The View From Olympus: A Glass Half Full

With the elements in the Trump administration pushing our continued intervention in the Middle East and Korea, plus backing away from better relations with Russia, the future was looking grim for America First. America First means keeping our distance from other peoples' quarrels.But some recent developments suggest the glass may be half full. On his recent trip abroad, President Trump refused to bow down to the great clay god NATO. The May 29 New York Times reported,

Mr. Trump declined to publicly endorse NATO's doctrine of collective defense or to agree to common European positions on global trade, dealing with Russian aggressions or mitigating the effects of climate change.

Quelle horreur! It seems America won't go down for Gdansk.As the same issue of the Times wrote, President Trump's approach to NATO worked. German Chancellor Angela Merkel said after her meetings with him, "Europe should pay more attention to its own interests 'and really take our fate into our own hands.'" Hallelujah! This is just what successive American administrations have worked for for fifty years, without success: that Europe provide its own security, as it has the money, people, and technology to do.  President Trump has succeeded in doing what President Eisenhower expected and wanted. When NATO was formed, he said, "If we are still in this ten years from now, it will have been a mistake." American defense of Europe was intended to be only a short-term measure while European countries recovered from the war. That happened a long, long time ago.There's more good news from President Trump himself: he has reportedly not signed on the idiot plan, pushed by his National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster, to send thousands more American troops to Afghanistan in another doomed effort at "nation building". The president knows sunk costs are no argument to continue what has failed. He wants to get out. He's right and the war cabal around him is wrong.Meanwhile, there is good news from Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. In a speech in mid-May to State Department employees, he broke decisively with Wilsonianism, the notion that we can and should force democracy and "human rights" down the throats of every people on earth, with bayonets if necessary. The Secretary drew an important distinction between our values and our interests. Our values, he said, are "freedom, human dignity, the way people are treated...our values never change."Then came the key passage in his remarks, the one that threw off the albatross of Woodrow Wilson's corpse:

And in some circumstances, if you condition our national security efforts on someone adopting our values, we probably can't achieve our national security goals or our national security interests.If we condition too heavily that others must adopt this value that we've come to over a long history of our own, it really creates obstacles to our ability to advance our national security interests, our economic interests.

In other words, our policies must be based on our interests, just as other nations base their on their interests. This is how the international state system works. It is reality.That's the half glass of good wine. But the empty part of the glass is of equal importance. Neither in President Trump's remarks in Europe nor in Secretary Tillerson's speech is there even a hint that they get the new strategic context, that is, the threat to the state system itself posed by Fourth Generation war. Both the president and the secretary speak and seem to think of a world where the basic conflict is between states, not between non-state entities (i.e., "terrorists") and the state system. In a Fourth Generation world, this is a fatal weakness.It is also a weakness politically, because the American people could and would grasp a need for an alliance with Russia and China, indeed with every other state, as the only way to defeat "terrorism". By changing the context of international relations, President Trump and his administration could leave Senator John McCain and the rest of the warhawks high and dry on history's beach, to shine and stink like the rotten mackerel in the moonlight they are (thank you, John Randolph of Roanoke).President Trump won office by changing the political context. His administration is now floundering because he has allowed the establishment to suck him back into the existing context, which the establishment created and within which it thrives. An understanding of Fourth Generation war and the new international context it has created offers the president a chance to again pull the rug out from under the Establishment and plunge it into a context it cannot handle. That's how to win. 

Leftism on the Skids

Love him or hate him, Donald Trump has revealed the fundamental schism in American society: those who are believers in the system as it was, and those who realize it is time to jump off the sinking ship of Leftist social engineering.The most controversial fact about the man is that he was elected in the first place, once we factor out the idiosyncrasies that bombastic men and strong personalities usually have, and he has united the confederacy of dunces against him with admirable efficiency. In doing so, he has smoked out the arrayed forces of the Left, including a propagandistic media and a vicious and dogmatic Establishment spanning government and industry which has thrived under Left-leaning presidents and their policies.Media articles reveal the emotional nature of Leftist culture shock. After first insisting that the election was somehow illegitimate, Democrats seized on the hope that they could prove that Russia had somehow hacked the election. With that narrative waning, they tried to prove a connection between the Trump staff and Russian government interests. When that failed, they turned to claiming Trump had leaked intelligence or pressured James Comey to go easy on Michael Flynn.Like a prisoner giving excuses, the Left seem to be inventing reasons on the fly to attempt to prove what they hope is true, and the reek of fixation and desperation portrays them in a morbid light.For conservatives -- whether they are Trump fans or NeverTrumpers -- the Trump administration has offered a great boon, however. Trump is a red cape waved at the bull of Leftist emotionality. He represents the refutation of the Obama years and an American turn away from the socialist-leaning, Social Justice Warrior (SJW) infused, and anti-majority thread of Leftist rhetoric in the years since the L.A. Riots. Strikingly, this message resonates with not just his audience, but those proximate to them.A recent survey reveals that Trump voters are motivated by concerns over changing American culture and identity more than purely economic concerns, although surely they have those following the disaster that was the Obama economy.Among other details, the survey revealed that white working class voters -- those without salaried jobs -- were focused on the changes wrought by Leftist social engineering. 65% of them believe that American culture and way of life has deteriorated since the 1950s, 48% of them feel like strangers in their own country, 68% believe the US is in danger of losing its culture and identity, 52% believe that discrimination against the majority is as big of a problem as discrimination against minorities, and 60% of them want a strong leader who is willing to break the rules in order to fix this situation.To Leftists, Donald Trump is a symbol of the actual threat; he represents the growing backlash against Leftist social engineering including the sacred cows of Civil Rights and bipartisanship. The Left enjoys the thought that it is above all of those ignorant dirt people out there "clinging to their guns and religion", which is why Hillary Clinton referred to them as "a basket of deplorables."Now the narrative of the 1960s has flipped. The Right are opposing a Leftist establishment, and the "safe bet" for the average citizen is to go along with our increasingly Soviet-like Leftist overlords. This has been the situation since the 1990s when the Baby Boomers hit their 50s and took over. Trump has articulated this to us by following a relative moderate playbook, which has caused media and Establishment panic.Leftist social engineering has created the world in which we find ourselves. A revolt against it is a revolt against Leftism. The parasites sense that their control is slipping, and that is why the news and government is full of apocalyptic statements and conspiracy theories aimed at displacing the rebellion against the Left. But the more the true believers demand we obey them, the more disobedient we become. Brett Stevens blogs at Amerika.org

The Way Forward

For those of us on the Right who long despaired for the future of our country, Donald Trump offered an unlikely ray of hope. He defied cultural Marxism, a.k.a. "political correctness". He promised to end the flooding of our country with foreigners and the export of its middle-income jobs. He rejected Wilsonianism and its endless wars for endless peace. In short, he promised to give us our country back.That hope is now gone. The Establishment has launched a double envelopment of President Trump that shows every sign of succeeding. On the one hand, it has taken over his administration from the inside, giving us the usual policies of the Republican Establishment. On the other hand, it is drowning the president in a flood of mostly phony charges intended to drive him from office. Either way, it wins, and real conservatives are left with no voice and no hope in the political system. The most important lesson of the Trump presidency may be that reform through the system is impossible.Where do we go from here? On issues such as foreign policy, trade policy, and immigration, we may be able to do little beyond wait for the disasters inherent in Establishment policy to unfold, then move in to pick up the pieces. Whether the state can survive such a monumental failure is an open question.But on the most important issue, culture, there is a way forward. That way is Retroculture.Retroculture is a call to revive old ways of thinking and living, with an emphasis on the latter. The basic lesson of America's history since the 1960s is that the old ways worked and the new ways don't. It does not require a great intellectual leap from that fact to wanting to live once again in the old ways, many of which had their origins in the Victorian period.For millennia, when a society found itself decaying and declining, it turned back and attempted to revive a past when life was better. The Renaissance and the Reformation are both examples. The result was not an exact recreation of the past, but by drawing on the past these attempts have at least sometimes brought about a new synthesis that was an improvement.At present, Retroculture is only a word and an idea. If we are to save and restore our country, it needs to become a movement. It will not be a political movement, aimed at gaining power in Washington and changing laws. That way has failed. Rather, a Retroculture movement will be individuals, families, and perhaps in time whole communities changing how they live. That is far more powerful than politics.There is an obvious parallel between Retroculture and Rod Dreher's "Benedict Option". The difference is that Retroculture is secular. Because religious faith and worship were of central importance in the lives of our ancestors--just look at the churches they built--Retroculture will tend to lead people toward religion. But they can join a Retroculture movement on purely secular grounds, i.e., wanting to create a better life for themselves and their families by doing what works.A Retroculture movement is a central theme in Thomas Hobbes' novel Victoria (which, as his agent, I recommend) and also in the last book Paul Weyrich and I wrote together, The Next Conservatism. More than that, it is reflected in the lives of several important groups of people. One is the Amish, who live rural lives similar to those of 100 years ago, before Henry Ford's Model T overran the countryside. Another group that embraces part of Retroculture is the home schoolers, many of whom home school to avoid the dreadful "education theory" that has replaced learning skills and facts with psychological conditioning and babble such as "self-esteem". A college graduate of today knows less than a high school grad of 1950.There is no single time period that defines Retroculture. Any time up through the 1950s, America's last normal decade, will do. Our country was wrecked by the cultural revolution of the 1960s, and any model for present life drawn from before that catastrophe will be an improvement. Emmett Tyrrell once defined utopia as the 18th century with modern medicine and air conditioning.Toward the goal of creating a Retroculture movement, this website is establishing a Retroculture bulletin board. Anyone who has ideas about Retroculture they want to share, or wants to connect with others choosing a Retroculture life, is welcome to post on it.Retroculture's home truth is simple: what worked before can work again. Ideologies promise perfect future societies based on this or that philosophy; invariably, they fail. Retroculture, in contrast, is based in reality, in the concrete, specific ways of living of our own forefathers. They were real, the ways in which they lived were real, and they worked. They built the greatest country on Earth. It wasn't perfect; no human endeavor can be. But their America worked a whole lot better than the country we now know by that name. It's time we brought that America back.

The View From Olympus: Strategic Idiocy--and an Alternative

In a column in the May 3 Cleveland Plain Dealer Eli Lake reported that the Trump administration has decided to redouble our efforts in Afghanistan. We are to send in more troops--5000 initially is the figure I'm hearing--and commit ourselves once again to nation building based on the corrupt and ineffectual government of Afghan President Ashraf Ghani. This was all decided in a White House meeting where the principle voice for stronger intervention came from the new national security advisor, General H.R. McMaster.Once again, we see everything Trump promised during the campaign go out the window as typical Establishment policies prevail. Worse, McMaster, who is a tactical genius, is revealed as a strategic idiot (the combination is not unusual; Rommel was another example). So we appear doomed to four more years of  strategic failure in Afghanistan and everywhere else McMaster is in charge. Where is Count Witte when we need him?What makes this hopeless reprise of a strategy that has already been tried and has failed especially disheartening is that other, more promising strategies are available for Afghanistan. Two could be combined to offer a reasonable chance of an outcome we could live with, namely a coalition government that includes the Taliban but excludes al Qaeda, ISIS, and other Salafists from the country.The first recognizes that Pakistan is the key to Afghanistan, but Afghanistan is also the key to Pakistan. So long as the Afghan government is aligned with India, as it now is, Pakistan must support the Taliban. The Taliban offers its only option for an alliance with Afghanistan, which it must have for strategic depth vis-a-vis India. Remember, India is Pakistan's number one strategic threat. A pro-India Afghanistan threatens Pakistan with a two-front war, which is intolerable. So Pakistan is tied to the Taliban whether it wants to be or not (my guess is not).A new strategy for Afghanistan begins with our compelling the current Afghan government to de-align with India and become a reliable (and subservient) ally of Pakistan. What if it refuses? We leave tomorrow and take our money with us. I suspect that prospect will make President Ghani see reason.Once Pakistan can break with the Taliban, a second new strategy comes into play. The Taliban is increasingly threatened by ISIS in Afghanistan. The two are already fighting, with casualties on both sides. ISIS is also a dangerous moral threat to the Taliban, because it is more extreme, which means it appeals strongly to young fighters. In effect, among Islamic puritans, ISIS makes the Taliban look like the establishment while it represents true purity. That scares the Taliban, as it should.So we now can offer the Taliban our aid against ISIS if it will join a coalition Afghan government. With Pakistan pushing in the same direction, the chances of success would be reasonably good--which they are not if we keep repeating what we have been doing for more than ten years without success.To show the depth of our strategic incompetence, instead of using ISIS in Afghanistan as a lever to move the Taliban, we are trying to destroy it. We are doing the Taliban's fighting for it, eliminating the threat to its flank and lessening the pressure it feels to do a deal with us. The "Mother Of All Bombs" we dropped in Afghanistan a few weeks ago was aimed not at the Taliban, but at ISIS. Like most air bombardments of dug-in opponents, it did very little. But why are we fighting ISIS in Afghanistan at all when it could serve our goal? Bismarck must be rolling in his grave.It seems the new Trump administration is just more of the same old, failed, incompetent strategy, or absence of strategy. We will do more of the same and expect a different result. That's not just stupidity, it's idiocy. And it appears that vaunted General McMaster is the craziest guy in the madhouse.

The View From Olympus: Korea

Is a new Korean War likely? Probably not. It would almost certainly end with the destruction of North Korea's Kim regime, and I think they know that. Dictators want to remain dictators.On the other hand, like the major European states in 1914, both North Korea and the U.S. could back themselves into a war, not knowing quite how they got there. If that happens, North Korea has some options I fear the Pentagon is ignoring.One is to open up a massive artillery barrage on Seoul, then turn it off after twenty minutes. The cease-fire could be accompanied by an announcement saying North Korea would only resume firing if the U.S. or South Korea took military action against it. That would leave us on the horns of a most unpleasant dilemma.If all-out war were to break out, instead of launching its main thrust directly at Seoul from the north with the armor it has positioned there, North Korea could keep that threat open while making its operational Schwerpunkt a light infantry advance down South Korea's east coast with a turning movement south of Seoul designed to pocket the main American and South Korean forces. The east coast terrain is favorable to light infantry, North Korea has lots of it and if you look at the movement rates of both North and South Korean light infantry on that coast during the first Korean War, you see it could unfold quite rapidly.Steven Canby, who may be America's best land war analyst, laid out this possibility in a paper he wrote in the late 1970s or early 1980s. When I worked for Senator Gary Hart, he sent Canby's paper to the U.S. commander in Korea. The reply he received essentially said, "We have our plan and we are going to follow it." That plan, I suspect, assumes the main North Korean thrust will be made by the heavy armor positioned north of Seoul. But that could well be the cheng element with light infantry in the east playing the chi role. Oriental warfare tends to avoid jousting contests.American forces want to fight the plan rather than the enemy because their Second Generation planning is so slow, convoluted, and cumbersome. The Marine Corps' sacred "staff planning process" takes at least 72 hours for a one-division plan. In contrast, the Wehrmacht expected a division to respond to unexpected enemy action in four hours, with action, not just a plan; a corps was given six hours. As John Boyd might have said, "We're not even in the game."A third North Korean option would be to respond to a U.S. pre-emptive strike not with an attack on South Korea but with strikes on Japan. Not only might that lead Japan to deny us the use of bases there, without which a war in Korea would be logistically impossible, it could rally South Korean public opinion for North Korea. All Koreans hate the Japanese, and the South Korean navy is designed less for a war with the North than for a war with Japan. If North Korea called on the South to join it against Japan, the South Korean government might find itself in a very difficult position. What would we do at that point?All of these actions would require a boldness and imagination on the part of North Korea that dictatorships are not very good at producing. On the other hand, if North Korea does what we expect it to in a war, its chances of winning are poor. Might there be some North Korean von Manstein going to Mr. Kim with a Korean counterpart to Sichelschnitt, the German plan for the advance through the Ardenne in 1940? If so, like our French mentors, we could get caught with our pants down and the privy on fire.

The End of the Trump Administration

After just three months, the Trump administration appears to be over. The agenda which got President Trump elected is being tossed over the side, replaced with the usual Republican establishment policies that don't work. It looks as if we are in for more immigration, more free trade that wipes out middle class jobs, more political correctness, and more avoidable foreign wars where we have no real interests at stake. As for Donald Trump himself, he is rapidly being relegated to the role of the crazy uncle who lives in the attic.Secretary of State Rex Tillerson seems to know less about grand strategy than he does about Maya glyphs. He has set us back on an anti-Russian foreign policy course where the U.S. is to promote Jacobin concepts of "human rights" while bombing anyone and everyone around the world. Both actions work to the advantage of our Fourth Generation, non-state enemies. Coupled with a failure to reform our Second Generation armed forces, we are on the same road to over-extension and collapse that every other Power seeking world dominion has followed. Donald Trump ran against all of this, and won. But what the public wants counts for nothing to the Republican establishment.The drumbeat of bad news for those who voted for Trump because they wanted reform grows louder daily. The New York Times can hardly contain its glee. On April 13 it reported that Steve Bannon, the highest-placed anti-establishment figure in the Trump administration, may be on his way out. Coming in, according to the Times, is Kevin Hassett, who will serve as head of Trump's Council of Economic Advisors and who is rabidly pro-immigration. He has denounced the Republican Party for becoming the "Party of White." Wall Street, which wants cheap labor, will be delighted.Just the next day, April 14, the Times reported that President Trump reversed himself on NATO. While hosting NATO's Secretary General, President Trump said, "I said it was obsolete. It's no longer obsolete." NATO has not changed one iota since the election, and it has been obsolete and counter-productive since the dissolution of the Soviet Union.What does this massive bait-and-switch operation mean for the country's future? In the short term, it means the Republican Party will take a huge political bath as those who have been betrayed cease voting Republican (and probably just cease voting). Both 2018 and 2020 are looking good for the Democrats, unless they nominate a black lesbian Moslem in the latter, which is always possible.But the effects of the sell-out will only start there. The message to anti-establishment voters is that there is no hope of change through the existing political system. Anti-establishment Democrats got the same message when the party machine blocked Senator Bernie Sanders and gave the nomination to Hillary. The Sanders voters were prevented from winning. Trump's voters won, and are now watching helplessly as their victory is stolen from them by the Republican establishment. In both cases, the message is the same: the current system has lost its legitimacy.That system's political strength, its closed nature, is also a fatal substantive weakness. As John Boyd, America's greatest military theorist, often  warned, all closed systems collapse. A mindless continuation of establishment policies guarantees a cascading series of foreign policy, military, economic (i.e., a debt crisis), and political crises, which will all wrap up into one general collapse. In a Fourth Generation world, the big question is whether that multi-sided collapse will take the state itself with it.The anti-establishment voters who elected Donald Trump, along with at least some of Sanders' supporters, now face the strategic question of where do we go from here? How do we begin to prepare strategically for the collapse of the current closed system? Our goal--and again I include some Sanders voters--should be to preserve the state while reforming it. This election has shown that reform through the ballot box is impossible. It can only happen on a bottom-up basis, where grass roots reform movements become so powerful that they replace the current establishment, both its Democratic and its Republican wings. I think there is a way to do that, and I will discuss it in a future column.

The View From Olympus: Asleep on the Beach?

The Trump Defense department is dominated by Marines. The Secretary of Defense, James Mattis, was until recently a Marine General. His number two, Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Work, as a Marine captain was one of my students in the seminar that put together maneuver warfare for the Marine Corps. The Chairman of the JCS, General Joseph F. Dunford Jr., is a Marine, as is his J-5 (Strategic Plans and Policy), Lt. Gen. Frank McKenzie.All these Marines were exposed to maneuver warfare and military reform from their earliest days in the Corps onward. As the best the Marine Corps has produced, it is reasonable to think they are readers of serious military history and theory. General Mattis is notably so.So why are we hearing nothing about military reform from any of them? So far, all the Trump administration has done in defense is add $54 billion to the budget to do more of what has not worked. Friends inside the Pentagon say it's all just business as usual. There has not been so much as a hint of reform, a word about leading all our armed services toward Third Generation maneuver warfare.It is not as if a well-developed agenda for military reform is lacking. That was put together in the 1980s, and most of it is relevant, mainly because we have remained as firmly stuck in the mud of Second Generation war as we were then. It begins with setting the basic components of military strength in the right order: people, ideas, and hardware. So far, DoD's Marine leaders have continued to put hardware first with people a long way second and ideas invisible.In personnel policy, needed reforms include vesting after ten years instead of all-or-nothing retirement at twenty; ending up-or-out promotion, and reducing the vast surplus of officers above the company grades, along with the hordes of civil servants and contractors who gum up the works. Instead, it appears that the service personnel strength increases DoD now plans will give us few if any new combat units. They merely perpetuate a personnel system that has created a Brontosaurus with three teeth.And a brain the size of a walnut, because those Marines at the top of the system seem to have forgotten that, for about twenty years, the Marine Corps was the most intellectually innovative of our armed services. While still in uniform, General Michael Flynn testified to Congress that our problem is that we are fighting Fourth Generation wars and we have a Second Generation military. Was he the only senior official who knows this? How can Mattis, Work, Dunford, and McKenzie not know it? The Four Generations framework was first laid out in the Marine Corps Gazette in 1989. It has since echoed around the world. Did none of these Marines read it, or even hear of it? Did they all drink from the rive Lethe on assuming their current offices?Nor is there any sign of improvement in our miserable process of weapons' design and procurement, which continues to give us one unaffordable turkey after another, with the F-35 fighter/bomber the most egregious. President Trump himself criticized that aircraft; instead of taking advantage of his criticism to kill the program, DoD seems to have fed him the usual lies so that he now supports it.It all brings to mind the title of the best book on the origins of World War I: The Sleepwalkers. If key DoD leaders were the usual bureaucrats and technology-hucksters, I would expect nothing else. But why are we getting business as usual from Marines? Are they asleep on the beach?Business as usual has already given us four defeats at the hands of Fourth Generation opponents. It will give us more such defeats, plus, perhaps, defeat by state armed forces that have an OODA Loop faster than ours (and ours is glacial). With the Marine Corps now running DoD, it will bear primary responsibility, before the American people and the world, for more defeats, defeats proceeding not from what Marines did but from what they did not do. As General Hans von Seekt said, military leaders who are brilliant but who will not make decisions and act are useless. Das Wesentliche ist die Tat--the important thing is action.

The View From Olympus: The Women Problem (Again)

Once again, the armed services are engulfed in a "scandal" involving female service members. Beginning in the Marine Corps and now spreading to the rest of the services, it involves servicemen passing around pictures of servicewomen in various states of undress. It all sounds quaintly Edwardian, yet the services' leadership, terrified of appearing politically incorrect, will treat it like a second Rape of the Sabines. Why they remain frightened of political correctness, a.k.a. cultural Marxism, when they have a commander-in-chief who was elected in part because he defied and rejected PC, I do not know. It might help if President Trump asked to see the pictures.Such "scandals" are certain to rise again and again so long as official policy insists on ignoring human nature. For the purpose of continuing the species, that nature decrees young men will take the initiative in seeking sex with young women. They will climb every mountain, slog through any swamp, and break all regulations to do so. King Canute knew he could not command the tide; he tried to do so only to show his courtiers he could not overrule the forces of nature. DOD's leadership, along with too many politicians, apparently believe they can.Generations of human history, as far back as you want to go, tell us there is only one way to keep young men from hitting on young women: keep them physically separate. That is what we did with the WAVES, WACS, etc. of World War II. The women's barracks were not only off limits; they were under armed guard. Of course, at that time young women knew they were the objects of men's desires. Most of them welcomed the fact as useful in finding a husband.So why do we attempt the impossible, mixing young men and young women cheek-by-jowl while saying, "Now now, no hanky-panky, boys?" It is part of feminism's (and cultural Marxism's) war on men. More specifically it is an attempt to destroy the male culture of our armed services. That is the same thing as destroying the services themselves, because any military that does not have an aggressively male culture will not fight. It will come apart at the first touch of real war.Here's how the game works. First, mix young men and young women in intimate situations (our submarines now have women in their crews). Then, empower the women over the men by allowing them to charge men with "sexual harassment" for any reason or no reason at all (giving a woman an order she does not like is often cause enough). Then, rip the man away from his chain of command, put him under a commissar system (with all the commissars loyal cultural Marxists) and presume him guilty until proven innocent. Faced with this, the kind of men who want to fight--who are a rare and precious resource in any military--first become discipline problems, then get out. Many of them will go on to find other ways to fight. The rest of the men either hate their lives or--what the feminists want--accustom themselves to being ruled by women.Why this game is allowed to continue under a Trump administration I do not understand. Probably it has not yet come to the president's attention; perhaps the latest scandal will prove helpful in that regard. Secretary Mattis surely understands that armed services must have a male culture if they are to fight. Is he merely going to sit back and let the cultural Marxists launch their latest assault on our servicemen?Again, if we want to have women in our armed services--which is overall a mistake, beyond limited, non-deployable clerical and medical roles--we have a model for doing so, the way we did it in World War II. Was there still some bunga-bunga back then? Of course. But it was presumed women knew how to say "no", and men were not punished for showing sexual interest in women. That was considered, on the whole, preferable to the alternative. It is only in a world gone mad that our armed services welcome gays while sending men who dare show an attraction to the women around them on their way to the gulag.

The View From Olympus: What it Takes to Win

Last month, President Trump took an important first step toward ending our military's string of defeats by Fourth Generation opponents: he acknowledged we have lost. The president said, according to the February 28 New York Times,

We have to start winning wars again. I have to say, when I was young, in high school and college, everybody used to say we never lost a war. We never lost a war, remember? And now we never win a war. We never win. And don't fight to win. We don't fight to win. We've either got to win or don't fight at all.

Unfortunately, the president followed this important realization with a measure that will do nothing to improve our chances of winning. He increased the defense budget by $54 billion. This is a classic case of doing more of the same and expecting a different result.If one thing should be obvious about our defeats by Fourth Generation opponents, it is that they did not outspend us. America's total defense spending, as measured by the Budget Committee's "National Defense Function", is about a trillion dollars a year. Hezbollah, Somali warlords, Iraqi militias, and the Taliban have budgets in the millions of dollars, at most. If we graphed their spending and ours on the same scale, theirs would not be visible. But we still lost.I'm sure President Trump is aware he knows little about militaries. It is logical he would therefore rely heavily on his advisors. But General Flynn, whose departure I think a loss to the country, understood the real problem. Before his military retirement, he testified to Congress that our weakness is that we are fighting Fourth Generation wars and we have a Second Generation military. Secretary of Defense Mattis is very well-read in military history and theory. Surely he recognizes that more money, a quantitative solution, will not fix qualitative problems such as outdated doctrine, over-officering, and institutional cultures that range from merely dysfunctional to downright poisonous (the Army and Air Force).To win, we need military reform. The agenda laid out by the military reform movement of the 1980s remains largely valid. It begins by setting priorities straight: to win wars, people are most important, ideas come second, and hardware is a distant third. Current policy inverts that pyramid, with hardware (and the budgets it justifies) first and the other two hardly visible.Putting people first means reforms such as promoting different kinds of men (more leaders and risk-takers, fewer ass-kissers and bureaucrats), reducing the number of officers above the company grades by at least 50%, getting rid of the horde of civil servants and contractors that now clutter up our armed services, ending all-0r-nothing retirement vesting at 20 years (which undermines moral courage), abolishing the up-or-out promotion system (which forces officers to be careerists), and revamping both officer and enlisted personnel policies to create cohesive units with long-term personnel stability. A curse that has fallen on our armed services since the 1980s must also be lifted: get women out of the combat units and out of any roles in which combat might find them. The way we incorporated women in World War II offers a workable model for current policy.In terms of ideas, we need to move our doctrine from the Second to the Third Generation: from dumping firepower on opponents in a contest of attrition to maneuver warfare. Maneuver warfare must, however, be real doctrine, what our Marines, soldiers, sailors, and airmen actually do, not just words on paper. Nor is that enough: once we have institutionalized the culture of maneuver warfare, with its outward focus on combat results, we must tackle the difficult intellectual challenge posed by 4GW. That will be a long-term effort, because 4GW is itself evolving in a process likely to take most of this century.In hardware, good design normally yields simplicity, not complexity. Weapons' designs must be based on combat history, not the self-interested claims of technology hucksters. We must remember that most complex systems have simple counters and that automated systems cannot deal with situations not envisioned by their designers (who are engineers, not soldiers). All major weapons should be chosen by competitive flyoffs and shootoffs and none should be produced until they have passed operational testing and evaluation.None of this is new. But it is what Secretary Mattis needs to do if he is to give President Trump what he wants: a military that wins. Absent reform, $54 billion just digs the hole we're in a little deeper.

The View From Olympus: The Big Question

The big question about the new Trump administration is whether its foreign policy will reflect President Trump's views or long-standing Establishment positions. It is too early to offer a firm answer, but early indications are worrying.The past several weeks have seen senior administration officials traveling the world, offering reassurances to our (mostly worthless) allies that no policy changes are coming. We will continue to be committed to war with China over the Japanese Senkaku islands, which are uninhabited; war with Russia over the Baltic states (which Russia is unlikely to attack); and, most worrying, to continued confrontation with Russia for no reason in particular.The latter is the central point. President Trump, during and after his campaign, made establishing good relations with Russia the key to his foreign policy. He was correct to do so. If we are to have a  foreign policy for the 21st, not the 20th, century, it must begin with an alliance first with Russia, then with China. This alliance needs to be directed against not any other state, but violent non-state Fourth Generation entities. This new Triple Alliance, in turn, should serve as the basis for an alliance of all states with the goal of preserving the state system against Fourth Generation challenges.President Trump has yet to articulate this grand strategy. But he has tried to lay the basis for it by ending our hostility toward Russia. That is the sine qua non. Without an American-Russian alliance, the rest of the strategy is impossible.Yet President Trump's officials are sending a contrary message. We will continue to regard Russia as an opponent, they tell NATO, the EU, and Japan. With the latter, they add the same message about China, compounding the move away from the Triple Alliance we need.What does President Trump do about this? Anything? What he needs to do is gather his senior national security officials, make it clear to them that he wants an alliance with Russia and China and that he expects them to work to that end. If they will not, there's the door. They are free to resign.The senior officials are counting on the fact that the establishment would scream bloody murder if they left. But it is going to do that anyway whenever the president moves away from the Establishment's preferred policies. That does not hurt his relationship with his base. In fact, it strengthens it. Were President Trump to model his future behavior on Mother Teresa the Establishment would still pour vitriol on him because it simply hates his guts. It hates him because he is not one of them.To put the big question another way, President Trump must decide whether he will rule or merely reign. The former means he makes the key decisions and expects his subordinates to carry them out. In the latter case, he spouts off whenever he feels like it, but everyone learns to ignore it and continue with business as usual. In foreign policy and defense, nothing changes, and what we do becomes more and more irrelevant to the world we face. To his credit, President Trump appears to want to rule in domestic policy. But whether that is true in foreign policy, and specifically in grand strategy, is much less clear. He needs to make it clear, soon.

The View From Olympus: How to Prevent 4GW in America

Low-level Fourth Generation war has been underway in the U.S. for some time, largely in the form of gang activities. That is likely to continue, as will occasional terrorist incidents. This low-level warfare is a problem, but it does not threaten the state.However, the Left's reaction to the election of Donald Trump as president points to a far more dangerous kind of 4GW on our own soil. Trump's election signified, among other things, a direct rejection of the Left's ideology of cultural Marxism, which condemns Whites, men, family-oriented women, conservative blacks, straights, etc. as inherently evil. Not surprisingly, those people finally rebelled against political correctness and elected someone who represents them.That is how our system is supposed to work. But the Left only accepts the results of democracy when they win. A rejection of cultural Marxism is, to them, illegitimate. Hence we continue to see not just the hard Left but the whole Establishment howl with hatred, loathing, and contempt directed toward President Trump and those who elected him. Establishment organs such as the New York Times drip venom from every page. The Times last week went so far as to devote and entire op ed to attacking the way the president ties his necktie!This reaction will not intimidate the people who voted for President Trump. On the contrary, it increases their motivation. Their victory in November showed them they can win. They do not have to lie passive as the Left heaps manure on them. Having won once, they intend to win again and again and again.The upshot is that we now have a country with two incompatible cultures. One is our traditional, Western, Christian culture. The other is the counter-culture of the 1960s, which was and remains largely a culture of instant gratification. The cultural Marxism of the Frankfurt School created that counter-culture and still provides its ideological justification. As currently structured, our political system is not able to create a situation where these two hostile cultures can live together. That means we are headed toward large-scale 4GW on our own soil and probably a failure of the American state.This is not an outcome any conservative, or anyone with a shred of prudence, can desire. We only need look at places like Syria to see why.Fortunately, our political system has a latent component which, if activated, could enable our two cultures to live together in one American state. That latent component is federalism.The authors and ratifiers of our Constitution never imagined that life would be the same in all states. In their time, life in Massachusetts or New York was very different from life in Virginia or South Carolina. Had they been told the government they were creating would use all its power to force life to become the same in every state, they would have been appalled. We would have remained a confederation.That earlier federalism can be revived. The federal government can allow states once again to be different. In some states, such as Massachusetts or California, the counter-culture and cultural Marxism will be the norm. In other states like Ohio or Alabama the old culture will prevail. Individual Americans can move to a state that reflects their preferred culture. But all states will still be part of one country, united for foreign affairs, defense, and commerce.The red/blue map of the last election, when shown by county, raises a further possible federalism. Donald Trump carried more than 90% of all counties. The cultural Marxists and their beneficiaries are concentrated in the big cities.We might therefore want to introduce something very old: free cities. Hard Leftist cities--Portland, Oregon for example--in culturally traditional states might be allowed to secede from their state and become a free city. They would belong to no state. They would not be represented in the U.S. Senate, but could elect members of the House. Given their high population density, this would tend to create red Senates and blue Houses. In a country where federal government efforts to impose one or the other culture are likely to lead toward break-up, the inability to get extreme measures through both houses of Congress might be a good thing.Both approaches to federalism would require Constitutional amendments. But if traditionalists and cultural Marxists can agree that large-scale Fourth Generation war on American soil is a bad thing, they should be able to cooperate on passing such amendments. However much we disagree on political, cultural, and moral questions, we do share a common interest in avoiding war in our common home.

The View From Olympus: A Memo for President Trump

To: President Donald TrumpFrom: W.S. LindRe: Your request for a plan to defeat ISISYou have requested a plan to defeat ISIS. Here is one. It begins with the highest level of war and works downward, because a higher level trumps a lower level. Too often in the past, the U.S. has ignored the higher levels, focusing simply on killing enemy fighters and taking ground. It then loses, but cannot understand why it lost. The approach recommended here does not repeat that mistake. It begins at the top, with grand strategy.

• Our grand strategy should be to create an alliance of all states against violent non-state forces. Such an alliance must begin by bringing together the three real Great Powers, Russia, China, and the United States. From that perspective, ISIS is an opportunity more than a problem. China is not likely to participate, but a campaign to destroy ISIS can draw in Russia, moving us toward our grand strategic goal. More, it must draw in Russia, as an equal, if the campaign is to succeed. As we will see below, there are areas where we need Russia to take the lead, with the U.S. in a supporting role. Thanks to your good relationship with President Putin, this should be possible.
• At the strategic level, we cannot destroy ISIS through military action alone. Military pressure alone is likely to bring the various elements within ISIS together, where our strategy should be to pull them apart. That is possible, because ISIS is an unstable and unnatural coalition between Islamists and high-level Baathists from Saddam Hussein's government and security services. The religious crazies provide the front men and the cannon fodder, but ISIS is run by the Baath. Only the Baath can make things work; break the coalition and the Islamists become wraiths.

To reach the Baathists inside ISIS, who are rational men with whom deals can be made, we need Russia to take the lead. Virtually all leading Baathists trained in the Soviet Union and Russia retains ties to many of them. The deal we should offer is to recognize a new country, Sunnistan, made up of Sunni-populated areas in western Iraq and eastern Syria, and to accept that it will be led by the Baath. In return, the Baathists will cut the throats of the Islamists, something they will do with considerable enthusiasm. Their alliance is one of necessity only.

• At the level of operational art (a long-time Russian specialty), we need to encircle Raqqa, ISIS's capital. The purpose is to put the Baathists on notice that time is not on their side and to show we are ready to move quickly to support them if they accept the deal we offer. Here again we need Russia to take the lead. The U.S. military sees campaigns in terms of linear wars of attrition, not encirclement. Even if that were to succeed against ISIS, it would be indecisive, because it would just push them out the back door. The campaign should be commanded by a Russian general with a combined Russian-American staff where Russians serve in the top intelligence (J-2) and operations (J-3) billets.

On the ground, the U.S. should offer a small, highly mobile force suited to battles of encirclement. This is not something the U.S. military is prepared to provide, but it can be cobbled together from units we have. All combat vehicles should be wheeled, not tracked, LAVs (Marine Corps) and Strykers (Army). The force should not be larger than 10,000 men, most of them fighters, with sea-based logistics. The choice of commanders from battalion level on up will be of critical importance. We have very few officers who can do maneuver warfare. If the key billets go to typical process-followers, we will fail. It must also be made clear to all American commanders that they will take orders from Russians.

• Tactics should not offer much of a challenge. Our force will not attempt to take urban areas aginst serious opposition. Once Raqqa is encircled, local militias can both man the lines of encirclement and, if it should be necessary, take defended urban areas. They will also deal with captured Islamists once our force, its mission done, leaves. The goal should be to get in and out in ninety days.

There you have it, Mr. President. No plan guarantees success, but this plan at least offers a chance of a decisive result, which more bombing and more advisors do not. Perhaps it is time to stop doing more of the same thing and expecting a different result.

The View From Olympus: His Majesty's Birthday

January 27 is the birthday of Germany's last legitimate ruler and my reporting senior, Kaiser Wilhelm II. As usual, I placed a telephone call to him to offer my congratulations. I am never quite sure where I am going to find the Reisekaiser; this year I reached him at Wilhelmshafen, the main base of the High Seas Fleet.After offering my best wishes for his birthday, I asked, "What brings you to Wilhelmshafen this time?""Well, I do like the town's name," he replied. "Now that I think of it, I should order that the main seaport in all of Germany's colonies be named Wilhelmshafen. I'll instruct my ambassadors to suggest to other colonial powers that they do the same. I'm sure they will be delighted at the idea.""No doubt," I replied. "We in the American republic now have a president who likes to put his name on things. Do you see any other similarities between him and your Imperial self?""Quite a few, actually," replied the Kaiser. "I made Germany great, and he will make America great again, so long as he follows one rule: don't go to war.""But I haven't answered your question," His Majesty continued. "I'm here for the simultaneous commissioning of twenty ships!""If they are battleships and battle cruisers, I hope there are some Mackensens among them," I ventured."Not a one," the Kaiser said. "They are all transports.""Why does his majesty find transports of interest, if I may be so bold?" I inquired."Because they will be used in the greatest amphibious operation of all time," the Kaiser said."The enterprise of England?" I asked."No, although Philip II still wants to give that another go," His Majesty replied. "These ships, and others like them building in all the shipyards of Europe, will carry out Operation Charles Martel: the expulsion of all the Moslems from Europe! The commander will be none other than Don Juan de Austria, the victor of Lepanto, come to save Christendom from the Turk a second time.""Just how will this work?" I asked."Mit Eisen und Blut!" replied the Kaiser. "We will round them up, put them on transports and, in a single wave, land them somewhere on the coast of North Africa. The High Seas Fleet and the Grand Fleet will jointly provide gunfire support, if it's needed. The Mackensens you love will chime in, have no fear!""But how is sad, beaten down, gutless Europe ever going to bring itself to do something like this?" I asked plaintively."Have you been sleeping at your telegraph key?" the Kaiser replied. "The tide has turned. The filthy Jacobinism that has ruled Europe since 1918 is on the run. President Trump's election has given Europeans who still believe in Faith and Fatherland hope. Marine le Pen, France's new Joan of Arc, will be its next president. All over Europe, people are remembering who they are. There is joy in heaven, let me tell you. Christendom's armies are on the march again!""I cannot help but wonder if Your Majesty is caught in a bit of a contradiction here," I said hesitantly. "When you were on the German throne, you allied with the Ottoman Empire. You visited Moslem countries and were quite friendly to Islam.""You are correct," His Majesty answered. "But I was friendly to Islam in Islam's portion of the globe. I would show the same friendship if I were in charge of Berlin today. But I would not be an idiot like Merkel and invite them to take over Germany and Europe.""You are, I take it, no admirer of the current chancellor?" I suggested."No woman has done more to prove I was right when I said women are for children, the kitchen, and the church. She has inflicted on Germany more damage than any chancellor since Adolf Hitler, flooding the Fatherland with a million Arabs, most of them Islamics. Germany was a safe and well ordered country. Now, all Germans have to be afraid on their own streets. Were I still Kaiser, I'd sell her to the Grand Vizier's harem.""I think Your Majesty is right: the tide has turned. Might it turn so strongly that Germany again has a monarch, and your mortal remains can be returned home from the Netherlands?" I asked."I will answer your question with another question: did not even the dumbest Hohenzollern give Germany better government than the CDU and SPD provide now? And with that I must be off to the General Staff's railway mobilization planning office. We will soon be moving a million people to Germany's ports, and the trains must run on time."

The View From Olympus: Maneuver Warfare and Navies

The debate in this country about maneuver warfare has centered on the Army and the Marine Corps, not the Navy. (It influenced the Air Force through John Boyd and Pierre Sprey, especially in the development and procurement of the A-10; for a recent look at air power and maneuver warfare, see the K.u.K. Marine Corps Air Cooperation Field Manual, available here. That traces to the origin of the debate, in my critique of the 1976 version of the Army's basic Field Manual, FM 100-5. The fact that, of all the U.S. armed services, it was the Marine Corps that showed most interest in the concept kept the focus on land warfare. History also played a role: maneuver warfare as we now know it was developed by and institutionalized in the Prussian/German Army between 1807 and 1945.But it did not start there. It started in the Royal Navy in the second half of the eighteenth century. Years ago, I asked John Lehman when he thought it began, and his answer was when George Anson became First Lord of the Admiralty in 1751. Anson, who led a round-the-world raid on the Spanish in 1740-1744, taking the Manila Galleon, certainly had the characteristics maneuver warfare seeks in a leader.Another British admiral, I think, did more than Anson to promote the outward focus maneuver warfare demands. That Admiral was the Hon. John Byng, who, on March 17, 1757, following his court martial, was shot by a firing squad on the quarterdeck of H.M.S. Monarch. Of critical importance, Byng was executed not for what he did, but what he didn't do. The charge against him was that, in action in command of a British fleet fighting the French off the Mediterranean island of Minorca, Byng had not done his utmost. By punishing with death a sin of omission, not commission, the Royal Navy created a bias for action in its officers that, by the time of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, had largely institutionalized what we know as maneuver warfare: outward focus on decisive results rather than inward focus on rules, orders, etc.; valuing initiative over obedience; decentralizing decision-making and depending on self more than imposed discipline. As Voltaire famously wrote, "Sometimes the British shoot an admiral to encourage the others."All this seemingly ancient history may have a new relevance in the U.S. Navy. The current PACFLEET commander, Admiral Scott Swift, is doing his utmost to promote the culture of maneuver warfare among his commanders. Driven by a probably accurate concern that, in a naval war with China (which God forbid) our communications will quickly be taken down, he is attempting to drive decision-making down and accustom his fleet to mission-type orders. He appears to grasp the fact that, as Marine Corps General Mike Myatt puts it, "Maneuver warfare is not centralized decision-making and decentralized execution. It is centralized vision and decentralized decision-making."If there is one book I could recommend to Admiral Swift, it would be Andrew Gordon's The Rules of the Game. This very readable volume tells the story of how and why, in the 19th century, the Royal Navy lost the culture of maneuver warfare and focused inward again. At the heart of the matter lay signaling; improved signaling gave fleet commanders the illusion that they could at all times control the actions of every ship in their fleet. And so they did. Gordon does not rest content with history; he relates that 19th century experience to what navies are doing today, as billions of dollars spent on communication equipment again creates the illusion of perfect centralized control.I wish there were a book I could recommend to Admiral Swift on the development of maneuver warfare in the Royal Navy in the eighteenth century. Sadly, no such book exists. I had lunch with Andrew Gordon a few years ago at the Royal Navy's Maritime Warfare Centre near Portsmouth, England, which was previously the Allies' D-Day headquarters. I told him I wanted to write that prequel to his book. He replied that unfortunately, the source material does not exist because the Royal Navy officers who were making it happen were not writing it down. Historians are restricted almost entirely to written sources. If there are none, the history cannot be written.But it happened, and we know it happened because it was a basis of Britain's vast naval superiority over the French Navy 1792-1815. That superiority had not previously existed; had the French Royal Navy not been qualitatively equal to the British during the American Revolution, the Queen's governor general would probably still be sitting in our capital of Philadelphia.So fair winds and following seas to Admiral Swift. He has a large task ahead of him. But it has been done, it did work, and what has been done once can be done again. Though we will perhaps need to shoot an admiral pour encourager les autres.

The View From Olympus: Korea and the Art of the Deal

As North Korea inches its way toward possessing an ICBM than can hit the United States with a nuclear warhead--both of dubious reliability--we can expect a Korean "crisis" to grow. In fact, there need be no crisis. A deal with North Korea is not difficult to envision, and America now has a president who is good at making deals.The conventional wisdom presents North Korea as a rogue state ruled by a madman, Kim Jong Un. He, and it, are irrational, dangerous, and impossible to predict. Sanctions having failed, we must pile up more sanctions. There is no alternative to growing hostility between North Korea and the U.S., a course which is likely at some point to lead to war. In the meantime, we must keep thousands of U.S. troops in South Korea, a country far stronger than North Korea.But there is another way to look at the situation, one that sees continuity rather than irrationality in North Korean policy. For centuries, Korea, then one country, was known as the "Hermit Kingdom". Like Japan under the last Shogunate, Korea was closed to foreigners, trade, and all outside contact. Its government, a monarchy, was centralized, powerful, and all-controlling. An "ideology" of sorts, Confucianism, was the only tolerated way of thinking. The king was regarded as semi-divine.From this perspective, today's North Korea is merely an extension of historic Korea. The Kims are a new dynasty, behaving very much like the old dynasty. North Korea's legitimacy is rooted in this continuity; it is South Korea, not North Korea, that is a historic anomaly.North Korea's stress on military power, including obtaining nuclear weapons and delivery systems, is defensive, not offensive, in motivation. If you want to wall yourself off from the rest of the world, you had better be strong militarily. Otherwise, you can expect a visit from Commodore Perry's Black Ships.If we can accept today's North Korea as normal Korea, a deal ending the risk of another Korean war is not difficult to envision. South Korea is able to defend itself against conventional attack. The U.S. keeps South Korea under its nuclear umbrella but pulls out its ground and air forces. The U.S. and North Korea establish normal diplomatic relations. Negotiations begin to formally end the Korean War; at present, there is no peace treaty, just an armistice.North Korea remains an unofficial nuclear power, like Israel. The North Korean government knows perfectly well that if they shot a nuclear missile at the United States, one that would probably blow up in flight or suffer a warhead failure, North Korea and the Kim dynasty would be obliterated. If they doubted that under President Obama, they will not doubt it under President Trump.The U.S., South Korea, and the world would accept North Korea's right to be the Hermit Kingdom. There would be no attempts to suck it into the Globalist Empire. Should it wish to join the alliance of all states against violent non-state entities, it would be welcome.Should North Korea wish to go further in opening itself to the world, a serious effort at reunification of South and North Korea could be possible. Obviously, the South Koreans do not want to rejoin the Hermit Kingdom. A reunited Korea would be modeled, economically and politically, on South Korea.But there could be one interesting twist: what if Korea reunified under a constitutional monarchy, with North Korea's Kim dynasty on the throne? The king would not have much political power, but he would have all the honors due a head of state. Might the Kims like having all the fun without the work of ruling?That might seem far-fetched. But in the art of the deal, no potential sweetener should go unexplored. Korea offers a situation where all parties need a deal. The U.S. now has a president who knows how to make deals. Can we imagine President Trump flying into Pyongyang to put an end to the North Korean threat? I can, and I suspect he can too.

The View From Olympus: On Intelligence

The Establishment's latest hissy-fit over Donald Trump was sparked by his questioning of some assessments by the U.S. intelligence community (CIA, DIA, NSA, etc.). According to the Establishment, a president or other decision-maker must regard intelligence as hard fact. To do otherwise is to create a "crisis". The January 6 New York Times hyperventilated on its front page,

Mr. Trump will have to say whether he accepts the agencies' basic findings on the Russian role [in the U.S. election]--or hold to his previous contention that inept, politicized American spies have gotten the perpetrator of the hacking wrong. That would throw the intelligence agencies into a crisis of credibility and status with few, if any, precedents.

In fact, President-elect Trump's doubts about the accuracy of our intelligence shows that he understands intel better than does the New York Times. Put simply, intel is never hard data. It is always a "best guess", and history is littered with cases where it has been wrong.The nature of intelligence is such that it is always incomplete. In any given situation, you do not know how incomplete it is. Further, some of it is always wrong, and you, the user, cannot know how much is wrong or what portions are wrong. Far from being hard data, intelligence is the world seen through a glass, darkly.Obviously, the degree of incompleteness and the extent of intel's error vary widely from case to case. If you have broken the other sides' codes, your intel is probably more accurate than it otherwise would be--unless your opponent has realized you've broken his codes and is feeding you false information. But even when we were reading the traffic protected by the Germans' Enigma machine in World War II, the Ardennes offensive of December, 1944 caught us completely by surprise. Suspecting we were reading their mail, the Germans kept their planning off the Enigma network. As is often the case, over-confidence in our own intelligence set us up to be surprised.Intel is always incomplete and some of it is always wrong because of its nature. Gaining intelligence is a competitive action against a thinking opponent who tries to deceive you. Unless he is a complete moron, he sometimes succeeds. He either causes you to miss something entirely, or he fools you into believing something that is not so. His goal can be either making you uncertain, or making you certain but wrong; the latter is deception, which is hard to achieve but has big pay-offs.As if all this were not enough to make intelligence a very squishy product, you next must consider the problem of bias. All intelligence agencies have biases, and those biases shape their findings. U.S. intelligence agencies are strongly biased toward telling a president what he wants to hear. Remember, the "findings" that Russia tried to elect Donald Trump were made under a president who sees Russia as an adversary. Then, the agencies are biased toward inflating the threat, because that supports their claim on more resources. Finally, their internal factionalism, such as the division between humint guys and photo interpreters, also creates biases and "filters" that distort findings.If you put this all together, you realize that a president who is skeptical about intelligence products is probably going to be better anchored in reality than a president who accepts what the intel community hands him. If he is a clever president, he will develop his own sources of information beyond what the system gives him. Were I President Trump, I would read the Financial Times over breakfast every morning. When trying to figure out what is happening in places such as the Middle East, I might even pick up the phone to my good friend Vladimir and ask him, "So what are your intel folks telling you about this one?"Admiral Rickover said, "You have to use the chain of command to pass your orders downward, but anyone who relies on the chain of command for his information is a fool." As President-elect Trump has repeatedly demonstrated, he is no fool.

The View From Olympus: Is the Marine Corps Waking Up?

From the mid-1970s to the early 1990s, the U.S. Marine Corps established itself as the leading service intellectually. The ultimate outcome was the adoption by the Corps of a new doctrine of maneuver warfare, which occurred in 1989. The driving agent of change was the Marine Corps Commandant at that time, General Al Gray.The Marine Corps' intellectual endeavors paid large dividends. Not only did the Corps get a modern doctrine, its awakening drew strong support from Capitol Hill, the press, and the general public. I was Hill staff at the time, and the Corp's clout in Congress was the envy of every other service.Then, after General Gray left the Commandancy, the Marine Corps went to sleep. The doctrine remained words on paper. Few efforts were made to align what the Corps did with what it said. The result today is a Marine Corps that can talk about maneuver warfare but, aside from a few islands created by individual commanders, cannot fight as a maneuver doctrine recommends. Like the U.S. Army, it just puts firepower on targets and expects that magically to yield victory. Against Fourth Generation opponents, it guarantees defeat.When General Robert B. Neller became Commandant earlier this year, no one expected any change in this situation. Neller was virtually unknown. To everyone's surprise, he asked the question, "Are we really doing maneuver warfare? I'm not sure we are." More, he has gone on to encourage others in the Corps to ask the same question. It is beginning to look as if the Marine Corps is waking up.Where this will lead is anyone's guess. But with the Commandant's encouragement the Marine Corps' Training and Education Command (T&E) at Quantico sponsored a conference in late October to address the question, "Are we doing maneuver warfare?" I was there, along with John Schmitt, the author of FMFM/MCDP 1, Warfighting; Bruce Gudmundsson, author of Stormtroop Tactics, the definitive history of the development of maneuver warfare in the German Army in World War I; and Marines ranking from corporal to brigadier. Unusually, the conference was run on a civilian-clothes, no-ranks basis, which led to everyone speaking up. Even more unusually, instead of the self-congratulations that are the norm in American armed services, the critiques offered were brutally frank. Not one person said the Marine Corps has institutionalized maneuver warfare. On the contrary, the conference concluded Marines can talk about maneuver warfare but they cannot do it.The slides from the briefing produced by T&E that summarizes the conference's finding are attached below. Great credit is due to T&E for not sanitizing the report. A few recommendations fell out, including making the Training & Readiness manual at the discretion of the battalion commander (at present it reduces both to dog training while leaving the battalion no time for free-play exercises), but most of what was discussed made it.The question lies squarely on General Neller's desk. As I saw in the Al Gray years, change will only occur if the Commandant drives it.  

The View From Olympus: China and Iran

President-elect Donald Trump's choices for cabinet positions have reassured his supporters that change will be real. However, for his presidency to begin successfully, there are two countries where change is needed in his approach. Those two countries are China and Iran.As always, to see how we should relate to any state we must begin with our own grand strategic goals. The most important of those goals should be forming an alliance of all states to confront the threat Fourth Generation war presents to the state system itself. Obviously, we want that alliance to include China and Iran; all states means precisely that. China is one of three genuine Great Powers (Britain and France have that title by courtesy). An alliance of all states is possible only if it begins with an alliance of the Great Powers. Otherwise, Great Power rivalry will undermine it from the outset. Iran is an important regional power whose cooperation against 4GW elements in the Mideast is important. At present, Iran is playing a central role in upholding the state in Syria.This grand strategy reminds us that in any situation, the worst possible outcome for our interests is the disintegration of another state and its replacement by a stateless nursery for more 4GW elements. The U.S. foreign policy Establishment has given us that outcome in Iraq, in Libya, and, in part, in Syria. A Trump administration should do its utmost not to add to that list of failures.In this context, Mr. Trump's initial actions vis-a-vis China, including receiving a congratulatory phone call from the leader of Taiwan, do serve to strengthen his bargaining position with Beijing. But it is important he accept the "one China" policy, with which both the Chinese Communist Party and the Kuomintang agree. Taiwan is an existential issue for China because of China's history of centrifugal movements. If one province can become independent, so can others, and China would be heading back to a situation of "warring states". That is the nightmare of every Chinese.Because any movement of Taiwan toward independence has this implication for China, Taiwan has the highest potential for bringing about a war between China and the U.S. Such a conflict would be a disaster for both parties. But from the United States' standpoint, it would be a lose-lose scenario. In the unlikely event the U.S. lost the war, our Great Power status would be called into question. If China lost, the result could be even worse. A defeat might destroy the legitimacy of the current Beijing government and with it the Chinese state. China could disintegrate into warring states in a huge victory for 4GW elements. We need China to be a center and source of order in the world. A defeat followed by disintegration would turn China into a vast source of disorder.As China resumes her historical Great Power status, we should not merely allow but encourage her to take over the job of preserving peace, order, and commerce in a growing portion of the world. China must agree that is her role, but Chinese culture puts high value on order and harmony so that should not be too difficult. In that context, if China wishes to take over the job of protecting freedom of the seas in the South China Sea and is able to do so, we should welcome it. We should have no desire to be the world's policeman. China, like Russia and the U.S., should have her sphere of influence, again and always in the context of upholding order and the state system.Much the same is true of Iran on a regional basis. If the U.S. and Iran were to go to war--and Mr. Trump was elected in part because he opposed avoidable wars in the Middle East--an Iranian defeat might lead to the break-up of Iran, where the Persians are not a majority of the population. As has been the case in Iraq and Libya (thank you, Hillary), a disintegration of Iran into stateless disorder would be far worse for our interests than is the present Iranian state.From this perspective, we should accept the Iran deal negotiated by the Obama administration. It may not be ideal in its terms, but if we tear it up, we will be on course either to accept a nuclear Iran in the near future or go to war with Iran, with all the dangers therein described above. Of these three alternatives, the present deal is clearly the least bad.The foreign policy opposite of the neo-con/Jacobin "idealism" of Hillary and President Obama is realism. It is reasonable for those of us who supported Mr. Trump to expect realism will be the basis of his foreign policy. Realism often means accepting arrangements that are less than ideal. Realists do accept them because the other plausible alternatives are worse.In the 21st century, the worst outcome of all will be destroying another state. Whenever and wherever the question of war against a state comes up, our thinking must begin with the realization that "victory" may, indeed is likely to, yield that outcome. We, and China and Russia and Iran and all other states face real enemies in the form of non-state opponents. Let us join together in confronting those enemies rather than pursue obsolete conflicts with each other.

The View From Olympus: Mattis

President-elect Donal Trump's selection of retired Marine Corps General James N. Mattis is a brilliant move. For the first time, we will have a Secretary of Defense who understands war--and also understands that much needs to change in the Pentagon if we are to win wars. General Mattis is a true warrior-scholar, someone who has read deeply in military history and theory and also has experienced combat at several levels of command. By choosing General Mattis, President-elect Trump has justified the hopes that so many of us have for his presidency.I have only met with General Mattis once, when he was in command of Quantico, the base where the Marine Corps' schools are located. He invited me down to discuss those schools and Marine Corps education generally. I proposed requiring "the canon" as a pre-requisite for Command & Staff College. "The canon" is the list of seven books which, if read in the right order, take the reader from the First Generation of Modern War into the Fourth Generation. General Mattis seemed favorable to the idea, but in the end nothing happened.This may point to a need for an Undersecretary of Defense who understands how the Pentagon works and knows how to make it act even when it does not want to. Getting a bureaucracy to do what you want it to is a fine art, and I am not certain it is one in which General Mattis excels. The best man for that job would be Chuck Spinney. Spinney was one of the core members of the Military Reform Movement of the 1980s, and he spent his whole career working in the Pentagon. He knows both what needs to be done and how to get it done. A team of Mattis and Spinney would be unbeatable.That team will face and imposing agenda. It begins with the subject of my last column, adopting a grand strategy appropriate to a world where we need and alliance of all states against non-state forces. In the 21st century, the state system itself is at stake. War between states is obsolete, because the losing state is likely to disintegrate into another stateless region, which will be a worse threat than was the original state.This new grand strategy means that many of the systems and forces the Pentagon is paying for are obsolete, because they are useful only for wars between states. This is good news, because it means that, by ceasing to build a military museum, we can save a great deal of money.That in turn is important in confronting the next challenge, the looming international debt crisis. We are either going to reduce defense (and other government) spending to the point where we can begin paying off the national debt, or we are going to have a debt crisis where the defense budget plunges to a small fraction of its current level. Prevention being better than cure, Secretary Mattis will be looking for programs to cut. At the head of the list should be the F-35, a poorly-designed, untested airplane on which we are expected to spend $1.6 trillion. Alternatives lie readily to hand: reopen the F-22 production line for the "high" end of the "high-low mix" and buy the excellent and cheap Swedish Gripen fighter/bomber for the "low" end of the mix. Other countries participating in the F-35 program should be allowed to purchase (and build parts for) the F-22 instead.Then come reforms to make our armed forces more effective in combat. Two should be top priority. First, get the women out of all combat arms units. Their presence severely undermines unit cohesion because instead of becoming a "band of brothers", the men see each other as rivals for the attention of the women. In combat, men will drop the mission to protect the women. And the women hold a whip hand over the men, because if a man does anything a woman does not like, including giving her an order, she can charge him with "sexual harassment". The man is presumed guilty until proven innocent, and the case is handled, not by the chain of command, but by a commissar system biased toward the women. We need to reduce the presence of women throughout the military, but getting them out of combat units is essential, or those units will not fight.We also need to move our Second Generation armed forces into the Third Generation, also known as maneuver warfare. On paper, the Marine Corps adopted maneuver doctrine in the early 1990s. However, it never institutionalized it, so it can't actually do it. The new Marine Corps Commandant, General Neller, is trying to change this. The other three services remain purely Second Generation, reducing war to putting firepower on targets through highly centralized, slow-moving, predictable processes. We do not know whether even Third Generation state armed services can successfully carry on Fourth Generation war, but we do know that Second Generation militaries cannot.That's a full plate, and there is much more beyond this. If anyone can do it, General Mattis can--if he has someone by his side who understands how the bureaucracy works.

The View From Olympus: The Most Important Thing

The election of Donald Trump opens the door to change and reform in many areas. The most important, in terms of our country's future, is grand strategy and foreign policy (the latter, understood correctly, is a subset of the former). The United States needs a grand strategy aimed at preserving the state system.Our present grand strategy was conceived in a world of states in conflict with each other. Its purpose is to make America dominant over all other states. The U.S. is not the first state to attempt this. Like its predecessors, it is failing. No state has ever been powerful enough to establish the "universal monarchy", as it was once known. Attempts to do so have always resulted in overreach, then fall. Remember, Portugal once ruled half the world.But the most important thing is not that we reduce our goals to match our power in the world of conflict between states. The most important thing is that we realize Fourth Generation war poses so serious a threat to the whole state system that conflict between states has become obsolete. We need an alliance of all states against Fourth Generation entities. If we and other Great Powers, especially Russia and China, continue to squabble among ourselves, the 21st century is likely to witness the end of the whole state system. Mere anarchy will be loosed upon the world.President-elect Donald Trump has already spoken with the leaders of Russia and China, telling them he wants better relations with both. That is a promising start. An alliance of all states should begin with a Triple Alliance of the three strongest Great Powers. Britain and France will probably join. Those five (who conveniently make up the permanent membership of the U.N. Security Council) should be the policy-makers. Any more and decisions will become impossible.I do not know whether President-elect Trump or his advisors understand the context within which we need a new Triple Alliance or Quintuple Alliance, and here as so often in grand strategy context is important. It is, again, the need for all states to work together against Fourth Generation, non-state entities that wage war. The alliance is a means, not an end.The end is that whenever 4GW manifests itself, wherever it does so, all states work together to defeat it. The power of Fourth Generation entities, or at least some of them, at the moral level of war is so great that, even with all the states in the world against them, beating them will not be easy. Let me say it once more: what is at stake in the 21st century is the state system itself. If events remain on their current course, by the year 2100 the state will probably be just a memory (a fond one, as in Syria, Libya, and Iraq) in much of the world. States have never played for bigger stakes.A corollary of a grand strategy that unites all states against violent non-state entities is that war between states must disappear. Too often, the losing state will disintegrate, creating a new petri dish of 4GW entities that is a far worse threat than the old state could ever be.Therefore, the new alliance of all states will work assiduously to avoid and prevent wars between states. Any state that appears to be moving toward war with another state will find the whole world in its path yelling "Stop!" Ironically, this Realpolitik may do more to prevent interstate conflict than have all the "peace movements" led by idealists.Some may ask, what about Iran, North Korea, and other "rogue" states? Do we want them in this alliance? Yes. "All states" means just that. Iran faces 4GW threats from non-Persians within her borders. North Korea does not face a 4GW threat, but she could be a useful ally, and we do not want her providing arms and expertise to non-state entities because of a desperate need for cash. A peace treaty with North Korea, followed by the removal of U.S. troops from South Korea, is just the kind of deal President Trump should be good at making.I hope the Trump White House will take a serious look at revamping America's grand strategy so it fits a century where the most dangerous threat will be Fourth Generation war. There is at least a chance it will do so. Under Hillary, or any other Establishment president of either party, there would be no chance at all.