thedrifter
03-14-06, 09:08 AM
A quick review of Neither Shall the Sword by Chet Richards
Thomas P.M. Barnett on March 14, 2006
This book is a bit of a sequel to Chet’s 2001 book entitled A Swift, Elusive Sword, in which he made some radical arguments for the restructuring of the U.S. military, a process that would yield a force not unlike my Leviathan, according to Chet himself. This Sword force would be shaped largely around the concepts of maneuver warfare, the notion being that “history shows that forces that fight according to this doctrine virtually always defeat those that don’t, regardless of how much the other side spends or how many troops it has.” Given that bent, this force is relatively ground and Fourth Generation Warfare (4GW) friendly.
But this book is also a bit of a survey of new ideas of warfare against a non-state enemy, and Chet pursues this survey because he admits his Leviathan-like force is only so appropriate for that new environment. The five “distinguished strategists” he selects to compare are William Lind, Martin van Creveld, Thomas X. Hammes, Michael Scheuer and me. I buy Lind, van Creveld and Hammes as operational strategists and myself as grand strategist. I simply balk at including Scheuer, who I find to be uniformly full of crap on anything other than describing the terrorist threat. A strategist that intell weenie is not.
Chet covers a lot of ground in 95 pages, a stunning amount--really. But I’m not going to review all that because I’m writing this during an oil change and I’m not going to add much to his thinking. If you want a sometimes quirky but often brilliant distillation of descriptions and thinking and analysis on warfare today and into the future (with a focus on 4GW), the first half of the book is well worth the investment. It’s like a lecture course on steroids: you will be significantly smarter once you read it.
Highlight for me: the funky “scheme” of the generations of war on page 21 is cool.
I also like this very nice distillation of future global security:
So far in this monograph, I have suggested that in the future, organized armed conflict will consist of:
First, second, and possibly third generation warfare largely between and within developing countries.
Second and third generation warfare by developed countries against developing countries and very rarely, if at all, against each other.
Insurgency by groups against governments largely in weak, failing or failed states.
An evolving form of conflict, fourth generation warfare, employed by transnational groups with roots in the developing world against both local governments and the developed world.
Methods, mostly yet to be created, by developed countries to deal with fourth generation warfare.
Succint, dead-on, and comprehensive. Very Chet
After covering a lot of ground in the first 30 or so pages, Richards starts looking at the various strategists and what they say about how to deal with al Qaeda and the GWOT.
First Richards covers Lind’s rather retro concept of isolationism, then van Creveld’s “wall” concept that sounds a lot like Israel’s security fence extrapolated to the entire Gap (go figure!). Then he does Ralph Peters (inserted just here) and Scheuer and their approach to consistently entering the Gap just to do killing and leave it at that (a pre-emptive sort of retaliation strategy). Then comes Stephen Biddle and Hammes and their collective notion that interventions need to be strategically applied (sort of a Peters-Scheuer strategy with brains).
Then Richards comes to me, and my strategy of shrinking the Gap is recast as rollback, which is somewhat accurate but also a bit hyperbolic, suggesting that the 4GW enemies we face somehow own the entirety of the Gap instead of simply thriving there. Better I think, to employ some medical analogy of the chemo-of-connectivity against the metastasized tumors of al Qaeda that live throughout the Gap and sometimes spread into the Core.
But I quibble a bit. Richards does a brilliant job, in many ways, of explaining PNM and BFA, starting on page 38. I don’t agree with everything he says, but I can’t complain about how seriously he treats the vision or how well he translates it into the world that the Linds and Biddles et. al inhabit (largely about war, some politics, almost no economics
Where Chet gets really interesting for me is how seriously and cleverly he argues the “tool” of system perturbation. Now, in the past, Chet’s use of that concept has gone overboard, as far as I was concerned. But here he’s pretty much dead on, if, as usual, a bit heavy on the pol-mil and light on the socio-economic-networking. So he gets the “war within the context of everything else” approach. He just feels more comfortably explaining how the military changes within that approach than things beyond the military, which is where my work increasingly turns.
But, overall, Chet is quite fair and very provocative in how he treats my ideas and explores my vision. Can’t complain about that.
Chapter IV starts with an analysis of using system perturbations as a strategic tool of change. Very interesting stuff. I learned a lot here. Well worth reading.
Next chapter compares Chet’s original Sword force concept to the various tasks implied by the competing strategies. When he gets to the rollback strategies, it’s interesting how complimentary Chet seems to think my ideas are with Tom Hammes’ (Biddle doesn’t make this grade, apparently). It’s at this point that Chet starts trotting out his most radical idea in the book, which I could basically summarize as governmentize the SysAdmin force as much as possible and privatize the Leviathan force as much as possible. I’m not paraphrasing here: this are basically the words Chet uses, and he adopts the Leviathan/Sword v. SysAdmin breakdown quite openly as he discusses the best path forward.
This is where the book really takes off for me, and where Chet does his most interesting writing because, when it comes to provocative ideas that challenge your thinking, Richards is really amazing. Plus, he’s so consistent in examining all sides and possibilities that you feel a lot of trust when reading him, which is impressive considering the seemingly wild things he’s proposing. It’s a wonderful skill that really speaks to Chet’s capacity as a change agent.
Chet punts a bit at the end (Chapter VI), despite all this provocative stuff prior, by basically hedging his near-term bets with a containment force that grows into a more interventionary strategy over time. Even he doesn’t like this outcome, complaining about his choice in print and then enunciating his truly preferred outcome, which is a brilliant description of my three-pronged strategy to shrink the Gap (Chet only seems to focus on my shrinking part, primarily, I suspect, because it is the most military-heavy portion of the overall strategy I propose).
First, though, note the very cool graphic on how the Sword Force evolves into Leviathan and SysAdmin forces over time, along with the privatizing option on the Levithan. That’s found on page 79.
Chet, in this concluding chapter, basically says “I would prefer rollback as a goal, as I think even Lind would, if there were a reasonable chance that it could be made to work. Lind would argue that there is not.” Here is where Chet’s mil-heavy focus perverts his thinking. Globalization will shrink the Gap whether we’re there with military force and focused aid to speed up the process or not. I simply argue for speeding up the process, but I don’t pretend that the military aspect is predominant, by any stretch. And Chet’s problem here is that he’s talking my strategy almost solely in terms of the military aspect. FDI, for example, is simply ignored here, and the private sector’s role is basically ignored.
Because of that, Chet doesn’t’ get to the truly interesting stuff that my work is now addressing: shrinking the Gap is a market-making opportunity for Core pillars in general, meaning that if you want to define competition in the future, it’s mostly about who shrinks the Gap best by building up and networking into their economic spheres the emerging markets waiting to be developed there. Now some will call this a new form of colonialism. But when you strip out the overt, direct, and comprehensive political control of the states in question, that’s just not a reasonable comparison. That’s like saying it’s still slavery but we give them wages and benefits and workers rights and so on--but it’s still basically slavery! Great rhetoric if you can get it, but basically ideological BS.
My point in exploring that concept: that gets us to the strategic imperative of creating the Development-in-a-Box tool that animates both the SysAdmin force and makes the creation of the Department of Everything Else a realizable goal. Plus, it points out the strategic complimentarity of the U.S.’s Leviathan capacity with the New Core’s ability to provide much-needed manpower to the SysAdmin function, which Chet always presents as basically an America-only affair (at least he never seems to explore its multinational character that I argue for consistently).
It’s on page 82 that Chet basically makes my argument, saying our strategy should “attract” or “pull” countries from Gap to Core, and here he finally raises some economics, like ag subsidies. So his final argument becomes this: “Maybe I can assuage my conscience [for choosing containment] by arguing for ‘coercive containment/attractive rollback’ as my top-level grand strategy.”
Bingo!
That’s my argument in a nutshell: 1) grow the Core’s ability to withstand System Perturbations (very Chet, even though he doesn’t explore this argument); 2) discretely firewall (containment) the Core off from the Gap’s worst exports (somewhat Lind-like); and 3) shrink the Gap by using military power selectively to deal with the worst security sinkholes there and then using private-sector FDI to “attract” the most attractive Gap economies into progressively joining the economic, political, and ultimately security networks that define the Core.
So, in sum, Chet has made quite the journey in this book, coming from a position of great skepticism toward my work (see his original review of PNM, later amended) toward one of near embrace. Whether he realizes it or not, his “coercive containment/attractive rollback” is basically my three-pronged strategy, with the building up of Core resilience in the fact of System Pertubations implied (or how else to maintain our attraction to the Gap in this increasingly complex world?).
Tellingly, though, Chet can come only part way in his acceptance, moving off Lind to a certain degree by embracing Hammes, and through Hammes reaching out to me.
This is fascinating to me, because it basically ratifies my description in Blueprint of the cool week in Bergen, Norway that I spent with Chet and Hammes, arguing out our collective ideas in front of an audience of young officers in the Norwegian Naval War College back in the winter of 2005. When Chet and Tom saw the ability to preserve the Marines and their maneuver warfare, plus their emerging 4GW capacities, within my SysAdmin concept, they basically dropped their strong resistance to my concepts, and we were suddenly united in the theory that the SysAdmin function represented the future toolkit for defeating future enemies while the shrinking Leviathan (shrinking mostly through technology) was our collective hedge against the past (and the great power war models that still lurk in the minds of the “realists”--and nowhere else).
Now, I’m being a bit self-aggrandizing here, but I’m not stretching any truth, and I think Chet’s book backs up that analysis hugely, especially since he uses Hammes as the bridge from Lind’s increasingly anachronistic take on 4GW (he and van Creveld seem stuck in the 20th century, which beats the 19th century purgatory of the realists--by about 100 years) to my hybrid take (war within the context of everything else, or globalization, which Lind defines simply as the decline of the state and which the realists ignore completely in their billiard-ball analysis of great powers and their “interests”).
Final treat to the book: Chet writes cool endnotes!
Overall, this is a strategic-education-in-a-box book, one that is seriously worth the money and time. But to me, it was also quite thrilling to read, simply because it confirms the bridge strategy that I’ve sought to employ in the direction of the 4GWers. Not all will get it, and please don’t ever tag me with that nonsensical, protect-the-(white man) American-culture stuff that Lind peddles primarily now, or the over-the-top bloodthirstiness-without-consequences view of Peters. But when Chet Richards gets it, and uses Thomas Hammes as his bridge toward my strategy, I know I’m making very real progress.
And yeah, I do take that sort of thing very seriously--as in, life-and-death serious.
Ah, my van is ready!
Ellie
Thomas P.M. Barnett on March 14, 2006
This book is a bit of a sequel to Chet’s 2001 book entitled A Swift, Elusive Sword, in which he made some radical arguments for the restructuring of the U.S. military, a process that would yield a force not unlike my Leviathan, according to Chet himself. This Sword force would be shaped largely around the concepts of maneuver warfare, the notion being that “history shows that forces that fight according to this doctrine virtually always defeat those that don’t, regardless of how much the other side spends or how many troops it has.” Given that bent, this force is relatively ground and Fourth Generation Warfare (4GW) friendly.
But this book is also a bit of a survey of new ideas of warfare against a non-state enemy, and Chet pursues this survey because he admits his Leviathan-like force is only so appropriate for that new environment. The five “distinguished strategists” he selects to compare are William Lind, Martin van Creveld, Thomas X. Hammes, Michael Scheuer and me. I buy Lind, van Creveld and Hammes as operational strategists and myself as grand strategist. I simply balk at including Scheuer, who I find to be uniformly full of crap on anything other than describing the terrorist threat. A strategist that intell weenie is not.
Chet covers a lot of ground in 95 pages, a stunning amount--really. But I’m not going to review all that because I’m writing this during an oil change and I’m not going to add much to his thinking. If you want a sometimes quirky but often brilliant distillation of descriptions and thinking and analysis on warfare today and into the future (with a focus on 4GW), the first half of the book is well worth the investment. It’s like a lecture course on steroids: you will be significantly smarter once you read it.
Highlight for me: the funky “scheme” of the generations of war on page 21 is cool.
I also like this very nice distillation of future global security:
So far in this monograph, I have suggested that in the future, organized armed conflict will consist of:
First, second, and possibly third generation warfare largely between and within developing countries.
Second and third generation warfare by developed countries against developing countries and very rarely, if at all, against each other.
Insurgency by groups against governments largely in weak, failing or failed states.
An evolving form of conflict, fourth generation warfare, employed by transnational groups with roots in the developing world against both local governments and the developed world.
Methods, mostly yet to be created, by developed countries to deal with fourth generation warfare.
Succint, dead-on, and comprehensive. Very Chet
After covering a lot of ground in the first 30 or so pages, Richards starts looking at the various strategists and what they say about how to deal with al Qaeda and the GWOT.
First Richards covers Lind’s rather retro concept of isolationism, then van Creveld’s “wall” concept that sounds a lot like Israel’s security fence extrapolated to the entire Gap (go figure!). Then he does Ralph Peters (inserted just here) and Scheuer and their approach to consistently entering the Gap just to do killing and leave it at that (a pre-emptive sort of retaliation strategy). Then comes Stephen Biddle and Hammes and their collective notion that interventions need to be strategically applied (sort of a Peters-Scheuer strategy with brains).
Then Richards comes to me, and my strategy of shrinking the Gap is recast as rollback, which is somewhat accurate but also a bit hyperbolic, suggesting that the 4GW enemies we face somehow own the entirety of the Gap instead of simply thriving there. Better I think, to employ some medical analogy of the chemo-of-connectivity against the metastasized tumors of al Qaeda that live throughout the Gap and sometimes spread into the Core.
But I quibble a bit. Richards does a brilliant job, in many ways, of explaining PNM and BFA, starting on page 38. I don’t agree with everything he says, but I can’t complain about how seriously he treats the vision or how well he translates it into the world that the Linds and Biddles et. al inhabit (largely about war, some politics, almost no economics
Where Chet gets really interesting for me is how seriously and cleverly he argues the “tool” of system perturbation. Now, in the past, Chet’s use of that concept has gone overboard, as far as I was concerned. But here he’s pretty much dead on, if, as usual, a bit heavy on the pol-mil and light on the socio-economic-networking. So he gets the “war within the context of everything else” approach. He just feels more comfortably explaining how the military changes within that approach than things beyond the military, which is where my work increasingly turns.
But, overall, Chet is quite fair and very provocative in how he treats my ideas and explores my vision. Can’t complain about that.
Chapter IV starts with an analysis of using system perturbations as a strategic tool of change. Very interesting stuff. I learned a lot here. Well worth reading.
Next chapter compares Chet’s original Sword force concept to the various tasks implied by the competing strategies. When he gets to the rollback strategies, it’s interesting how complimentary Chet seems to think my ideas are with Tom Hammes’ (Biddle doesn’t make this grade, apparently). It’s at this point that Chet starts trotting out his most radical idea in the book, which I could basically summarize as governmentize the SysAdmin force as much as possible and privatize the Leviathan force as much as possible. I’m not paraphrasing here: this are basically the words Chet uses, and he adopts the Leviathan/Sword v. SysAdmin breakdown quite openly as he discusses the best path forward.
This is where the book really takes off for me, and where Chet does his most interesting writing because, when it comes to provocative ideas that challenge your thinking, Richards is really amazing. Plus, he’s so consistent in examining all sides and possibilities that you feel a lot of trust when reading him, which is impressive considering the seemingly wild things he’s proposing. It’s a wonderful skill that really speaks to Chet’s capacity as a change agent.
Chet punts a bit at the end (Chapter VI), despite all this provocative stuff prior, by basically hedging his near-term bets with a containment force that grows into a more interventionary strategy over time. Even he doesn’t like this outcome, complaining about his choice in print and then enunciating his truly preferred outcome, which is a brilliant description of my three-pronged strategy to shrink the Gap (Chet only seems to focus on my shrinking part, primarily, I suspect, because it is the most military-heavy portion of the overall strategy I propose).
First, though, note the very cool graphic on how the Sword Force evolves into Leviathan and SysAdmin forces over time, along with the privatizing option on the Levithan. That’s found on page 79.
Chet, in this concluding chapter, basically says “I would prefer rollback as a goal, as I think even Lind would, if there were a reasonable chance that it could be made to work. Lind would argue that there is not.” Here is where Chet’s mil-heavy focus perverts his thinking. Globalization will shrink the Gap whether we’re there with military force and focused aid to speed up the process or not. I simply argue for speeding up the process, but I don’t pretend that the military aspect is predominant, by any stretch. And Chet’s problem here is that he’s talking my strategy almost solely in terms of the military aspect. FDI, for example, is simply ignored here, and the private sector’s role is basically ignored.
Because of that, Chet doesn’t’ get to the truly interesting stuff that my work is now addressing: shrinking the Gap is a market-making opportunity for Core pillars in general, meaning that if you want to define competition in the future, it’s mostly about who shrinks the Gap best by building up and networking into their economic spheres the emerging markets waiting to be developed there. Now some will call this a new form of colonialism. But when you strip out the overt, direct, and comprehensive political control of the states in question, that’s just not a reasonable comparison. That’s like saying it’s still slavery but we give them wages and benefits and workers rights and so on--but it’s still basically slavery! Great rhetoric if you can get it, but basically ideological BS.
My point in exploring that concept: that gets us to the strategic imperative of creating the Development-in-a-Box tool that animates both the SysAdmin force and makes the creation of the Department of Everything Else a realizable goal. Plus, it points out the strategic complimentarity of the U.S.’s Leviathan capacity with the New Core’s ability to provide much-needed manpower to the SysAdmin function, which Chet always presents as basically an America-only affair (at least he never seems to explore its multinational character that I argue for consistently).
It’s on page 82 that Chet basically makes my argument, saying our strategy should “attract” or “pull” countries from Gap to Core, and here he finally raises some economics, like ag subsidies. So his final argument becomes this: “Maybe I can assuage my conscience [for choosing containment] by arguing for ‘coercive containment/attractive rollback’ as my top-level grand strategy.”
Bingo!
That’s my argument in a nutshell: 1) grow the Core’s ability to withstand System Perturbations (very Chet, even though he doesn’t explore this argument); 2) discretely firewall (containment) the Core off from the Gap’s worst exports (somewhat Lind-like); and 3) shrink the Gap by using military power selectively to deal with the worst security sinkholes there and then using private-sector FDI to “attract” the most attractive Gap economies into progressively joining the economic, political, and ultimately security networks that define the Core.
So, in sum, Chet has made quite the journey in this book, coming from a position of great skepticism toward my work (see his original review of PNM, later amended) toward one of near embrace. Whether he realizes it or not, his “coercive containment/attractive rollback” is basically my three-pronged strategy, with the building up of Core resilience in the fact of System Pertubations implied (or how else to maintain our attraction to the Gap in this increasingly complex world?).
Tellingly, though, Chet can come only part way in his acceptance, moving off Lind to a certain degree by embracing Hammes, and through Hammes reaching out to me.
This is fascinating to me, because it basically ratifies my description in Blueprint of the cool week in Bergen, Norway that I spent with Chet and Hammes, arguing out our collective ideas in front of an audience of young officers in the Norwegian Naval War College back in the winter of 2005. When Chet and Tom saw the ability to preserve the Marines and their maneuver warfare, plus their emerging 4GW capacities, within my SysAdmin concept, they basically dropped their strong resistance to my concepts, and we were suddenly united in the theory that the SysAdmin function represented the future toolkit for defeating future enemies while the shrinking Leviathan (shrinking mostly through technology) was our collective hedge against the past (and the great power war models that still lurk in the minds of the “realists”--and nowhere else).
Now, I’m being a bit self-aggrandizing here, but I’m not stretching any truth, and I think Chet’s book backs up that analysis hugely, especially since he uses Hammes as the bridge from Lind’s increasingly anachronistic take on 4GW (he and van Creveld seem stuck in the 20th century, which beats the 19th century purgatory of the realists--by about 100 years) to my hybrid take (war within the context of everything else, or globalization, which Lind defines simply as the decline of the state and which the realists ignore completely in their billiard-ball analysis of great powers and their “interests”).
Final treat to the book: Chet writes cool endnotes!
Overall, this is a strategic-education-in-a-box book, one that is seriously worth the money and time. But to me, it was also quite thrilling to read, simply because it confirms the bridge strategy that I’ve sought to employ in the direction of the 4GWers. Not all will get it, and please don’t ever tag me with that nonsensical, protect-the-(white man) American-culture stuff that Lind peddles primarily now, or the over-the-top bloodthirstiness-without-consequences view of Peters. But when Chet Richards gets it, and uses Thomas Hammes as his bridge toward my strategy, I know I’m making very real progress.
And yeah, I do take that sort of thing very seriously--as in, life-and-death serious.
Ah, my van is ready!
Ellie