I promise myself to take a break from the 4GW debates, only to have DNI bring up another issue that ignites my passions.

I swear folks, I read more than DNI. It just occupies a disproportionately large percentage of my posts…

So Robert Hirsch is worried about the risks of oil production peaking. Kenneth S. Deffeyes thinks it has already happened. John Robb uses the assumption of oil peaking as background in his system disruption studies.

First of all, since I haven’t written about this on the blog before, let me begin by apologizing in advance if I lose my temper over this subject. It gets my goat.

I take issue with the term “peak oil.” I understand that people use it as a general label for discussions of the challenges we face in meeting our worldwide energy needs, but it still irritates me.

Let’s begin with the unextraordinary nature of a “peak.” Anyone who has taken elementary Calculus has learned that any continuous function will have a maximum over a finite domain. So if we’re considering world oil production over 250 years, say, there will necessarily be a peak. This, as mathematicians say, is trivial.

But I ought to be fair. The peak oil volk don’t just claim that there is some maximum to world oil production, they claim that world oil production follows a bell curve, meaning that the peak corresponds to the point when half the globe’s oil being consumed. Furthermore, the bell curve tells us that production will drop at an increasing rate as we start to move past the peak.

All we have to do now is assume monotonically increasing global oil demand and we have everything we need to paint our doomsday scenarios. Thankfully Hirsch and Robb steer clear of the most dramatic of these. Deffeyes, however, cannot help himself. He claims that “By 2025, we’re going to be back in the Stone Age.”

So, by this line of reasoning, we’ve got lots of problems. And I don’t object to the assertion that we’ve got problems. I object to the line of reasoning used to justify why we have problems and describe the nature of those problems. Why? Because it all depends upon the assumption I placed in bold two paragraphs ago. Why do we believe that world oil production follows a bell curve?

Because a geologist named M. King Hubbert said so. He built himself a little model and produced the bell curve. And his bell curve accurately predicted the peaking of oil production in the lower 48 states. But that’s it.

One.

One example does not a proof make.

Especially when it comes to complex systems. And if the world oil market isn’t a complex system, then I don’t know what is. Take, for example, the oil shocks of the 1970s.

A few outliers like the 1970s oil shocks might not look like much of a difference when one compares it to an idealized bell curve (”hey, it still kinda looks like a bell curve”) but consider this: the experience of that oil shock changed the politics, economies and populations of the world, producing significant and long-term dynamics. Brazil committed to decreasing its oil production, which meant that 20 years later it became a net exporter of oil. The world economy staggered, leading oil consumption to fall (production took roughly a decade to reach pre-1980s levels). It ushered in smaller, fuel efficient cars to the American market. In short, we have multi-scale and mult-phase dynamics in the political, economic, social, geological and technological realms. Hubbert’s model is restricted to geologic considerations.

Proponents of peak oil thinking acknowledge that issues like politics, security and economics are external to the Hubbert model, yet they never seem to recognize the need to defend why they feel that the model is still relevent. Incidentally, these assumptions explain why Hubbert’s model worked so well for the lower 48 states - political, technology, security and economic issues were external between the late 1950s (when Hubbert did his work) and the early 1970s. The US economy was experiencing uninterrupted growth, the time horizon Hubbert faced was brief enough that long-term dynamics didn’t have time to get into play, security was more than sufficient to allow economically efficient extraction and the political climate was stable.

Now ask yourself, how many of these assumptions hold for the world oil market of the 21st Century?

I am not saying we don’t have a problem. I am concerned about our risk exposure to short-term supply disruptions caused by the low global surplus between production and demand. Consequently I think that there is a compelling moral and economic argument for corproations (especially those that operate large fleets of vehicles) to invest in alternative energy sources as a real option to mitigate their risk exposure to oil prices. I just wish people didn’t use the concept of “peak oil” to advocate that position!

W00t I say! Mountain Runner drops right into the middle of the 4GW scrum and offers the sort of historical perspective that the debate has been missing. He examines the historical narrative of 4GW and finds it extremely wanting:

Before and after the creation of the Westphalian state system in 1648, rulers relied on hired soldiers for military requirements. Defensive and offensive needs were tied to commercial aspirations, whether it was the defense of a town or the attacking of another kingdom. Limits on state capital prevented maintaining the desired and necessary armies and navies to both grow the state and protect its resources. As states accumulated wealth and gained power, they grew more autonomous in the international system and more institutional. Reflecting their need for order and stability as they conducted business to increase their wealth, states sought order and accountability in the international system.

The shining light of an intelligent design of the State, with its mythical powers immediately apparent and equal through the centuries, did not happen. Fourth Generation War theorists are prone to say Clausewitzian war is over because the state is losing primacy. In reality, the state had primacy for maybe one hundred years. The United States wasn’t a coherent state until after the Civil War (always referred to as “These United States” and frequently at war along and inside its border). The rise of the international system usurped power and autonomy from the states, which 4GW’er fail to acknowledge as part of evolution. Philip Bobbitt’s description of the evolution of the state-nation, nation-state, market-state is useful here, but not much use to 4GW’ers.

Clausewitz did not write the “State” had sole power to conduct war. This thought, a basis for 4GW, lay in revisionist interpretations of the evolution and concept of war, the writings of Clausewitz, and, most importantly, the ever-present employment of political, economic, ideological, and military means to ends.

…

There is no crisis of legitimacy in the state system. Roles of states are changing, as they always have. The power of Diasporas is increasing. The value of inter-related commerce and societal pressures increases. But none of these are properly addressed by 4GW, but in fact, improperly attributed. States are losing their autonomy (although Putin’s Russia is fight that trend) willingly. As states evolve, voluntarily ceding autonomy, as in the European Union today, as in the states of the US federal project a century and a half ago (read about Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton, Madison, Jackson to see how tenuous our “State” was and how it doesn’t fit in the 4GW theory). States did not magically appear in the present image and will continue to evolve.

The theory of Fourth Generation Warfare fails when applied to reality and as a theory itself. It fails to prescribe, predict, describe, or explain behavior. Its explanations of relationships and ideas do not connect when exposed to historical realities.

Read the whole thing.

EBO critics have been scoring some critical hits recently.

Zenpundit linked to an extremely potent four page essay by Dr. Tim Challans challenging the DoD’s vision of Effects-Basd Operations (EBO). InsideDefense.com posted an email from retired USMC Lt. Gen Paul van Riper to AF Lt. Gen. David Deptula concerning the incoherence of EBO (subscription required, sorry). Recall that Riper commanded the red forces in a notorious 2002 wargame where he savaged the EBO-focused blue forces… before the organizers reset the exercise, told him to “play by the rules” and declared the game a victory.

Two points from Riper’s email are so powerful that they bear repeating here. First, regarding complexity:

. . . neither [Deptula] nor Colonel Warden showed that they had any understanding of the differences between structurally complex systems — such as integrated air defense systems and power grids — and interactively complex systems — such as economic and leadership systems. Operational planners can understand the first using the reductionism of systems analysis. They can only understand the second type of system holistically. Tools for one type of system are inappropriate for the other.

Second, regarding EBO’s ignorance of maneuver warfare:

…by introducing the effects-approach you contributed, in my opinion, to a decades long undermining of the powerful and coherent professional lexicon created at some cost during the intellectual renaissance of the late 1970s and 1980s…
The dichotomy you build between those who support an attrition focused approach and an effects-based one is false. You apparently missed reading or understanding such seminal documents as the Army’s 1982 and 1986 editions of Field Manual 100-5, Operations or the Marine Corps’ 1988 Fleet Marine Force Field Manual 1, Warfighting. The latter document states on page 59; “. . . the aim in maneuver warfare is to render the enemy incapable of resisting by shattering his moral and physical cohesion–his ability to fight as an effective, coordinated whole–rather than to destroy him physically through incremental attrition, which is generally more costly and time consuming.” Contrast this with your words in Effects-Based Operations: Change in the Nature of Warfare:

‘Today, the permanence of the philosophies of attrition and annihilation tend to inhibit the development of organizations and doctrine that capitalize on effects-based operations that enable parallel war.’

I am unsure of who you think had or has this ‘permanence’ for attrition and annihilation. It certainly was and is not the mindset of the soldiers and Marines I have known over the past twenty years. Nor in recent years have I found many sailors or airmen with such a mindset.

EBO reeks of an overly-technical view of warfare. If it reflects that some folks have realized that annihilation is not necessary for incapacitation, then that’s great. But instead of trying to build their own doctrine from scratch, they ought to integrate this realization with the existing doctrine Riper cites. An existing doctrine, by the way, that recognizes that adversary systems (as a whole) are not the same as adversary infrastructure.

We can’t avoid or innovate away the need for strategic thinking in leaders. Technology, networks and the like ought to improve the tools available to those leaders, but ultimately success depends upon the strategic skill of our leaders. None of this is new - Wohlstetter (among others) was making this point fifty years ago. His 1954 SAC bomber study wasn’t influential because of its technical insight, it was influential because it was framed with an understanding of the fundamental strategic environment. He portrayed the Soviet armed forces as a thinking adversary, who had to be answered with more than OR optimizations. All conflict-worthy systems need this sort of robustness. Technology informs and amplifies, it does not rule.

UPDATE

I just finished reading Barnett’s latest Esquire article, “The Monks of War.” In it, Gen. Wallace enunciates a similar view of technology’s role in warfare:

“I think that those of us that have been in the fight, we recognize that the technical solutions only enable the individual solder and small unit to do his business a little bit better… there aren’t any precision-guided squads.”

The Army and the Marines get it; they’re the ones living the reality on the ground. Wallace, Mattis and Petraeus aren’t talking about EBO, they’re talking about countering and out-innovating the enemy.

So I read Corn’s article but it turns out I haven’t got anything to add to Henrik’s analysis at the moment.

I got Chet Richards’ Neither Shall the Sword: Conflict in the Years Ahead yesterday and got a nice hour to dive into it this morning. I’m only a little ways in, but already I am impressed by Richards’ synthesis. He ties in Stephen Biddle’s excellent research on the nature of military capability (if you haven’t read Military Power, you have a real treat waiting for you) during his discussion of maneuver warfare, for example.

I shouldn’t be surprised, since Richards has a solid track record of inightful writing, combined with the sort of intellectual honesty and self-security that allows him to- *gasp* - change his thinking as new evidence and ideas arise.

…back to reading I happily go.

A great big, giant hat tip to Henrik over at Draconian Observations for catapulting an excellent article onto the top of my reading pile: Tony Corn’s article on World War IV as Fourth Generation Warfare. We’ll see when I can get to this…

A picture of a domestic Sys-Admin force looks like:

Black ministers in Boston, responding to a surge in youth violence, have launched a drive to recruit, train, and deploy 1,000 volunteers to work with at-risk young people from the city’s toughest and poorest neighborhoods.

The initiative, the largest undertaken since the youth crime wave of the early 1990s, aims to greatly expand the ministers’ street-level involvement in fighting violence. It also seeks to revive the community-police partnership that was a key factor in the drastic reduction in the city’s homicide rate from 1996 until last year.

Stable and sustainable order is about more than just police enforcement. It is about developing the fabric of a community - an approach that has shown success before:

The police department will help train volunteers and will develop deployment strategies for the initiative, which is being launched by the Boston TenPoint Coalition, a group of churches and faith-based organizations founded in 1992 to combat gang violence.

The first 100 volunteers are nearing the end of their training and will be deployed on neighborhood walks, home visits, and mentoring assignments after a final training session with Police Superintendent Paul Joyce next week.

The volunteers will try to build trust between neighborhood residents and police, improve police response to community problems, and reconnect community groups to young people, TenPoint leaders say.

…'’There is a realization that we’ve been asleep at the wheel,” said the Rev. Jeffrey L. Brown, a Dorchester resident and pastor of Union Baptist Church in Cambridge, speaking of the clergy, law-enforcement agencies, and social service organizations that collaborated so effectively in the 1990s that their work became known nationally as ‘’the Boston miracle.”

Last summer there was a smaller scale effort with a similar philosophy that caught my eye. Lyndhurst Street had been characterized as a “Hell Zone:”

…residents and activists say the corner is in state of lawlessness. They say young people from other neighborhoods take care of their illegal business on Lyndhurst because they know they can get away with it.

In response, the Rev. Bruce Wall of Global Ministries Christian Church decided to “occupy” the street for a week.

At the beginning of the Rev. Bruce Wall’s weeklong occupation of Lyndhurst Street, he and six followers did exactly what they had set out to do: They tried to confront the bands of dope dealers, prostitutes, and other young people who were hanging out at night on the street corner that some residents call the Hell Zone.

But by the middle of the week, Wall had a gang of his own: about three-dozen Boston police officers, MBTA police, probation officers, city councilors, clergymen, cameramen, and flashing police cruisers were at his side.

Everyone agreed that the effort made the street safer in the short term. But, as in counterinsurgency warfare, the ability to remain in an area and maintain the gains is a challenge:

‘’They’ll be back when all this is over,” said Jimmy Ambroise, 16… referring to the characters who strike fear in Lyndhurst residents at night.

Rev. Wall has been maintaining a presence on the street and there have been some positive signs:

‘’It’s probably stopped some people from running a very profitable business on that corner,” said Emmett Folgert, director of the Dorchester Youth Collaborative. ‘’Even if things don’t change right now, a seed is planted.”

I used the counterinsurgency comparision very deliberately. Nobody is going to confuse Dorchester for Ramadi, but the challenges presented by each lie on a continuum with peace, harmony and security at one extreme and a Hobbesian state of nature on the other. While there is no single silver bullet strategy for transitioning a region from one extreme to the other, there are strategies that have been shown to be successful over certain portions of the continuum. Just as a successful counterinsurgency campaign needs to involve more than just military force, developing and securing urban neighborhoods needs more than just police officers. The hot questions become: are there successful networking approaches (social networks, collaborative online tools, inter-agency iniatives, public-private sector partnerships) that can be collected? Could we develop a toolkit of techniqes, technologies and strategies that would make us better at this, so we don’t have to keep re-inventing the wheel? Can we reach the point where there is an established body of expertise concerning these problems? What would be the Detriot equivalent of the Boston TenPoint Coalition? What would the Afghan equivalent look like?

That’s what Sys-Admin means to me.

William Lind doesn’t like the new name for the GWOT. It is easy to sympathize with him - who can get behind such an unweildy acronym? But his specific complaints with the new term - “The Long War” - aren’t convincing me. Lind is concerned that the war is framed in maximalist terms, which he sees as unnecessarily broad and impossible to achieve:

Either they will succeed in turning us into Taliban-style Muslims or we will turn them into happy consumers in globalism’s Brave New World. Since most Americans would rather be dead than Talibs and most pious Moslems would rather perish than lose their souls to Brave New World, Mr. Rumsfeld has proclaimed a war of mutual annihilation.

While I sympathize with Lind’s concern of how such statements of purpose will be interpreted by Muslim populations, I am frustrated to high heaven by his misrepresentation of globalization. It is not a question of consumerism, it is a question of flows. To what degree will you permit content, people and capital to flow across and within your territory? Globalization is defined by a minimalist rule set. It is not a list of what one must do, it is a short list of things that one must refrain from doing. Despite this, Lind characterizes expanded globalization as a maximalist objective.

Lind feels that less ambitious objectives ought to be considered - such as to state that we want “to be left alone in our part of the globe, to enjoy peace, prosperity and an ordered liberty at home, while we left Islamics alone in their traditional territories.” It is easy enough to propose such an alternative, but how feasible is it? For that matter, how desirable is it? How much seperation is necessary in order to leave “Islamics alone?” Do we have to stop trading with them? Do we have to stop investing money in their economies? How far do the “traditional territories” of Muslims extend? Does India count? How about Spain? Again, Lind misses the boat due to globalization. We could isolate ourselves from anywhere in the world that there were individuals who felt threatened by the flow of our money, our television, our movies, our music and our products. But the global population would pay a heavy cost in its standard of living.

It really isn’t any wonder that Lind harbors such vitriol for Barnett, since Lind doesn’t recognize the minimal nature of of the globalization rule set. No, Lind sees it as MAXIMAL:

[Barnett] would create an inescapable new world order that bears a remarkable resemblance to the one Aldous Huxley described in his short novel Brave New World, published in the 1930s – a “soft totalitarianism” where the first rule is, “you must be happy.” Happiness, in turn, is a product of endless materialism, consumerism, sensual pleasure and psychological conditioning. If that sounds like a good description of American popular culture, it is exactly that culture Barnett proposes to force down the throat of every person on earth…

As long as Lind insists on portraying globalization in such a manner, his ability to accurately describe our current strategic environment will be severely handicapped.

I took so long to comment on Fabius Maximus’s first article The Myth of Grand Strategy that he got out a second article before I had written anything about the first.

At the rate this is going I won’t ever catch up, so I’m going to jump right to FabMax’s second article The Fate of Israel. He opens with the following:

To plan a successful grand strategy the strategist must know if he has a weak or strong position. Failure almost certainly results if he gets this fundamental fact wrong. Realist or idealist, this is the starting point for developing a grand strategy.

I would say that a successful grand strategy starts with an accurate description of the world but the fundamental point is the same. We need to accurately describe the world if we are going to respond to it in an intelligent manner.

So, what does our world look like? Fabius argues that in our current geopolitical climate, “a stateless people with no modern government, economy or army” can be more powerful than a developed state. The rest of his article examines the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and argues that it illustrates how the global strategic environment places states in a weak position.

The first great Palestinian strategic advantage Fabius cites is the moral advantage produced by their underdog status. This leads to “support by important elements in the developed nations and most less-developed states… giving themselves and their supporters belief that they have the moral high ground.” This may be true in certain circles, but Fabius does not address the strategic blunders Palestinians have made since the first Intifada. Col. Hammes has discussed the deliberate way in which the leaders of the first Intifada created media messages and images to claim the moral high ground.: images of teenagers throwing rocks at heavily armored Israeli security forces, or eloquent and reasonable spokesmen, dressed in Western-style suits, explaining their greivences on Western television networks. The al-Asqa Intifada lost this strategic clarity. Writing on page 116 of The Sling and the Stone, Hammes writes that “…Arafat did not understand 4GW. .. he managed to destroy the Palestinian’s hard-won image as a peaceful people resisting a brutal occupying force.” A few pages later, Hammes expands upon this assertion:

To date, the al-Aqsa Intefada has reversed the international perception of Israeli and Palestinian roles of Intefada I. The Palestinians are now the side with major image problems in the West. Resorting to suicide bombings and declarations about the destruction of Israel squandered the international image they built up during the six painful years of the Intefada. Instead of effective messages sent to their internal, Israeli and Western audiences, the Palestinian leadership has sent incredibly damaging messages to each group.
…The Palestinain suicide bombing campaign succeeded in transforming the image of Israeli settlements from an impedement to peace to a key component of Israel’s survival.

Moral strength does not automatically flow to the weaker side in a conflict. Weakness has the potential to be a profound advantage, but only if exploited correctly. Palestinian leaders haven’t always been able to do this and won’t necessarily be able to always do it in the future.

This brings us to the $64,000 question: do non-state groups hold the strategic high ground in the early 21st Century?

Fabius feels that the “primal strategies” weilded by non-state groups give them a strategic advantage:

The Palestinians show us the raw power of a primal strategy, a belief in a shared dream. They dream about the extermination of Israel. That is the official goal of Fatah, the former ruling party. Which is in turn losing strength to Hamas and Hezbollah, who seem even more dedicated to eliminating Israel. Their primal strategy forges the Palestinian people into a powerful weapon, against which Israel has few defenses.,

But the power of this shared dream is not absolute. Non-state groups face all the same centripital forces that all human groups do. Competing desires and different priorities break the monolithic power of the single shared dream. For example, Fatah lost power to Hamas not because Hamas was more dedicated to eliminating Israel, but because Hamas represented an alternative to the corruption and inefficiency of Fatah. Consider:

Three quarters of all Palestinians, including more than 60 percent of Hamas supporters, are willing to support reconciliation between Palestinians and Israelis based on a two-state solution. During the last 10 years, the trend among the Palestinians has been to move away from hard-line attitudes and to embrace moderate ones. Indeed, more than 60 percent of Hamas voters support an immediate return to negotiations with Israel.
…The two most important issues for the voters were corruption in the Palestinian Authority—which is dominated by Fatah—and the inability of the PA to enforce law and order. On both counts Hamas posed a clear alternative, with its reputation for discipline and incorruptibility.

Fabius cites Israeli vulnerabilities over the long term (emigration and incremental surrender) yet he does not ever question the vulnerabilities of the Palestinian’s shared dream. How do we know that in 100 years the shared dream underlying their primal strategy will remain?

The 4GW perspective is valuable because it considers novel and potentially crippling vulnerabilities of states. Clearly, non-state actors have gained power during the past six decades and we need to examine the consequences of this. However, 4GW theorists have yet to convince me that non-state actors have gained enough power to give them the strategic advantage. This would require an examination of the relative strength of states and non-state groups.