By Major Matt Cavanaugh *Note: What follows is the beginning of an essay of mine (“A Very Unequal Dialogue”) on the current state of civil-military relations, which is available in full over at The Best Defense. Tom...
Read MoreImage created by ML Cavanaugh. By Major Matt Cavanaugh There’s only one thing wrong with the New America Foundation’s Future of War Conference – not one participant has skin in the next game. There’s...
Read MoreImage (proudly) created by Matt Cavanaugh. By Major Matt Cavanaugh Choices made both close and create opportunities. For a simple Valentine’s-ish example, consider that when one selects a (soul)mate for life, while that...
Read MoreBy Major Matt Cavanaugh
To best serve the nation, the Profession of Arms must nurture a culture of candor that enables good ideas and adaptation in order to successfully adjust to the rapidly changing circumstances of the modern world. To achieve this, we should practice moral courage by occasionally, respectfully expressing Divergent and “Red” Ideas.
The truth can be difficult to express and infinitely more challenging than a lie. As the venture capitalist Peter Thiel notes in his recent book, “Brilliant thinking is rare, but courage is in even shorter supply than genius.” There are fewer Sam Damon‘s than we might wish.
Moral courage is in short supply due to social pressures (not wanting to rock the boat amongst peers) as well as a strong sense of positional inferiority (i.e. “he’s a Colonel so he must know something I do not know”), both of which serve to clam up well-meaning individuals. The Profession of Arms, in particular, is uniquely susceptible to this lack of candor owing to two reasons: the high punishment in lives and resources for military mistakes and a relatively rigid senior-subordinate hierarchical structure.
To address this gap, the Army War College has published studies on “closing the culture chasm,” largely based on business reports on developing a working “culture of candor.” The Profession of Arms feels as though it must instill this characteristic somewhere in the arc of development as a reservoir of moral courage to safeguard against applying old solutions to new challenges. But we can look beyond the narrower Profession of Arms to the wider world to find support for this value.
There are some excellent personal codes on offer from three titans of our world. Marc Andreesson, the fantastically successful entrepreneur is known for his mantra: “strong opinions, weakly held.” Tony Judt, the essayist, once famously stated, “When the facts change, I change my mind.” And, the one appropriately held in highest esteem amongst members of the Profession of Arms, Sir Michael Howard wrote in his 1982 book, The Causes of Wars (p. 6): “I make no apology for any contradictions or inconsistencies that may be found in [these essays and lectures]. Those who do not change their minds in the course of a decade have probably stopped thinking altogether.” Andreesson, Judt, and Howard are instructive in that they give us cover to adjust our thinking as paradigms shift. Members of the Profession of Arms must recognize that warfare and our world is constantly changing and so should our estimates and appraisals.
Read MoreBy Major Matt Cavanaugh
I’ve actually written quite a bit on ISIS to date, so it may be prudent for those that are unfamiliar with WarCouncil.org to visit some of these other short essays in order to provide some broader context:
Moreover, I’ve also written about Sun Tzu, most recently with respect to the War in Afghanistan:
“Teaching Sun Tzu can be fairly straightforward – and kind of tough. For example, what does he mean when he writes that ‘what is of supreme importance in war is to attack the enemy’s strategy?’ (Griffith translation, p. 77). Moreover, he writes that this should take precedence over other options – like attacking the enemy’s alliances, army, and cities (in order). That sounds great – sort of like telling a trader to “buy low, sell high” – but what does it actually look like?”
So how does the core of Sun Tzu’s strategic logic describe ISIS? How can we use Sun Tzu to understand ISIS strategic behavior?
Let’s start with American strategy. The President’s speech on ISIS on September 10, 2014 included language that US non-military strategy would include, among other things, efforts to counter ISIS’s “warped ideology.” More specifically, “It is America that has the capacity and the will to mobilize the world against terrorists.” So a key part of US strategy is informational. The US is doing this in two ways. First: denying ISIS legitimacy as a state actor, which can be seen in the seemingly infinite versions of what to call “them” (Daesh, ISIL, IS, Islamic “State,” and my favorite – “The Group That Calls Itself A State”). Second: the more of what the world sees of ISIS the more it will mobilize global public opinion against them.
Here’s how ISIS is running Sun Tzu’s counsel to attack the informational part of US strategy. The public executions target Westerners (they’re not doing this to everybody – they just let 350 Yazidis go) and are truly barbaric but simultaneously are the most violently theatrical way of demonstrating territorial control. Moreover, these hostage situations necessarily force states with captive citizens to negotiate with ISIS as if they were a state. Lastly, ISIS’s specific selection of journalists for targeting deters future reporting, which denies us part of our informational strategy (same playbook the Russians used in Crimea).
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