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The first three chapters in Sun Tzu’s timeless classic “The Art of War” describe how to make net assessments by comparing your strengths and weaknesses and those of your adversary and how to formulate strategy. Near the end of Chapter 3, he sums up his advice, saying, “Know your enemy and know yourself; in a hundred [...]
No program better illustrates the pathologies of the weapons acquisition process as it is currently practiced by the Military – Industrial – Congressional Complex (MICC) than the entirely predictable, and in this case, predicted, problems dragging the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter into a dead man’s spiral. The F-35 in on track to be the most [...]
Attached herewith is an essay written by William R. Polk outlining a strategy for diffusing the Iranian crisis. I am posting it with his permission. He is a former State Department official — and historian and foreign policy expert — who specializes in the Middle East and Central Asia. The essay is written from the [...]
By Thomas Christie, Pierre Sprey, Chuck Spinney and Winslow Wheeler Almost 30 years ago, in 1983, the Heritage Foundation stepped forward as a thoughtful, independent thinking participant in the then-raging debate over Ronald Reagan’s defense budget increases. In one of its major policy publications, Heritage published an insightful analysis with an unambiguous conclusion: “The increased [...]
Mark Thompson’s 27 December posting, “General Newt,” alerted readers of Battleland to Karen Tumulty’s pastiche of mini portraits of Newt Gingrich’s martial prowess. Mark highlighted one the few passages that zeroed in on the insubstantial essence of the K Street Clausewitz. Unable to contain my mirth, I immediately forwarded Mark’s posting to to my close [...]
In the winter of 2002, a close friend, a liberal staffer on Capitol Hill, asked me if I thought the crazy fulminations of the neocons and the tough-guy rantings of an insecure President [1] could result in a war with Iraq? My answer was something like ‘read the Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August and you will [...]
On 12 December, I described a concatenation of warmongering pressures that were shaping the popular psyche in favor of bombing Iran. Now, in a 21 December essay, Steven Walt describes a further escalation of these pressures — in this case, via the profoundly flawed pro-bombing analysis, Time to Attack Iran: Why a Strike is the Least Bad Option, penned [...]
Since the middle of the 19th Century, the central questions in European politics have been the closely-connected questions of nationalism and the rise of German power. As my good friend and eminent historian Gabriel Kolko shows in this brilliant essay, the post-war solutions of NATO and the European Union, together with the exigencies of the [...]
Patrick Cockburn, one of the best reporters now covering the Middle East, recently described the growing tensions in Iraq over the question of sharing its oil wealth among its constituent regions. Specifically, Exxon is cutting an independent oil drilling deal with the Iraqi Kurds in northern Iraq despite the objections of the Iraqi central government [...]
While President Obama worries about appeasing Israel and Jewish votes at home, as well as being pressured by the neocons to support threats of an Israeli attack on Iran, the government of Israel beavers away as usual, creating new facts on the ground in the occupied territories. Here (portions of which are quoted below) is an editorial in Ha’aretz, one [...]
