Bizarre... On Strategy was just assigned to my history class. I planned on starting to read it today.

Two very good reads on that topic! Essential to understanding warfare and modern warfare. Gwynn Dyer's War was a good late 1970's summation of warfare and *why* conscript based warfare will not work in the modern era based on technology and training. That lovely paradigm of 1943 Germany dedicating as much factory space to aircraft production as the US does... and it produced 4,000 aircraft/month while the US does 1. From him two succinct observations: all future wars are 'come as you are' affairs, and that the greatest threat to the legitimacy of National armed forces is terrorism, which uses military attacks in an illegitimate fashion.

One of the greatest deficeits in education in the late 20th century, is the move away from teaching the basics of what makes warfare go beyond mere geopolitics. That Leftist/Socialist conception leaves those taught under it very, very ill-prepared to deal with the modern world or even how to differentiate problems by scale. That should be a hand tool in one's mental toolbox: figuring out when you need to do a bit of troubleshooting and when you need to do problem solving. There is a vast difference although a high level of interconnectivity between the two. By not being able to differentiate tactics from strategy one is left ill-prepared for learning how to scale differentiate things. Everything is given equal weight even when they have unequal bias and impact, and that leads to no good end.

So when even a simple proposition like trying to put together a New Iraqi Army is put forth, the idea is *not* to get something immediately on the ground and unprepared. In point of fact the #1 question is: how long until they get a reliable NCO cadre? Because, as looking at de Atkine's Why Arabs Lose Wars the one thing we do NOT want is a traditional Army there. And *that* requires rebuilding a culture so that this new Army has support and can support its culture. Thus the counter-insurgency concept of the 'oil drop' could not work and the US Armed Forces did something different which no one has bothered to recognize, calling it chaos, instead.

That runs you straight into the Foreign Policy 'Realists' and their failings in Iraq to even begin identifying the scope of the problem there. Mind you these were the folks that had the USSR going blithely on at least until 2030... if not 2050... so they do have some major gaps in their concept of the world and how it works. Even worse is the ignorance engendered by the educational instruction that does not begin to hash out why wars happen and what post-war situations have as outcomes. When all of those fine folks that point to Iraq being a 'long war', the question is: in comparison to WHAT? By being unable to do historical analysis with military analysis, one cannot even begin to address what is good and bad with current post-war situations in Iraq and Afghanistan. If you concentrate *only* on endings that have a 194_ and higher pre-fix you will, most definitely, get it wrong. People forget that there are long term consequences to defeat.

*sigh*

Yes, I can vent on this topic for hours! Even the very basic concept of terrorism as illegitimate war that is the sole realm of the Nation State got pushed aside, so that it was treated as merely criminal. So lovely to not call horrific attacks using military means a 'crime'... it can be a crime but it is a War Crime in the international arena, at least to all Nations that signed the Geneva Conventions. But for over two decades it was not *called that*... and ignorance roamed the Earth.This is aided and abetted by a media system that puts forward the notion that there is such a thing as legitimate armed political parties. Well, if you want Fascism I guess that might be true... but hard to see how one can reconcile being *armed* as a political party with *civil* politics. Hard to name any of those 'armed political parties' that have actually secured rights, offered more freedom and laid down their arms once killing their way to power.

From all of that once you get down to the brass tacks of what Foreign Policy with Grand Strategy should get you for something like Peace in the Middle East the 'Realists' hem and haw and wave arms around and come to no answer. The Neo-Cons give you many free dumb looks. People like Mr. Barnett pull out the powerpoint slides and show you cores and gaps and then offer nothing via that framework that is flexible and extensible, and is full of needing constabulary forces. The Left just wants to smash up all Nations and install themselves in power and force peace via killing off all those that disagree with them... simple to the point of simplistic. And those that push trade before freedom seem to miss the point that this has failed, continuously, since it was first put into being in WWI by the US. This conception has so skewed thinking that we no longer remember that *freedom* came before *free trade* in the US.

Yes, all of that from being able to see what Strategy is, how it is linked to Tactics, how one can drive the other, but how Strategic outlook is guidance oriented so as to give formulation to solutions and then Tactics. If you can't identify if something is mere trouble to be shot or larger scale problem to be solved, then the basis for doing analysis and understanding interlocking scale-based situations is removed from how one approaches the world.

Summers' book is rather focused on a nation-state approach, which may not apply to the current situation, or so says LTC Nagl (Eating Soup with a Knife) - it has been years since I read Summers.

I highly recommend Nagl.

I find Summers' text unpersuasive and in many ways misguided, as it applies principles of war that were formulated from Napoleon's time to a war profoundly unlike those of that era.

That doesn't mean he's entirely wrong -- but as useful correctives I'd recommend Andrew Krepinevich's "The Army and Vietnam" and Mark Moyar's recent "Triumph Forsaken." Both have a much better handle on the documentary evidence than does Summers. I respect Summers, his experience, and his work a lot, but I think both "On Strategy" and "On Strategy II" are in the end Procrustean beds.

Benjamin I. Higginbotham, "On Deceiving Terrorists," a master's thesis from the Naval Postgraduate School, Dec., 2001. It is available online.