Check Out Military Podcasts at Blog Talk Radio with Midrats on BlogTalkRadio By Major Matt Cavanaugh I was thrilled to get to spend Sunday afternoon on the Midrats Radio Show with hosts Commander Salamander and Eagle One –...
Read MoreTwo films I’ve recently watched really got me thinking about the nature of victory in conflict: The Gatekeepers, an Israeli documentary which contains interviews with six former heads of the Shin Bet (Israeli intelligence arm); and The Monuments Men, the George Clooney movie about saving art from the Nazis at the end of World War II. Though the movies varied greatly in quality (the former was stunningly good, the latter left a lot to be desired), both had something to teach about organized, armed conflict.
For just one example from The Gatekeepers – consider two comments from former Shin Bet head Ami Ayalon. First, at about 1:10 into the film, he described a 2002 trip to London in which he met with Palestinian security leaders on the Intifada. Ayalon said he was pouring a cup of coffee when Iyad Saraj (who he describes as a “Doctor of Psychiatry”) comes alongside him and the following conversation ensues:
Saraj: “Ami, we have finally defeated you.”
Ayalon: “Are you mad? What do you mean, defeated us? Hundreds of you are getting killed. At this rate thousands of you will get killed. You’re about to lose whatever tiny bit of a state you have and you’ll lose your dream of statehood. What kind of victory is that?”
Read MoreSaraj: “Ami, I don’t understand you. You still don’t understand us. For us, victory is seeing you suffer. That’s all we want. The more we suffer, the more you’ll suffer. Finally, after 50 years, we’v reached a balance of power, your F-16 versus our suicide bomber.”
One of the most important parts of being a strategist is understanding the environment. To have a grasp on the zeitgeist sharpens analysis and focuses the mind on what “is” and what might come. My contribution to this is the assessment that the contemporary warfighting environment is dominated by what I call “Rubik’s Cube” conflicts. This is an adaptation of Emile Simpson’s reference to Iraq as a “mosaic” conflict (see War from the Ground Up, p. 95). The term “mosaic” is not quite right as it indicates a static environment, whereas I see a more dynamic environment. My definition of a Rubik’s Cube conflict:
Any conflict or war which features at least one belligerent cohort fighting for common military objectives while motivated by multiple and (potentially) shifting social, ethnic, cultural, religious, or political causes.
Some will see this is similar to Frank Hoffman’s (great) work on hybrid warfare, particularly owing to one big commonality: defining a multifaceted enemy. Hoffman’s definition of a “hybrid threat”:
Any adversary that simultaneously and adaptively employs a fused mix of conventional weapons, irregular tactics, terrorism, and criminal behavior in the battle space to obtain their political objectives.
These are two separate attempts to define the contemporary warfighting environment. Hoffman defines the ways in which hybrid threats employ force – modes of warfare. My effort is to define what appears to be a shift in the ends – the disaggregation of battlefield actors motivations for war. For example, during the Cold War, the vast majority of battlefield actors motivations could be traced directly to either Uncle Sam (the U.S.) or Uncle Joe (the U.S.S.R.). The catalyst often came from Washington or Moscow.
This is not the case today. Moreover, this disaggregation has led to a corresponding increase in the number of armed groups. So instead of fighting the monolithic Soviets, a well-traveled American military officer might recently have faced: Sunni insurgents, Shia militias, international terror organizations (not to mention Al Qaeda affiliates), the Afghan Taliban, the Pakistani Taliban, as well as a Regionally Aligned Forces mission to train African military forces to hunt Joseph Kony. All these actors have different motivations for fighting; all could be considered a different colored tile (while on the same face) of these Rubik’s Cube conflicts.
Which raises an important question – how well has the U.S. done in this paradigm?
Read MoreIt isn’t all that often that a new analytical tool becomes available, particularly one that is (1) easy to use and understand, (2) available everywhere there’s an internet connection, (3) free, and (4) acceptable for use in scholarly circles. That’s the power of Google’s Ngram Viewer.
To provide a very brief background, multiple authors coined the term “culturomics” in a 2011 Science article, which they described as a “quantitative analysis of culture.” Essentially, Google has been scanning as many books as they can get their hands on, which by 2011 was roughly 4% of all the books ever printed. Google Ngram enables users to search all these books for desired words or terms. A more full (yet still succinct) description can be found in an offshoot TED talk, “What we Learned from 5 Million Books.” The two lead authors also wrote a book.
How does it work? For example, if you want to know the prevalence of the word “war,” you could conduct a search for this word. I have done so above – in relation to the word “peace.” We can see that “war” has always been on the mind and in the pens of writers more than “peace.” That is, at least, in our sample of what has now advanced to approximately 6% of all the books in recorded history.
There are, of course, other great uses for this tool – like resolving the conflict between Clausewitz and Jomini – who held more sway – and when?
Read MoreImage courtesy of the Royal United Services Institute. By Major Matt Cavanaugh I had the privilege...
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