War, Chaos, and Business
Harper’s Washington Editor Ken Silverstein recently asked Doug Macgregor six questions about the war. [Thanks to Dave Dilegge who runs the Small Wars Journal for the tip.]
COL Macgregor (USA, ret.) is the author of two influential books on military strategy: Breaking the Phalanx and Transformation Under Fire. There is a presentation from the [...]
Adam Elkus has written an interesting article on the subject now posted on DNI. It’s a controversial topic, with some people claiming that the threat these people represent is overblown, while other analysts see an emerging fifth generation of war.
In a comment to a recent post, nweaver raises a very important point, and one that I’ll be writing on a lot. The US military is indeed fixated on the speed of the decision cycle, and so speed and accuracy may trade off. That is, to get decision cycle speed up, it may be [...]
“We can’t pass their legislation,” a senior American official in Baghdad said. “We can’t make them like each other. We can’t even make them talk to each other. Well, sometimes we can. But we can help them execute their budget.”
STEVEN LEE MYERS and ALISSA J. RUBIN
U.S. Scales Back Political Goals for Iraqi Unity,
New York Times, [...]
In 1988, a retired Army general, James H. Polk, wrote a short piece for Armor magazine called “The Criticality of Time in Combat.” In it, Polk listed several of the effects of what we would call “operating inside an opponent’s OODA loop”:
Surrender after token resistance
Abandoned [...]