detailed degree. A state must have legitimacy to have a monopoly on the use of force, but it is often force, fed by identity, that gives it that legitimacy.

The situation amongst states today is one of confusion. With the end of the Long War (1914-1990), and the victory of the democratic nation-state, the virtue of its purposes is being called into question. In essence, the state no longer has a clear calling. Is it to establish other democratic nation-states? If so, the inability to establish a clear policy one way or the other in the twenty years since the end of the Cold War has not only been counter intuitive, but incredibly harmful. Bobbitt again: “That calculus [What are our forces for] depends upon the axiomatic requirement of the State to survive by putting its security objectives first.” What, exactly, are the security objectives of the modern nation-state?

Bobbitt says the need to maintain order must factor in, but the need to maintain order does not catch minds, and is not a concept domestic orders can easily get behind. “The state, being highly future-oriented, can channel resources into the future and harness present energy for deferred gains. But this quality of futurism is also its vulnerability: the state is a clumsy instrument for persuading people to make sacrifices when objectives are in doubt, or to parry subtle long-term threats, because the interests of the people can easily be severed from those of the state when long-term objectives and goals are at issue.”

* * *

As is probably clear by now, Bobbitt’s overall point is the context which the nation-state reformed so continuously throughout the 18^th and 19^th century and put into practice in competing systems in the 20^th century died when the Long War ended. While the state is not dying, the nation-state is – the basis for the state is changing, and organizing the state along principles of nationalist sovereignty does not hold up to the leveling force of globalization. Corporations now dominate the world economy, in the sense that they are economies unto themselves, controlling larger amounts of wealth than most nations. Bobbitt says the market-state is the next logical step, which will maximize the opportunity of its people, as opposed to the nation-state maximizing the welfare of its people.

Globalization results in a short-term nationalistic tendency, as culture and economy go through upheaval, then settles down as culture and economy get plugged in with the rest of the world. Globalization, also, has no controlling force; the United States is the ‘source code’, in the words of Thomas P.M. Barnett, but in many ways the United States lost control of the virus it created. Nobody has control of it now, leading to a hybrid of political nationalism and economic dependency. American politicians demand American jobs, and the American consumer agrees, while also wanting the cheap goods China makes and provides.

The nation-state undergoes upheaval strategically as the element of its existence disappears, and as globalization helps transform warfare, assisted by nuclear weapons, instant communications, and the recognition that defeating the United States in a conventional war is unlikely. Warfare goes to the ground, so to speak, in avoiding American strengths and playing to a key weakness – prolonged engagement. The nation-state, which for so long was based around deterrence of conventional and nuclear war (especially among major powers), compellence of weaker states, and reassurance of allies via nuclear umbrella. With everyone deterred, weaker powers somewhat compelled, and reassurance not entirely needed, the state must rediscover its strategic basis for action and re-legitimize itself at home for a populous increasingly frustrated by the lack of control they, and the state, seem to have.

Link Set and Commentary

While I finish the first chapter of Shield of Achilles...

China leads in Solar Production - Want the US to move to clean energy? Give us some competition.

Marines Fight Taliban With Little Aid from Afghans - Just depressing. In Iraq, we could provide security with a 'surge' and then work to build a system from the bottom up (as opposed to the top town, which we tried and failed at: see Iraq, 2004-2006). We can provide the security but, more and more, it seems like little is following up.

The Ultimate Burden - Reinstate the draft? Expand the roll of the Peace Corps? Make federal programs to teach students languages from a young age?

How do we make Americans realize their role is not just within the country?

The End of 'The Wire' - The Brits and Baltimore

40 dead in Afghanistan - Hot off the press!

And, as always, today's Nightwatch

The Shield of Achilles – Prologue, and the nation-state as it exists today

Shield of Achilles is about the modern nation-state; past, present, and future. The focus is not on the state itself as much as it lies on the key relationships which make the state whole: the relationship between the history of the state and war, the relationship between constitutional (state) and international law, and the relationship between war and the international legal order.

The state today is different from the traditional model of sovereignty, so much different one would be foolish to consider that a state does have true sovereignty within its own territory. Yet that is the model the international legal order is based on, established in 1914, reinforced in 1945, and seen through to success in 1990. Bobbitt gives five main challenges to the sovereign state:

1) universal human rights

2) nuclear weapons and other WMD’s and the ability with such weapons to render the state defense of civil society impotent (much less state borders)

3) trans-border threats, such as environmental damage, migration, and disease

4) economic freedom, leaving states out of the management of economics

5) global communications network which bypasses traditional network paradigms for the transmittal of news

While the initial state was created because it was a better way to finance a larger army (extrapolate this notion from buying a few cannon to the timetabled armies of World War I to get the full effect of the idea of the state), today even armies are outsourced under point 4, or are out of limits of state control, #3, but remain protected by that state due to the notion of sovereignty. Coupled with #2, this causes a huge problem in the way modern nation-states act: deterrence works in a threat-based strategic environment, but not when the threat hides amongst the people.

There is more, and probably will be more, but the basic notion is thus: the nation-state as we know it is undergoing a transformation. Most often, throughout history, this turbulence in the international legal order resulted in war to establish a new order; with the growing interdependency between nation-states, the legal order can be reset with growing political cooperation.

There is more in the prologue, but it deals with visions of the future as well as the structure of the book; overall the key point taken from the prologue is the changing conception of the nation-state. It’s difficult to think of the nation-state in terms of absolute sovereignty, yet that is what we define it as. For the past…at least 19 years, and maybe longer, the various states of the world have agreed on an international forum (at the least) and some semblance of international legal order without any mechanism of enforcement. Given the notion of the sovereign state, there does not need to be any mechanism, but given the idea of ‘state-sponsored terrorists organizations’ what does a nation-state do when the threat remains hidden in another state which is incapable or unwilling to deal with it?

The Nation-State

In an effort to continue my education on a subject I've always been keenly interested: The triad relationship between modern war, the modern state, and globalization.

There are, I'm sure, hundreds of books about this topic or one of the three relationships. I've read some of them, but I want to delve deeper into the topic.

The start of this will be twofold: Phillip Bobbitt's The Shield of Achilles and Machiavelli's The Prince - Machiavelli being one of the first to lay out the building blocks of the paradigm that would be the state. I've read The Prince a few times now, but not with this critical eye.

Only just finished an interesting forward in SoA by Michael Howard, giving a very brief background on the history of the state as Bobbitt sees it, beginning with the breakdown of the feudal order and the creation of the dynastic order; its fall and the creation of the nation-state; and the current period of upheaval within nation-states themselves.

Thoughts so far:

1. The climax of the state was World War I, of the nation-state, World War II, with a long period of waiting out the Soviet Union. If Kant and Bentham guide one path of statehood (the western tradition) and Hagel guided a second, Marx and Lenin were relative latecomers to the game, but did establish a third path. However, after World War II the world begins to see operating forces not controlled by a state, so while the end of the Cold War may have proven the legitimacy of the western-style nation state, the climax was much earlier.

2. States earn their legitimacy by how well they keep the peace, but they keep the peace only as well as they defeat those elements seeking to undermine it. This doesn't always mean war, but in many cases it does.

Afghan Elections

Afghanistan's Tyranny of the Minority - Selig S. Harrison, NYT

Probably not going to happen today. The best scenario for the immediate future is a true run-off, with security improving over the next month and a better political battle. Even that is unlikely to happen.

World War I and II

One of the reasons for the lack of posts the past week are two books I’ve been fascinated by.

The first is Edwin P. Hoyt’s The Glory of the Solomons. The Solomon Island campaign of 1942-1943 is a fascinating topic, primarily because both the Japanese and the Allies (Australia and New Zealand both played large roles) were evenly matched. This was not true in all areas – the Japanese were superior when fighting at night, and their torpedoes were far better than the American types, while the Americans had the advantage of the increasing abilities of radar and much better interservice co-operation – but the year and a half of battle saw the tides shift towards each side many times.

The book moves its way from Guadalcanal up through the Russell Islands, New Georgia, the bypassing of Kolombangara by invading Vella Lavella, and Bouganville, which was invaded in late 1943. Even as late as then, had the Japanese committed more troops to the island, the Allied force would have found itself in serious jeopardy.

The Solomons campaign is as full of drama and luck as any other period of military history, making a study of it riveting. Not only was the issue in doubt many times, but the sheer difficulty of fighting on islands of sheer jungle make each invasion unique. 500 yards a day was exceptional – this is, by no means, Operation Cobra. The other aspect making the campaign fascinating is the learning curve on each side. After the invasion of Guadalcanal, the lessons learned in the Solomons campaign shaped the rest of the Pacific War, ranging from fighter interception and carrier radar detection to landing craft and sites to jungle warfare and how to blast the Japanese out of their defenses.

One other point of note, which translates well: exaggeration. Both the Allies and Japanese were prone to exaggeration after attacks (in terms of planes shot down, ships suck, etc). The Japanese, however, were far guiltier of this offense, having sunk the Allied fleet many times over by the end of the campaign.

The other book I am reading is John Keegan’s The First World War. I don’t know how I’ve got so far in life without reading it, because it is excellent and the First World War remains the subject around which all of the 20^th Century can be explained. It remains, also, one of the more tragic events in history – the poetry alone is tear-jerking, much less other works. Entire generations of men were wiped out because mass, supposedly, ruled the day.

There are times, looking at war, when I wonder how we possibly got here from there. A vociferous anti-war movement, a strategy in Afghanistan which has to be reduced to sound bytes and therefore makes no sense, militaries built to fight rivals as increasing trade makes it unlikely (but not impossible – see Germany, 1914), weapons which destroy entire cities. On some level, we’ve moved past nation-state war, with nuclear weapons and the globalization bug which America no longer controls – it reproduces and spreads on its own – but that means we have to learn to fight all over again. I don’t mean the military by any means, but the public. Symbols of military power and foreign success are not what they used to be at all.

China and Australia

With a little understanding - Economist.com

In the western Pacific, China lays at one end and Australia the other; therefore the relationship between the two is important. What is interesting about this description is the surface dichotomy between the political and economic ties between the two countries. Reading this, and one gets the impression Australia is welcoming Chinese dissidents, and China is acting like a child in the knee-jerk response.

Yet economic connectivity still goes on, and the head of the Australian Treasury is optimistic about this.

The further question will be how China and Australia balance the Chinese need for resources vs. Australian economic sovereignty. When Chinese companies are state-owned and want to control huge amounts of Australia's resources, one can see the hesitation.

MOAR!

Updates are coming...been a busy week around here

HRC

The more I read about Hillary Clinton, the more I think she is a really good SecState.

Granted, this is an article written to be heartwarming, but she has good connections the world over from the 90's, and she genuinely cares about helping people.

I worry a lot more about the bureaucracy behind her in the Dept. of State rather than her actions the world over.

A Little Bit of Everything at the Meetings

Obama Sets Immigration Changes for 2010 - Ginger Thompson and Marc Lacey, NYT

There is a little bit of everything in here: immigration, health care, foreign policy, etc. The interesting part of this is: what if, in this Health Care debate, Obama is letting all the anger, frustration, and suspicion get out of the way before he tries anything meaningful? I don't know if this is what is planned or happening, but the past week (if you've been unlucky ennough to watch any cable news) has been people shouting and generally flipping out.

I pondered this when I read:

"Mr. Obama predicted that he would be successful but acknowledged the challenges, saying, 'I’ve got a lot on my plate.' He added that there would almost certainly be 'demagogues out there who try to suggest that any form or pathway for legalization for those who are already in the United States is unacceptable.”

The same basic policy is going to happen. The more conservative parts of the GOP will flip and there will be a week of non-stop shouting before anything meaningful is brought to the public eye.

I reference Thomas PM Barnett: We Need a Loyal and Strong GOP - why the GOP is, yes, somewhat useful. Or at least could be if they had ideas. Also, John Stewart, on how this cycle is working.

Maybe the White House dropped the ball on health care in not forcing it through. However, with the way American politics works - emotional, pandering, soundbytes, incomplete ideas, and otherwise utterly incoherent - the outcry over any health care reform was bound to be loud, strong, and utterly baseless because of the general lack of ideas.

The state of American politics is best exemplified by the GOP response to the problem. Once a certain segment of the population flipped, and Fox News found their haymaker of an issue to bash, the GOP utterly abandoned any pretense of provinding alternative ideas, bringing up sound points and issues with working towards resolution, or generally attempting to create something workable and immidiately tried to make health care Obama's 'Waterloo.' Immigration, I suspect, will follow largely the same path.

With opposition like that, who needs enemies?

State War

Colombia President, On South American Tour, Defends U.S. Military Role - Alexei Barrionuevio, NYT

"Ecuador and Colombia broke off diplomatic relations last year after Colombia’s military assassinated a rebel leader of the FARC in Ecuadorean territory."

Nation-state wars. Harder to fight than they used to be, as borders matter even less.

Afghan Elections

Karzai in His Labyrinth - Elizabeth Rubin, NYT Magazine

Long, but worth every page.

A long time ago, I was told that generations will have to pass after the Civil Rights campaigns in the 60's for true equality to be achieved. The generation that dealt with it can't reconcile; nor can the generation after, because they are poisoned by their parents. Only in the third or forth generation will reconciliation begin to happen on a non-superficial level.

How this relates to Afghanistan? Things are not going to be solved soon. I don't think this means there will be a large troop presence for decades to come, but 5 years seems to be a distinct possibility (then tapering off).

The inherent problem is there is no one starting point. Everything relates, and getting the country to a point where outside assistance is not needed means many things have to happen simultaneously to work.

We can sink them again

Russian Subs Patrolling Off East Coast of U.S. - Mark Mazzetti and Thom Shanker, NYT

The only reason we know this is because we have subs on their tail. Or, if not, its more fun to think about it that way.

Resource Security

A Souring Relationship - Economist.com

China is buying everything they can in the developing world, especially in Africa. It's not surprising they would try the same strategy with developed nations, but its not quite that easy.

However, what is a country's role in securing resources for itself? A century ago, it was deemed essential through direct colonization; a decade ago it was through free trade. Is securing resources via purchase - a hybrid of trade and colonialism - the new trend? This article goes into some of the negatives about agro-colonialism. While I don't agree with all of it, certainly it made me think.

Use the Force

I don't know what to say beyond: this is so cool.

Sixth Sense - TED TV (via Small Wars Journal)

The idea of de-centralizing information from traditional sources and making it peer produced and consumed takes a huge leap. The possibilities of this program are incredible.

I want clouds of word tags to appear as I meet people.

Erratic Afghan Forces?

Erratic Afghan Forces Pose Challenge to U.S. Goals - C.J. Chivers, NYT

While some of the problems are with Afghan forces, the end of Chivers' report was the most insightful - about cold weather gear and ammunition.

The first point is that supplying the military and neglecting the rest of the population is unsustainable. These guys pass it along because their families freeze, and because they've been embroiled in a civil war for the past decade.

Point two is that Afghanistan is not just a way to clean up and organize a nation's surplus goods. Long-term, sustained commitment is the best way out, and most of that time will not be a civil war - there will be a tipping point where the Taliban filters out and society starts on the long, slow path to (relatively more) integration and sustainability.

BBC's North American Editor Leaves, Says Insightful Things

Checking out of 'Hotel America' - Justin Webb

The full audio is at the bottom of the page, and I recommend it. There is something about the intonation of his voice which adds to his comments.

For those few who read, what are your thoughts about America?

I'm saving mine for next post.

Photo Series and Urban Regeneration

Two neat web pages (tip to Democracy in America)

Remains of Detroit - Time Magazine

100 Abandoned Houses

Both speak to the concept of urban regeneration (which one of my favourite blogs, The Strategist speaks of every now and then). At some point, people will move back to Detroit, buy the abandoned houses, make the areas livable again.

Until that, why not invest in the future of Detroit, say, employ some of the massive number of unemployed - over 15% of the population - and tear down some of the waste. Detroit's future is not in industry, so it's not like people are going to come back and renew the factories.

New Podcast

PRI: America Abroad

I just listened to the latest one - Diplomacy Under Fire. Fascinating to listen - began with an interview with Ryan Crocker (whohoo Spokane), moving onto a discussion about Plan Colombia, and the efforts of the State Department to reinvent itself - how officers no longer wine, dine, and talk, but instead go out and help build a community.

Basically, with the absorption of USAID and taking on the 'development' part of foreign affairs, as well as the diplomacy, the Department of State is best served by blurring the line between the two concepts. Development, as an aspect of strategy, deals with failing or failed states, which diplomacy inherently cannot deal with because there is no state function. While the Department of State still has to serve the traditional role of establishing American presence abroad, this role has to be melded for two reasons.

First, the absurdly high number of states needed development aid means before there can be an American presence, there has to be an American effort to make these states into something beyond a hollow term. FSO's who deal with a state in the development phase can help that state transition much easier than rotating them out when some arbitrary line has been crossed. Second, thinking of establishing an American presence in individual states, say, in Central Asia is like, so last century (that is how CNN would report it. You know, they really care about what you say. You can talk about the discussions you had at lunch period on their broadcast and it will be real news! Because really, we all care).

Aherm. Anyway, as was first introduced to me in the Bottom Billion, and as Rashid continues it in Descent into Chaos, stability in the countries where it is most needed exists in large part outside that country. In central Asia, stability in Afghanistan will depend on Pakistan (obviously), but also on the states on the northern border - Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and the like. What's needed is an aid strategy for a region - the Marshall Plan is always cited here. But whatever it is, it should help pick a region up rather than focus solely on one state.

This entails a sustained, focused, continually refined, strategy based on an understanding of each state, its relation to its neighbors, the history of the region, and the different cultures involved in any such effort. Hence, its a complete and utter fantasy because these concepts are anathema to those members of our government who control the purse, so I'll just stop now before I get my hopes up.

Descent into Chaos, Introduction

Thoughts:

How did Bush ever get elected, yada yada yada - when did we just cease to care? I don't get the basis of conservatism, circa eight years ago. For a movement which wanted limited government interference, its members trusted the government on everything, once the movement gained power.

I've never understood what happened to the media after 9/11. Beyond the basis of questioning what the government was saying - where did any mainstream sort of investigative journalism go?

In a paragraph, here is the basis of American foreign policy when Bush was elected. For eight years after the end of the Cold War, the American foreign policy establishment searched for some strategy. The strategy was...to avoid strategy, to paraphrase Barnett. The criticism here falls, as it should, on the shoulders of Clinton. He listened to polls far too much, making each call of intervention as it happened, rather than orienting the United States on a path and working hard for support and education of his ideals. When Bush is elected, and the neoconservatives sweep into power, they also have no grand strategy, because they see a world where they can shape the reality. There is no need for a focused strategy because each action by the United States creates a reality which the rest of the world has no influence on.

So we end up here, eight years later, with a president who is much more in tune but also with a Congress still as idiotic and useless as ever, and a media which either lies, mischaracterizes
, or deems twitter and facebook postings important enough to show on the news (thanks, CNN, for being more useless than Congress!)