A fascinating read and not what I would have expected from the Chronicle of Higher Education.   Professor Ginsberg's new book will be going on my reading list.  This certainly makes an indirect argument for the importance of Security Studies. (and for those in SSP this might make a useful read for 500 and 501)

August 12, 2013

Why Violence Works

http://chronicle.com/article/Why-Violence-Works/140951/

Franco Pagetti, VII

Syrian rebels launch a rocket-propelled grenade against an army position in Aleppo.

By Benjamin Ginsberg

Humans, and perhaps their prehuman ancestors, have engaged in murder and mayhem, as individuals and in groups, for hundreds of thousands of years. And, at least since the advent of recorded history, violence and politics have been intimately related. Nation-states use violence against internal and external foes. Dissidents engage in violence against states. Competing political forces inflict violence on one another. Writing in 1924, Winston Churchill declared—with good reason—that "the story of the human race is war."

Some writers see violence as an instrument of politics. Thomas Hobbes regarded violence as a rational means to achieve such political goals as territory, safety, and glory. Carl von Clausewitz famously referred to war as the continuation of politics by other means. A second group of writers view violence as a result of political failure and miscalculation. The title of an influential paper on the origins of the American Civil War by the historian James Randall, "The Blundering Generation," expresses that idea. A third group, most recently exemplified by the Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, regards violence as a pathological behavior that is diminishing in frequency with the onward march of civilization. Some proponents of that perspective have even declared that violence is essentially a public-health problem. Whatever their differences, each of these perspectives assigns violence a subordinate role in political life.

The West's global dominance for most of the past millennium is in large part a function of its capacity for violence.

But there is an alternative view, one that assigns violence a primary role in politics. This outlook is implied by Mao Zedong's well-known aphorism that political power "grows out of the barrel of a gun." Violence, in other words, is the driving force of politics, while peaceful forms of political engagement fill in the details or, perhaps, merely offer post-hoc justifications for the outcomes of violent struggles. Mao corrected Clausewitz by characterizing politics as a sequel to or even an epiphenomenon of violence—a continuation of violence by other means.

Unfortunately, Mao seemed to have an inordinate fondness for bloodshed. After all, he suggested that the quality of a revolutionary should be judged by the number of people he has killed. Yet our revulsion at Mao's practices should not blind us to the accuracy of his observation. Violence and the threat of violence are the most potent forces in political life.

People say that problems cannot be solved by the use of force, that violence, as the saying goes, is not the answer. That adage appeals to our moral sensibilities. But whether or not violence is the answer depends on the question being asked. For better or worse, violence usually provides the most definitive answers to three major questions of political life: statehood, territoriality, and power. Violent struggle—war, revolution, terrorism—more than any other immediate factor, determines what nations will exist and their relative power, what territories they occupy, and which groups will exercise power within them.

In the case of statehood, there are occasional circumstances when a state may be built and endure mainly through peaceful means. The peaceful divorce of Slovakia and the Czech Republic is an example. This is, however, one of the rare exceptions. As the social scientist Charles Tilly has observed, most regimes are the survivors or descendants of a thousand-year-long culling process in which those states capable of creating and sustaining powerful militaries prevailed, while those that could not or would not fight were conquered or absorbed by others. Similarly, when it comes to control of territory, virtually every square inch of inhabited space on the planet is occupied by groups that forcibly dispossessed—sometimes exterminated—the land's previous claimants.

The meek, in short, have not inherited very much of the earth. Indeed, the West's global dominance for most of the past millennium is in large part a function of its capacity for violence.

(Continued at the link below)

http://chronicle.com/article/Why-Violence-Works/140951/

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)

American Revolution Reinvents Guerrilla Warfare

From Max's description of the American Revolution I can see Mao's on protracted warfare and and Ho and Giap's Dau Tranh.  I can see them studying George Washington and Thomas Paine's writings and the Declaration of Independence. 

And of course there are some eery parallels to this excerpt:

BOOT: Well, there is a division in the British ranks, as there often is. Many of the leading British generals thought that they should try to win over the hearts and minds of the Americans - a famous phrase which was first used by General Sir Henry Clinton, who is one of the British commanders in North America. But his desire to win over the hearts and minds of the Americans was undermined by many of his harsher subordinates. 

So the British did not have a consistent policy of conciliation, nor did they have a consistent policy of harshness. Instead, they were confused and there was this strategic muddle that, as much as anything, led to their defeat.

I also think his commentary on technology is useful.

 I would be very skeptical of the idea that there are technological fixes to such deep-rooted problems. 

... 

So drones can be an effective tactic in a very limited way. But they are not the end-all and be-all.

V/R

Dave

American Revolution Reinvents Guerrilla Warfare

January 15, 2013 2:47 AM

http://www.npr.org/2013/01/15/169388719/guerrilla-warfare-turningpoint-america-revolution

In the new book Invisible Armies, author Max Boot traces the role of guerrilla warfare through history, starting in the Roman Empire all the way up to Afghanistan. He tells Steve Inskeep the American Revolution was the turning point in guerrilla warfare.

STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

(Reading) Listen my children and you shall hear of the midnight ride of Paul Revere.

That's the start of a poem that tells a story almost every American kid learns in some form. In 1775, a Boston silversmith rode to warn Americans colonists that British troops were on the way. Barely trained American militiamen shot the elite British force to pieces.

So, let's think about this for a moment. The British were the world's policeman - smart and technologically advanced - while the Americans were the insurgents.

The historian Max boot cannot help but notice the irony.

MAX BOOT: Today, we're used to having Americans soldiers be the forces of the government. And, of course, in our revolution, we were the insurgents and the British were the role of the counterinsurgency. And, in fact, many of the strategies which the American rebels used against the British are similar in many ways to the strategies now being used against us around the world.

INSKEEP: Now, the American revolutionaries eventually did form a regular army. But guerrilla tactics played a huge role in securing their independence. Max Boot sees modern lessons in that story, as told in "Invisible Armies," his new history of guerrilla warfare.

What were the strategies that the American rebels used when they were rebels?

BOOT: Well, it first of all, comes down to not coming out into the open where you could be annihilated by the superior firepower of the enemy. The British got a taste of how the Americans would fight on the very first day of the Revolution, with the shot heard around the world, the Battle of Lexington and Concorde, where the British regulars marched through the Massachusetts countryside.

And the Americans did not mass in front of them but instead chose to slither on their bellies - these Yankees scoundrels, as the British called them - and fired from behind trees and stone walls. And not come out until the kind of open gentleman's fight that the British expected, and instead, took a devastating toll on the British regiment.

(Continued at the link below)

http://www.npr.org/2013/01/15/169388719/guerrilla-warfare-turningpoint-america-revolution

The man who made friends with Mao: The first American to join the Chinese Communist party in the 1940s tells about his extraordinary life

An interesting and I think little known history (I was unaware of this)

V/R
Dave

January 11, 2013 8:06 pm

The man who made friends with Mao

By Jonathan Margolis

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/5befa6be-5abb-11e2-bc93-00144feab49a.html#axzz2HzpDtFhA

The first American to join the Chinese Communist party in the 1940s tells about his extraordinary life

©Eduardo L. Rivera

There is a not inconsiderable history among the children of successful, prominent Jewish families of getting involved in leftwing politics. From the Marxes to the Milibands, it’s a well-trodden path. Few have taken this tradition quite as far, however, as Sidney Rittenberg, scion of a prominent Jewish family in Charleston, South Carolina.

It was in the 1930s that Rittenberg rejected a career as a lawyer and became a trade union and civil rights activist. He then went a little further. He became a communist, learnt Chinese, went to China, joined Mao Zedong’s guerrillas fighting Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalists, emerged after the communist victory as a senior party member close to Mao, ran Radio Peking, translated Mao’s thoughts into English, became a leading rabble rouser in the Cultural Revolution – and, by the by, was imprisoned for 16 years in solitary confinement, accused of being a US spy. Then he came back to the US and made a fortune advising American companies on how to get into China.

I first heard of this historical revolutionary figure in China, where he is known as Li Dunbai (it sounds a little like Rittenberg to Chinese ears). To this day, he is taught about in schools as a righteous American who helped build Chinese communism.

Now 91, Rittenberg is not only alive, but living in Arizona – quite unusual for one honoured by Mao as an international communist fighter – and still running his company and teaching at a university. He is also on Facebook. The answer to an interview request came in five minutes. From his iPad. “You’re welcome,” he said.

For a veteran Chinese communist revolutionary, Rittenberg’s impish sense of humour comes as a surprise. Could I bring him anything from Britain? “I have always yearned for one of those old Scottish castles,” Rittenberg replied. “It could be disassembled, modular style, brought here and reassembled. I would, of course, require a tartan to match it.”

Even without the castle, Rittenberg greets me warmly on the doorstep. He looks, perhaps, 70. He was starved in Chinese jails, but never physically tortured – just mentally. Yulin Wang Rittenberg, his wife of 60 years, had it even tougher after the Cultural Revolution went bad on the couple in the late 1960s. She spent three years in a back-breaking labour camp – after being brutally beaten and made to sit in the doorway of the women’s restroom with a placard round her neck saying, “This is the unrepentant wife of a dog of an Imperialist spy.”

(Continued at the link below)

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/5befa6be-5abb-11e2-bc93-00144feab49a.html#axzz2HzpDtFhA