Proactively “From the Sea”; an agent of change leveraging the littoral best practices for a paradigm breaking six-sigma best business case to synergize a consistent design in the global commons, rightsizing the core values supporting our mission statement via the 5-vector model through cultural diversity.
As the world has set its own course as we have been planning other things, some believe that the 2016 election will be more focused on foreign policy and defense issues than any of the candidates thought would be the case at the end of last year. What will be the above-the-fold topics? The baseline was set by the '16 budget battle last year and the winding down and a post-mortum on the sequestration gambit of the last couple of years. As proxies in the emerging discussion, to join the old bulls on the Hill, are there emerging new leaders on defense issues elected in the '14 cycle? Where do declared or expected candidates for President for both parties stand on policy and present operations? To discuss this and more in the foreign policy and defense arena Sunday from 5-6pm Eastern will be returning guest, Mackenzie Eaglen, Mackenzie is a resident fellow in the Marilyn Ware Center for Security Studies at the American Enterprise Institute, where she works on defense strategy, defense budgets, and military readiness. She has worked on defense issues in the House of Representatives and Senate and at the Pentagon in the Office of the Secretary of Defense and on the Joint Staff. In 2014, Eaglen served as a staff member of the congressionally mandated National Defense Panel, a bipartisan, blue-ribbon commission established to assess US defense interests and strategic objectives. This followed Eaglen’s previous work as a staff member for the 2010 congressionally mandated bipartisan Quadrennial Defense Review Independent Panel, also established to assess the Pentagon’s major defense strategy. A prolific writer on defense-related issues, she has also testified before Congress. She has an M.A. from the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University and a B.A. from Mercer University.
Join us live if you can with the usual suspects in the chat room and offer up your questions for our guest, but if you miss the show you can always listen to the archive at blogtalkradio. If you use iTunes, you can add Midrats to your podcast list simply by clicking the iTunes button at the main showpage - or you can just click here.
On FbF, we usually highlight a person, a crew, a unit, or just a battle in order to spark a pondering about the nature of man in the face of a decision; a decision to turn towards, not away. A lot comes from WWII - and that makes sense; but ... something is missing. Context; beyond the USA. We think we were touched by WWII ... but were we really? Do we really make an effort to fully understand how that war impacted the national character of other beligerants? This FbF, let's take a moment to think about that for a moment. Get a cup of coffee, put the phone to voicemail. Neil Halloran has put together one of the more powerful, fact based representations of the human cost of that war - and by comparison - others. Well worth your time.
On Tuesday over at FP, Admiral James Stavridis, USN (Ret.) offered up some of the best advice I have read in awhile for those who are trying to get their head around Putin and what is going on with Russia. As I've mentioned here and we've discussed often on Midrats, Russia is neither West nor East ... she is just Russia. To try to understand her as anything else simply will not work. Given that ... why is Russia being ... Russia?
Want to really understand what’s going on in Russia? Get rid of that CIA report full of dusty Cold War tropes. Forget the NSA intercepts or spy satellite imagery. And drop the jargon-filled scholarly analysis from those political science journals.
Instead, get back to the richest literary gold mine in the Western world: Russian novels and poetry. Read Gogol, Dostoyevsky, Turgenev, Pushkin, Lermontov, Tolstoy, Solzhenitsyn, and Bulgakov. That’s where you’ll really find how Russians think.
Stavridis gives a great series of recommendations.
Begin with Nikolai Gogol’s 1842 masterpiece, Dead Souls. It is the blackest of black humor, a story in which a mysterious businessman moves through the Russian countryside “buying up souls” (i.e., taking away a tax burden from the estate owners).
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How will Russians fight and what kind of leaders do they follow? Want to understand their patriotism? Go read the master, Leo Tolstoy. His sweeping 1869 epic, War and Peace, shows us how the Russians think about their ability to fight, and illuminates the deep patriotism that fuels today’s nationalist tendencies.
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Fyodor Dostoyevsky in Crime and Punishment spins a tale that captures the Russian sensibility perfectly: A deeply troubled protagonist chooses to kill, but then is haunted by guilt and — encouraged by the good people around him — eventually confesses. He is then purified and ultimately achieves redemption.
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Think the Russians will crack under sanctions? Try reading One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, the 1962 novel by dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn. His protagonist, a convict in a Siberian gulag, finds a hundred ways to scrape through the day, dealing with the petty corruption, laughing at the predicaments, occasionally reveling in the harsh conditions of his imprisonment, and powerfully exhibiting the ability to overcome adversity.
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For something more modern, try One Soldier’s War by Arkady Babchenko. It’s a foot soldier’s memoir set in Chechnya during the height of the war there in the 1990s waged by the Russian conscript military against the rebellious population. This is counterinsurgency turned upside down — the Russians aren’t trying to win the hearts and minds; they are quite content with putting a bullet into each.
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And finally, to understand the view of the Russian émigré, the brilliant Russian-American novelist Gary Shteyngart’s Absurdistan captures the post-Soviet space better than any book of non-fiction. Set in Moscow and a thinly disguised Azerbaijan (a former republic of the USSR, in case you forgot), it serves up a portrait of Russian “capitalism” with a huge dose of black humor. It echoes Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, a magical realist novel written in the 1930s, in its evocation of the Russians’ ability to exist quite happily in a world where everything is half a beat off the music.
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And what of Russian leaders? Dostoyevsky said about one key character in his masterpiece, The Brothers Karamazov, that “Anger was buried far too early in a young heart, which perhaps contained much good.” A description of the young Putin? Perhaps.
When in doubt, no one could be accused of doing a bad thing if they picked up a book. Or, as simply put by Stavridis;
We have three options to outline a foreign and defense policy. Which one is the direction the American public would support? I'm discussing over at USNIBlog. Stop by and let me know what you think.
If we want answers about how to squash Isis, we should look to another field of combat, 5,000 miles away from Palmyra — to a war has been all but won against equally determined Islamists.
After five grim months as part of Boko Haram’s self-declared ‘caliphate’, life is slowly returning to normal to the Nigerian town of Michika. Residents who fled in droves are trickling back to plant crops before the rains, and despite the desecrated churches and tales of neighbours kidnapped and murdered, there is optimism.
Also looking cheerful for the first time are local army units, who unlike the Iraqi army, have found unexpected success in pushing Boko Haram from Michika and other north-east Nigerian towns.
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So why the turnaround? In Michika recently, I found a clue. Down a dusty road, by a road block of empty munitions cases, I came across a gaggle of Nigerian soldiers, who angrily shooed us away when they saw our cameras. Before they did so, though, my photographer glimpsed six uniformed white men behind them, who made themselves scarce sharpish. Were they the SAS, perhaps? Unlikely. While both Britain and America gave ‘technical help’ to the Nigerian army after the Chibok kidnappings last year, they stopped short of providing special forces. Instead, the most obvious explanation was that they belonged to another, equally publicity-shy force: mercenaries.
There are many reasons why some nations' military are less the effective in the field against the forces of Islamic extremism - but in general it can be broken down to leadership, will, and a cultural ethos. PMC are noting if not meritocracies, the very opposite of what we see in many nations. If they are the best solution, and often the only solution, then they should be embraced. To paraphrase a great man; judge them by their battlefield performance, not the color of their skin.
Midrats is back live this Sunday at 5-pm Eastern; tanned, rested and ready for the summer. Join EagleOne from EagleSpeak and me for the full hour this Sunday from 5-6pm Eastern as we cover the major national security and maritime issues that are set to dominate conversations as the kids get out of school and that moving trucks start to roll. From China's sand islands, the Islamic States expansion, the response to a revanchist Russia, to the usual goings on with the Potomac Flotilla - we'll cover it all.
Join us live if you can with the usual suspects in the chat room and offer up your questions for our guest, but if you miss the show you can always listen to the archive at blogtalkradio. If you use iTunes, you can add Midrats to your podcast list simply by clicking the iTunes button at the main showpage - or you can just click here.
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