The View from Olympus: The Marine Corps Gazette Gets the Evolution of Maneuver Warfare Right.

The September issue of the Marine Corps Gazette includes an article for which there has been a long-standing need, namely an accurate recounting of the history of maneuver warfare’s evolution into official Marine Corps doctrine.  Written under the pen name Marinus as part of an ongoing series, the Maneuverist Papers, it does what none of the books on the subject have managed, namely provide a non-partisan account that identifies all the streams that fed into the maneuver warfare river.

Of these streams, which the article calls threads, there were five: intense dissatisfaction among Marine Corps officers over our performance in Vietnam and our final loss of that war (something that seems to have vanished with more recent defeats); interest in mechanized operations because that is what a conflict in Europe with the Soviet Union seemed to require; the model offered by the Prussian/German Army, for which I was the main spokesman; renewed interest in classical military literature, especially Clausewitz and Sun Tzu; and the theoretical work of Col. John Boyd, USAF.  My only quibble with the account is its failure to mention that I began the maneuver warfare debate with a critique of forthcoming Army doctrine that I wrote in 1976 and was published in Military Review in 1977.  Like it or not, I was first.

I appreciate the fact that the article gives credit to someone who played a highly important role in the process but is often overlooked, namely Col. John Greenwood USMC, the editor of the Marine Corps Gazette at that time.  Col. Greenwood did not always agree with what the maneuverists were writing, but he published their material anyway, because he understood the function of a professional journal.  The Gazette was the main forum through which I reached Marines; Col. Greenwood later told me that over a twenty-year period, I wrote more articles for the Gazette than any other single author.  Without the Gazette and its editor the maneuver warfare movement in the Corps simply would not have happened.

I highly recommend that all who have not read this latest Maneuverist Paper do so.  But my purpose here is to pick up where it leaves off.  Its last sentence reads, “Three decades after maneuver warfare became doctrine, we believe the Marine Corps is overdue to have a conversation about its views on the nature and conduct of warfare going forward.”  I agree.  In fact, that conversation has been going on for some time, but a lack of interest from senior levels has pushed it into something of a backwater.

The conversation is about Fourth Generation war, war with opponents who are not states.  We just lost such a war, the war in Afghanistan.  We have also given a big boost to Fourth Generation war throughout the Middle East by destroying the states in that region, including Iraq, Syria, and Libya, helpfully clearing the way for Fourth Generation entities to move in.  We have demonstrated no ability to win Fourth Generation wars.

But, as was the case with the maneuver warfare movement, individual Marines, mostly junior officers, have been thinking, studying, and writing in order to fill the vacuum.  For a few years, thanks to an initiative by then-colonel Ron Bailey, I co-led a seminar at Expeditionary Warfare School devoted to Fourth Generation war.  Just as was true in the earlier movement, it was quasi-clandestine (the seminar couldn’t be named for 4GW), the students received no course credit and the fact that I (briefly) had an office at EWS upset the brass.  But that seminar paralleled earlier maneuver warfare seminars by writing draft field manuals on 4GW.  Were General Gray still Marine Corps Commandant, those FMs would have come out as official Marine Corps publications.  Sadly, he was not, though some of us would like to bring him back.  Fortunately, as head of the Central Powers Military Mission to the Marine Corps, I was in a position to approach the relevant authorities in Vienna and Pola, with the result that they were published by the K.u.K. Marinekorps.  They are available in English in the “resources” section of traditionalright.com.

But unofficial efforts did not stop there.  The Marine officer who co-led the later seminars with me, Lt. Col. Greg Thiele USMC, and I drew on what we learned from those Marine captains to write the Fourth Generation Warfare Handbook.  It is available from Castalia House Press and on Amazon.  It is intended to serve as a starting point for the Corps as it moves to become the nation’s go-to force for 4GW, much as my Maneuver Warfare Handbook, published 1985, helped kickstart the Marine Corps adoption of maneuver warfare.  (With regard to which, I am currently writing a new, improved Maneuver Warfare Handbook, not to replace the current book, but to talk about some things we’ve learned since it was written.)

So let me offer a challenge to the Marine Corps and the Marine Corps Gazette: let’s do with Fourth Generation War what the Corps did thirty years ago with maneuver warfares and develop it intellectually, experiment with it in the field, have another giant food-fight over it in the pages of the Gazette and finally make it doctrine for, again, America’s force of choice for this kind of war.

The Corps can move into 4GW while the Army remains stuck in 2GW.  The Marine Corps only survives by having an expertise the country needs that no other service can offer.  4GW is where war is going, whether it justifies F-35s or not.  Those of us who led the maneuver warfare fight – Mike Wyly, G.I. Wilson, Bill Woods, General Gray, John Schmitt, sadly not John Boyd – are still alive and we have one more campaign left in us.  Are HQMC and the Gazette up for it, or will us old guys have to hit this beach alone?

I want to close on a personal note.  “The Evolution of Maneuver Warfare Theory” writes that, in comparison to the Army’s top-down doctrine development process (which has left the Army stuck fast in the Second Generation),

The Marine Corps process more resembled the cafeteria food fight scene in Animal House, with Lind in the Bluto role

Animal House was inspired by one of the fraternities at Dartmouth College when I was a student there (1965-69).  I was known to occasionally have a drink and smoke a pipe at their bar, the picture of which in the film was not inaccurate.  So closes another circle in my life.

Two Political Dilemmas and One Solution

As we look toward the 2024 Presidential election, we see each political party faces a dilemma.  On the Republican side, if former President Donald Trump runs again, his personal negatives are so high that, according to recent polls, President Joe Biden would still beat him.  For a Republican victory, it is essential that he not be the candidate.  I say that as someone who voted for Mr. Trump both in the 2016 Ohio primary and in the general election that year and in 2020, contributed to his campaign and met with him in March, 2016 in Cleveland to give him a copy of Paul Weyrich’s and my last co-authored book, The Next Conservatism.  That meeting was not at my request but that of some of his campaign staff who saw the potential the book offered for a new and widely attractive conservative agenda.  

The dilemma here is that it is likely Mr. Trump will run again because he seeks vindication for his Presidency.  That is understandable, even laudable, because he was a successful President who gave us a booming economy, no new wars and Operation Warpspeed, without which we probably would not yet have Covid vaccines.  If he runs again, he will win the Republican nomination because he retains tremendous support among the Republican base – again, for some good reasons.

I think this dilemma has a solution: a Republican ticket of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and, for Vice President, Eric Trump, President Trump’s son.  DeSantis has been a true conservative, one willing to challenge cultural Marxism (most Republicans won’t), defy federal mandates and back effective local law enforcement.  He has also been a successful governor, and Presidential candidates should generally be governors rather than U.S. Senators or Representatives.  Why?  Because governors actually have to make things work while Senators and Congressmen need only give speeches.

By putting Eric Trump on the ticket as the Republican Vice-Presidential candidate, President Trump can get the vindication he seeks without having to run himself.  Why not Donald Trump, Jr.?  Because voters may get confused between two Donald Trumps.  Putting Eric on the ticket will bring millions of voters who voted for his father.  And if the Democrats try to run not against Eric but against former President Trump, all he will need to say is, “How many people are carbon copies of their father?”  A DeSantis/Eric Trump ticket will be the Dems worst nightmare.

Well, second-worst.  Their worst is the dilemma they face, for which I do not see a solution.  It is clear that President Biden is on his last leg physically and mentally.  I say that with sadness.  I remember him from when I was U.S. Senate staff.  Indeed, I once worked with him to get an amendment through the Senate Budget Committee.  He was intelligent, considerate, and a pleasure to us lowly staffers, which was not true of all Senators.  But running him again in 2024 would be like bringing out all the dead and mummified Incas, still dressed in their finery, for state occasions in the Incan Empire.  It is simply not possible.

That leaves the Democrats facing President Biden’s poison pill, Vice President Harris. She was a failure as a candidate in 2020 for the Democratic nomination and she will be a failure again if she heads the Democratic ticket.  But how can the Democrats deny the nomination to a black woman without enraging a large portion of their base?  The only way forward I see for them is to nominate a different black woman.  But someone like Stacy Adams would alienate not only whites but Asians and Hispanics as well.  Michelle Obama?  That would probably be their best shot, but I don’t think she wants to put her family through another Presidential campaign, or, for that matter, another Presidency.

If the Republicans solve their dilemma with a DeSantis/Eric Trump ticket while the Democrats remain trapped in their own, the 2024 election outcome is not difficult to forecast.  All it requires is for Republicans to be smarter than Democrats.   Ulp.

Pronouns

On the surface, the cultural Marxists’ war on normal pronouns is simply silly, the vaporings of unhinged women.  Even those unhinged women know that in the real world, men are “he,” women are “she,” things are “it,” and “they” is plural.  We all learned this by third grade.

So what is all the pronoun nonsense about?  As foolish as it seems, it has a serious purpose: it acts as a political barometer.  The cultural Marxists can and do gauge their power by the absurdity of what they command.  The more absurd the demand, the greater their power if we obey.

Obviously, from a conservative point of view, it is important that we not obey.  Yet many are tugging the forelock, bowing to requirements we call each nutcase whatever pronoun he/she/it wants, even if it sounds and reads like Esperanto spelled backwards.

Why are we yielding to such absurdity?  Part of the answer is that, at least in some institutions, we are forced to do so.  The Wall Street Journal recently reported a case where a child in elementary school was threatened with a federal felony charge for calling some girl by a pronoun other than the one she specified.  Sunlight killed that bacterium, but many like it go undisclosed.  In places such as university campuses where cultural Marxism rules (and our tax money goes to sustaining their rule), any student who uses the “wrong” pronoun, which is to say the grammatically correct pronoun, faces school discipline.  The same is true in “woke” workplaces.

This sort of enforcement points to 1984, where the mandated language was “Newspeak” and anyone who spoke normal English was sent to a labor camp or shot.  Do not doubt that the cultural Marxists want the same power here.  At the moment, all they can do is fire or expel the employee or student who defies their rules.  But they seek a totalitarian state like those the classical, economic Marxists created in the Soviet Union, Mao’s China, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, etc.  Here, if cultural Marxism wins, a “wrong” pronoun will send you to the basement of the Lubyanka.

But there is more to it than threats and brute force.  The members of the Frankfurt School, the institution that created cultural Marxism, crossed Marx with Freud.  From psychology they took the weapon of psychological conditioning: working on people’s minds through “Critical Theory” and endless propaganda to the point where anyone who defies their rules thinks he has done something wrong, something terrible.  He looks in the mirror and sees “another Hitler.”

The pronoun game is a tool the cultural Marxists can use to further condition normal people and gauge the success of their conditioning.  If Ma and Pa Kettle use the standard pronouns, they have scorn heaped upon them, are called “thisists” and “thatists,” told how ignorant they are and ordered to grovel in the dirt and “apologize” to whatever creatures in the left’s zoo they have “offended.”  If they yield and use absurd pronouns, cultural Marxists can claim another victory and cook up yet more ridiculous demands.  

As is generally the case with cultural Marxism and other ideologies, the way to fight back is to defy their rules.  If you get expelled for using normal, standard English pronouns, sue.  There are conservative organizations that will take your case pro bono.  And make sure you demand trial by jury.  Most people on juries speak standard English.  In states governed by Republicans, pass free speech laws that outlaw requiring anything but standard English for employment or attendance at a state college or university (and defund any academic department at such schools that require non-standard pronouns).  There is one, only one case where I could accept a newly-created pronoun.  For women who are so bizarre, so ditzy, so plain old butt-ugly that calling them “she” is an insult to all ladies, I will consent to a new pronoun that combines the feminine with the neuter: “she-it.”  Wear it with pride, former gals, wear it with pride.

Repeating a Blunder

In my latest book, Reforging Excalibur, I argue that the threat of state disintegration and spreading Fourth Generation war is so great that only an alliance of all states can ensure the state system will survive the 21st century.  Further, I suggest that an alliance of all states must begin with a new Triple Alliance of the three Great Powers, the U.S., Russia, and China.  Only then can all other states be led to combine their efforts, because only then will other states not be pushed or pulled into one or another blocks built around contending Great powers.  I am saying that Great Power competition is obsolete, a mutual error on the grand strategic level that will lead to the destruction of all three of the current Great Powers.

The Blob, the Washington foreign policy establishment, will dismiss such a notion as piffle.  How could all three Great Powers possibly make such an error?  My reply is that three of the five Great Powers in the pre-1914 world made just such an error, and in the process all three were destroyed.

In the world of 1890 to 1914, all Great Powers were European countries, and by general consensus there were just five: Germany, France, Russia, Austria-Hungary, and Great Britain.  Three, Germany, Russia, and Austria-Hungary, were conservative, Christian monarchies.  France was a republic and the leader of Europe’s left.  Britain was a monarchy but all real power was in the hands of Parliament, not the monarch.

All five Great Powers shared a grand strategic orientation in which the threats they perceived came almost entirely from other Great Powers.  In 1890, Germany, Russia, and Austria-Hungary were loosely allied despite Austro-Russian rivalry; Bismarck’s Reinsurance Treaty allowed Germany to ally with Russia without openly betraying Austria.  Britain saw her threats as coming either from France or Russia; she was friendly with though not allied to Germany or Austria.  By 1914, these alignments had shifted.  Britain, France, and Russia were allied against Germany and Austria-Hungary.

Unfortunately, this whole grand strategic orientation was an error, especially on the part of the three conservative monarchies.  The real threat they faced was democracy coupled with secularism and, often, socialism.  This new and growing threat meant more than the loss or gain of a province here or there or perhaps some colonies, with a resulting effect or prestige.  Democracy, secularism and socialism promised to wipe Christian, conservative monarchy from the board and all three ruling houses, Hohenzollerns, Hapsburgs, and Romanoffs, from future history.  As we now know but they could not foresee, that is what happened, with the result a grand strategic shift of the whole political spectrum sharply to the left.

What I am saying in Reforging Excalibur is that all three of today’s Great Powers are repeating the blunder three of the five Great Powers made then, the blunder of operating within an obsolete grand strategic framework.  This is the largest and therefore the most damaging error a country’s foreign office can make.  Then, it damaged, perhaps fatally, Western, Christian civilization.  Now, it may fatally damage the state system itself, leading to global anarchy.  Just as the three conservative Great Powers of 1914 needed to be allied then, in a new Holy Alliance or Dreikaiserbund, so all three Great Powers need to be allied now in defense of the state system against the non-state forces which drive Fourth Generation war.

The Blob cannot think in these terms, because any departure from its institutionalized groupthink endangers the career of anyone suggesting there is a problem.  The same seems to be true in Moscow and Beijing.  All I can do is point to the price earlier foreign policy establishments in the Wilhelmstrasse, the Ballhausplatz and on the Nevsky Prospekt paid for making the same mistake.  Some mistakes are so vast and have such baleful consequences that the phrase, “Heads will roll,” becomes more than a metaphor.

The View from Olympus: My New Book

Finally, my new book is out (Arktos, London).  Written mostly in 2020 and co-authored by “John Ewald,” a nom de plume for someone vulnerable to DOD retaliation, Reforging Excalibur: Creating a Sustainable and Relevant Defense for 21st-Century America has two goals.  The first is re-structuring our grand strategy and armed forces for a world of Fourth Generation war, where the enemy is not other Great Powers but non-state forces such as al Qaeda, ISIS and drug cartels.  The second is getting ready for the inevitable debt crisis, financial crisis and hyper-inflation, which will drastically reduce the amount we can spend for defense.  When those titanic economic forces hit, we will be lucky if we can spend $100 billion (in today’s dollars) for defense, not the trillion we spend now.

The 90% reduction in our defense budget will not be voluntary; Reforging Excalibur does not advocate it, because there is no need for advocacy.  We will have no choice.  Rather, my new book shows how it can be done while preserving our ability to defend ourselves effectively.  “Defend” means just that: keeping Americans safe in their homes and beds, not attempting to dictate to the rest of the world.  We would still play an important role in the world, but it would be in the context of a new and very different national grand strategy.  Our new grand strategy would have as its goal the preservation of the international state system in the face of spreading state collapse, itself both a consequence and a cause of Fourth Generation war.  Our National Defense Strategy, which currently calls for preparing for war with Russia and China, would instead seek an alliance with both countries and then through that new Triple Alliance an alliance of all states in defense of the state system.

Objections will immediately be raised that we are now in a proxy war with Russia and Ukraine.  That is true, but why are we careful to keep it a proxy war rather than engaging U.S. and Russian armed forces directly?  Because Russia is a nuclear power – as is China.  Nuclear powers do not fight conventional wars with each other because the risk of escalation to nuclear war is too great.  Is Kiev worth Boston, Philadelphia, and Chicago?  No, and even the hucksters saying we must spend trillions preparing for such wars know it.  The current National Defense Strategy is a fraud.

Other lessons from the Russian-Ukrainian war also point away from classic state vs. state conflict.  Russia, still thinking in those terms, launched a World War II style attack on Ukraine.  And how has that worked out for them?  Their initial attempt at a Blitzkrieg-type campaign failed.  It failed because a Russian army is not a Prussian army.  Russia has now fallen back on a typical Russian approach, relying on mass artillery followed by very expensive assaults by poorly trained infantry.  Ukraine seems to have learned something of maneuver warfare, i.e. the German style of war, and is practicing it rather well.  Is there perhaps some historic memory of German-Ukrainian ties in both World Wars?

Russia also found itself in a people’s war, not just a war between two armies.  From Napoleon in Spain onward, where that happens the invader faces a hard and lengthy slog to victory, or more often defeat.  People’s war is not per se Fourth Generation war.  It is not 4GW in Ukraine (despite some writers’ mis-definition of 4GW as just guerilla warfare) because it is still being fought in a state vs. state framework.  Where Fourth Generation war may rear a very dangerous threat is if Russia and the Russian state collapses.  That is not impossible, and it is why French President Macron among others is correctly warning against humiliating Russia.  A failure of the Russian state would give the forces of 4GW by far the greatest victory they have won to date, one we would find difficult to contain.

All this puts my new book well outside anything being considered within the Washington establishment.  So does one other point it makes forcefully: if you want your armed forces to lose,there is no more effective way to set them up than by filling them with women.  The cultural Marxists will howl, as will our senior military “leaders” who prostrate themselves before Feminism, but facts are facts.  When we see something that has been true for all of human history in almost every corner of the world, in this case that the fighting is done by men, there is probably a good reason for it.  Stuffing women into every nook and cranny of our military is, to borrow Roger Kimball’s apt phrase, an “experiment against reality.”  It will not end well.

Anyway, the establishment will hate this book.  I can give it no higher recommendation for your own reading.

Everyone will Hate this Column.

Throughout the Western world, everybody is rooting for plucky Ukraine.  It is the classic story of David and Goliath, and who ever rooted for Goliath?  Russia had no reason to invade Ukraine.  Ukraine does not qualify for membership in NATO, nor can it do so as long as it has a border dispute with Russia, which it always will.  The brutality of the Russian army has made the good vs. evil nature of the war even more apparent.  Ordinary people here in Cleveland are flying Ukraine flags, contributing to funds set up to help Ukrainian refugees and welcoming more Ukrainians to a city that already has a lot of them.  And it should; Ukrainians are exactly the kind of people America needs more of.  We should take as many as want to come.

But. . .

Foreign policy should never be based on emotions, however understandable the emotions may be.  By their nature, foreign relations are amoral.  That’s what Machiavelli is all about.  If they are to attain the objective they desire, they must be calculated purely on the basis of interests.  America’s interests in the Russian-Ukrainian war dictate that Russia not be defeated too badly.

At the outset, a Russian defeat seemed impossible.  But the Russian army has performed so badly that its outright defeat now appears likely.  Outright defeat means not only that Russia fails to take and hold all of Ukraine, but that she loses everything she held before the invasion began, including all of the Donbas and Crimea.  Again, let me say what everyone will hate: such a defeat for Russia is not in America’s interest.

The reasons are two.  First, President Putin cannot survive Russia’s outright defeat.  So what?, some might say.  The sooner he is gone the better.  I agree.  But with his neck on the line and no conventional options left, the pressure on him makes the nuclear option seem ever more unavoidable.  It is not in our interest that this or any war go nuclear, because even if the first use is of tactical nuclear weapons in a place far from our shores, the potential of strategic nuclear war, with American cities going up in fireballs, is all too great.  As I’ve said before, the number one interest we have in this war is preventing nuclear warheads from landing on American soil.  All other interests are trivial in comparison.

The second reason we should not want Russia to lose too badly is that such a dramatic defeat could lead to a breakup of the Russian state.  This war, its casualties and the economic damage it has brought on Russia are heavy burdens for the state to bear.  In the 1990s, under President Yeltsin, Russia was close to a break-up.  President Putin’s great achievement, and the reason he has been popular with most Russians, is that he strengthened the state.  His wild, uncharacteristic gamble on war with Ukraine has undone that achievement.  In a world of spreading state weakness and the rise of Fourth Generation war, an outright Russian defeat could mean not only the desirable fall of the Putin regime but a dissolution of the Russian state itself, creating a vast, stateless region with thousands of nuclear warheads and strategic delivery systems floating around it.

This is not some alarmist fantasy.  Ukraine sees the possibility and welcomes it.  The May 21-22 Wall Street Journal interviewed the chief of Ukraine’s military intelligence, Major General Kyrylo Budanov, who said,

Putin is in an absolute dead end.  He cannot stop the war and he cannot win it. . .  If they finally realize that the czar is not as great and mighty as he pretends to be, it’s a step towards the destruction of the statehood of today’s Russia.

So, what should the U.S. do?  First, we should make it clear to Ukraine that we will support her effort to defend herself but not a strategic offensive aimed at re-taking the Donbas statelets and Crimea.  If Ukraine were to try anyway, we, the U.S. and NATO, should close her borders with the West.  Second, we need to offer Russia a peace where she gets something.  That something might include recognition of the areas of the Donbas she held before the invasion and Crimea as legitimately Russian and the lifting of all sanctions.  Third, we must move quickly on this, before events outrun it, possibly to the point where a complete Russian defeat will be inevitable unless she goes nuclear.

In wars where a state has limited interests but runs large risks, which describes America’s situation with reference to the war in Ukraine, her most important interest is to end it.  That is where Washington’s efforts should now be focused.

Playing with Nuclear War -- and Some Advice for My Friends in Sweden

The Blob, the Washington foreign policy establishment, is playing with nuclear war.  So what if Russia goes nuclear in Ukraine?  We will just pile on even more sanctions, make Russia more of an outcast, and tell her she must grovel in the dirt to be readmitted to the concert of powers.  Some are going further: the lead op ed in the April 28 Wall Street Journal, by former deputy undersecretary of the Navy Seth Cropsey, was titled, “The U.S. Should Show It Can Win a Nuclear War.”

No, it can’t.  A single nuclear weapon detonated on one American city would do this country more damage than it has suffered in all its wars to date.  No foreign policy goal can justify such a price.  No threat to our “credibility,” no diplomatic humiliation, no “abandonment of our allies” can outweigh the consequences of a single American city getting nuked.  Not only would we suffer tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of Americans killed by the blast, and far more doomed to radiation sickness, we would have a collapsed financial system and economy, a completely discredited government and quite possibly a revolution or devolution as people withdrew their allegiance to a state that had brought catastrophe upon them.

What is the danger of this happening?  Unfortunately, it's fairly high.  The course of events leading to it is already taking place in Ukraine.  Russia and her armed forces have been humiliated by the failure of their initial campaign in Ukraine.  They have regrouped and are trying again, with more limited goals.  As of writing this (May 1), the outcome of the second Russian offensive is unclear, but it seems to be making slow progress at best.  If it fails, the initiative is likely to pass to Ukraine as the shift will be a natural event after a defense succeeds.  But in part, it will also be because of U.S. and NATO support for Ukraine.  At some point, the shift may permit Ukraine to go on the offensive.

What does Russia do then?  What does President Putin do to save his neck?  Near the top of the list will be escalating by using tactical nuclear weapons.  Where does the escalation stop?

A wise U.S. and NATO foreign policy establishment would now be building a golden bridge over which Russia can retreat rather than going nuclear.  Asking itself the question, “What would Bismark do?”, it would call a conference in, say, Vienna.  A deal could look something like this:

Ukraine sells the portions of Luhansk and Donetsk that had already declared their independence to Russia, along with a narrow land corridor connecting them to Crimea (which remains Russian).  The price is high enough to make a substantial contribution to re-building Ukraine.

Ukraine agrees not to join NATO unless Russia also joins.  That would leave open the door to the alliance Christendom needs, one running from the U.S. Pacific coast to the Russian Pacific coast, oriented south.

Russia agrees to Ukraine joining the EU.

Russia cedes East Prussia (the “Kaliningrad Oblast”) to Ukraine, giving Ukraine a Baltic as well as a Black Sea outlet for her grain exports.  Russia also funds building a new, high capacity railway, not running through Belarus, connecting Ukraine with the East Prussian port of Konigsberg.

What does Ukraine think of all this?  It doesn’t matter.  In true Bismarkian style, the great powers make the deal and inform the smaller powers what they are going to do.  Otherwise, no deal is possible in cases such as this.

And in Vienna, let the ball commence. A word to my good friends in Sweden.  Sweden is considering joining NATO.  Don’t do it.  The reason Sweden still has Stockholm’s Old City, the wonderful 18th century dockyard at Karlskrona and much else is that it has not gone to war since 1815.  As Swedes know, Sweden did almost join Germany in both World Wars.  Had it done so, Stockholm would have no Gamle Stan, and Karlskrona would have been shelled or bombed flat.  After their abysmal performance in Ukraine, neither Sweden nor Finland nor anyone else has much reason to fear Russia’s conventional armed forces.  And even a mad Putin is not likely to nuke Stockholm or Helsinki in a neutral Sweden or Finland.  Neutrality has benefitted Sweden greatly for more than two centuries.  Don’t kill the chicken that has laid so many golden eggs.

Maneuver Warfare in Ukraine

Has maneuver warfare turned up in the conflict in Ukraine?  Yes, and it has done so in ways that are instructive.

The original Russian campaign plan was classic maneuver warfare at the operational level.  Stavka has focused on operational art since before World War II, indeed in some ways back into the Czarist period.  But as I said in a previous column, the Russian army in Ukraine fell into a trap of its own making: its units could not deliver on the tactical level what the campaign plan required on the operational level.  This is not unique to the Russians.  In the First Persian Gulf War, the U.S. Army’s Seventh Corps could not move fast enough tactically to attain its operational objective, the encirclement of Iraq’s Republican Guard.  In World War I, my favorite German general, Max Hoffman, said of the Austro-Hungarian chief of staff, Conrad von Hotzendorf, that his plans were operationally brilliant but his army could not execute them.  That raises the question of whether a plan for an army that cannot do it is a good plan.  I tend to think not.

On the Ukrainian side, the April 14 Wall Street Journal, in an article by Daniel Michaels titled “NATO Training Retooled Ukraine Army,” reported that:

NATO countries also helped Ukrainian military leaders adopt an approach called mission common, where higher ups set combat goals and devolve decision-making far down the chain of command, even to individual soldiers.

This is Auftragstaktik, one of the central components of maneuver warfare.  I wonder just who in NATO the Ukrainians got it from?  The U.S. Army is an unlikely source, since, though it may talk about Auftragstaktik, it does not do it.  The translation as “mission command” suggests the British army was a source, since that is the term they use.  The Bundeswehr is also a possibility, although I don’t think it was involved in training in Ukraine.

A more intriguing possibility is that Ukrainians have some ancestral memory of Auftragstaktik.  Ukraine first received its independence from Germany in World War I, and hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians fought for Germany in World War II.  All is not forgotten.  Some years ago, when speaking to the Balitic Defense College, I said, “Don’t model yourselves on the U.S. Army of today.  Model yourselves on the Wehrmacht.”  many of the students responded by saying, “sure.  My grandfather fought in the Wehrmacht.”  As disorienting as it may be to Americans, in much of central and eastern Europe, the Germans were the good guys since they were fighting the bad guys, the Bolsheviks.  As the Russian mother of a friend of mine, who was in Riga when the Red Army arrived in 1940, said to me, “When the Germans came in 1941, it was liberation.”

As the Russians gear up for a new offensive in eastern Ukraine, maneuver warfare also has something to say to the Ukrainian high command: do not let your army get encircled.

From what I read in the newspapers, Ukraine has stationed most of its best units in the country’s east.  Russian operational art dictates that the Russian goal must be to encircle those forces.  From the Ukrainian perspective, the desire to defend every inch of ground is understandable.  But it can also easily be fatal.  If Ukraine must choose between giving up ground or having its mobile forces encircled, maneuver warfare theory says to pull those forces back, even if that means the Russians take Donetsk and Luhansk.  Ground can always be re-taken, but Ukraine’s ability to reconstitute mobile forces is small.  If they are lost because of the blunder of adopting a cordon defense, they are lost for good.  At that point, Ukraine will have no capability of launching a counter-offensive and the war will be decided.  (Maneuver warfare theory also points out that a counter-offensive is often more powerful than an offensive, because in the former the enemy will have few or no reserves.  That’s what happened to the French in 1940.)

If Ukraine were to adopt a defense based on an operational level counter-attack, it could also make use of an ability it has demonstrated, namely to hold on to urban areas come hell or high water.  Mariupol is only one example.  By holding the cities and larger towns in areas where it hopes to counter-attack, it not only ties down large Russian forces, it also blocks the Russians from using the railways to resupply, because the tracks run through those urban areas.  A defense based only on holding fortresses can do nothing but delay defeat, but a defense that combines holding fortresses with a strong mobile reserve can be powerful.

More lessons for maneuver warfare and many other things will undoubtedly flow from the war in Ukraine.  Let’s hope one of them is not that nuclear war must be avoided at all cost.

The Ghost of 1914

World War I ended with a global pandemic.  Has the next world war begun with one?  I pray not, but no historian can look upon the war in Ukraine and not see the ghost of 1914 rising wraithlike from it – a ghost which, I fear, bears a striking resemblance to Conrad.  When was Przemsyl last in the news?

When we think back to World War I, to its origins, its course and its consequences, the parallels are frightening.  The first is that, in 1914, no one expected war or wanted war – at least a general European war.  Kaiser Wilhelm II certainly did not.  On the contrary: as soon as he realized, too late, where events were leading, he made desperate efforts to head them off.  He ordered a cable sent to Vienna telling Austria to take Belgrade and then stop, but the German Foreign Office did not send it.  Tsar Nicholas only approved the order for mobilization with great reluctance; his war and Foreign Ministers acted before he could change his mind.  The Kaiser even halted his army on the Belgian frontier when the British Foreign Secretary hinted Britain might stay out – but then Grey pushed the British cabinet in.

Are events today again running away from those who seek de-escalation?  Russia expected a quick victory (like everyone in 1914), but now finds herself bogged down in a stalemate with no clear exit.  As wars go on, they tend to spread.  The West is upping the ante in the help it is extending to Ukraine.  At what point does Russia start hitting Western weapons shipments while they are still on NATO’s soil?  How long can China remain on the fence when Russia is her principal ally?  If Russia uses chemical weapons in urban combat, does the U.S. wrongly declare them “Weapons of Mass Destruction” and thereby open the nuclear Pandora’s box?  There are a lot of ways for this conflict to get bigger, fast.

The parallels do not end with the merely military.  In 1914, the world had a global economy.  Only in the last decade did the value of global trade reach 1914 levels, as a percentage of the global economy.  But even before Russia invaded Ukraine, America’s use of economic sanctions as weapons was swiftly undermining Globalism, as did the Coronapanic and its effects on global supply chains.  Now, every country is striving to “re-shore” whatever it can, in a security-driven race towards autarky.

World War I ended with the destruction of three great, Christian, conservative empires, the Russian, the German, and the Austro-Hungarian, with ongoing consequences for Christendom.  What states may fail as a result of the war in Ukraine and its potential expansion?  Then, the old empires reformed as republics.  But now, we live in a time when the state is in decline and non-state entities are rising.  Fourth Generation War theory says that a defeated Russia might break up still further, as the Soviet Union did, to become a vast stateless region with lots of nukes and delivery systems floating around.

What then, Russophobes, which is to say the Blob, the neocons, and the neo-libs?  You destroyed states such as Iraq, Syria, and Libya and have not been able to put them back together.  What is your plan for a stateless region running from the Polish border to the Pacific Ocean?

The political establishments in Washington and the EU would be wise to remember that World War I brought a wholesale collapse of establishments.  The monarchies in Russia, Austria, and Germany were swept away, replaced in the first by Bolshevism and the latter two by socialism.  Shortly after the war, in 1922, the Italian political establishment was replaced by Fascism, and in 1933 in Germany by National Socialism.  Do the cultural Marxist elites that now rule in Washington and most European capitals think they are likely to survive a cataclysm they created? (I promise them their replacements will come from the right, not the left.)

If those establishments want to survive, they need now to bend every effort to de-escalate the war in Ukraine, to build a golden bridge Russia can withdraw over without humiliation, one where the Kremlin can claim some sort of victory (i.e., Ukraine will never join NATO and Crimea is recognized as Russian) and all Western sanctions are quickly removed.  The U.S., the E.U., and Russia then join to rebuild Ukraine.

In 1914, the post-1815 European order sleepwalked itself into a world war that swept it from the board.  In 2022, the post-1945 world order is on the verge of doing the same.

Is the Defense Now Dominant?

As of this writing (March 19), the Russian invasion of Ukraine is stuck in the mud.  That is bad news for Russia, because time favors Ukraine.  As Western military aid pours in and Ukraine mobilizes all its resources, the correlation of forces shifts in Ukraine's favor.  With the typical Russian logistical collapse, it is hard to see how it can regain the initiative.  This is a problem with Blitzkrieg-type offenses: if they fail, the next move is not obvious.

Russia’s failure to date raises a broader question: is the defense now dominant? If it is, that would come as no surprise to Clausewitz: he argued that the defense is inherently stronger than the offense.  Were not that the case, we would routinely see the weaker side in a conflict take the offensive.

What we’ve seen so far in Ukraine makes it tempting to think the defense is now generally stronger.  The ability of Ukrainian forces armed with anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles to stop Russia’s armored offensive appears to suggest that is the case.  Broadly, the packaging of firepower in smaller containers has historically helped the defenders.  In World War I, where the defense was dominant, developments such as land mines, barbed wire, and machine guns enabled individual soldiers or small groups to lay down firepower or create fortifications that previously would have required much larger units.  In 1914, a German infantry regiment was armed almost exclusively with rifles.  By 1918, it had many machine guns, trench mortars, and hand grenades, plus a few artillery pieces (Sturmartillerie).  This pushing down of firepower to lower levels made the 1918 regiment far more powerful than its 1914 counterpart.

A hypothetical situation allows us to see the same phenomenon: what if at Stalingrad Germany and its allies had Panzerfausts in large numbers?  Would the Soviet armored forces that created the encirclement still have been able to break through the Romanian, Hungarian, and Italian units holding the flanks?

But there is another side to this coin.  Before we jump to the conclusion that the defense is now dominant, we need to factor out the elements that are unique to the current situation in Ukraine.  First, Russia committed the common mistake of underestimating its opponent.  That in turn led to Russia attacking with second and third-class units that mirrored Russian units throughout history: conscripts with low morale, poor training, and, again, logistics that quickly collapsed.  In the 1970s, I visited Professor John Erickson, who wrote the definitive history of the Soviet Army in World War II, at his university office in Scotland.  One of the things he said to me was, “Do you want to understand the Russian army today?  Ask yourself what it was like under Czar Nicholas I.”

My information is that Russia has four first-class divisions, manned by well trained, long service volunteers and given Russia’s best equipment.  It held these in reserve until it's offensive failed.  Now it has committed two of them, but, again, once an armored offensive has failed, it is challenging to get it moving, especially with weak logistics.  All those failed Russian units still have to be fed, fueled, and given ammunition, plus the new units.  In addition, March means the Rasputitsa, the dissolution, where the roads all turn into bottomless mud holes.  Russian logistics are heavily rail-based, but the Ukrainians still hold cities near the Russian-Ukrainian border through which the rail lines pass.  As a German military historian, I have to say this is deja vu all over again, in all the same places, but with the boot now on the other foot.

Yet another factor particular to the situation, but certainly not historically unique, is that the Russians’ operational plan demanded more of the tactical units than they could deliver.  This was to some extent true of Germany’s Schlieffen Plan in 1914, although she was actually winning on the Marne until the fatal order to withdraw was given (over Kaiser Whilhelm’s objections).  Max Hoffman wrote in his memoirs of the Austrian chief of staff, Conrad, that his plans were brilliant but his army could not execute them.  But is a plan good if the army it is written for can’t do it?  This was a dilemma for the Soviet Army throughout the Cold War, and it seems like it still is.

These factors particular to the situation make me hesitant to declare that the defense has once again established its dominance over the offense.  During and after the 1973 war in the Middle East, the vulnerability of Israeli tanks to Egyptian Sagger anti-tank missiles, supplied by the USSR, led many experts to declare the days of the Blitzkrieg were over.  But Sharon’s classic operational maneuver, crossing the Suez Canal and taking Egyptians from the rear, showed it still had a great deal of life in it, despite some Egyptian victories at the tactical level.

A higher level trumps a lower.  At the tactical level, the Ukrainian defense has defeated the initial Russian operational plan.  But that plan was defective, in that the units ordered to execute it could not.  As to whether the defense can now prevail over a good operational plan for an army that can execute it, I think the jury is still out.

Russia's Invasion of Ukraine is a Disaster for Christendom

As of this writing, March 4, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has turned into a typical Russian mess.  Ukraine is not dead yet.  The Russian army’s logistics have broken down, as they usually do.  And Russia has suffered a monumental self-inflicted defeat at the moral level of war, which is the most powerful level.

But the magnitude of the disaster is only visible if we step back a bit and look at the grand strategic effects it has on all of Christendom, the great civilization that stretches from the Western Hemisphere’s Pacific Ocean coast through Britain, Europe, and Russia, to meet the Pacific once again.  Just when we thought Christendom’s civil wars had ended, allowing us to focus on the new threat from the global south, Mr. Putin has plunged us back into an east-west conflict.  It is hard to imagine a worse development for Christendom’s future, short of nuclear war.

To see this picture clearly, we need to remember our civilization as it was in March, 1914.  Quite simply, it ruled the world.  Even in places such as China that remained independent, our culture was the model everyone aspired to.  Christendom itself was full of self confidence.  It knew it was the best, most productive, most morally sound culture the world had ever produced (this slighted China, an equally successful culture, but in 1914 China seemed hopelessly backward).

Then, in August of that awful year, Christendom launched itself on the first of three civil wars, World War I, World War II, and the Cold War.  In the course of the 20th century, Christendom devoured itself.  Not only did it kill a hundred million or more of its own people and reduce much of its physical patrimony to ashes, it lost all confidence in itself.  In fact, its own elites became its worst enemy, worms gnawing its vitals from within, replacing the faith that created it with an ideology, Marxism (of several varieties), that called on it to destroy itself.

Then the Cold War ended.  Christendom could be reunited.  But it wasn’t.  The Blob, the American foreign policy establishment, made an error of vast proportions.  It crowed over Russia as a victor, when it should have welcomed a non-Communist Russia back into the Concert of Powers.  Not only should the U.S. and western Europe not have expanded NATO into former Warsaw Pact countries, they should have welcomed Russia into NATO.  Why?  To meet the threat rising from the global south.

Today, not a single Russian soldier stands on American or western European soil.  But both are swamped by millions of far more dangerous invaders, immigrants from other cultures very different from our own.  They are fleeing their own defective cultures, but they bring those defective cultures with them because they are all they know.  At least the American picture is not too bad; most of the illegals pouring across our southern border are Christians.  But many of those breaching Europe's borders are Moslems.  They are not coming to join Christendom; their intention is to Islamicize us – by whatever means necessary.

Until Russia invaded Ukraine, a “reset” was still possible.  President Trump understood we needed Russia as a friend and ally, not an enemy.  He grasped the fact that the real threat is south-north, not east-west.  Russia could still have been invited to join NATO.  After all, she holds Christendom’s vast right flank, running from the Black Sea to the Pacific.

Now, Mr. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has killed any possibility of ending the east-west conflict to face south.  The Blob and the Pentagon are of course delighted; they can go on pretending that the world is still shaped by great power rivalries, that nothing need change, that the invasion from the south is just the movement of “undocumented workers.”  They forget that endless civil war is what destroyed the Roman Empire.  We now face what may be the last act, the last fatal civil war, in Christendom.

Is there a way out?  One, I think.  President Putin could become the new Lavrentii Beria.  Beria, as the head of the KGB, was in charge of Stalin’s terror machine.  Shortly after Stalin’s death, he was taken out and shot.  Dead, he was more useful to Russia than he was alive.  Why?  Because all the Blunders and horrors of Stalin’s regime could be explained with, “Oh, that was Beria’s doing.”

Mr. Putin has made an enormous blunder.  He has gravely embarrassed the Russian army, never a good thing in Russian politics.  Were he suddenly removed, the invasion of Ukraine could all be blamed on him – especially if he were not available to deny it.

If you pick up your paper in the morning and find a headline announcing Mr. Putin is no longer President of the Russian Federation, don’t be surprised.

Putin Rolls the Iron Dice

As of this writing (Friday, February 25), the Russian campaign in Ukraine looks like a model of maneuver warfare, a direct follow-on to the Soviet campaign against the Japanese in Manchuria in 1945.  But the year is not 1945, and the results may be an operational victory but a strategic defeat for Russia.

Why is that a likely outcome?  Not because of Western economic sanctions, which Russia has prepared for.  The strategic question for which I suspect the Kremlin has no answer is, once you have taken Ukraine, what do you do with it?  Any government installed in Kiev by Russia will have no legitimacy.  The U.S. just found out in Afghanistan what happens when the foreign troops backing such a government go home.  If Russia keeps substantial forces in Ukraine to buttress its puppet government, those Russian soldiers will be targets for Ukrainian resistance forces.  How will a constant, if low-level stream of Russian casualties play on the home front?

How does Russia get a strategic win out of all this?  By annexing Ukraine?  That also runs into the problem of endless Ukrainian partisan warfare.  It is difficult to see a positive ending for Russia here.

I did not expect President Putin to take the risk of invading Ukraine.  It’s more than a risk, it is a gamble, throwing the iron dice of war and hoping for a win.  As the old saying goes, hope makes a good breakfast but a poor supper.

Why did Putin do it?  My guess – Zeppelin reconnaissance only reveals so much – is that he expected a diplomatic solution.  But NATO, led by Washington, offered him nothing, dismissing Russian security concerns and stressing that Ukraine had every right to join NATO.

Why did the American foreign policy establishment, aka the Blob, take a position that almost forced Russia to go to war?  Maybe the answer is just the Blob’s usual combination of hubris and incompetence.  But it is also possible it wanted Russia to get into what may prove a strategically unwinnable war.  With the rest of the American Establishment, it hates Russia because Russia rejects cultural Marxism, as do most of the former Soviet bloc countries.  It seems they know a thing or two about Marxism and are not so eager to get another dose of it.  In looking at the Blob’s motives, remember that the U.S. has no real interests at stake in Ukraine.  Our involvement is strategically gratuitous.  Ideological motivation, in Washington, not Moscow, may be at least a partial explanation for the unhelpful role the U.S. has played.

On the Russian side, President Putin began with a brilliant move (only former President Trump, among American leaders, acknowledged its brilliance).  By recognizing the independence of Ukraine’s two eastern provinces, he put the Ukrainian government on the horns of a dilemma.  If it accepted the loss of those provinces, it was finished politically.  If Ukraine invaded them, Russia could present its attack on Ukraine as a defensive response.  Russia would have been in a relatively strong position at the moral level of war.  But Putin jumped the gun, with the result that Russia is now universally seen as the aggressor.  There are times when inaction is a form of action, and Mr. Putin did not grasp that this was such a time.

Perhaps the most important question at this point in the conflict is, will it expand to include NATO?  I do not expect NATO to change its position and intervene in Ukraine.  But there are at least two scenarios that lead to NATO involvement in the fighting.  The first is if, in response to Russian moves toward western Ukraine, Poland sends troops in to secure territory that was, between the wars, Polish, including the important city of Lemberg (now Lviv).  The other is similar: if Russia decides to take Moldova en passant, Romania, which also claims Moldova, could intervene.  In both cases, the armed forces of NATO countries would have taken the offensive, so NATO would not be obligated to come to their aid.  But the hawkish mood in Washington might lead it to do so, with incalculable results.

What does this state vs. state war mean for Fourth Generation war theory, and vice versa?  Those who reject the 4GW concept will say it proves their case that Great Power rivalry will continue to determine international affairs.  But breaks between generations of war are not clean.  If they were, today’s U.S. military would still be modeling itself on the Second Generation French Army of the 1930s, a model that went down to defeat in six weeks in 1940 when hit by the Third Generation Wehrmacht.  Institutional change takes time, often too much time for contemporary Great Powers to maintain their positions.

4GW theory makes another point: if Russia fails strategically, there may be serious danger that the Russian state, not just its current government, falls apart.  That was a real possibility during the Yeltsin years, and the reason President Putin is popular in Russia is that he has strengthened the state.  The Blob would see Russia’s disintegration with delight, at least until the implications of a vast, stateless region with nuclear weapons hits home – possibly with a mushroom cloud or two.

As someone who recognizes Russia’s importance in the defense of Christendom, holding as she does its whole right flank from the Black Sea to Vladivostok, I am not delighted by the potential the war in Ukraine holds for a delegitimizing Russian strategic defeat.  But Russia seems to have fallen into the same trap Japan jumped into in the 1930s, the trap of acting out of time.  Japan saw itself as merely doing what the European powers did before World War I, invading other countries and subjecting them to its empire.  But the post-war world was a different place, and what was legitimate in 1880 was not legitimate in 1937.  President Putin’s apparent goal, restoring the Russian Empire, would have been acceptable in the 19th century, maybe in most of the 20th.  But today, it is not, unless it is accomplished peacefully.  Let us pray that the consequences of Russia acting out of time do not engulf us all.

Putin's Gambit

As of writing this (Tuesday, February 15), Russia has not invaded Ukraine.  I doubt that it will.  Why?  Because Russia has more to gain by not invading than by taking all the risks war entails.

On the surface, that may not seem to be the case.  Russia has spent a great deal of money positioning her armed forces for an invasion.  By not going ahead with it, she might look weak, at least in the eyes of fools.  The neocons and the Blob – the Washington foreign policy establishment – will claim threats of U.S. sanctions forced President Putin to back down, even though he has repeatedly said he has no intention of going to war.

That points to the first benefit to Russia by not attacking: Putin will appear to be a man of his word, while the Blob will have been exposed as an hysterical fraud.  That will not hurt the Blob domestically – it and its neo-con lampreys have been wrong on everything since the end of the Cold War yet remain in power – but the rest of the world will take note.  It will be less likely to react the next time the Blob barks at the bear.

For Russia, the biggest payoff from not invading is to have proven that it can.  The Russian military will have carried out (quite well) a completely convincing mobilization for a conflict in Ukraine.  No one doubts that, should she be forced to do so, Russia can take Kiev in two weeks.  There is no near-term possibility for Ukraine to join NATO, so Russia has no need to act presently.  But everyone now knows what the Russian Army can do.

Meanwhile, the financial cost to Russia of her extensive mobilization is easily repaid by intelligence she has gathered.  Intelligence on what?  On what NATO and especially the U.S. can and cannot see.  The Blob’s panic has led Washington to reveal a great deal of intelligence, which in turn points to sources.  The Russians now have a clear picture of what U.S. intelligence can perceive and, of even greater importance, what it cannot.  Maskirovka – masking or camouflaging planned actions, especially the massing of forces before an offensive – has long been a central Russian principle of war.  Russia – but not the U.S. – knows from what we revealed where her maskirovka worked.  She can do more of what worked while trying to do better elsewhere.

Finally, Russia will have reminded the world of the limits on American military power.  On the Eurasian continent, continental powers are dominant and maritime powers, including the United States, are less important players.  Fortunately, President Biden realized we could do nothing effective and ruled out sending American troops to Ukraine.  But what he did instead, dispatching handfuls of paratroopers to Poland and Germany and a few light armor units to Romania, showed how weak we are on the continent, not how strong.  Due to our shortages of both air and sea lift and the enormous logistics train American units require, all we could contribute to a major continental war is a few speed bumps.

As I have said in previous columns, this whole situation was easy to avoid.  All the U.S. had to do was to assure President Putin, in writing, that the U.S. was and would remain opposed to any changes in NATO’s by-laws.  Those by-laws prohibit any country that has a border dispute with a neighbor from joining NATO.  That would toss the hot potato back in Ukraine's lap, since ending its border disputes with Russia would mean accepting Russian ownership of Crimea, something no government in Kiev can do.  Problem solved.

On the other side of the ledger, President Putin must know that the course and outcome of wars are never predictable.  Russia could probably get away with slicing off a corner of Ukraine, enough to get a land bridge to Crimea.  But more than that would mean sailing into uncharted waters, waters where the Russian state could run hard aground.

In the end, Russia has more to gain by not invading Ukraine than by going to war.  This is one of the rare situations where the low risk course offers more gain than a high-risk venture.  I suspect President Putin saw it this way from the outset.  He is now positioned well to gain from his gambit, and not just in central Europe.

His Majesty’s Birthday

As I do every year, on this January 27 I phoned my liege lord and reporting senior, Kaiser Wilhelm II, to offer congratulations on his birthday.  I expected to find him in high spirits, thanks to the growing Reichsburger movement in today’s Germany, which recognizes that he was the country’s last legitimate government.  Nor is that all:  Germans are organizing a new, grass-roots movement to put Prussia back on the map.  The Hohenzollerns’ stock is on the rise, and rightly so.

After a few rings, the telephone was answered, not by His Majesty but by Her Majesty, Kaiserin Augusta Victoria.  She was beloved by the German people, and I was delighted to be able to tell her that she still is.  But I still needed to speak to her Willi.

“His Majesty expected your call,” she said, “and would love to speak with you, but right now he is unreachable.  The Reisekaiser is off on a grand tour of the United States, and the crowds welcoming him are so vast and enthusiastic that he cannot predict his schedule.  He requested that you talk with me instead.”

“Well, I am both honored and delighted with the opportunity to do so,” I replied.  “But I must say I’m curious as to why he is receiving such a rapturous reception in my country.  He deserves it, of course, but just over a century ago Americans looked on him with somewhat less favor.”

“Yes, well, they now know what they were told about him and the German Empire were all British lies.  But more than that, they know the dirty little man they elected President, Mr. Wilson, also lied to them.  They did not want to go to war, and they re-elected him because he promised not to, and then in a month after his inauguration he did.  And all those American boys died, and the Spanish flu was brought to America, with America fighting for the wrong side.  I understand the Devil has given Mr. Wilson quite a splendid palace in Hell.  It even has air conditioning!”

“Yes, well, he earned it,” I replied.  “But I think people nowadays would like to hear what you, and all the other good Christian women in Heaven, think about our time.  You represented everything good in women, not just German women but women everywhere.  What do you have to say to us?”

“Well, for me and for all the women here, it is just sad, very sad.  We do not understand why so many women in your time have unsexed themselves.  They want to live the lives of men!  Why?  Do they not understand that women’s work is not only different from mens’ it is more, not less, important?  It is women who pass the culture, our Western, Christian culture, on to the next generation, boys and girls alike, as mothers, grandmothers, aunts, teachers, neighbors, and friends.  When women fail to do that duty, it goes undone, because it is not natural to men.  And when it is not done, civilization itself is lost, as you see all around you.  Oh, when we compare our time to yours, we weep.  Why do you think that when the Blessed Virgin appears in your world, she does so weeping?”

“So when your husband said women are for “Kinder, Kuche, und Kirche” –children, the kitchen, and the church – he was not putting them down?”, I asked.

“No, not at all,” the Kaiserin replied.  “Men and women are equal but different.  Up here, that difference is celebrated.  After all, did not the Virgin Mother herself devote her life to her child, her kitchen, and the newly-created church?  What higher calling could we have then hers?”

“So what would your message be to American and German women today,” I asked?

“Just be a woman!” she said.  “But there is something more I would say to some of your women, the black women in America.  The pain you are suffering as your young men shoot and murder each other is something you can stop.  And perhaps only you can stop it.  How?  Refuse to have anything to do with young black men unless they get rid of their guns.  Take a page from 19th century women in the Temperance Movement.  They said, ‘Lips that touch liquor will never touch mine,’ and that convinced many young men to give up their drinking.  Tell your men that it’s us or the guns, you can’t have both.  Organize a pledge campaign, march in the streets, take your sons by their ears to the gun buy-backs.”

“So sometimes women do need to get out of the kitchen, you’re saying?” I asked.

“Yes!  But not by becoming men.  The women who did so much good in the Temperance Movement still dressed like women, had the manners of women, kept their homes clean, and put three good meals on the table each day for their men.  Women’s moral power comes from being women, not pretend men.  And because we use that moral power only when men fail, we are stronger than men.”

“And America’s black women should see Aristophanes’ play Lysistrata?”

“Yes, exactly,” said Her Majesty, laughing.

“Well, it sounds to me as if you should follow his Majesty and visit my country.  Our women need to hear you.”

“Willi said exactly the same thing in his last cable.  He told me the Imperial Zeppelin will be at my disposal, and I look forward to the trip.  He said the President’s daughter, that nice girl Alice Roosevelt, would love to be my hostess.”

“Hmm, Alice Roosevelt? ‘Nice’ was not the adjective usually applied to her.  You, the nicest woman in all of Germany, and she should be an entertaining combination.  Well, thank you, Your Majesty, and please pass my birthday best wishes on to your husband.  And let me close by saying all Germany awaits your return mit Ungeduld.” “Komme gleich,” als die Osterreicher sagen,” she replied with a laugh.  And so she rang off

January 6: The Unasked Question

This column is not another retrospective on the Capitol Hill riot of January 6, 2021.   rather it is a retrospective on the recent retrospective of the original event.

What we saw in that retrospective is what anyone who understands the system would expect:  false claims that the original event was a coup attempt, an Insurgency, even a rebellion (it was just a riot);  that President Trump intended and designed it (he was as surprised as anyone else); that he should have rushed to the Capitol and told his people to stand down (It would have been a good move on his part, but security would never have allowed it); and that only the right would ever do such a thing (Well the left regularly riots, loots and burns in our cities nationwide). The left's hypocrisy reeks to the heavens.

But the most interesting thing about the retrospective was the question that was never asked, at least not within the Establishment or it's kept media: why did Americans think they had to physically invade the Capitol in order to be heard?

The answer is that the January 6, 2021 riot on Capitol Hill was the flip side of the “cancel” coin.  When the Establishment decrees that anyone who voted for President Trump or fails to abase himself before cultural Marxism becomes an “un-person,” those people have only one way to make themselves heard: take to the streets.

To understand the dimensions of this problem, realize that somewhere between a third and a half of all Americans have been “canceled.”  What that means is that from the Establishment’s standpoint they no longer exist. They may not be allowed to speak.  Their interests can have no representation.  They may not be quoted or published.  If their politically incorrect views, speech or writing can be brought to the attention of their employer, that employer must fire them or be canceled himself.  They must be driven from their field and made unemployable.  They may be physically attacked without fear of their attackers being charged with a “hate crime.”  They are political Untermenschen, sub-humans, and if they or their property are subjected to a Krystalnacht by the goons of the left, well, they had it coming.  And the event will not make the papers.

In its impudence, the Establishment, which is wholly owned by cultural Marxism, thinks there will be no blowback for canceling somewhere upwards of 100 million Americans.  Well, on January 6, 2021, there was blowback.  A year later, through their rigged retrospective, they smirked that their kept media wrote the story, so the ordinary Americans who made themselves heard that day are presented as monsters.  The house owns the gaming tables, sucker, so place your bet and lose.

An objective observer would realize there is another America out beyond the Establishment and its rigged media whores.  That America is made up of the worker bees who make the Establishment drones’ lives comfortable.  They see the game that is being played at their expense.  They know they have been declared “unpersons,” that they have no voice, and their interests do not matter.  At a certain point, events will propel them out into the streets across the whole country, not just Capitol Hill.  That is what happens when you tell everyone who voted for Mr. Trump, and millions more who did not vote but reject cultural Marxism, to go f*** themselves.  And that is the message the retrospective on January 6 sent.

Ukraine: The Backstory

American establishment media, which combine historical ignorance with shallow ideology, are presenting Russia’s threat to invade Ukraine as just typical Russian bad boy behavior.  However, there is a backstory to current events, and if we understand that backstory Russia’s actions become a good deal more understandable.

The backstory begins with the Bosnian Annexation Crisis of 1908.  The Russian foriegn minister at that time, Izvolsky, made a deal with his Austrian counterpart, Aehrenthal, that Russia would not object to Austria annexing Bosnia if Austria would similarly not object to Russia taking the straits linking the Black Sea to the Mediterranean (both territories were then owned by the Ottoman Empire).  Izvolsky set off for other European capitals to obtain their OK to the deal – something Aehrenthal knew he would not get.  Austria, however, moved quickly to annex Bosnia, leaving Izvolsky looking like a sucker and Russia humiliated.  In 1914, one of the main arguments of the pro-war faction in St. Petersburg was that anything was better than another embarrassment like that of 1908.

Now the backstory moves forward to the late 1980s.  As the Soviet Union careened towards dissolution, the United States assured Gorbachev that if Moscow dissolved the Warsaw Pact, NATO would not expand into the former Pact countries – Poland, Hungary, Rumania, etc.  Then, after the USSR was gone, NATO did exactly that.  When Russia objected and pointed out America’s promise, Washington replied, “You did not get it in writing.”

You think Russia might now have some reason to distrust the promises of both European capitals and the United States?  And why she now demands written promises that Ukraine will not be allowed to join NATO?  Has anyone in the U.S. State Department ever heard of the Bosnian Annexation Crisis of 1908 and the role it played in starting World War I?

The ignorance and incompetence of the Blob, as the American foriegn policy establishment is now known, is once again setting the world up for disaster.  I am sure Russia does not want to invade Ukraine.  She knows the cost will be high, especially if she bites off more than she can chew and faces an endless guerrilla war in lands she occupies.  But after we lied about expanding NATO eastwards, what choice does Russia have given the humiliation and geo-strategic threat NATO membership for Ukraine would mean for her?

The Ukraine crisis is one of our own making.  The Blob’s combination of hubris – the rest of the world must do as we tell it, or we will send in the U.S. military (and lose)-- and Wilsonian idealism, which denies that other powers have legitimate interests, has pushed Russia into a corner.  The Blob neither understands nor cares, asking itself (it only talks to itself) what Russia can do about it.  What Russia can do, and is completing its preparation to do, is have the Russian Army in Kiev in two weeks and reply to the sanctions we threaten by shutting off the gas to Europe and letting NATO freeze in the dark.  It is no accident the Ukrainian crisis is occurring in winter;  President Putin knows Russia’s two best generals have always been General January and General February.

There is a way out of this situation without war.  The White House needs to dump the Wilsonian idealism that prattles, “Ukraine is a sovereign country and can do whatever it likes,” recognize that great powers, us included, have legitimate spheres of interest in their neighborhoods, express our understanding of Russia’s security concerns and promise, in writing, that Ukraine (and Georgia) will not be invited to join NATO.  This should not be a hard promise to give, because NATO’s own rules say that no country with a border dispute can join.  We can maintain peace by giving up nothing.

Will it happen?  The Blob cannot change, because if a member of the Blob lets even the slightest hint of realism show, his career is instantly over.  The top people can overrule the Blob, but those top people, the Secretaries of Defense and State and the President, are currently Winkin’, Blinken, and Nod.  The one potential player in a position to make both Washington and Moscow listen to reason is Berlin.  Let us hope it asks itself, what would Bismarck do?

"Critical Race Theory" is Just the Tip of the Iceberg

Rightly, American parents are up in arms over the teaching of “Critical Race Theory” to their children in public schools.  When the left denies this is happening, they are lying.  In fact, the situation is much worse than most parents know.  Public school curricula throughout the land are not just teaching Critical Race Theory, they have been shaped and molded in almost everything they do by Critical Theory, of which Critical Race Theory is only one element.

Some history is helpful here.  What is commonly known as Political Correctness or “Wokeness” is actually cultural Marxism, Marxism translated from economic into cultural terms by a German think tank, the Institute for Social Research, usually called the Frankfurt School.  The Frankfurt School’s goals were the destruction of Western culture, the Christian religion (and all religion) and, starting in the 1950s with Herbert Marcuse, the white race.  One of the tools they developed for attaining these ends is what they called “Critical Theory.”

The term is something of a play on words: the theory is to criticise.  By constant, unremitting criticism of every characteristic of “bourgeois” society – the family, the schools, the churches, different social roles for men and women, distinctions between ethnic groups and races, normative heterosexuality – they sought to delegitimitize all aspects of traditional America and Western societies.

By the late 1940s, Critical Theory was already shaping curricula in teachers’ colleges and college education departments.  Today, it completely controls those places, to the point where if a student who wants to become a public school teacher does not mouth the lies it demands, he cannot graduate.

One of those lies is “Critical Race Theory,” which blames blacks’ problems entirly on white “discrimination.”  Society must be completely remade to eliminate “racism” of all kinds, which is defined as acknowledging what everyone knows, that racial and ethnic differences are real.  Does anyone seriously pretend there is no difference between, say, Swedes and Italians, or Irishmen and Russians?  How many people, looking for a good time on a Saturday night, go to a Russian bar?  But should any student in a college education department say that, he would be doomed.  What Critical Theory demands is endless cant, all the time and about everything.

But, again, Critical Theory does not stop with race.  It lies behind sex education in schools, the goal of which is to make every kind of deviant behavior “normal” while condemning traditional Judeo-Christian morals.  It permeates the teaching of history, where instead of presenting America as an example for the world, it is seen as a criminal enterprise from the start.  It is now influencing math and science, where the very idea of objective truth is denounced as white, male, and “oppressive.”  If a student is black, any answer he gives to a math problem must be accepted.

The members of the Frankfurt School, as early as the 1930s, said that it does not matter whether students in public schools learn any skills or any facts.  All that matters is that they graduate with certain “attitudes.”  In other words, schools are not about transmitting knowledge but are instead Skinner boxes, places where students are psychologically conditioned, like Pavlov’s dogs, to live by ideological lies.  Should they doubt the lies, they have been conditioned to look in the mirror and see “another Hitler.”

The parents who have risen up to demand Critical Race Theory not be taught in their public schools have seen only the tip of the iceberg.  Broader Critical Theory shapes everything public schools teach.  The goal is to produce, through endless conditioning, good little cultural Marxists who will launch an American cultural revolution, like that in Mao’s China, where everything old will be swept away.  And what will succeed it?  The members of the Frankfurt School refused to answer that question.

PS:  If readers have not seen it, I recommend a video documentary on the Frankfurt School, “The History of Political Correctness.”

The View from Olympus: The Marine Corps, Continued: An Alternative Approach

In my last column I laid out the reasons why the Marine Corps’ current strategy is trivial.  It focuses on a war with China that is unlikely to happen, and in which the Marine Corps would be only a player, adding a handful of anti-ship missiles to the surplus we already have.  (After the first 48 hours, both sides’ surface warships would be either sunk or in port.)

The question is, can we devise a better alternative?  I think we can, to the advantage of the Marine Corps and the country.

The starting point immediately presents a challenge: the Marine Corps’ strategy must fit within the national strategy, and the national strategy is defective.  It focuses on a war with China that is highly unlikely because both the U.S. and China are nuclear powers.  Any direct engagement of conventional forces would contain a high risk of escalation to nuclear war.  The side losing conventionally would be under immense political pressure to redeem the situation by going nuclear.  Both sides know this, and if an incident between their respective armed forces does occur, they will both be attempting to contain it.  The real story here is that our national strategy is a budget strategy, not a strategy for the outside world.  However, it contains an opportunity for the Marine Corps, one I will address shortly.

The Marine Corps needs a strategy that bows to the war with China nonsense but also looks beyond it.  The brief I would create would go something like this:

The Marine Corps recognizes that war with China is the most dangerous situation America faces, but also that it is unlikely.  Should such a war occur, it will be of critical importance to prevent it escalating to the nuclear level.  To that end, the most powerful but least risky strategy for the United States is a distant blockade of China.  China depends on massive inflows of resources.  The Navy/ Marine Corps team can block the seaborne flow and can do so at distances from China where the Chinese armed forces cannot project power.  That means we can do it without firing a shot -- a tremendous advantage in a conflict where preventing escalation will be literally a matter of life and death for both countries.

Within the strategy of a distant blockade that must be enforced with minimal violence, the Marine Corps offers critically important capabilities.  These include:

• Stopping and boarding ships to inspect their cargoes and papers to determine whether they may pass or not.  Boarding ships is a traditional Marine function, and the Corps’ work to develop non-lethal weapons and tactics can minimize the risk of casualties.
• Isolating Chinese overseas bases and ports controlled by Chinese companies.  The Navy would blockade such bases and ports from the sea while Marines did so from the land, normally with the consent of the locals but if necessary without it.
• Establishing local bases for our own ships enforcing the blockade.  Those bases will need protection from their landward sides.
• Maintaining a “fleet in being” threat to take Hainan island.  Taking Hainan would require direct engagement and could only happen after prolonged fighting had reduced Chinese anti-ship capabilities to a minimal level.  But the loss of Hainan would be such a dire blow to the Chinese Communist Party’s legitimacy that it could not ignore a Marine Corps prepared and ready to take it.  The threat alone would tie down substantial Chinese forces and also move Beijing toward wanting a quick settlement of the conflict.  (Marines can add more examples of what the Corps can contribute in a conflict that must not escalate.)

At the same time the Marine Corps must be prepared for important roles in a conflict with China, it must also be ready to fight and win wars with non-state enemies around the world.  In the Marine Corps’ view, such conflicts are less dangerous than war with China but more likely.  Climate change, mass migration and state failure will create happy hunting grounds for non-state entities that for a variety of reasons regard the United States as an enemy.  We dare not merely sit and wait for them to strike.

The Marine Corps is the obvious servicer to specialize in containing these “Fourth Generation war” or “non-trinitarian” threats.  Doing so requires strategic mobility, which in turn means a ground force must be married to the sea.  The Marine Corps has a long history of involvement in such conflicts, going back to the sands of Tripoli and the banana wars of the early-to-mid 20th century.  Marines have been working to understand war with non-state opponents and how to win it since the beginning of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.  (The first field manual for 4GW, the K.u.K Austro-Hungarian Marine Corps FMFM-1A, was produced around 2005 by a seminar made up mostly of Marine officers, and Lt. Col. Greg Thiele USMC is the co-author of the Fourth Generation Handbook.  If the Marine Corps wants to pick up these works and use them, we will not object, and I’m confident both the Admiralty in Pola and His Imperial and Royal Majesty Kaiser Karl will give their permission.

Specific Marine Corps capabilities that are necessary for fighting non-state threats include:

• Raids
• Punitive expeditions
• Not relying on airpower, which results in civilian casualties and major destruction of civilian assets, but meeting our enemies eyeball-to-eyeball while protecting the local civilian population.  In both Iraq and Afghanistan over-reliance on air power brought strategic-level negative outcomes.  (Again, I’m sure HQMC can give more examples.)

In conclusion, the Marine Corps can make important contributions in a potential conflict with China, contributions that serve strategic requirements to minimize violence and thus avoid escalation.  At the same time, it can be the nation’s first responder for the type of conflict most likely in the 21st century, conflict with threatening non-state entities.

Any questions?

The View from Olympus: The Marine Corps, Again: Fire/Counterfire.

The October, 2021 Marine Corps Gazette contains a long letter from Lt. Gen. Paul K. Van Riper and Col James K. Van Riper, both USMC Ret., denying the value of the concept of Fourth Generation war and of the broader intellectual framework of the Four Generations of Modern War.  Their timing is perhaps a bit off, since we just saw the Marine Corps, along with the other American armed services and some NATO allies, defeated in a Fourth Generation war in Afghanistan.  But I have known General van Riper for decades and respect him highly, so a reply is in order.

As the Van Ripers' note, war has an immutable nature, though the conduct of war (they say “character”) changes over time.  Change itself is thus part of war’s nature, and it makes war’s nature dialectical.  One way of war establishes itself for a shorter or longer time as dominant; it is challenged by a new way of war, usually mixed with elements of the old, becomes dominant and the cycle begins anew.  Thesis, antithesis, synthesis; we see it over throughout history.  I call the new syntheses “generations.”  The Van Ripers’ can call them “bananas” if they want to.  But to deny war is dialectical is to deny its nature.

As to Fourth Generation war, the Van Ripers miss its essence.  It is not, as they state, insurgency, nor do 4GW entities win by having superior will.  It is a contest for legitimacy, which makes John Boyd’s moral level of war decisive: people regard as legitimate whatever entity seems most moral to them (their standards of morality may be very different from ours).  The entity that has legitimacy in their eyes is one they are willing to fight for, to the point of becoming suicide bombers (throughout military history, suicide attacks have been rare).  It is the power of 4GW at the moral level that enables physically weak entities like ISIS and the Taliban, who have no tanks, fighters/bombers, artillery, or the other usual measures of combat power, to defeat the U.S. Marine Corps and other state armed forces.  With our massive firepower, we win all the battles, but they win the wars.

The van Ripers argue that:

Many of the characteristics that Lind identifies as central to the fourth generation of war -- the rise of non-state actors, decentralization, and the blurring of the lines between combatants and civilians -- have dominated wars of past ages.  They are not new to a so-called fourth generation of war.

I agree completely, and I have pointed the same thing out for decades.  The framework I advocate is the four generations of modern war, war beginning with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648.  4GW has many similarities to war before the rise of the state.  

The Van Ripers discount the fading states’ legitimacy around the world, but do not seem to understand that even in their own country, a growing number of people question it.  How many Trump voters consider the combination of the Biden Presidency and Democratic control of both Houses of Congress legitimate?  Had the election gone the other way, how many people on the left would accept President Trump as legitimate?  How many did so in his first term?  As I have said and written many times, you do not have to go to the Hindu Kush to fight Fourth Generation war; it is coming to a theater near you.

Finally on the subject of 4GW, the Van Ripers write, “Lind has continued to champion the fourth generation of war ever since, without success, having failed to operationalize it in any meaningful way.”  May I suggest to them the Fourth Generation Warfare Handbook, co-authored by Lt. Col. Greg Thiele, USMC, and myself?  It is based on seminars Lt. Col. Thiele and I led at EWS and thus on the experiences of many Marine captains just back from fourth generation wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Van Ripers complain that I continue to say the Marine Corps has adopted maneuver warfare doctrine only on paper, not in terms of what Marines actually do.  Ever since FMFM 1, Warfighting, was published, Marines of all ranks have said to me, “What the Marine Corps says is great, but it’s not what it does.”  At a conference put on by T&E a few years ago, which I attended, there was unanimity, colonel through staff sergeant, that the Corps is not doing maneuver warfare.  But there is an easy way to settle this: let HQMC order all Marines to read the (now) MCDP 1, Warfighting, then vote on one question:  “In your daily life as a Marine, do you experience what this book says Marines should be doing?”  I’ll wager Cleveland pierogies to Lejeune sand fleas the “no” vote will win it.

I suspect the Van Ripers’ letter was written in response to a request from Headquarters, Marine Corps, and perhaps partially by HQMC, to discredit my critiques of the Corps’ recently adopted strategy.  I am aware many Marines individually think intellectually about war.  But only an institution that checked its brain at the door could come up with a strategy so comically bad as the one now promoted by HQMC.  That strategy is to prepare for a war with China in which Marines will take islands from the Chinese, then mount anti-ship missiles on them to shoot at Chinese warships (some varients include anti-submarine warfare too, presumably with underwater bayonet charges).  To recapitulate what I have said elsewhere, this strategy has three notable deficiencies:

• First, China is a nuclear power, and nuclear powers do not fight each other in conventional wars because the risk of escalation is too great.  If such a war did occur, the US Navy and Air Force already have many times the number of anti-ship missiles we would need, especially since the Chinese would keep most or all of their surface warships in port.  The Corps’ strategy adds nothing to the defense of our country.
• What the country does need is a service specialized in Fourth Generation war, because state collapse is the main danger we face.  State collapse brings, among other problems, vast numbers of refugees.  One mission a Fourth Generation focus would give the Marine Corps is returning refugees from the country or region they came from, which may not want to receive them.  We will need the capability,, for places with sea coasts, to make a (possibly opposed) amphibious landing, dump the refugees ashore, and leave quickly.  Punitive expeditions against places that harbor terrorist threats are another logical Marine Coprs mission.  By becoming America’s force of choice for a world of collapsing states, the Marine Corps would give itself a strategy meaningful to national security and to the American public.
• Finally, by adopting a strategy of “me too” -- a few more anti-ship missiles in a war unlikely to happen -- the Marine Corps raises the question of its own future.  We still have a Marine Corps because past generations of Marines came up with roles the public and politicians could grasp, were unique to the Marine Corps and clearly met a real national security need.  I do not want to see the Marine Corps disappear.  But if today’s Marine Corps, as an institution, cannot do better than the farce of a strategy HQMC has come up with, its future is in doubt.  Remember, the Corps is no longer inexpensive, and we have a debt crisis in our future.

I thank the Van Rippers for their letter, as it helps bring out facets of Fourth Generation war that need to be addressed.  I am particularly grateful for their citation, as a critique of 4GW, of an article in Parameters from 1993, “elegant Irrelevance: Fourth Generation Warfare,” by Kenneth F. McKenzie, Jr. That same McKenzie, now a general, is the CINC of Central Command, where he recently presided over our final defeat in a twenty year war against a Fourth Generation entity, the Taliban, and our tail-between-the-legs withdrawal from Kubal.  Ironies are seldom that delicious.

The View from Olympus: The Scheller Affair and Moral Courage

Several weeks ago, a Marine battalion commander at Camp Lejeune, Lt. Col. Stuart Scheller, went public in a big way in a video with a demand for accountability at high levels for our disastrous flight from Afghanistan.  The Marine Corps responded as he knew it would, by immediately relieving him of his command, which ended his Marine Career.  There is no bigger sin in the U.S. military bureaucracy than committing truth.  Lt. Col. Sheller, who sacrificed his pension by his initial act, made a second video resigning from the Marine Corps and saying he wanted no benefits from his seventeen years of service.  Both videos have circulated widely on the internet.

What it comes down to is that Lt. Col. Scheller had the moral courage to say what is being said widely in both the Army and the Marine Corps from the ranks of captain to colonel.  But so far, only Lt. Col. Scheller has had the guts to go public with his demand.  Where are the other voices asking for the same?  Do the Marine Corps and the Army put together now have only one officer with moral courage?  So it seems.

From before the dawn of history, courage has been recognized as the most essential virtue of the warrior.  American soldiers and Marines, including their officers, are today noted world-wide for their physical courage.  More than one European officer who was in combat alongside American units has told me that American officers sometimes have too much physical courage, taking unnecessary risks.

That is a high compliment to American officers.  But there is another kind of courage, no less necessary in military officers: moral courage.  As the Scheller Affair demonstrates, it is possible to have both, as Lt. Col. Scheller clearly does.  But a person can also have one without the other.  The fact that only one American officer, to my knowledge, has gone public with a demand for accountability -- not just for the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, but for the whole incompetent conduct of the war over a twenty-year period -- suggests moral courage is as rare among American officers as physical courage is common.  That is, indeed, my observation over almost fifty years of working with the U.S. armed forces.

Why is that the case?  Because the American military personnel management system penalizes moral courage.  The system’s rule of “up or out,” which requires officers to continually get promoted or leave the service, compels everyone to be a careerist at an early age.  Many young officers find that distasteful, but they know their only choices are to bend to the system or get out.  So those who plan a career, most of them anyway, bend.  In doing so, they get their first lesson in moral cowardice.

More quickly follow, because the promotion process relies on officer fitness reports in which even a small mistake often ends a career.  This teaches a CYA mentality in which safety of career depends on never taking initiative and always following every rule, even when the result will be defeat.  Anyone who objects to a stupid order, process, or procedure, puts his future on the line -- and, from my long observation, is often forced out.  Driving out young officers who show strong character and moral courage is so common that if we really wanted to reform our armed services, asking them to come back would be an effective first step -- especially if we then used them to replace the careerists.

The personnel system’s war on moral courage breeds inward focus, where gaming the career system and rising in rank replaces getting the results the battlefield demands as officers’ lodestone.  That inward focus in turn means the American armed forces cannot get beyond  Second Generation war, a war of processes for putting firepower on targets.  Third Generation war, also called maneuver warfare (and official USMC doctrine), demands outward focus on the situation, the enemy, and getting the result the situation requires.  That in turn requires moral courage, because it often means acting against rules and orders.  A maneuver warfare military promotes officers who do that and thereby get the necessary result.  Our armed services get rid of them.

And so we lose wars like that in Afghanistan, because a Second Generation military cannot win a Fourth Generation war.

The real meaning of the Scheller Affair is that the American armed forces need lots more Lt. Col. Schellers.  The Marine Corps Commandant has said there will be a full accounting for the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan (although not, so far, for the lost war).  If he’s serious, there is an easy way to show it: refuse Lt. Col. Scheller’s letter of resignation and put him in charge of the investigation.  Does the Commandant have the moral courage to do that?  Or should Lt. Col. Scheller be staying and the Commandant resigning?