Though the holidays have added a wealth of enticing books to my to-read pile, Fred Kagan’s latest is going to have to move to the front of the queue. Finding the Target: The Transformation of American Military Policy looks like an incisive examination of doctrine, strategy and reform.

Frank Hoffman’s article in the latest AFJ provides an enticing overview of Finding the Target:

In many respects, our prospects in Iraq are the culminating point for a decade of sloppy thinking about the nature of war in American policy circles. Fred Kagan’s “Finding the Target” covers this period and the strategic experience of the U.S. from the post-Vietnam era to the present.

Kagan warns that

Understanding the changing nature of war requires not merely exploring the trendlines of technology, but also comprehending war’s interactive nature. Revolutions in military affairs do not occur as the result of the actions of a single state, but as the result of the interactions between multiple states. Attempts to change warfare through an inwardly focused transformation, looking only at one’s own capabilities and program, are unlikely to succeed…
The U.S. strategy community in the 1990s was in general so caught up with the minutiae of technology that it lost sight of the larger purpose of war, and there missed the emergence of a challenge even more important than that of technology, the challenge of designing military operations to achieve particular political objectives.

Finding the Target definitely looks like a must-read.

Austin Bay’s latest article at TCS includes the following excellent summary of the motives of the global Salafi militant movement:

Al-Qaida’s dark genius — or, more accurately, the dark genius of the Egyptian strain of internationalist jihadism — has been to connect the Muslim world’s angry, humiliated and isolated young men with a utopian fantasy preaching the virtue of violence. That utopian fantasy seeks to explain and then redress roughly 800 years of Muslim decline. The rage energizing al-Qaeda’s ideological cadres certainly predates the post-Desert Storm presence of American troops in Saudi Arabia.

Col. Bay regularly does a good job of succinctly summarizing these dynamics (though I do wish he would stop using the term jihad as a synonym for terrorist). It is the sort of clarity and strategic context that day-to-day reporting often lacks.

Art Hutchinson had a pair of excellent posts last week regarding the impact of the Taiwan earthquake on telecom infrastructure. At some point, these choke-points will have to be addressed. How hard would it be for an anti-globalization/anti-modernity group to take one out on purpose? I’m reminded of the Triad of Stephenson’s The Diamond Age blowing up the Feeds that provided the raw materials for all of the distributed replicaters.

Considering these sorts of scenarios is the first step in figuring out how to address them.