Younghusband of Coming Anarchy defends Robert D. Kaplan's focus on naval arms buildup in China:
"In the post-cold war the first new influential thinking that came out was net-centric warfare, developed by an admiral. The army guys read up on that stuff and loved it, and it is reflected in the RMA literature filled with visions of “the network” and “total battle space awareness.” Well, that platform-based stuff doesn’t translate too well on the ground. There are important functional differences between air and sea operations and ground operations. Some theorists tried to modify NCW to fit the ground war (NEOps, ADO etc.) but others simply abandoned it. Now the pendulum has swung the other way. All the current conceptual work is in xGW, COIN , UW etc. None of this fits the platform-based services particularly, but they are still reading the stuff. With all the attention focused on the ground fighters, there is a lack of visionary thinking for the navy. ...
So, before you go “spanking” old Kap over his article, remember this: How many “experts” do we have on Afghanistan, Iraq and COIN popping out of the woodwork now? Academic journals on security are jam-packed full of articles on that stuff. Naval arms races in northeast Asia on the other hand? There may be lots from the mid-90s when we were preparing for “war with Japan” and a fight over Taiwan, but since then it has dropped out of the headlines. Unfortunately the situation there has yet to be defused. There is lots of build-up still happening but it is a page 10 story. That is the kind of stuff that Kap has made a career drawing attention to. Remember the Balkans? In about 10 years when there is a boomer war going on in the Pacific, and DOD only has a shiny new COIN manual to turn to, the US president will be calling Kap to the White House once again for a chat."
That would be rather amusing to imagine--Kaplan arriving to essentially say "I told you so" to the President and the Secretary of Defense. Now, putting aside that image, the dispute over Kaplan's article illustrates, in part, a large problem. As Younghusband notes, North American seucurity thinking is, in a large part, a search for the "next big thing." Before counterinsurgency, it was network-centric warfare, and before that it was
AirLand battle, etc. What makes John Boyd exceptional is not the relevance of his theories to Iraq or Afghanistan. It is that he presents a totalizing vision of human conflict that is applicable across the board, rather than a specialized doctrine suited to a particular service of conflict.
While I agree with Younghusband that it is foolish to write off the emerging East Asian naval security situation, I also don't have the fear,
as some do, that the current theoretical focus in American security thinking on unconventional conflict will lead to degraded conventional ability. As Air War College professor Jeffrey Record
notes, counterinsurgency has never been really been regarded as central to American military thinking. True, the United States has been involved in COIN operations both at home and abroad well before Vietnam, but it was always regarded as a kind of specialist sideshow. That is why it was so easy for Army to largely erase COIN from their institutional memory after Vietnam.
Inspired by Zenpundit's example, I'm moving to a new blog. Update your blogrolls and RSS feeds to
