How Chinese Strategists Think - and a comparison to north Korean Strategists

See the article on Chinese Strategists below.  I received the following in response to the article.

I think this is a very instructive summary of how the north Koreans view and "do" strategy from one our nation's foremost experts on north Korea: Robert Collins.  This short summary explains more about the nature of the Kim Family Regime than can be read in volumes of studies on north Korea.

Conversely, North Korean strategists are constrained by a stovepipe organizational structure where individuals developing strategy and individuals implementing strategy are judged consistently on their support of supreme leader guidance.  Organizations - party, military and government - are judged the same way.  Policy is developed around supreme leader guidance and never the other way around.  While competing leaders have differing opinions, they cannot go against supreme leader guidance unless they are close enough to talk directly to the supreme leader or demonstrate fault in a competitor's logic.  This creates an extremely dominant trend of compliance with current policy - whether it is the military planning provocations, the foreign ministry linking alternatives to military policy for maximum effect (the on-again, off-again provocation mixed with diplomatic initiatives), human rights policy, or economic policy.  The only entity that can openly counter supreme leader guidance is the supreme leader himself.  To change his opinion demands personal access, something only a handful of people have.  Strategists must comply with the on-again, off-again approach that has been the standard for decades.  Same people, same policy, same strategy. 

V/R
Dave

How Chinese Strategists Think

By  James R. Holmes

http://thediplomat.com/the-naval-diplomat/2013/06/19/how-chinese-strategists-think/

June 19, 2013

Toshi Yoshihara joins me (or I join him) over at Investor's Business Dailyto refocus attention on the human dimension of the U.S.-China strategic competition. Followers of these pages pixels know that Toshi and I are true believers in the idea that competition is a human enterprise. As Colonel John Boyd liked to say, people, ideas, and hardware — in that order — are the determinants of competitive endeavors like power politics.

People, not stuff, fight.

That's not to say hardware is unimportant. Not for nothing did author Hilaire Belloc ascribe British imperial dominance over subject peoples to the fact that "we have got the Maxim gun, and they have not." Too great a material advantage, then, can translate into an insurmountable competitive advantage. And this mismatch holds true beyond colonial wars against outgunned antagonists. World War I proved that there were limits to men's capacity to stand against fire, even when peer army faced peer army.

But human ingenuity is crucial even in the material dimension, isn't it? It's the common denominator among all of Boyd's elements of competition. People with ample resources concoct gee-whiz engines of war. People not blessed with such abundance can work around material shortcomings, devising asymmetric tactics and weaponry to get more bang out of scarce materiel. Look no further than the improvised explosive device, a homemade landmine that has given high-tech militaries fits in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. Only expensive countermeasures have kept the IED menace at bay, and imperfectly so at that.

Which is a roundabout way of getting back to China. As red-blooded 'Mercans, my wingman and I have little sympathy with Beijing's goals. But as professors we've come to admire how assiduously our Chinese counterparts do their homework. They look to history, and to the greats of strategic theory, to guide their thinking and illuminate their strategic discourses. Mahan is a fixture in debates over sea power, however improbable that might seem. Corbett puts in the odd appearance. And, unsurprisingly, Sun Tzu and Mao are regulars.

(Continued at the link below)

Mahan, Bean-Counting and Ideas

Excerpts:

Strange to say, but the idea that ideas count is a contested one in the groves of academe. Many international-relations scholars voice discomfort at differences between states and societies. One of the deans of the realist school likens nation-states to billiard balls. His sports metaphor implies that nation-states are basically the same size and shape, have the same dimensions, and bounce off one another in regular, predictable ways. Right … that’s why IR scholars routinely and faultlessly foretell international interactions.
…
The mania for quantitative analysis that grips our field also helps explain scholars’ allergy to intangibles like strategic thought and human motives. How do you measure an idea? What units of measurement do you assign when forecasting the doings of governments or institutions? Better to measure what we can measure.

I concur with this conclusion that we need to take a holistic approach to strategy (e..g, balance and coherency among ends, ways, and means) and we discount it at our peril.  

So by all means, let’s keep track of the material dimension. No one disputes its importance. But let’s also bear in mind that bean-counting comprises only part of the strategic picture. A wise U.S. Air Force officer once proclaimed that people, ideas, and hardware—in that order—are the determinants of martial encounters between societies. Just so. Concentrating purely on one factor, to the exclusion of the others, begets myopia.

V/R

Dave

Mahan, Bean-Counting and Ideas

By James R. Holmes

http://thediplomat.com/the-naval-diplomat/2013/01/14/mahan-bean-counting-and-ideas/

January 14, 2013

Zounds! It seems ideas really do matter in international politics and strategy. TheSouth China Morning Post carried a long article last week confirming the influence Alfred Thayer Mahan now exercises in China. Someone should run with that topic—forthwith! Not that Chinese scholars or practitioners of a nautical bent are bashful about advertising their enthusiasm for Mahanian theory. America’s sea-power prophet has been a fixture in Chinese strategic discourses about the sea for at least a decade.

Indeed, The Economist’s pseudonymous Asia correspondent, Banyan, reports that a Mahanite leaps out these days whenever you poke a military man hailing from India or China. Mahan, it seems, proffers the trident to any nation that bears some resemblance to the America of his day—the natural hegemon on the rise that’s endowed with certain building blocks of sea power and covets a dominant say over events in its nautical near abroad. His influence is nothing new. Great powers on the make, including Imperial Germany and Imperial Japan, seized on Mahan’s writings during his lifetime, using them as a guide to constructing fleets and making strategy.

Strange to say, but the idea that ideas count is a contested one in the groves of academe. Many international-relations scholars voice discomfort at differences between states and societies. One of the deans of the realist school likens nation-states to billiard balls. His sports metaphor implies that nation-states are basically the same size and shape, have the same dimensions, and bounce off one another in regular, predictable ways. Right … that’s why IR scholars routinely and faultlessly foretell international interactions.

(Continued at the link below)

http://thediplomat.com/the-naval-diplomat/2013/01/14/mahan-bean-counting-and-ideas/