“Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free.  But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.”
“Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a man’s mind,” Paul quoted. …
“But what the O.C. Bible should’ve said is: ‘Thou shalt not make a machine to counterfeit a human mind.’ … The Great Revolt took away a crutch,” she said.  “It forced human minds to develop.  Schools were started to train human talents.”
                                          Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam and Paul Atreides in Dune[1]
 
[1] Frank Herbert, Dune, Chilton Company: Boston, Massachusetts, 1965, 12, 11-12.

I have worked in the world of professional military education (PME) for about fifteen years and I have taught cadets as part of a Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) program at a university and I have taught brand new lieutenants and new captains at the U.S. Army Armor School (then at Fort Knox, Kentucky) and I have helped to shape the training and education of officers in several Middle Eastern countries and I currently teach new majors at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff School at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.  The standard use of the acronym PME is for professional military education.  In this post I advocate for professional mentat education.

Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel Dune introduces the reader to a universe where human beings had ten thousand or so years earlier fought a war to defeat thinking machines – computers or robots with artificial intelligence.  Humans developed three human replacements for the loss of thinking machines.  One of those groups included people called mentats.  These people were taught to understand probabilities and possibilities to include concepts of politics and strategy.  I am not trying to make anyone a Dune nerd with this explanation.  My point is that Western (and particularly American) professional military education (PME) needs to develop the equivalent of mentats today.

I have intended to write this article for a very long time as I was frustrated by the failure of the U.S. officer corps to conduct wars more effectively during the Global War on Terrorism and I have regularly hoped to connect posting this with an anniversary of the withdrawal from Afghanistan and to explain how American PME had failed the nation in the past and what its responsibility is to the nation in the present.  That is still one of the objectives of this piece.  I have also listened to numerous discussions on how to bring artificial intelligence into the classroom of civilian schools and within PME.  One morning, about a year ago I listened to a piece from NPR that was an interview with an associate professor from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania who requires students to use ChatGPT to write papers for his class.[1]  I have noted in my current eleven year stretch of graduate level education that students arrive at my institution less and less prepared to have discussions of importance that require an understanding of history and less capable of refining and articulating their thinking in a written form.  I have blamed this on the broader failures of the undergraduate education system.  This NPR interview expressed just how degraded education has become.  In short, it seems as if the body has forgotten the meaning and purpose of education.

The purpose is not about product.  The purpose is teaching process.  We should be teaching people how to research, how to think, and how to articulate that thought in speech and writing.

Too many people seem to think that colleges are involved in producing products and the argument in favor of artificial intelligence (AI) is that it helps average people produce better products.  That is probably true, but in the process of placing emphasis on product, we are failing to teach the processes – the hows of learning – that truly matter down the road.  The point at which I realized the interviewee was wrong was when he said that calculators didn’t make us worse at mathematics.  Yes, they did.  People are demonstrably worse at calculator-less computation today than humans were one hundred years ago because they don’t practice the skills and they quickly turn to a device to offer the easy solution.  This makes people worse at a skill.

For those who haven’t heard of ChatGPT, it is a chat bot that can write for a person.  A person feeds in questions and the bot produces a paper of a specified length based off the parameters provided by the person.  It has recently produced graduate school passing work.  This isn’t wonderful.  This is horrible.  I am not a Luddite, by the way.  I like and value technology.  I use calculators.  I also understand that using aids, of any sort, makes me weaker in that way.  Crutches and wheelchairs facilitate and promote muscle and bone density atrophy.  Crutches and wheelchairs are useful and even essential for some, but they should never be used by all, or we risk societal harm.  My biggest concern regarding the involvement of AI in education is that it will cause thinking, like any other muscle using a crutch, to atrophy.

What does this have to do with PME?  We are not teaching people who manage societally sanctioned violence on behalf of the nation to do so properly.  I question if the responsible institutions and organizations understand what such an education should include.

I acknowledge that these are strong statements.  I will give some examples to illuminate my assertions.

I contend that the U.S. government, including the U.S. military, suffers from three sins of ignorance: ignorance of underlying logic, ignorance of narrative space, and ignorance of strategy.  I will briefly explain each of the problems in turn.
 
Underlying logic.
I often ask students to explain the underlying logic for how to win a war.  That request regularly gets blank looks and silence in response.  I don’t blame the officers.  No one has taught them to think about the logic which undergirds their doctrine or their approach to war, in general, or a war, in specific.  I sometimes continue the discussion by asking students to explain the logic behind why defense is considered the stronger form of war or the logic behind a turning movement.  Both of these lines of questioning often lead to informative discussions about why a force should or might conduct a specific type of operation.

To explain what I mean by underlying logic, I will use the surge in Afghanistan that was initiated in 2009.  What was the underlying logic for that effort?  It goes something as follows in the forms of necessary steps and assumptions:

1. People want to be “good” – the Taliban was preventing goodness
2. Secure the people by separating them from the Taliban
3. Remove “evil” violence potential
4. Replace “evil” governance with “good” governance
5. People will become “good”

With each step of this logic trail there are problems, but this is a simplistically stated logic trail for why people believed the surge could work.  Now, what are the problems with the logic trail?  Most of this comes in the form of simple questions.  First, did the Afghan people and the U.S. leadership either in the U.S. or in Afghanistan agree on the definition of good?  Second, what was the distinction for the average Afghan villager between good and evil?  Was that easily and obviously discernable in terms of the differences in behavior of the Taliban, the Afghan National Security Forces, or U.S. military personnel?  Third, there was no good governance available to replace the evil governance even when the first three steps were achieved.  That meant that the people never had the opportunity to be good such that they would reject future Taliban advances or assertions of authority.

I hope that this little exercise causes some internal debate and argument.  I expect that some readers will poke holes in it.  That is what I want.  I want readers and students to think through the underlying logic of a given philosophy or doctrine.  We do not teach this, and we do not regularly discuss this and we definitely do not do this when planning operations, campaigns, or writing strategies.

[1] Mary Louise Kelly, “'Everybody is cheating': Why this teacher has adopted an open ChatGPT policy,” National Public Radio [26 January 2023]. https://www.npr.org/2023/01/26/1151499213/chatgpt-ai-education-cheating-classroom-wharton-school [accessed 19 February 2024].

​Narrative space has terrain, just as does physical space. Narrative space terrain is made up of ideas, concepts, humiliations, grievances, history, culture, language, religion, etc. that have different values in terms of shaping the thoughts, perceptions, and associated actions of people who reside in that narrative space. Narrative, for the purposes of this philosophical approach, includes social identity, enduring narrative and transient narrative. Figure [to right] captures the imagery of this concept in the form of a geologic metaphor in that social identity forms the core of how the society or culture sees itself and the most deeply rooted narrative structures. It is the bedrock of the later described narrative space. …
Continuing with the geologic metaphor, narrative space terrain is constructed in much the same way as is physical terrain through basic processes of deposition, erosion and tectonic forces, which creates a narrative landscape or narrative shape/structure. Understanding narrative shape and structure is narrative morphology. These processes, as with their physical counterparts, happen over long periods of time or can happen in violent episodic events. The primary shapers of this space are events, ideas (people-thinkers) and actions (people-doers).[1]

[1] Brian L. Steed, “Narrative Leads Kinetic Warfare,” Dangerous Narratives: Warfare, Strategy, Statecraft, Washington, DC: Narrative Strategies Ink, 2021, 23, 25.

Understanding narrative space means understanding self, opponent, terrain, etc.  It includes understanding the operational environment, but as expressed above it is more than the physical composition, disposition, and strength of the enemy and more than the intelligence preparation of the battlefield.  For those who think this doesn’t matter, I include a quote from then LTG Douglas Lute who had been the person on the National Security Council responsible for coordinating the Global War on Terrorism through part of two different presidential administrations.  He was quoted in a SIGAR (Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction) interview in 2015 saying the following: “I bumped into an even more fundamental lack of knowledge; we were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan – we didn't know what we were doing. What are the demographics of the country? The economic drivers?”[1]  If Doug Lute says that we didn’t understand or know what we were doing, then we didn’t understand or know.  Such an expression should lead to an underlying logic discussion of what it takes to know what we are doing.  In part, it takes an understanding of one’s own and the opponent’s narrative space.  To gain that understanding requires study in a variety of topics to include history, philosophy, religion, etc.
 
Strategy
What is strategy?  There are multiple expressions of this word.  While I may not disagree with many of the points regarding the importance of ends, ways, and means in the calculations of strategy, I disagree with the characterization of the point and purpose of strategy.  I am a phenomenologist when it comes to war, as were Carl von Clausewitz and Hans Delbruck and T.E. Lawrence.  That means that I try to look at war as a whole – the entire duck as a duck and not the separate elements of a duck – rather than breaking it down to lines of effort and a list of events or actions on each line.

I think that T.E. Lawrence gives one of the simplest expressions of strategy in his 1920 article titled “Evolution of a Revolt.”  In that article he says, “… strategy, the aim in war, the synoptic regard which sees everything by the standard of the whole.”[2]  Lawrence goes on to articulate that in both strategy and tactics he found three elements present: algebraical, biological, and psychological.  His expression of his development of strategy in this article is genius and worth your time.  The point is that Lawrence identifies strategy as seeing all the actions in the sense of the whole or everything in one as included in the meaning of the word synoptic.

The U.S. military regularly confuses doing things with having a strategy.  We did a lot of things in Ukraine, Afghanistan, Iraq, Vietnam, etc. but that doesn’t mean that we had a strategy – a singular vision in which all those things worked together to accomplish the overall objective.  Strategy is accomplishing and not necessarily doing.  It is possible for an actor to accomplish a great deal while doing very little.  If one reads and studies Sun Tzu one will see that he regularly advocates for a strategy that allows for just this sort of low ratio between accomplishments and actions.

Mentat Training Recommendation
If I am right in these three sins, then PME needs to compensate for this failure.  In doing so, it is also crucial that PME respond to the ever-decreasing quality of graduate that the secondary and baccalaureate education institutions produce.  As the world increases in complexity and academia decreases in effectiveness, there is a widening gap that needs to be closed.  Some would have us believe that the way to close such a gap is through AI.  I disagree for three primary reasons.  One, I agree with Bill Dembski when he posits that there will be no artificial general intelligence (AGI).[3]  Two, I think the 2014 movie Ex Machina gives a chilling point that must be considered.  The film addresses a sort of Turing Test of whether an AI motivated robot had become sentient.  What is learned by the end is that it hadn't really achieved sentience even though by all appearances it seemed to have.  In fact, it had simply been executing its programming to deceive someone about being sentient.  While I believe that Dembski is correct that AGI is technically impossible, deceptive AGI may be possible.  We may be able to deceive others and possibly ourselves about whether a robot, machine, or AGI is sentient and by so doing risk ourselves and humanity.  Three, Skynet from the Terminator movies and television series is evil in that humans should never seek nor create a machine mind that does our thinking for us.  If you watch Ex Machina, holding to the Skynet is evil paradigm, then it is one of the most significant horror movies ever made as in the film humans plot under computer deception for the death of other humans.  That is the worst of all worlds and possibly the world toward which we are heading as militaries develop and test semi-autonomous and moving toward autonomous human killing machines.

AI, in general, and AGI, more specifically (though it has general in its name) costs billions of dollars in investment.  It is unclear how much money the U.S. Department of Defense is investing in seeking to create something that it may never achieve; however, I believe the DoD may achieve AI in a deceptive and self-destructive way, or it may create forms that only weaken and enfeeble minds and thought processes.  It is certain that the money spent on this effort is pointless, at best, and existentially destructive, at worst.  The point here is that a portion of this money should be directed toward the development of better thinking humans – the improvement of human intelligence and not artificial intelligence.

To what end should that money be directed?  What is provided below will be only a brief expression of how the proposed mentat education program might initially be done with the intent to generate conversation and better ideas.  I want to begin with the four basic rules that should govern the mentat program:

• One, the program should be entirely voluntary.  Anyone who wants to pursue it should be allowed to do so.
• Two, the program should be rigorous such that those incapable of meeting the standards will be weeded out over time.
• Three, the program should have rewards attached to it – incentives in terms of assignments and promotions down the path.
• Four, the program needs to be a career long path from commissioning to retirement and maybe beyond.  Possibly, mentats would never actually retire but only leave uniformed service.

Next, I offer subject areas that should be addressed.  This may not be the comprehensive list, but this is where it should start in the form of foundational understanding of how societies are built, organized, think, process information, make decisions, and go to and fight wars.

• History.  Such study should include military history, the history of ideas, and cultural and regional history.
• Geography.  Because the land and the people are connected, such study should include both physical and social geography.
• Philosophy.  Such study should include schools of philosophy, ethics, and domestic and global religion.
• Logic.  Linked with philosophy and connected to statistics, this study should ensure that students understand the basic structure of logic and how other peoples see logic differently.
• Statistics.  The current buzzword related to this field of study is data literacy.  All that phrase really means in its common usage is a basic understanding of statistics.  Ideally, this study truly makes people data literate.

Finally, I offer the manner in which these mentats are to be trained.  U.S. officers currently enter service to a basic level training that the U.S. Army calls the Basic Officer Leaders Course (BOLC)(almost immediately after commissioning) and they continue to the Captains Career Course (CCC)(about four years after commissioning) and then to the Command and General Staff Officers Course (CGSOC)(about ten years after commissioning).  The mentat program would simply piggy-back on the existing PME and be conducted as follows:

• BOLC.  Self-selected mentats receive night classes and classes on the weekends as this is all voluntary in the various subject matter areas.  Students are evaluated and meet minimum requirements to continue from one block of instruction to the next.
• CCC.  The same process as at BOLC.
• Service in Units.  Participants take a block of curriculum that requires written and oral exams to continue progressing in the program.
• CGSOC.  All mentats who make it to CGSOC enroll in a special mentat course of instruction that covers the required material and also offers additional training, instruction, evaluation, and opportunities with respect to experience with civilian industry, academia, and travel.

I recognize that it will require effort to develop such people.  I believe that there are already hundreds of officers who would gladly volunteer to become intellectually elite.  For many of them, this is what they hoped for when they took their oath of office.  I believe that such a cohort would demonstrate greater value than all the failed investment in AI or AGI and would be more qualified to use whatever technical aids we do develop.  Those interested in providing national security in the world as it is and to which it seems to be devolving hopefully will see that the fractional investment in people rather than technology will create the qualitative difference needed for countries to achieve cognitive overmatch of their opponents on the battlefields of the future.

[1] Brian L. Steed and Sheri Steed, editors, Voices of the Afghanistan War: Contemporary Accounts of Daily Life (Voices of an Era), Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2023, 269.
[2] T.E. Lawrence, “The Evolution of a Revolt,” in Evolution of a Revolt: Early Postwar Writings of T.E. Lawrence, University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1968, 105.
[3] Bill Dembski, “Artificial General Intelligence as an Idol for Destruction,” billdembski.com [22 January 2024]. https://billdembski.com/artificial-intelligence/artificial-general-intelligence-idol-for-destruction/ [accessed 19 February 2024].

– “Hotel California” by The Eagles (emphasis added)[1]

[1] Don Felder, Don Henley, and Glenn Frey, “Hotel California,” Hotel California (Eagles Album), Asylum, 1976.

On 7 October 2023 Hamas attacked Israel with thousands of fighters who broke through the barriers separating the Gaza Strip from Israel and ravaged numerous communities killing more than a thousand, wounding thousands more, and then taking more than two hundred hostages back to the Gaza Strip.  Almost immediately a cry went up for Palestinian rights as protestors in many Western cities expressed moral outrage for the plight of the Palestinians and called for an end of the Israeli occupation.  For weeks following that fateful day news reporters, analysts, and pundits gave opinions, explanations, and projected possible events while most viewers wanted to know why it happened or why the demonstrations were happening.  What follows is an attempt to provide an answer to those questions.

What was lost in the heat of the events was that on 5 October 2023 there was the first intra-NATO shootdown of an aircraft as an American F-16 shot down a Turkish drone over Syrian airspace.  The drone was part of a Turkish attack on Kurdish fighters in Syria and Iraq in retaliation for a Kurdistan Workers Party suicide attack in Ankara on 1 October 2023.[1]  On 19 September 2023 Azerbaijan captured the province of Nagorno-Karabakh after decades of struggle, disagreement, and conflict.[2]  Prior to the Hamas attack there looked to be a possible agreement between the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the state of Israel.  Prior to that there was a seemingly successful mediation by China to heal some of the recent strife between the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and Iran.  A week before Hamas launched its attacks, the national security advisor to the president of the United States stated that “The Middle East region Is quieter today than it has been in two decades.”[3]  Contrary to that expression, 2023 was a very busy year for the Middle East.  Will there be a sea change in regional power dynamics and which great power will have the most influence in the years to come?  What will regional changes mean for broader global geopolitics as great powers continue to use the region as a means of testing each other and using the region as their conflict laboratory?

In 2003 I attended a training seminar for new foreign area officers (FAOs).  During that conference I asked a member of the training team from the FAO proponent office why there were so many army attachés or security cooperation chiefs in the Middle East who were majors or lieutenant colonels while every single similar position in Central and South America were colonels.  His paraphrased answer was that during the 1990s no one believed that we would again go to war in the Middle East and that the only war that mattered was the war on drugs.  I questioned him at the time about Operations Desert Shield, Desert Storm, and Desert Fox as well as Operations Southern Watch and Northern Watch.  He simply shrugged.

That was the first time that I thought about the Eagles’ 1976 classic song “Hotel California.”  In particular, I thought about the ending sentence which says, “You can check out any time you like but you can never leave.”  The Middle East is that for America and the American national security apparatus.  America can check out mentally, professionally, and academically, but it can never leave.  That doesn’t mean that America is a literal prisoner, but as stated in the lyrics of “Hotel California”, America is a prisoner of its own device.

The are four simple reasons that keep America a prisoner of its own device in the Middle East: oil, religion, non-state actors, and great power struggles.  In many ways these answers are obvious expressions.  The point of this article is not to dive into these four reasons specifically though the discussion that follows will provide information that does touch on many of them, but the purpose is to identify the contextual reasons that make understanding the Middle East so complicated for so many leaders and policy makers seeking simple solutions.

To understand the Middle East one can easily get sucked into a variety of rabbit holes that can go rather far back in history.  There are roots of conflict in the region and deep roots.  The dividing line between the two is World War I and the collapse and dissolution of the Ottoman Caliphate and the loss of the caliph of Islam.  This article focuses on the events in the roots of conflict construct and offers twenty-five events plus one military theory that have shaped the narrative space for the war that many people believe began on 7 October 2023.[4]
The first point is the importance of the question: “where do you draw the line?”  This is a common question that rarely leads to an informative discussion and is often asked in a regular conversation to frustrate a useful discussion or resolution to a problem.  In the case of understanding the Middle East and the conflict associated with Israel, this question is quite important as where one draws the line may well determine how one sees the problem.  If the problem begins on 7 October 2023, then it is easy to place the blame on Hamas.  If the line is drawn on 29 November 1947 with the United Nations vote to partition Palestine, then one can blame the international community.  If one draws the line on 6 June 1967 which was when Israel completed the capture of the Gaza Strip during the Six-Day War and the beginning of Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, then one may place the blame on Israel.  What follows is an attempt to provide those events that provide context for why some people draw the line where they do.  Understanding these events should help one to see the complexity in the events currently transpiring as well as the difficulties in coming up with some type of mutually acceptable solution to these events.

The events have been divided up into seven sections: competing promises, inter-war problems, “solutions”, the state of Israel and state responses, Islamism, America in the Middle East, and resolutions.  None of these will be addressed in detail.  The intent here is to provide an awareness of the complexity of events and to also see what must be understood to begin the necessary healing for there to be peace.

[1] Natasha Bertrand and Oren Liebermann, “US fighter jet downs a drone belonging to NATO ally Turkey over Syria, officials say,” CNN [5 October 2023]. https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/05/politics/us-downs-turkey-drone-syria/index.html.
[2] The Associated Press, “Azerbaijan moves to reaffirm control of Nagorno-Karabakh as the Armenian exodus slows,” NPR [2 October 2023]. https://www.npr.org/2023/10/02/1203150145/azerbaijan-moves-to-reaffirm-control-of-nagorno-karabakh-as-the-armenian-exodus-.
[3] Gal Beckerman, “‘The Middle East Region Is Quieter Today Than It Has Been in Two Decades’,” The Atlantic [7 October 2023]. https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2023/10/israel-war-middle-east-jake-sullivan/675580/.
[4] The list of twenty-five plus one is as follows: Hussein-McMahon Correspondence, Sykes-Picot Agreement, Balfour Declaration, Dissolution of the Caliphate, Increased Jewish Immigration, Establishment of the Muslim Brotherhood, Arab Uprisings and the 1939 White Paper, The Final Solution, The State Solution, 1948 War and Al-Nakba, Twin Pillars Policy, 1967 War, 1973 War and the Camp David Accords, 1979 Iranian Revolution, Birth of Hezbollah, Globalized Jihad and the birth of al-Qaeda, Birth of Hamas, Intifadas, Operation Desert Storm, al-Qaeda’s Declaration of War and GWOT, 2006 Lebanon War, Arab Spring, Mowing the Grass, The Abraham Accords, ISIS and the Islamic Revolution, and The Management of Savagery.

World War I was the Great War for Great Britain, and it taxed the empire more than any previous conflict.  In 1914, the British Empire ruled over the largest population of Muslims on earth and the declaration by the Ottoman Sultan-Caliph of a global jihad against the enemies of Islam and forbidding Muslims to fight against the Central Powers in addition to an Ottoman attack against the Suez Canal led the British Empire to look for friends everywhere and further caused them to make promises to those various friends of access to the same pieces of territory through three particularly well know sets of documents.

For those familiar with diplomatic language one can easily see in the documents that much less was actually committed to than most critics state.  That said, it can be easily seen that the British were offering access to the Levantine coast of the Middle East to three different peoples: Arabs, French, and Jews.

The first of the three was not a single document, but a series of letters as part of a correspondence between Hussein the Sharif of Mecca and Henry McMahon the British High Commissioner of Egypt between July 1915 and March 1916.[1]  McMahon received a request from Hussein, and he continued the correspondence implying and then stating that the British would support an Arab state.  It was this correspondence that generated the British mission in support of the Arab revolt that was made famous through the acts and coverage of British officer Thomas Edward Lawrence.  In those letters it could be read that the Levantine Middle East was promised to the Arabs.

The second was a document that was originally negotiated between the British, French, and Russian governments while the correspondence with Sharif Hussein was ongoing.  This is known to us today as the Sykes-Picot Agreement for British politician and officer Mark Sykes and French diplomat Georges Francois Picot as the Russian negotiator’s name was dropped once the Russian Revolution began.  The purpose of the negotiations and later the agreement was to determine how the Ottoman Empire would be divided once the war ended.  For those who criticize the British and French for this effort as some expression of European colonialism, it is important to note that the victors of the Great War carved up the German and Austro-Hungarian Empires as well and placed new lines all over Europe.  It was generally accepted in the early twentieth century that to the victors went the right to redraw the map regardless of which opponents’ territory was being carved up.  This agreement was an agreement and not an official treaty.  Much of what was promised to the French was never realized as it was never taken from the Turks.  When reading the document, one could read it in a very positive way and see that the agreement wasn’t in contradiction to the correspondence with Sharif Hussein.[2]  In practice, the French sent an army into Syria in 1920 to expel Sharif Hussein and his leadership from Damascus and used the Sykes-Picot Agreement as their justification to do so.

The third was the Balfour Declaration.  Arthur Balfour was the British Foreign Minister in 1917 and he was approached by Baron Rothschild to seek a declaration in favor of a homeland for the Jewish people in the land of Palestine.  Balfour eventually signed the declaration and by doing so seemed to offer the land of Palestine to a third group of people.  This wasn’t actually true, and it was, in no way, a legally binding commitment to do anything.  In reading the details of the document one can easily see that the British government doesn’t commit to anything, but it does state that the British government looks favorably upon the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine.[3]  As with the Sykes-Picot Agreement, the proof of intent comes in the actions in the years to follow when there was a spike in Jewish immigration to British mandatory Palestine.

[1] Henry McMahon and Hussein bin Ali, Cmd.5957; Correspondence between Sir Henry McMahon, G.C.M.G., His Majesty's High Commissioner at. Cairo and the Sherif Hussein of Mecca, July, 1915–March, 1916, published 1939 with map. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/75/Correspondence_between_Sir_Henry_McMahon_and_the_Sherif_Hussein_of_Mecca_Cmd_5957.pdf
[2] The agreement in the below reference is as part of correspondence between Sir Edward Grey, then serving as the British Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs to Paul Cambon, the French Ambassador to London.
Mark Sykes and François Georges-Picot, Sykes-Picot Agreement, 16 May 1916.  https://wwi.lib.byu.edu/index.php/Sykes-Picot_Agreement
[3] Arthur James Balfour, The Balfour Declaration [2 November 1917]. https://wwi.lib.byu.edu/index.php/The_Balfour_Declaration.

The Ottoman Empire ended on 1 November 1922 when the Ottoman Sultan-Caliph stepped down and there was a designation of a person known only as the Caliph.  That person and the designated position ended on 3 March 1924.  One can make the argument that the Ottoman Sultan-Caliph was a Turk and never a descendant of the same tribe as was the Prophet Mohamed.  One can further argue that few Muslims globally acknowledged the Sultan-Caliph’s ideological or legal suzerainty over them.  The lack of significant disruption from the Sultan-Caliph’s call to jihad is a simple example.  Regardless of the acceptance or lack thereof experienced by the Ottoman Sultan-Caliph, the position was no longer.  For the first time in something close to 1,290 years there was no caliph on the earth.  In a poetic sense there was no leader for the faith and the faithful which had existed from the Prophet Mohamed until 1924.  There was no successor of the Prophet Mohamed and no one to unifyingly lead the community of the faithful.  The absence of the caliph was felt much stronger than was his existence.

The loss of the unifying position was nearly coincident with the extension of European authority over the former Ottoman lands except for what came to be the Republic of Turkey.  The League of Nations gave mandates for Palestine and Syria to Great Britain and France, respectively.  Not only did European powers divide up the lands of the Ottoman Empire, but they also sought to establish European-styled states in the region.  In addition to the creation of the states, most of which were governed by European powers through mandatory designations from the League of Nations whereas many of the rest had significant European influence including military and foreign policy.

During the 1920s Hassan al-Banna and others formed a group called the Muslim Brotherhood with the intent of establishing an international Islamic group with emphasis on establishing a Muslim polity based off Islamic law or sharia and not beholden to any secular leadership.  This group became the sole pan-Arab or pan-Islamic group as it ultimately spread across the Arab and then later the Islamic worlds with a variety of off-shoot groups.  Its adherents or associated actors attempted to control and dominate a variety of states throughout the region to include members of an extremist offshoot group who took credit for the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat.  [By the time of the 2023 Hamas War the leaders of Turkey and Qatar as well as the satellite channel Al-Jazeera all had strong links to the Muslim Brotherhood and its ideology.]

Into the 1920s and 1930s British mandate of Palestine came a consistent and increasing number of Jewish migrants as they left the chaotic and collapsing Russian Empire and other post-World War I European states.  Britain allowed the Jewish purchase of land and the establishment of communal living in kibbutzim.  Jewish immigration came at a cost.  Unlike previous changes in land ownership done by mostly absentee landlords, the Jews intended to live on the land, work the land, and turn the land into something commercially viable.  That meant displacing Palestinians who were often not the landowners and usually lived on and worked the land in some form of tenant farmer status.

Obviously, the displacement of Palestinian farmers by thousands and tens of thousands of immigrants outraged the Palestinians.  There were strikes, marches, and revolts using significant amounts of violence that took the British Army, locally sourced militia, police, and military organizations to quell over three years that started in 1936.  Finally, the British government issued a white paper in 1939 that stated that there would be an eventual end to Jewish immigration.[1]  That policy was obviously interrupted by World War II and the associated holocaust of Jews throughout Nazi controlled Europe.  After the beginning of World War II and in response to the White Paper, David Ben Gurion, then the chairman of the Jewish Agency stated, “We will fight the war as if there were no White Paper, and we will fight the White Paper as if there were no war.”[2]

[1] Secretary of State for the Colonies, Palestine: Statement of Policy, His Majesty’s Stationary Office [May 1939]. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1939_White_Paper_cmd_6019.djvu or https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/brwh1939.asp.
[2] The Jewish Agency for Israel, “The White Paper of 1939” [7 August 2005]. https://archive.jewishagency.org/ben-gurion/content/23436/.

World War II was a watershed in the Middle East for many reasons.  It effectively introduced two ideas to the world that are crucial to understanding the Middle East: the Nazi Final Solution for dealing with the Nazi stated problem of Jews by exterminating all Jews under Nazi authority and the state solution for the post-war Jewish refugee problem.  Related to these two “solutions” are the following points.

One, the Arab and other natives in the region were disinclined to support or root for their colonial overlords: Great Britain and France.  As a result, many Middle Eastern people expressed an affinity for Germany in the contest.  The rising tensions regarding Jewish immigration in Palestine in combination with the anti-Jewish rhetoric and policies coming from Germany both before and during the war garnered additional Arab support.

Two, the effort by Adolf Hitler and his senior subordinates to actively slaughter the Jews created sympathy for the Jewish plight on behalf of Western powers, generated a genuine Jewish refugee crisis following the war, and exacerbated the Jewish sense of homelessness as Jews returned to villages and towns to lost property, anger, and violent, deadly attacks from non-Nazi former neighbors. 

Where was home if you were a European Jew in 1945 and 1946?  There wasn’t a home.  Jews could stay in or near the death camps.  Apparently, Jews couldn’t return to their home countries and former physical homes.  The solution to Jewish homelessness created by Hitler’s Final Solution was turned over to the fledgling United Nations.

The United Nations developed a somewhat elaborate land division deal with respect to Mandatory Palestine: divide it between Jews and Palestinian Arabs.  The partition plan was voted on and passed by the United Nations General Assembly as Resolution 181 with all voting Arab and/or Muslim countries voting against the partition and the United States, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics leading most nations to vote in favor.  There was officially to be a Jewish state in Palestine.

Three, the United States became a major player in the Middle East for the first time in its history.  President Franklin Roosevelt met with the king of Saudi Arabia on the USS Quincy in the Red Sea as the president returned from the Yalta Conference with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin.  In that meeting, supposedly President Roosevelt agreed to protect the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia from external aggression and to consult with the king regarding any decisions about Palestine.[1]  Whether or not Harry Truman was informed of these agreements following President Roosevelt’s death, Truman didn’t adhere to them in spirit or letter.

[1] Michael B. Oren, Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East: 1776 to the Present, New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2008, 470-471.
George Lenczowski, The Middle East in World Affairs, fourth edition, Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1980, 582-583.

The Palestinian Arabs did not take well to the United Nations decision to partition Palestine and violence began almost immediately after the vote was announced.  The British planned to pull out of Palestine in the spring of 1948 and Israel declared its independence on 14 May 1948 to make sure that it captured a moment and didn’t allow the fate of a Jewish state be referred to an international body. The war that followed established two key principles that have remained ever since.

One, every conflict that takes place in Palestine or Israel is done according to some international game clock.  It is as if the global community will only allow people in that part of the world to kill each other so long before it will step in and demand some sort of ceasefire or cessation of hostilities.  This happened during the 1948 War when it served the interest of the Israeli people.  The ceasefire allowed Israel to consolidate and resupply such that when the fighting resumed, Israel had the advantage, and it went on to secure the borders that have generally lasted as legitimate Israel until the present.

Two, this was a catastrophe or al-nakba for the Palestinian people.  The Arabic phrase literally translates as The Catastrophe which is what it was.  The cause of the catastrophe is open for debate and has shifted – to a degree – over time.  Was this the catastrophe of incompetent and poorly coordinated Arab states who could not defeat a single Jewish one?  Or, was it the catastrophe of Jewish expulsion of Palestinians from their homes and villages as a form of ethnic cleansing.  The latter interpretation is what predominates in the twenty-first century among the Palestinians and the Palestinian diaspora.  Such a grievance has given energy to resistance of Israeli occupation of all Palestinian lands; meaning all of what many Palestinians regard as Palestine exclusive of what are regarded as illegitimate Israeli claims on the land.

In July and November 1969, President Richard Nixon restated American policies for dealing with the global situation in what became known as the Nixon Doctrine.[1]  Most of the doctrine was related to Vietnam, but it had significance for the Middle East as well.  The idea was to help provide stability and security globally by empowering and supporting states to secure themselves and help secure their respective regions.  In what is commonly called the Twin Pillars Policy, the Middle East was to be secured via support to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and Iran.

In 1967, in anticipation of a threatening arms build-up on its borders by Syria, Jordan, and Egypt, Israel again went to war against multiple Arab states and defeated all of them.  From 1948 to 1967 the Gaza Strip belonged to Egypt and the West Bank belonged to Jordan.  Israel felt that it was being surrounded by hostile forces that included the blocking of the exits from the Gulf of Aqaba by Egypt.  This was a cause for war in Israeli geo-political thinking.  Consequently, Israel launched a preemptive attack against Egypt that captured the Gaza Strip and the entirety of the Sinai Peninsula.  Supporting artillery fire from the Jordanian Armed Forces led to Israel attacking into the West Bank to capture Jerusalem and the entire West Bank up to the Jordan River.  Finally, Israel attacked into the Golan Heights to secure that territory from the Syrians who had been using the dominating high ground to conduct artillery raids into northern Israel.  In six days, Israel defeated three major Arab states who were supported by military units from other neighboring states.

The 1967 Arab-Israeli War effectively destroyed the notion of the power of the Arab state to achieve goals vis-à-vis Israel.  While non-state actors were extant prior to 1967 they became more and more significant since that war.  It was the Arab state failure in the 1967 War that led to the transformation from a state centered approach to fight Israel toward a non-state centered approach.  The variety of ways to attack Israel through the narrative space as part of a narrative war was born in the frustrated failure of 1967.  One might even see in Egyptian President Anwar Sadat’s approach to the 1973 War a narrative war approach.  He didn’t intend to win the war through violence.  He intended to win the war through diplomatic negotiation and what he needed to begin that negotiation was a military success which the crossing of the Suez Canal gave him.[2]

Egypt and Syria attacked Israel on Yom Kippur, 6 October 1973, with tactical and strategic surprise.  The Egyptian Army crossed the Suez Canal, captured dozens of Israeli defensive fortifications, and established a seemingly impervious anti-tank and anti-aircraft missile shield.  Syria was also initially successful in its surprise and gains in the Golan Heights.  Israel responded and was able to drive the Syrians from the Golan and to cross the Suez Canal itself and surround an Egyptian army.  Regardless of the military gains, the 1973 War set the stage for a negotiation between Egypt and Israel.
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The negotiations that followed resulted in the first peace treaty between an Arab country and Israel with the signing of the Camp David Accords in 1979 with Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, and U.S. president James Carter.  The sad lesson that came out of the agreement was the assassination of President Sadat on 6 October 1981 by extremists with loose association to the Muslim Brotherhood.[3]  The lesson was that to sign a peace deal with Israel can mean death.

[1] Richard M. Nixon, “Informal Remarks in Guam with Newsmen,” The American Presidency Project, UC Santa Barbara [25 July 1969]. https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/informal-remarks-guam-with-newsmen.
Richard M. Nixon, “Address to the Nation on the War in Vietnam,” The American Presidency Project, UC Santa Barbara [3 November 1969]. https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/address-the-nation-the-war-vietnam.
[2] George W. Gawrych, The 1973 Arab-Israeli War: The Albatross of Decisive Victory, Leavenworth, Kansas: Combat Studies Institute, 1996, 9 and 13.
[3] Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, New York: Vintage Books, 2006, 58-59. 

The year 1979 was momentous for the Middle East.  Not only did it see the signing of the Camp David Accords, but it also saw the overthrow of the Shah of Iran initially by secularists and then later by Islamists.  For decades, the Muslim Brotherhood and other related and off-shoot groups in the Sunni world called for the overthrow of Western influence in the region and the establishment of an Islamic state.  The sad note for those groups was that it did happen in 1979, but not because of Sunni fundamentalism; rather, it was brought about by Iranian Shia fundamentalism.  In a region where the Sunni tended to look down on the Shia this was significant.  The Iranian religious scholars who led the transformation of the revolution into a religious one called it an Islamic Revolution, but it was only an Iranian Revolution in that in 1979 it only directly affected Iran.  It wasn’t until the 2000s with the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq that empowered Iran and 2014 and the arrival of ISIS in power in Iraq that the revolution became something closer to an Islamic Revolution as Iran expanded its influence throughout the region with both Shia militias and Sunni non-state actors.

Success in Iran in 1979 gave heart and focus to Shia groups around the world as well as to all Islamists.  The intellectual heart of Twelver Shiism was southern Lebanon and following the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, various Shia militia groups began to band together under the leadership and financing of Iranian agents to create a group that later called itself Hezbollah (the party of God).

Hezbollah was a group born in opposition to Israeli occupation and developed in clashes with American military and government forces and installations in and around Beirut and also with the Israeli Defense Forces.  Hezbollah’s attacks in concert with those of other oppositional Lebanese groups effectively caused Israel to withdraw further into southern Lebanon in 1985 and then out of all of Lebanon in 2000.  Hezbollah took credit for defeating Israel on both occasions and in 2006.  Defeating Israel was something that no Arab state accomplished and therefore Hezbollah held a pride of place among non-state actors operating against Israel.
While Israel was operating in southern Lebanon, the Palestinians in the occupied territories rose in opposition to that occupation in a shaking off or Intifada.  The First Intifada (1987-1993) tended to be less violent, or the violence was mostly limited to non-lethal means such as rock throwing and occasionally elevated into Molotov cocktails and other more dangerous methods.  The intent was to shake off the occupation.  One might say that this intifada resulted in the Oslo Accords that resulted in the establishment of the Palestinian Authority with its headquarters in Ramallah and later the recognition of Israel by the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.  The Palestinians did not feel that what followed was a sufficient improvement in their situation and there was a Second Intifada or the al-Aqsa Intifada because of its precipitating event of a visit by Israeli politician Arial Sharon to the Temple Mount or the Haram al-Shareef which is the location of the al-Aqsa Mosque.  This intifada included much more violence in terms of lethal violence used by both sides and served to further harden positions as the Israelis saw it as a result of concessions made in the Oslo Accords and the failure of the Palestinian Authority and the Palestinians blamed the increased protocols of the occupation that increased Palestinian humiliations and disenfranchisement.  It was at the end of the Second Intifada that Ariel Sharon, then the Prime Minister, ordered the unilateral withdrawal of all Israelis from the Gaza Strip.

In the late 1980s a Muslim Brotherhood affiliated group using an acronym for a name issued a declaration of undying war against Israel in the form of its charter.  Its full name is the Islamic Resistance Movement, and its acronym is Hamas.  Unlike Hezbollah which is a Shia organization with direct ties to Iran, Hamas is a Sunni group that only developed financial support ties to Iran after decades of opposition to Israel.  Hamas won elections in the Palestinian territories in 2006 and has turned that victory into near complete governance of the Gaza Strip and an ever-growing presence in the West Bank.  Hamas is the face of the Palestinian violent opposition to Israel, and it has been Hamas who has maintained some sense of continued violence.  The organization’s charter is clear in that it wants to see the destruction of the state of Israel to be fully replaced by a Palestinian state in the entirety of the former mandatory Palestine. [1]

While Hezbollah fought Israel in Lebanon and Hamas fought it in the Gaza Strip and elsewhere in the occupied territories, an obscure group calling itself al-Qaeda declared war on the United States of America, twice.[2]  Each declaration served a profound purpose in defining the fight between the Islamist interpretation of the Middle East and the West, writ large and America, in specific.  Al-Qaeda’s greatest act of violence was that against the United States on 11 September 2001 killing 2,977 and wounding thousands more.  It was this attack that drew the United States into the Middle East in force and was the genesis for the Global War on Terrorism.
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Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, and al-Qaeda are all a bit different and greatly different in the specifics of how they see Islamism enacted in the world.  All these groups claim to want to govern the community of believers through Islamic Law, but the differences in the interpretation of that law are significant.  Currently, these actors are acting in concert in opposition to United States’ interests and to weaken and eventually destroy Israel.  That agreement is certain to be temporary because if they could remove Israel as a state in the region, they would almost certainly turn against each other.

[1] “Charter of the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) of Palestine,” translated by Muhammad Maqdsi, Journal of Palestine Studies, Summer, 1993, Vol. 22, No. 4 (Summer, 1993), 122-134. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2538093.
“Hamas in 2017: The document in full,” translated by the Middle East Eye Staff, Middle East Eye [2 May 2017]. https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/hamas-2017-document-full.
Hamas has published two charters as linked above in 1988 and 2017.
[2] Osama bin Laden, “Declaration of Jihad Against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holiest Sites,” Counter-Terrorism Center, West Point, New York [23 August 1996]. https://ctc.usma.edu/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Declaration-of-Jihad-against-the-Americans-Occupying-the-Land-of-the-Two-Holiest-Sites-Translation.pdf
Osama bin Laden, “Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders: World Islamic Front Statement,” Federation of American Scientists [23 February 1998]. https://fas.org/irp/world/para/docs/980223-fatwa.htm.
Osama bin Laden declared war on the United States in 1996 and 1998 which are both provided in the references above.  Each is a bit different from the other, but they are both fundamentally following the same operational and strategic approach to exhaust America through murder and economic stress.

America first entered the Middle East in the post-World War II world in force during the 1990-1991 Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm.  These operations are important in that they brought in nearly 700,000 American military personnel to defeat the Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait.  After removing Saddam’s army from Kuwait, the Americans redeployed most of its forces, but not all.  American military forces remained in many bases, some of which predated the 1990-1991 operations, in Bahrain, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.  It was the American failure to depart the Arabian Peninsula, in particular, that was used by Osama bin Laden as a justification of his attacks against United States interests in Africa, the Middle East, and then in the United States.

Obviously, the attacks on 9/11 initiated the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT) that saw American forces sent to fight against so-labeled terrorists in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, the Philippines, Sudan, Libya, Syria, and numerous other countries around the world.  The use of the expression so labeled is that many of the groups after which American forces were sent were not considered to be terrorists by locals or regional actors.  Whether or not such labeling was accurate, this war involved America in a religious war without ever acknowledging the need or importance to study religion or the adoption or use of overt religious motives or objectives.  Whether or not such an approach was correct, the region saw the use of the word crusade by President George W. Bush as an explicit call for a religious war and all subsequent attempts to veil it were just that.[1]

[1] George W. Bush, Remarks by the President Upon Arrival, The White House [16 September 2001]. https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010916-2.html.

As America was embroiled in the GWOT, Hezbollah attacked an Israeli patrol and outpost, killing several soldiers, and capturing two others and the Israelis responded with significant violence.  The Israeli response destroyed a great deal of Lebanese infrastructure as Israel tried to force Hezbollah to stop firing rockets into Israel.  Hezbollah did not stop so long as the war continued.  The incessant firing led Israel to launch a ground invasion of southern Lebanon.  The regional consensus, at the time of fighting in 2006, was that Hezbollah won the engagement.[1]  Years later, the Israeli perception changed as the northern border with Lebanon remained quieter than it had ever been for longer than it had ever been.
While the 2006 War was probably not the birth of the concept, it became an example of the idea of mowing the grass.  When one has a yard full of weeds the only real alternative is to regularly mow the grass to keep the weeds down and manageable.  In the case of conflict with Hamas or other related groups like Islamic Jihad and Fatah-related organizations, the Israelis believed that they needed to regularly, every couple of years or so, reassert its dominant and deterrent position by responding to a particular attack with a significant amount of force intended to reduce Palestinian resistance capability such that attacks would be necessarily reduced for years to come.  For example, Israel conducted operations in or against Gaza in the following years: 2005 (withdrawal of Israelis from Gaza), 2006, 2008-2009, 2011, 2012, 2014, 2021, 2022, and 2023.  Mowing the grass was something done when there was no other perceived option than punishment and when there was no perceived partner or positive outcome possible, only punitive.
Throughout the post-Operation Desert Storm period, the Palestinian linked groups, regional Islamist actors, and other non-state actors throughout the Middle East transformed their approaches to war.  They all sort of evolved to include four key elements.  One, they changed the definition of conflict success to essentially be an existential definition, meaning that if the group continued to exist despite the pounding it may have taken in a conflict with the West or Israel then it was winning.  Two, the groups needed to absorb the high-technology punishment that the West and Israel could inflict on them.  This absorption was envisioned through going literally underground or by dispersing both weapons and personnel amongst the civilian population.  Three, the groups needed to deter attacks by developing the ability to continually attack Israel or the West in depth through rockets, mortars, or suicide attacks and by convincing their opponents that they would never end the fight.  This last point is directly connected to four, which is basing the entire strategy on exhausting the will of the opponent.  This transformation in the non-state actor approach was best captured by retired Israeli brigadier general Itai Brun.[2]
On 18 December 2010 a street vendor in Sidi Bouzid, Tunisia set himself on fire to protest the oppressive and corrupt government then in power.  His self-immolation provided a fire that swept across much of North Africa and the Middle East to touch almost every country at least through demonstrations and topple more than one regime: notably in Egypt and Libya.  Even though the precipitating event took place in the winter, the general movement was labeled the Arab Spring in hopes that new governments and new freedoms would grow from the uprisings.  The Arab Spring did two critical things related to understanding the Middle East in 2023.  One, it toppled the Egyptian government of Hosni Mubarak and replaced him in elections with a Muslim Brotherhood president Mohamed Morsi.  Morsi’s rise to power in Egypt was the fulfillment of the Muslim Brotherhood’s efforts for more than eighty years.  While short-lived as he was soon replaced in a military coup, it was still a powerful message across the region and signaled a rift between Muslim Brotherhood states (e.g. Turkey and Qatar) and non-Muslim Brotherhood states (e.g. Saudi Arabia, UAE, and Bahrain).  Two, the Arab Spring inspired protests in Syria that grew into a civil war creating a vacuum of leadership into which ISIS was able to step and grow.
The Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham or ISIS was a critical player in reshaping the relationship between the United States and the region.  Though it existed in the region for more than a decade, it burst into America’s consciousness with its stunning successes in taking Syrian and Iraqi cities in 2014.  ISIS combined spectacular violence that included beheading, immolation, stoning, and other attention-grabbing approaches to violence with a mastery of social media to broadcast and narrowcast material throughout the world.  Its actions, in combination with the anti-Assad regime sentiment generated by the Syrian Civil War generated tens of thousands of foreign fighters and local recruits to join the newly declared caliphate.  ISIS also generated a significant response from the Islamic Republic of Iran which was primarily to mobilize and fund Shia militia groups.  The Shia groups in Syria primarily fought for the Basher al-Assad regime and the groups in Iraq fought in opposition to ISIS.  The figurative explosion of Shia militias across Mesopotamia, the Levant, and in Yemen in combination with Iranian monetary support for non-Shia groups throughout the Middle East during the decade from 2010 to 2020 turned the Iranian Revolution of 1979 into a true Islamic Revolution.  ISIS didn’t start the rise of Iranian non-state actor support, but it served as a type of catalyst to accelerate the expansion and, to a degree, give a cloak of state sponsorship to the activities as the Syrian government needed the militias to save itself and the Iraqi government needed the Shia militias to drive off ISIS.
The United States presidential administration of Donald J. Trump approach the Israeli security problems differently than any president before him.  He didn’t seek to resolve the Palestinian issues, rather, he chose to ignore them or to downgrade them in priority.  The Trump administration instead sought to make deals between Israel and Arab or Muslim states.  These deals have been collectively labeled the Abraham accords and eventually involved some form of recognition from and cooperation with the following states: Bahrain, Morocco, Sudan, and the United Arab Emirates.[3]  Much of the calendar year 2023 included discussions of whether Saudi Arabia would join the accords in some fashion.  This was a significant change in the United States approach to the challenges of the Middle East and it seemed to be having effect until the attacks on 7 October 2023.

[1] Matt M. Matthews, We Were Caught Unprepared: The 2006 Hezbollah-Israeli War, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas: Combat Studies Institute Press, 2008, 61.
[2] Itai Brun, “'While You're Busy Making Other Plans' - The 'Other RMA',” Journal of Strategic Studies, 33: 4, 535-565 [20 August 2010]. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01402390.2010.489708.
[3] U.S. Department of State, The Abraham Accords Declaration [15 September 2020]. https://www.state.gov/the-abraham-accords/.
The site includes links to the specific agreements between the various Arab countries and Israel: Bahrain, Morrocco, United Arab Emirates, and Sudan.

All the events listed above provide a narrative space in which the various actors act.  What is needed is a theory for action that informs the reader how the actor will use their acts to achieve an ultimate outcome.  There are many writers in the Middle East who have provided such a theory, but The Management of Savagery: The Most Difficult Phase through which the Umma Must Pass is the single best expression of how actions work to accomplish the desired end.

Abu Bakr Naji is a pseudonym for the author of The Management of Savagery.  This book was published in Arabic in 2004 and made available in English in 2006.  Abu Bakr Naji is considered to have been an al-Qaeda strategist and his book captures an operational approach for fighting against the West and its lackeys in the Middle East.[1]  Even though the book predates what most people label as ISIS and was written for Sunni and not Shia actors, the words and approach explained in the book are important for understanding how ISIS, Hezbollah, Hamas, al-Qaeda, Iranian-back Shia militias, and all similarly structured and ideologically motivated groups use exhaustion as their preeminent strategy for accomplishing objectives.  The book is more than a theoretical text as it has been found on almost all ISIS computer hard drives that have been captured and exploited making this, effectively, an ISIS operational manual.[2]

Naji explains that the way to defeat the West is through defeating the media halo surrounding it and then to weaken it over time through the weight of its own security.[3]  Naji suggests that when the mujahidin attack one resort, it forces the opposing governments to defend all similar resorts. “For example: If a tourist resort that the Crusaders patronize in Indonesia is hit, all of the tourist resorts in all of the states of the world will have to be secured by the work of additional forces, which are double the ordinary amount, and a huge increase in spending.”[4]  The same is true if the mujahidin attack a refinery and so on.  As the opponent guards more and more facilities, the cost to pay the people and purchase the equipment to scan, search, and protect every facility will ultimately crush the opponent under its very weight.  The view is to exhaust the opponent economically and morally.
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ISIS did this through its disruption campaign in 2012 and 2013.  It forced the governments of Iraq and, to a lesser extent, Syria to guard everywhere.  Both governments failed to do so, and cities fell in days and hours.  One could say that Hamas was able to pull off its spectacular raid on 7 October 2023 because it exhausted the Israel Defense Force.

[1] Alastair Crooke, “The ISIS’ ‘Management of Savagery’ in Iraq,” The World Post [30 June 2014].
[2] Alastair Crooke, “The ISIS’ ‘Management of Savagery’ in Iraq,” The World Post [30 June 2014].
Michael Weiss and Hassan Hassan, ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror, New York: Regan Arts, 2015, 44-46.
[3] Abu Bakr Naji, The Management of Savagery: The Most Critical Stage Through Which the Umma Will Pass, translated by William McCants, Cambridge, MA: John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies, 2004 (original), 23 May 2006 (translated), 17-23.
[4] Abu Bakr Naji, The Management of Savagery, 46.

Let’s assume that we all agree on the above information.  Where does that leave those who think about, plan for, and pontificate on Middle East and American national security?  There will not be a long-term peaceful and stable Middle East without significant American leadership and energy.  The states and non-state actors in the region have decades and generations of animosity regarding each other.  There are no accidents, and everyone is a villain in the other actor’s story.  This means that the region needs a strong hand to make all the actors abide by the rules of the game.  That can’t be done internally to the region because there is no single player in the region that has the demographic, financial, and/or narrative capacity to provide the regional leadership necessary for such peace and stability.  Every major regional player lacks significance in one or more of the three areas identified.  Saudi Arabia doesn’t have the people, Turkey has too much Ottoman and Muslim Brotherhood baggage, Egypt cannot manage its own population and it doesn’t have the money, and no one in the region would dare accept Israeli leadership.  It may be possible for the region to be self-stable eventually through some stitched together lattice of relationships as imagined in the most comprehensive version of the Abraham Accords, but such a latticework would require significant involvement on the part of America for at least a generation for the lattice to solidify to provide the self-supporting structure as demonstrated by the Arab state reactions to the events following 7 October 2023.  None is confident enough in their population’s support of the accords to give even lukewarm support to Israel.

The region must have a great power providing the outside leadership and incentives to inspire, cajole, or coerce peaceful coexistence.  China cannot do it because no one in the region really wants long term and invasive Chinese influence.  China doesn’t really inspire friendship and loyalty and Arabs and Persians are not known for providing fealty.  Russia provides strong leadership, but Russia is a bully regardless of who sits as the Czar or Czarina and the region knows this.  That leaves only America.

America cannot leave.  Oil is necessary for the global economy until the world embraces nuclear energy at scale and oddly enough the Middle East seems to be one of the regions seeking to embrace such energy.  America cannot abandon the region for domestic religious reasons.  The American Great Awakening still resonates in American communities and that religious period taught America that it was the New Jerusalem giving the country an affinity for the original Jerusalem.  That affinity will not go away for generations yet to come.  If America leaves the region, then non-state actors with violent intent will fester and grow as was witnessed since Barack Obama’s pivot to Asia that began in 2011 and was made a lie on 7 October 2023.[1]  The ill will is there and has been there for more than a century.  It will take something like a century of stability for that ill will to be dissipated if it ever is.  Finally, the Middle East is where great powers compete in the twenty-first century.  It used to be in Europe, but following World War II the competition space moved to the Middle East for many reasons that have been mentioned above and needs more space to address properly.  As far as this paper goes, it just is.  For those who think that America shouldn’t play in the great power competition, that is just naïve.  American rules are how the world works and if China were to win in this competition, then those rules will be rewritten to benefit China and harm American interests thereby harming the livelihoods of Americans.  This competition matters and so we cannot leave.  This is what it means to be a prisoner of your own device.
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If America cannot leave, then this paper strongly encourages America to not checkout again.  America needs to stay in the Hotel California committedly through study, understanding, and empathy with the purpose of gaining and wisely using influence across and throughout the region to build that future self-supporting latticework of peace, security, and stability that is so badly needed.  The following rules are useful in achieving as much.

[1] Kenneth G. Lieberthal, “The American Pivot to Asia,” Brookings [21 December 2011]. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-american-pivot-to-asia/.

What has preceded this are twenty-five plus one events that need to be understood.  What follows are general rules derived from an understanding of the region that can inform policy and interactions in the region.

• Know the Middle East.  As this paper began, this region is America’s “Hotel California” and it is imperative that American government, military, and academics need to know why we are prisoners here of our own device.
• See the pyramid.  Or, at least recognize that there is more than a square’s perspective.  Every group, nation, or people in the region has a perspective that is accurate for them and needs to be understood to successfully operate or influence in the region.
• Believe what they say and write.  When Iran calls for the destruction of Israel or refers to the United States as the Great Satan, when Hamas calls for the elimination of Israel, or al-Qaeda states that it is on the side of God, believe them.  Yes, it is poetic hyperbole, but like with scripture that also uses poetic hyperbole, they believe it to be an expression of truth to be enacted in the world.  They mean what they say.  They are seeking to create a world in which those statements will be made true.  That doesn’t mean that there is no room for negotiation or temporary agreement, but such negotiators should never confuse the short term with actual belief.  For example, just because one of these actors makes a deal, doesn’t mean that that actor now wants to become a part of the international order and be welcomed into the family of nations that follows rules established by secular or other religious leaders and countries.
• The conflict environment has changed.  It is not World War II, Operation Desert Storm, nor Operation Iraqi Freedom.  Social media has given greater impetus to spectacular attacks and emphasis on such.  Expect greater emphasis on what the West labels atrocities and use of prior grievances as atrocities as justification for the same.
• Do your homework to know the narrative space.  Know the roots and the deep roots of conflict in the region.  Nothing that happens is a result of what happened yesterday.  Yesterday may have been the earthquake, but the earth shook because of the tensions created in the years, decades, and centuries that preceded it.

​Since America is somewhat stuck in the Middle East (our Hotel California) then it behooves national security and military professionals to understand what created the Middle East environment with which such professional interact.  The discussion above tries to provide an introduction or primer to those events that are deemed by this author as necessary to begin such an understanding.  This is by no means a comprehensive list, nor does it represent sufficient understanding, but it is hopefully a useful beginning.  The purpose of the article is to be an invitation for further study.

This article was written for my participation in a roundtable discussion with The Institute for Conflict Studies and Analysis of Russia (IKAR) held on 6 December 2023.  That discussion is available on YouTube here.  The paper doesn't really address what I spoke about during the roundtable, but it is related to those comments.  It is also an expression of ideas that have been on my mind for several years as I teach military officers.  Most Western military doctrine is based on what Hans Delbrück would characterize as annihilation or relatively rapid success through winning in battle.  I do not believe that such a doctrine is the operant strategy for conflict in the world in 2024.  Moreover, I think that the conditions of the world in 2024 are set for exhaustion to be dominant.  Even if that weren't true, I am musing here that if you boil strategy down, all wars are won through exhaustion.

Carl von Clausewitz, the nineteenth century Prussian general and military theorist, says that “war is …” more than one hundred times.  He doesn’t do this because he didn’t know what war was, he did it because he wanted to express that war wasn’t just one thing.  There wasn’t and isn’t one metaphor to understand war.  In fact, in one English language translation, he states that “war is more than a true chameleon that slightly adapts its characteristics to the given case.”[1]  In this, I believe, that he means that any given war may be significantly different (maybe even radically so) than any other war.  It is probable that wars within themselves change more than does a chameleon in that there is change that is greater than simply changing color; a war may change its essence within itself.  For example, the war in Ukraine has moved from a war of dislocation – breaking the enemy’s will with rapidity – to a war of exhaustion – breaking the enemy’s will over time.  If so, how is it possible to understand a given war let alone a variety of wars or to derive lessons applicable from one war to the next?  The answer is to understand narrative war.
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Antulio Echevarria, a present historian and strategic scholar, writes about and defines ten different military strategies.[2]  He may be wrong about there being ten.  Hans Delbrück, a late nineteenth and early twentieth century German historian, argued that victory comes through one of two primary strategies: annihilation or exhaustion.  Delbrück, used the term ermattungsstrategie (literally fatigue strategy) which is often translated as attrition, though I believe exhaustion to be a more relevant expression.

The distinction between attrition and exhaustion is critical in that attrition implies reduction of physical force through losses whereas exhaustion implies, for the purposes of this argument, a reduction in will from physical, moral, economic, or ideological losses.[3]  Delbrück’s ideas are inserted here as his dialectic is crucial to understanding the evolution throughout modern war from a focus on annihilation to much greater emphasis on exhaustion.  Clausewitz, in one of his descriptions of war says, “War is thus an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will.”[4]  Later he says that the object of war is “to impose our will on the enemy.”[5]  Will is that thing which allows one to continue when that person or side in a war is physically weak.  It is the internal drive, conviction, and certainty that ultimate success can happen.

It is possible that Delbrück, like Echevarria, was also wrong.  There may only be one strategy: exhaustion.  The defeat of any opponent may always be expressed as an admission of exhaustion.  Exhaustion, despite the sound of the word and the image it conjures of a person at the end of a marathon or some very long race, can happen quickly as well as slowly.  Observe how quickly an outmatched opponent concedes a competition as a simple example.  Once a person accepts that he or she cannot win then that person is on the road of exhaustion.

If Clausewitz is correct and war is about imposing will or compelling the will of the enemy, then one of the most crucial things to understand is the will of the enemy.  It is impossible to impose, compel, or break a thing which one doesn’t understand.  Related to this understanding is the importance of knowing the source of the opponent’s will.

Will is derived from virtue.  In this sense, the word virtue is used in connection with Niccolo Machiavelli’s use of the Latin term virtu which was a combination of skill and drive – that which compelled a person to act in the face of challenge and adversity.  It is also used in line with the twenty-first century sense of the term as a form of righteous expression.  In both cases, virtue taps into something deep in a society or a person and provides the force that generates will.  Thus, to break the will of an opponent one needs to understand the underlying virtue generating that will.

Virtue is typically expressed through the stories that make up the societal narrative.  Each society has one or more narratives.  Those narratives are the way in which society interprets the experiences of the world, and they are expressed in the world through stories.

For example, Russia has a narrative that includes national suffering.  This narrative was built on large and powerful stories like the invasion of Napoleon in 1812 and the Soviet Union’s success on the Eastern Front during World War II.  In World War II, the Soviet Union lost as many as twenty-seven million people.  The people in Leningrad (now St Petersburg again) were under siege for nearly two and a half years.  Many starved to death, and those who lived shared stories of surviving off roots and shoe leather.  Vladimir Putin was born to a family who lived through that siege.

George Kennan, a U.S. diplomat, and historian who served as the deputy chief of mission in U.S. Embassy Moscow in 1947, wrote a long telegram to explain Soviet thinking that was later edited and published in Foreign Affairs under the pseudonym X with the title “The Sources of Soviet Conduct.”[6]  In that article Kennan gave one of the best expressions of the Soviet narrative space.  In part, he concludes that the leader of the Soviet Union bordered on paranoia because Russia, and later the Soviet Union, was always surrounded by enemies, but the Russian and Soviet people persevered through enduring suffering.

The Russian narrative has built in a conception of the ability and need to endure suffering for the sake of the state.  Russians are narratively prepared for a war of attrition.  They believe they will win such wars because they have won such wars.  The Russians defeated the will and the force of the French armies of Napoleon Bonaparte in 1812 through drawing that army into the heartland of Russia, wearing the army down physically, and exhausting the leaders emotionally.  The Soviet Union defeated the armies of the Third Reich of Adolph Hitler by drawing them into the Soviet heartland, wearing the force down physically, and exhausting the leaders emotionally.  By 1945 dozens of Soviet armies were breaking through German units and attacking toward Berlin.

Russians endure and Russians persevere because they must.  It is a core element of their societal narrative.  This means that exhausting Russia is difficult as it runs against the prevailing narrative space.  It is, in effect, like trying to climb a narrative cliff rather than running downhill.

The West lacks a similar societal narrative.  American military doctrine calls for quick and decisive operations.  The NATO alliance is designed to deter aggression, not to stand up to a military hegemon with control of continental energy supplies and global food security.  At the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, this was what the West got wrong.  It misread its own narrative space as it signaled support for a war that it wasn’t willing to actually fight: only support.  All the media personalities, pundits, and early proclaimers of Putin’s folly and Russian defeat failed to understand the power of power.  Military commitment means something.  The willingness to inflict violence month after month and year after year means something.  It isn’t enough to tell stories, one must enact them in the world for those stories to have efficacy.

Narrative isn’t just about words and stories.  It is about understanding the narrative space terrain on which one operates.  Who are we and who is our opponent?  What is our narrative regarding war?  How much are we willing to suffer for what we say we want?  If narrative space terrain is understood, it can inform us how we will behave and how our opponents will behave.  It can tell us how and how easy it will be to exhaust the enemy.

A proper understanding of narrative space terrain is crucial for any conflict that will involve suffering whether that suffering is economic, emotional, or physical.  This is why a proper understanding of one’s own society matters.  For example, if you believe that your country is corrupt and systemically flawed, then why would you be willing to suffer for it?  On the other hand, if you believe that your country is the bastion of freedom, the arsenal of democracy, the shining city on a hill, then you will probably be more willing to make those sacrifices.

In every war, the belligerents express their reason for fighting, for continuing the fight despite suffering, and their path toward victory in the fight through stories.  It may be a nationalist story that expresses the dominance of one nationality over others.  It may express the inherent weakness of the opponent because the opponent lacks a similar sense of characterization, objective, or connection to the setting.

Though this may seem trivial, such stories express the virtue of the belligerent and can inform others of the strength and weaknesses of the will that needs to be broken for exhaustion to occur.

What is perceived as virtue is important and has power for people.  Perceived virtue is the power that motivates people to endure hardship.  This has always been true.  In the days of the Roman Republic and Roman Empire virtue was directly linked to manliness and masculinity.  During the Cold War virtue was linked to freedom, individual rights, and liberty.  Virtue is what empowers the world to act.  One must understand how the definition and expression of virtue changes by country, by culture, and over time to understand what is motivating, or will motivate, populations now and in the future.

As is stated in The Lord of the Rings trilogy where there was one ring to rule all of the rings of power, there may just be one strategy to overcome all of the other strategies whether that be the two posited by Delbrück or the ten posited by Echavarria.  That one strategy is exhaustion, and it comes by degrading and defeating the enemy’s will which, in turn, is derived from the societal narrative’s expression and understanding of virtue.


[1] Carl von Clausewitz, On War, Edited and translated by Michael Howard and Peter Paret, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1976, 88-89.
[2] Antulio J. Echevarria II, Military Strategy: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017.
[3] Annihilation is the effort to achieve victory through a decisive attack, battle, or campaign that forces the enemy to accept terms.  Exhaustion achieves victory through the dissipation of the opponent’s will.  These brief definitions are a synthesis from Clausewitz, Delbruck, Craig, Bowdish, and others.
[4] Ibid, 75.
[5] Ibid
[6] George Kennan, “The Long Telegram,” Telegram, February 22, 1946. From Teaching American History. https://teachingamericanhistory.org/document/the-long-telegram/ (accessed August 28, 2023).
X, “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” Foreign Affairs [1 July 1947]. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/russian-federation/1947-07-01/sources-soviet-conduct.

A colleague of mine asked me a series of questions for an article that he published in Breaking Defense that can be found here.  The questions are excellent in that they caused me to ponderously reflect, and he was unable to publish all of my answers which I wanted to be captured in total.

Question 1: What would constitute a victory for Israel in Gaza and how difficult would it be to achieve?
Answer 1: I am going to give two answers. One is what I think the Israelis are trying to do and the other is what I think is possible in this circumstance.

1. I think Israel wants to effectively defeat Hamas.  To reduce its leadership at all levels such that it no longer can function as an integrated organization at the political or military level.  The difficulty will depend on Hamas.  If Hamas fights as did the Viet Cong during the three major efforts in 1968 then Hamas, like the Viet Cong, will be eliminated as an organization.  If Hamas goes to ground and hides among the populace as it did during the 2009-2010 Operation Cast Lead then it will be nearly impossible short of significant civilian casualties because how can Israel separate Hamas from the populace?  I don't know what Hamas will do, but I expect that it will do the latter and go to ground and deny Israel of the victory.
2. I think the best Israel can actually do is to remove and destroy much of the Hamas military infrastructure and weapons that have been stockpiled across the Gaza Strip.  By doing this, Israel could eliminate much of the Hamas ability to strike Israel and reduce them back to 1990s nuisance levels.  This is doable within a limited timeframe and with relatively low casualties.

I have a couple of comments that relate to both options.  One, any option for significant changes in the situation requires a ground assault and any ground assault will incur significant Israeli casualties and Palestinian collateral deaths as well.  Two, there is a clock ticking for how long the United States will allow Israel to do anything.  It isn't that Israel will have to follow the American timeframe, but Israel will not completely ignore it.  My initial assessment is that Israel has thirty days (plus or minus) to do whatever it intends to do and then the US administration will be making sounds to end the hostilities.  The same is also true of the Israeli population.  They do not have an unlimited amount of patience or stomach for the casualties that they will have to absorb and witness.
 
What I don't know is how much the tragedy of 7 October scarred the Israeli psyche and how much anger and willingness to endure additional losses exists in Israel.
 
Question 2: What impact would a northern front have on the Gaza offensive?
Answer 2: None.  Not really none, but relatively close to none.  It would depend on the scope and scale of the front.  If it is relatively limited to rockets and missiles then none.   If there are regular ground incursions then that might change the calculus a bit.  I don't think that Hezbollah is in a position to mount a ground offensive and I doubt that they would want to.  Hezbollah's strength lies in their ability to harass at range and simply make life difficult for Israel.  Though they have developed the ability to take villages during the Syrian civil war that hasn't been against Israelis.  I think that Hezbollah could take the Hula Valley of Israel if it was committed to an all out effort and such an attack would then cause a serious degradation of Israeli capability as Israel would be forced to regain lost territory which would be the preeminent priority, but I think this is well outside Hezbollah's intent or objectives.  Additionally, such an effort would cause massive damage and loss to Lebanon and Hezbollah would bear the brunt of the blame for the carnage.
  
Question 3: What do you expect would happen if Israel emerges militarily victorious from the Gaza War?
Answer 3: The answer depends on what you mean by victorious.  If by victorious you mean my option one above - the defeat of Hamas - then Israel will have a stronger position in the region.  If option two - the reduction of Hamas' capability, but Hamas remains - then Hamas will gain credibility in the region as it will have weathered the storm and lived to stand and still fire back.
 
What I hope is something very different.  I would hope that this effort will reduce Hamas such that a responsible Palestinian Authority leader can come forward and govern Gaza and the West Bank in a manner that allows for some sort of legitimate partnership between the international community (which doesn't really exist), the Palestinians, and the Israelis.  This is a hope or maybe even a dream, but I would like to see it.  I want the bloodshed and hatred to end.
 
Question 4: Do you think there is a successful effort to achieve a two-state solution?
Answer 4: I don't believe that there is a leader on either side who has the wasta to lead to this sort of resolution.  Netanyahu is a weak leader without the ability to force his will on the Knesset.  I don't think he truly wants it, but even if he did, he couldn't make it happen.  The irony is that only Ariel Sharon could do that and see what that got him?  Mahmoud Abbas doesn't have the authority or charisma either and, like Netanyahu, I don't think that he truly wants it.  Maybe an outside power could impose it, but there isn't sufficient agreement on what it looks like to make it happen nor is there a leader who can risk the domestic blowback by forcing it and then having a rocket launched from Tulkarem.
 
I gave my hope for this scenario above.  I think that an outside possibility would be to have an external and respected Arab power come in and control the Palestinian territories, but I know that no one wants to do that.  Mohammed bin Salman could be that person if he were so inclined and then he could make his family the guardian of the three holiest sites in Islam.  He is visionary enough, but no Arab leader wants to be seen as serving as the jailers for the Israelis nor do they want the hassle of dealing with the raucous Palestinian street.  

As a professional military educator, I offer what follows as a first cut of how one might begin a self-critical learning process from the events transpiring in Israel.  These efforts are made with a reminder from the Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz. "The first, the supreme, the most far-reaching act of judgment that the statesman and the commander have to make is to establish by that test the kind of war on which they are embarking; neither mistaking it for, nor trying to turn it into, something that is alien to its nature.  This is the first of all strategic questions and the most comprehensive."[1]

What I offer in the following is an attempt to begin learning from the 2023 Hamas War by understanding the kind of war it is and identifying challenges in the past that have caused myself and others to understand such wars in ways that were alien to their nature.  Of course, for me, understanding a war comes through understanding it in terms of narrative and the narrative’s connected and associated stories, messages, and words-deeds-images.
 

Where one stands determines what one sees.  The location of an observer is impeded by the shape of the surrounding terrain.  If one is at the bottom of a valley, then visibility will be more limited than if one stood high on a hilltop.  The area that one cannot see or that a weapon system cannot engage from a given position is called deadspace as it affords opportunities for opponents to move unobserved and/or unengaged.  The shape of the physical landscape in combination with the location of the observer creates deadspace.

In cyberspace, there is an entire portion of the web referred to as the dark web.  This includes domains that are discreet and not included on web browsers.  One must know the specific address to access such a site.  There are also applications that only allow entry to those with invitations from existing members and include highly secure forms of communication.  Both types of sites create deadspace for governments and security professionals.  The nature of bitcoin and other types of cryptocurrencies, that are only available through online commerce, also present effective deadspace – a means to conduct business transactions that are both unobservable and untraceable.

Narrative space also includes deadspace.  Some of this is determined by decisions of the observer, just as is true for physical space.  Where one stands determines the observable world.  In discussions of narrative there tends to be a lot of emphasis on social media.  This may be, in part, because there are existing tools that can track and map social networks thereby making it easier to understand the terrain.  The problem with this emphasis is that so focusing creates tremendous deadspace for those groups or organizations that do not primarily rely on social media to promote or promulgate their narrative.  Narrative is much more than social media.  It is also history and culture and language.  In this sense, what one studies or has been taught is also determinant of what one sees.
 

We are a week into the most recent war in the Levantine Middle East and I expect that everyone has heard more than a few allusions to the 1973 War that began fifty years prior to this war.  The calendar alone makes the comparisons logical, but as I have listened to a few military and national security analysts I have been disappointed by the depth or the lack thereof of the analysis.  The 1973 War was the last state-on-state war between Israel and its neighbors.  Some readers may point out the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon as a state-on-state war, but I do not agree.  The purpose of that war was to attack the Palestinian non-state groups launching attacks from Southern Lebanon and to take the fight to the leadership of the Palestinian Liberation Organization then headquartered in Beirut, Lebanon.

The significance of 1973 was that it marked the end of a paradigm in the struggle against Israel – Arab or Muslim states were no longer deemed to be capable of defeating the Jewish state and a variety of non-state actors became the primary approach to attacking Israel.  I use the phrase non-state actor rather than terrorist or violent extremist organization because it is broader and more appropriately reflects the approach against Israel.

I have my opinions on who is right and who is wrong in this current fighting, but I do not offer what follows as an expression or a defense of those opinions.  I am trying to be as objective as possible in describing the approach to fighting Israel that few in American defense or national security circles do a sufficient job in expressing.

Consider the variety of non-state actor attacks against Israel in the last fifty years.

• Violent groups or terrorists in common parlance
• Religious ideology
• Manipulation of the Palestinian societal narrative through education and media portrayal of the Israelis as subhuman or unworthy of humane interaction or treatment
• Economic attacks through boycott, divestment, and sanctions – expect this to increase as violence continues against the Palestinians in Gaza
• Academic departments in Western universities – there are few non-Jewish scholars who defend Israel and many more who regularly describe the perspective and rightness of the Palestinian grievances particularly as an expression of anticolonialism
• Global satellite or internet news sources – there are few global news outlets who tell the Israeli story.  Almost all major outlets with global reach provide a pro-Palestinian story
• International organizations to include the United Nations – since the UN vote to partition Palestine in 1947 there has been a concerted effort to capture international organizations to become anti-Israel as most clearly demonstrated by several committees with focus directly on the Israeli-Palestinian issues

Most of these types of attacks were never considered as legitimate or effectual battlefields for war.  In that sense, these were all narrative deadspace where opponents of Israel moved, operated, and built support and influence outside of observation or engagement on the part of Israel or friends of Israel.

The somewhat standard story for the 1973 War explains how Arab armies learned from their 1967 defeat, developed a strategy for victory, and then developed training to accomplish the strategy.  The story continues with the attack across the Suez Canal and through the Golan Heights to defeat Israeli initial defenses and threaten operational reserves with a combination of surprise, technical ability, tenacity, and determination.  The Israelis responded with aggression and creativity to drive the attackers back.  So goes a somewhat balanced presentation of the war.

While this story may be useful in helping to prepare for large-scale combat operations which is how it is traditionally used by the United States Army, I offer that it is not useful in understanding what also happened between 1967 and 1973 and how that more important transformation shaped the above stated list of non-state actor attacks against Israel and other Western interests in the fifty years since 1973.

The 1967 Arab-Israeli War effectively destroyed the notion of the power of the Arab state to achieve goals vis-à-vis Israel.  While non-state actors were extant prior to 1967 they became more and more significant since that war.  I am arguing that it was the Arab state failure in the 1967 War that led to the transformation from a state centered approach to fight Israel toward a non-state centered approach.  The list expressing the variety of ways to attack Israel through the narrative space as part of a narrative war was born in the frustrated failure of 1967.  One might even see in Egyptian President Anwar Sadat’s approach to the 1973 War a narrative war approach.  He didn’t intend to win the war through violence.  He intended to win the war through diplomatic negotiation and what he needed to begin that negotiation was a military success which the crossing of the Suez Canal gave him.

Too many people, including myself in prior decades, look to the wars in which Israel participated as expressions of firepower or maneuver war philosophies.  While that may have been true for 1948, 1956, and 1967, every war since 1967, including the 1973 War, has been a narrative war.
 

The fighting that is currently a week old is the latest expression of narrative war.  There have already been numerous opinion pieces stating significant intelligence failures on the part of the Israel Defense Forces.  Most of the emphasis on these failures addresses technical failures, overreliance on technology rather than human intelligence or human observers and reactions forces, and an underestimation of Hamas as an opponent.  These issues will all certainly be addressed in the future committees and think tanks studies to be formed and conducted in the months and years to come.  What I want to emphasize here are an initial three instances of narrative deadspace in 2023.

1. The enemy is no longer in the behavioral box in which they have previously operated.  The 1973 and 2023 comparison generated narrative deadspace in that Israel was looking at Hamas as an organization intending to function within a box of competition long established between the two belligerents.  By that I mean that Hamas lashed out by small incursions or rocket and missile attacks, Israel responded with violence as punishment, and then the situation stabilized for a period.  This was often referred to as mowing the grass.  A friend of mine referred to Gaza as the world’s largest open-air prison.  If that is true, and I think it is, then the paradigm was that of prisoners and guards and that the prisoners regularly attacked the guards for the sake of lashing out.  This past week Hamas changed the scope and scale of the interaction.  To follow the paradigm of a prison; the prisoners (Hamas) decided to attack the homes and neighborhoods of the guards and to inflict significant terror upon them.  This was not intended as a prison break and unlike 1973, it wasn’t a conventional attack or offensive.  It was a raid to terrorize the guards and their families in their guardhouses, homes, and villages.
2. All enemies learn.  Many years ago, I lived in Israel and while serving there a U.S. military employee referred to Israel as the laboratory of modern war.  That is true.  Israel is a laboratory of war and what happens there often spills out of the laboratory and to the rest of the world.  Suicide bombing began in Lebanon as responses to the Israeli invasion and occupation.  Rocket attacks began as an asymmetric way to strike against Israel which inspired the Iron Dome anti-missile and rocket system which, in turn, inspired the massed rocket and missile attack on 7 October 2023 to overwhelm the shield.  The suicide bomber is a poor man’s precision guided weapon.  The massed rocket attacks, mostly consisting of inexpensive and poorly guided munitions, are the poor man’s response to sophisticated and expensive defense systems.
3. The people are a weapon system.  Benjamin Netanyahu has said on multiple occasions that Israel uses missiles to protect its people and Hamas uses people to protect its missiles.  That is true and should not be surprising even though many pundits act shocked and appalled by its reality.  Westerners do not need to go very far back in history to find a time when we used soldiers as if they were ammunition to be expended.  Both World Wars were great examples of this.  States and non-state actors without sophisticated technology will use their people, including and especially civilians, as a weapon system.  They will use their people as shields.  They will use their people to generate media attention to manipulate the narrative.  The people, in those cases, become the talking points, the messages, and the story.  By late on 7 October 2023, Western news sources were already talking about the Israeli airstrikes in response to the Hamas attacks and the deaths of Palestinian civilians.  The story was turning from massacred Israelis to massacred Palestinians.  That is by choice and design on the part of Hamas and many of those who live in Gaza.  The civilians understand what is happening and why and they recognize that they and their children may be a tool in the war.

 
These are only the initial three expressions of narrative deadspace.  As we learn more there will certainly be more revealed, but these three are a great place to regularly start in checking our own narrative deadspace.  What is the box in which I have placed my opponent?  What has happened from which my opponent may have learned?  What are the resources on which my opponent will rely?

For those wondering why this matters to them I want to make two points.  One, the United States and others have also been victims of their own narrative deadspace; most notably, leading up to 9/11, the rise and success of ISIS, the collapse of the Afghan national government in the face of Taliban offensive success, and the misreading of Hamas since Israel wasn’t the only intelligence service or group of national security analysts caught off guard in this attack.  Two, what is happening in Israel will not stay there.  Iran has funded Hamas for a long while now.  Those who are ideologically opposed to Western civilization and culture learn.  They truly learn; in that they will adapt their behaviors and actions based off what works.  Regardless of the illegality and immorality of the Hamas attacks on 7 October 2023, they worked in transforming the interaction between Hamas and Israel.  Others like ISIS, the Taliban, al-Qaeda, the scores of Iranian sponsored militias, and all related groups which operate in Asia, Africa, South America, Europe, and North America will act upon the lessons they are learning.  They will see the narrative deadspace of their opponents and like various infiltrators in past battles and wars they will move undetected through that space until they can strike a blow against their opponents.  This time, that opponent was Israel.  As we support Israel in this current fight, let’s work to make sure that we also learn and adapt so that we all close down our own narrative deadspace to prevent future atrocities.
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If we are narratively standing in the wrong place, then we need to move.  We need to seek better and more appropriate narrative vantage points opening our vision and our appreciation of the operational environment.  As with physical battlespace, one can also close down deadspace by placing additional observation such that even if the weapon system cannot shoot there, it is still covered by observation.  Such action requires awareness and conscious avoidance of existing deadspace.


[1] Carl von Clausewitz, On War, Edited and translated by Michael Howard and Peter Paret, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1976, 88.

I am writing this during the late afternoon of 7 October 2023 and last night, my time, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and other groups launched a coordinated attack into the state of Israel that included rockets, boats, paragliders, motorcycles, trucks, explosives, wire cutters, and many other tools and techniques of infiltration and assault.  I am a regular listener and consumer of the Generation Jihad podcast and recommend this episode released hours after the attack began for the best discussion of what happened.

I want to make four small points, one large one, and a prediction regarding what is happening and will be happening over the next several days.

1. This isn’t over and it may only just be starting.  Pay attention as there is more to come. 
   
2. Iran’s role in this is fascinating from a geopolitical player’s position.  It is possible that Iran may have done this to scuttle an Israel-Saudi Arabia accord as it is unlikely that such an accord will happen so long as Israel is retaliating against the Palestinians.  This reference from the Long War Journal is useful to understand the anti-Israel Iranian efforts.
3. Watch Lebanon and see what Hezbollah does.  If Hezbollah does nothing, then this will be localized to Gaza and the West Bank.  If Hezbollah begins to contribute, then this may become something quite significant that may go beyond an Israeli-Palestinian problem and evolve into a regional problem.
4. Capturing Israeli civilians and bringing them back to Gaza as hostages will inflame the Israeli populace.  This may be a Rubicon as far as Israeli-Palestinian relations are concerned.  A line has been crossed that cannot be easily or relatively easily recrossed.  I expect the Israeli civilian population to be enraged and galvanized and unified well beyond anything they have experienced since 1973 and coming as this has on the fiftieth anniversary of that war there will be many who refer to this as a similar existential crisis.

My large point is this: this was not a Black Swan.  It was a Gray Rhino.  If you are not familiar with these terms, let me do a brief summary.  Black Swan was a term made popular by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his 2007 book The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable.  He offers three main characteristics of Black Swan events:

1. The event is a surprise (to the observer).
2. The event has a major effect.
3. After the first recorded instance of the event, it is rationalized by hindsight, as if it could have been expected; that is, the relevant data were available but unaccounted for in risk mitigation programs. The same is true for the personal perception by individuals.

A gray rhino, on the other hand, is something that is known and expected, but also has a major effect.  All too often, the problems that create the greatest destruction in our lives and for our countries are gray rhinos, not black swans: World War II, COVID-19, collapse of the Afghan national government in 2021, the rise of ISIS, and this attack into Israel on 6 October 2023 fifty years after another gray rhino in the same area; the 1973 Arab-Israeli War.

Today’s attack was a gray rhino because Hamas has been posting videos of their training and they have mounted numerous minor movements against the security perimeter around the Gaza Strip for months and years.

Usually, our opponents tell us what they are going to do before they do it.  This was certainly the case here.  The events of today and in the days to come should stand as a stark warning about the importance of studying what the enemy says and understanding the enemy’s thinking and perspective.

This is part of what I call the narrative space.  It is crucial that one does a narrative net assessment of any opponent.  I think the greatest example of a net assessment comes from Sun Tzu at the end of his chapter ten when he says “know the enemy, know yourself; your victory will never be endangered. Know the ground, know the weather; your victory will then be total.”[1]  In each case of knowing this involves understanding strengths and weaknesses.  Those strengths and weaknesses then get compared with those of the enemy, the weather, and/or the terrain.  This net assessment is more than a cognitive approach.  It must also include, as recommended by Sun Tzu, the environment, the experience, and the associated cognition.

Everyone needs to understand the narrative space of the opponent immediately in front as well as the opponent at a distance.  Iran certainly is supporting these activities, and may be, in some way, seeking to coordinate them.  If I am right, then all Western forces in the Middle East need to study and be concerned with what was demonstrated today and what happens in the next several days as similar efforts may be taken toward them.

Now for my prediction.
Depending on how long this lasts and how many Israeli civilians are killed, the Israeli retaliation may generate an effect similar to that achieved by the response to the 1968 Tet Offensive in January of that year.  Most people forget or never knew that what we refer to as Tet was really three separate events that happened over the course of much of 1968.  Each event was smaller than what preceded it.  The response to the three large-scale and disparate attacks and efforts across South Vietnam by the South Vietnamese security personnel and the American forces stationed in South Vietnam effectively destroyed what was commonly referred to as the Viet Cong: the insurgent South Vietnamese allied with North Vietnam.  They were killed and captured in huge numbers, and they didn’t really recover after 1968.

I believe that it may be possible that Hamas and other groups will have so profoundly enraged the Israelis that they may hunt down as many fighters as they can and capture or kill a generation’s worth of such people.  Hamas may no longer be an effective fighting force following what happens.

I offer this prediction as just that.  I am no prophet and many of my COVID predictions proved to be faulty.  Regardless, I wanted to get this thinking out there so as to generate the thinking of others.
 
I will end with my first small point.  This is in the earliest stages and may not evolve at all as I have suggested.


[1] Sun Tzu, The Art of War, trans. Samuel B. Griffith (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963), 129.

People are miscalculating.  The current miscalculation is that business practices and maxims of prior generations are operant today.  I think we have turned a corner, and virtue – not the consumer or sales or the bottom line – rules the decisions that corporations make.

Throughout my work on my PhD, I had what I think was a fun and ongoing give and take with my committee chair in which she argued for the importance of incentives, and I argued for the importance of religion in motivating non-state actors.  I jokingly called her emphasis on material incentives Marxist, and I think she thought I was something of a religious zealot.  What I didn’t articulate well in those light-hearted exchanges was what I am now articulating as the importance of virtue as an incentive.

I am using the twenty-first century interpretation of the word virtue which is related much more to how someone feels about what they do than about the actual value of a person’s actions.  In this sense I am still connecting it to religious or quasi-religious motivations in that this expression of virtue is connected much more to belief, emotion, and morality than to hard- or numbers-driven data.

The Prussian general and military theorist Carl von Clausewitz stated that war is “thus an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will.”  He also stated that “force … is thus the means of war; to impose our will on the enemy is its object.”[1]  Earlier on the same page, he stated that in war both sides seek to compel the other to their will.  Clausewitz refers to will a lot.  It is important in both having a strong will and in weakening the will of the enemy.  What is will?  Or, more important to this discussion, what makes will?

Will is that thing which allows you to continue when you are physically weak.  It is the internal drive, conviction, and certainty.  Will is derived from virtue.

Will matters in war.  It may be one of the most important elements of war as Clausewitz said.  If will does come from virtue, then the source, conception, or interpretation of virtue matters.  One might argue that national will was formerly derived from a belief in the capability of the nation to do things.  In a world where most people don’t produce things through their actions and where most actions are focused on the service economy, what is the source of national will?  National will would then be derived from beliefs and the strengths of emotions surrounding those beliefs.

Such a definition could describe something regularly labeled virtue signaling where a person demonstrates their virtue through signs, social media posts, bumper stickers.  The belief is stated and probably believed, though possibly not demonstrated through action.

I have previously described the Western European and U.S. responses to the war in Ukraine (2022 to present) as the world’s first virtue-signaling war as it has been conducted in a way such that the actual results on the battlefield matter far less than the perceptions of rightness invoked by the actions and stories of the two nations involved in the conflict.  While battlefield results are tangible and not actually related to the virtue-signaling of non-fighters, what matters to those expressing themselves on social media or on cable news channels is the feelings that come from the virtue so expressed.

Similar virtue driven decisions have been demonstrated in the corporate actions and media expressions of Bud-Light, Target, the Los Angeles Dodgers, and other companies leading up to Pride Month in 2023.  The belief of my youth was that companies valued their bottom line more than any other single issue and would avoid confrontation or scandal that might threaten that bottom line.  In that sense, the bottom line was more powerful with regard to corporate decision making than virtue.  It was okay for a company to be focused on profits and earnings – that is what a company was supposed to do as people believed then.  Reflect on how corporations, especially large ones, were (and to a degree still are) portrayed in film.  The corporation was typically the source of evil.  They paid people to do bad things, threatened those who would not comply, and hired hitmen to threaten, harm, or kill those who got out of line.  This is still often the case, but since 2001, it seems the primary villain is a national government, most often the government of the United States of America.  In film, as portrayed in the twenty-first century, virtue exists in the person of the protestor, the rebel, the individual.

Corporations no longer seem to place the bottom line as their single most important objective.  They demonstrate virtue, and they seemingly welcome losses to their bottom line in the pursuit of virtue.  Bud-Light as of the time of writing (August 2023) has taken a significant hit to their profits yet there has been no direct admission of error.  Anheuser-Busch did produce what could be called conservative advertisements in a seeming attempt to stop the losses, but there has been no acknowledgement of a mistake on their part.  Some voices on the conservative right believe that the losses for Bud-Light might cause other companies to think more about their corporate marketing decisions.  Others have claimed that this isn’t about virtue (not their word of choice), but more about a business decision related to ESG (environmental, social, governance) scores or where the company ranks on the Corporate Equality Index.  Some think that Anheuser-Busch is making a movement back to the center but doing so quietly.

Simply put, I don’t know which element is the driving force behind what seems to be an unusual business practice – making decisions that offend the primary consumer of the product such that sales are negatively impacted.  I think those who believe the business practices of old are what is governing business decisions in the present are mistaken and are underestimating the power of virtue.  I believe that Anheuser-Busch will take quarters of loss to protect their position of virtue.  Note the losses that Disney Corporation has sustained in pursuit of its virtue agenda.  It hit its monthly high-water mark with the announcement of Disney+ streaming service in February 2021 with a price per share at $189.04.  Since then, there has been a decline to the August 2023 price per share at $86.30.  I believe this is because the standard Disney customer does not appreciate the content.  I know there are other interpretations, but I would suggest that in listening to those interpretations one will hear reference to virtue-related explanations.

My specialty is not business.  My specialty is understanding how and why non-state actors maintain commitment against larger and more powerful state actors in narrative war.  What I am describing with respect to contemporary business practices and decisions is a sea-change in corporate behavior that is reflective of a narrative war in which companies have rejected the basic 1980s Econ 101 sorts of statements: the customer is always right, buy low-sell high, and focus on your bottom line – in favor of signaling what are perceived to be virtuous beliefs.  I predict that few companies will change their virtue-signaling regardless of losses.  Even when Nordstrom announced its departure from downtown San Francisco in May 2023, it didn’t say that it was because of the crime.  It said that the market “has changed dramatically over the past several years, impacting customer foot traffic to our stores and our ability to operate successfully.”

Businesses in the twentieth century demanded safety for patrons.  Cities responded to those demands.  Citizens and patrons made demands of the municipalities where they lived and the businesses they frequented.  Certainly, crime victims today speak out, but non-victims seem to tolerate levels of behavior previously unacceptable of public spaces in major urban centers.  This was challenged in Oakland, California in July 2023 by the NAACP, and that challenge may represent a broader change, but major cities regularly tolerate homeless shelters in public areas and high crime rates while continuing to tout the importance of virtue related policies.

The previous five paragraphs are not an anti-woke or right-wing expression.  They are observations.  American liberals do not have a monopoly on the use of virtue as a motivator.  Donald Trump’s attacks on the conduct of the 2020 elections and the prosecutorial conduct since then taps into a current conservative virtue that is opposition to a perceived deep state.  The conservative news site, The Daily Wire, strives to take business from so-called woke companies by pointing out to conservative consumers that they shouldn't give money to people who hate you.  The five preceding paragraphs are intended to be an observation of what is changing and how narrative war is occurring in business as well as between countries.  Some readers may think the environment that I described in the preceding paragraphs are a net positive.  If that is so, then that is my point.  That virtue is what matters.

What is perceived as virtue is important and has power for people, businesses, and corporations today.  No one should be surprised going forward when old forms of motivational power, emotional power, or willpower lack the same force they possessed in the past.  Perceived virtue is the power that motivates people, businesses, and corporations to endure hardship.  This has always been true.  In the days of the Roman Republic and Roman Empire virtue was directly linked to manliness and masculinity.  During the Cold War virtue was linked to freedom, individual rights, and liberty.  Virtue is what empowers the world to act.  One must understand how the definition and expression of virtue changes by country, by culture, and over time to understand what is motivating, or will motivate, populations now and in the future.


[1] Carl von Clausewitz, On War, ed. and trans. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976), 75.

I am not a Chinese culture, language, of history specialist.  I am an observer of Chinese behavior and a proponent of recognizing narrative war as the active philosophy of war at the present.  As I observe the actions taken by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) over the last several years, its emphasis on and adherence to what I label narrative war is clear and those who do not understand narrative war often misinterpret CCP actions and motivations.

Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill, a Massachusetts congressman (1953-1987) and former U.S. Speaker of House (1977-1987), reportedly used the phrase “all politics are local” in his first political campaign in 1935.  He is famous for this saying though it didn’t originate with him.  Tip O’Neill was correct, all politics are local.  It is also true that all foreign policy is local.  National security decisions have much more to do with domestic politics and the internal narrative of a nation than anything happening outside the nation.  The idea that all foreign policy is local (or domestic) is important in a proper appreciation in why one needs to understand the narratives of each nation and particularly those nations or states with which a country may be considering conflict.
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That means, to understand a conflict with China, one must understand China’s narrative and the story of the current CCP leadership with respect to that narrative.

When I took a film class as a college undergraduate, I was told that every film has a theme that can be stated in one or two sentences.  I think that is true.  I also think that every national narrative can also be expressed in one or two sentences.  Here is my expression of the Chinese narrative as desired by the CCP.

China is the Middle Kingdom.

For most American readers that statement may seem overly simple and possibly confusing.  What does the “Middle Kingdom” even mean, a reader might ask.  The concept of Middle Kingdom in my words is that China is the belly button of the world.  The source of all harmony and fortune and the place through which, from which, and to which all good things should flow.  This is overplaying it a bit, but the CCP sees China as occupying the supreme and central position in the world and all nations, states, and international organizations should defer to it and its conceptions of the world order.  This doesn’t mean that all nations must be subservient to China as powerful nations will not be, but all nations, even the most powerful ones, should acknowledge the Chinese position of preeminence.

For those thinking this is overly arrogant, consider that since World War II, the United States has in some measure behaved this way.  It set the world order.  It established the United Nations, first as an alliance against the Axis Powers in World War II and then as a global body.  It established or coordinated with other like-minded states to form legal codes defining humanitarian behavior, financial interactions, and global commerce.  This is not a judgment, but a statement of fact that expresses a part of why China rejects so profoundly this American (and Western) established order and feels that the world needs to be placed back in harmony by reestablishing China as the Middle Kingdom.

In a 1988 article, a Chinese political influencer and future power behind the throne, Wang Huning, wrote a profound piece titled in English, “The Structure of China’s Changing Political Culture.”  I will reference this article a bit as I believe that Wang captures the heart of the Chinese narrative war strategy behind what we see in the world.

In his article, Wang identified a fundamental problem in China.  I ask you to remember that this was written in 1988.  Matthew Johnson, a scholar writing an introduction to the English translation of the article summarizes Wang’s thoughts this way:

“Wang’s argument is simple: it is a society’s cultural factors (rather than its economic organization) that create its politics. Changes in what Wang calls social “software” – values, feelings, psychology, and attitudes – can therefore shape a society’s political future. … Wang has a solution: to rapidly “re-engineer” and renew China’s political culture by purifying the traditional, modern, and Marxist-socialist structures that still remain, and build a unified “synchronic” political culture on top of these. As China’s population becomes more widely exposed to the process of political socialization, he implies, a new value system will begin to more fully emerge.”

Wang argues in his article that Western and Chinese social software are in direct opposition.  They are not the same and they do not pursue the same objectives.  He characterizes Western political culture as placing emphasis on external regulation whereas Chinese culture places emphasis on “virtues such as benevolence, righteousness, propriety, wisdom, and faithfulness, loyalty, filial piety, brotherly love, forgiveness, and courage, rites and sacrifices, such as those to the heaven, the earth, the ruler, ancestors, and teachers, and Neo-Confucian formulae like “aligning affairs, extending understanding, making intentions genuine, balancing the mind, refining one’s person, aligning one’s household, ordering the state, setting the world at peace," which emphasize the unity of heaven and man and the objective of becoming an “inner sage” and an “outer king.”  That sounds wonderful until one understands what that means.
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Chinese culture places emphasis on social harmony.  Anything unharmonious needs to be corrected such that harmony resumes.  This statement should cause one to reflect on the significance of the Chinese social credit system.  This is a collective form of societal control that rewards those who do things that promote harmony and chastises (my word) those, and their family and social connections, who promote disharmony.  Thus, if a person posts something that harms the harmony of the state, consider this as expressed in the form of the CCP, those people lose status in their social credit and so will all those connected to them.  This will affect credit, the ability to make reservations for services, and a host of other business, recreational, and basic life functions.  All done in the name of harmony.  It sounds great in the expression of Wang but sounds eerily Orwellian in my explanation.

In 1988, Wang identified the primary problem for China was the disruption and disintegration of Chinese culture by the interaction with Western culture.  He recommended in his paper emphasis on reintegration of the culture.  There needed to be one Chinese culture.  In my words, one, and only one, Chinese narrative.  My argument is that what we observe in China’s actions with the world since the elevation of Xi Jinping to General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party in 2012 is an effort by the CCP to enforce an integrated Chinese narrative across the entirety of the Chinese population.

Wang recognized that the effort he recommended was the creation of a new narrative or at least a modification of the then prevailing route of the current narrative into a new narrative based on the “original” or older societal narrative.  Wang says it this way by using the phrase value system rather than my use of narrative: “… the most urgent task in the transformation of Chinese political culture is to form a new value system. We of course cannot conjure this value system out of thin air; on the one hand, it must accord with objective political, economic and cultural developments, and on the other, it must promote a higher-level cultural and spiritual atmosphere that will contribute to the objective development process. Only when the new value system is established and fully socialized will the situation we have been discussing finally change.”
That singular and integrated narrative is ethnocentric.  Yes, China is the Middle Kingdom, but that Middle Kingdom is Han Chinese.  Thus, there is no such thing as a Uyghur or a Hong-Konger, or a person of Shanghai, or a Taiwanese.  They are all Han Chinese under CCP control.  If such a person thinks or acts like they are not Han Chinese then that person, group of people, or population is treated as if they are outside the norm – ignorant or crazy and therefore dangerous to the harmony of the state.  They need to be reeducated, corrected, punished, or controlled.

From this perspective, there is no genocide in Xinjiang, China as there is no identity of Uyghur to be removed or destroyed.  These are simply confused people who need to be properly educated or they are dangerous rebels who need to be punished.  I am not justifying CCP behavior.  This isn’t a judgment on the morality of their actions.  This is an explanation of the thinking behind those actions.

The suppression of Hong Kong protests that began in 2019 was another expression of this emphasis on enforcing a common narrative.  I argue that the locking down of Shanghai in 2022 and Beijing and other major cities across China under a zero COVID policy had and has nothing to do with COVID-19, but was and is an expression of CCP power to define, enforce, and control the narrative.  Everyone has to be in harmony with that narrative or they will be punished.

Thos who believe that the CCP will cease to do this when sufficient economic pain begins are wrong.  Xi Jinping and possibly many other CCP leaders are fully committed to this integrated Chinese narrative, and they are willing to do EVERYTHING necessary to establish such an integrated narrative.
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For those who believe efforts to achieve this integrated narrative will fail, I simply say wait and see.  I believe that we will see how much pain and violence is necessary to establish a common narrative across 1.4 billion people.  I believe that it will take significant pain and violence, but the CCP was willing to allow tens of millions to die in pursuit of previous narrative efforts including Mao’s Cultural Revolution.  It is unclear how many Uyghurs, Hong Kongers, and residents of major Chinese cities have died since Xi Jinping came to power in pursuit of these efforts.  Don’t ever count out those who have the power of life and death and are willing to use it.

For those who read this and wonder why this matters to you.  I think that is a good question.  Other than the ongoing humanitarian tragedy resulting from the current Chinese narrative war that compels an integrated singular narrative on its own massive population, I believe that there are three reasons why this should matter to the rest of the world.

1. Just because all foreign policy is local doesn’t mean that the effects and impacts of foreign policy are local.  The contrary is often true.  Foreign policy is executed in the world.  My point in emphasizing the localness of such policy is to express how to best understand it.  That isn’t how we, as foreigners, experience it.
2. The CCP is promulgating its story to the world and through whatever coercive means it has.
3. We can see what the CCP story is.

A narrative is how a person or country makes meaning of the world.  A story is how that person or country expresses that narrative to itself or others.  China is the Middle Kingdom and the CCP is expressing that by convincing the world that it is the indispensable nation.  All the world is connected to China and all benefits come from or through China.

The CCP Belt and Road Initiative or the One Belt and One Road Initiative is a way that China is enacting its story in the world.  It is connecting the world (or the world that matters anyway) to itself.

Because a narrative is often unconsciously understood, it is often enacted without consciousness regarding how people develop stories or messages.  In that sense, an actor in the world that expresses his or her story may be doing so in a way that appears duplicitous or deceitful but can be justified in the mind of the actor as necessary, honest, and valuable.  I am not saying that every time a CCP official lies in making a promise or a statement that this is somehow an honest mistake or misperception.  In some cases, it is an outright lie, but that lie is being given (from the mind of the speaker) to establish a proper global harmony.  In a way, this can be understood as an end justifies the means type of argument.

Taiwan is the most obvious way that the CCP enacts its narrative in the world.  Taiwan is part of China and is Han Chinese.  There is no such thing as Taiwanese.  Claims to being independent are responded to as if the CCP is a parent dealing with a rebellious teenager.  As of the time of writing this (August 2022), the most recent punishments of Taiwan come in retaliation for the Taiwanese government welcoming and hosting the U.S. Speaker of the House of Representatives.  Such a welcome was perceived as nothing more than pointless lashing out at the Middle Kingdom’s authority and economic, military, and social sanctions began during and immediately following the visit.

The best expressions of CCP story promulgation came in the 2008 and 2022 Olympics hosted by the CCP.  These events communicated the message of China as the Middle Kingdom to which the world came and from which harmony flowed.  The particular message of the 2022 Olympics was that China was the only country capable of gathering the world in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.  Evidence of CCP success in this narrative is that American-born freestyle skier, Eileen Gu, competed and won a gold medal for China during the Olympic competition.  By her actions, she communicated that prestigious athletes in America see China as the Middle Kingdom.

The CCP has been successful in coopting a variety of influential spokespeople for the Middle Kingdom narrative even if it is never spoken this way.  One example is the National Basketball Association that has lucrative business contracts with the CCP.  In 2019, the general manager of the Houston Rockets tweeted out “Fight for freedom, stand with Hong Kong.”  The general manager effectively apologized and the NBA made numerous statements kowtowing to CCP authorities.  The Houston Rockets were the most popular team in China because of their former player and Chinese great Yao Ming.  The business connections forced a major American entertainment industry to change its behavior and perspective on free expression because of recognition that China is the Middle Kingdom.

In 2021, John Cena, one of the stars of the Fast and the Furious films, F9, referred to Taiwan as a country during promotions for the movie.  For the effrontery of challenging the CCP narrative, John Cena issued a 68 second apology in Mandarin Chinese where he regularly said that he was sorry.  In effect, he had to reestablish that China was the Middle Kingdom.  John Cena was a professional wrestler and, in many ways, perceived as an icon of American masculinity and even he acknowledged China in its proper global position.

There are numerus other anecdotes of major American entertainment figures, politicians, and thought leaders acknowledging the greatness of China and, in effect, declaring it as the Middle Kingdom.

I make no distinction between Chinese business and the CCP for several reasons.  One, most large corporations in China are at least in part owned by senior CCP officials.  Two, most, if not all, corporations that function in China do so at the behest of the CCP and therefore guidance and direction come from the CCP when deemed necessary and that guidance and direction is followed.  Three, the social controls previously referenced as part of the social credit system mean that even if a business had no CCP ownership and received no direct guidance, its senior officials would still be controlled through the social credit system and under the direction of the CCP.  In short, there is no such thing as an independent company or industry in China.

China has become a direct challenge to the U.S. film industry.  Chinese made films often gross in the hundreds of millions of dollars and ninety percent or more of those earnings often come from Chinese audiences alone.  These films communicate to us the CCP story.  I want to reference one specific film though I believe that these ideas are present in most of the other big budget Chinese produced films.  The film that I want to discuss is the 2015 film Wolf Warrior.  This film was not as financially successful as its successor Wolf Warrior II, but I believe that its expression of the CCP story is much more simply given.

The main character is a People’s Liberation Army (PLA) special forces sniper who, at the beginning of the film kills the brother of a powerful drug lord.  The main character is subsequently welcomed into the elite opposing force for the PLA training center called Wolf Warriors.  The drug lord sends a mercenary team lead by a navy SEAL into the training center to find and kill the sniper.  We are told multiple times that the mercenaries fight for money.  Once it is clear that the mercenaries are killing PLA soldiers in the training center the Wolf Warriors are given live ammunition and they replace the unit patch on their shoulder with the Chinese flag with the phrase “I fight for China” written under it in English letters.  During the fighting, the PLA soldiers risk their lives to save wounded leaders and they sacrifice their lives in pursuit of the enemy.

This is a B action movie analogous to the Arnold Schwarzeneggar or Sylvester Stallone movies of the 1980s.  Despite its lack of cinematic profundity, the film is tremendously valuable in understanding the CCP story.  What are the major messages that the CCP want the Han Chinese people to know?

1. The enemy is America
2. The enemy fights for money and is, therefore, weak and uncommitted
3. Han Chinese fight for China
4. Han Chinese sacrifice for their leaders
5. Han Chinese will die in pursuit of their enemy
6. Han Chinese prevail

It may seem simplistic to say that a film is the expression of the CCP story, but I think that successful films regularly express the story of a society.  Other popular Chinese films reinforce these same messages.  The most successful Chinese films during the COVID-19 pandemic have been a series on the Korean War and the enemy is an evil, depraved, and weak American military that was driven out of Korea by the valiant and honorable soldiers of China.
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It doesn’t matter whether or not the films relay historical reality.  Films often convey metaphorical truth.  In the case of the movies referenced, it is a truth of the relative positions of America and China in the world and of the honor, power, and capability of China to be the Middle Kingdom.

Narrative isn’t just about words and stories.  It is about understanding the narrative space terrain on which one operates.  Who are we and who is our opponent?  What is our narrative?  What is their narrative?

China’s narrative war isn’t limited to the military and its efforts in cyberspace aren’t limited to actions against corporate America to steal intellectual property.  China is reshaping its people to have a common integrated narrative across more than a fifth of the global population.  This is a herculean effort that may succeed through Orwellian excess.

For all those who promote the endeavor to have a common American narrative through some form of compelled speech or coerced thought I ask you to observe what China has and is doing and note that the only way to achieve such ends is through massive amounts of government power and government expressed violence.
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The CCP is waging a seventy-year war to change the American narrative space terrain.  It has been successful in achieving some significant gains as it controls the speech and maybe the thoughts of popular athletes, prominent business leaders, and much of the American culture.  I haven’t even mentioned Tik-Tok and the purposeful efforts of that platform to transform a generation of Americans in thought and action.  This is serious stuff, and we must be aware.  War with the CCP isn’t about aircraft carriers, submarines, and bombers.  It is about thought, speech, and action inside the United States of America and every other country on Earth.  All national security policy is local.

​The war between Russia and Ukraine is a great example of what happens when you get narrative war wrong.  The biggest problem with narrative war is the semantic overload of the term narrative.  It gets used to mean a lot of different things and many of those meanings matriculate to the discussion of narrative war.  People think that narrative war is about words, or ideas, or story, or framing of a situation in a way that is advantageous for one side rather than the other.  These expressions of narrative have some value when discussing narrative war, but they are insufficient for appreciating the full concept of narrative war theory.  What I plan to do in this post is discuss the fundamental aspect of narrative war by using two examples coming from Ukraine.  The first is what Russia got wrong and the second is what the United States or the West got wrong.  I conclude with my thoughts on meaning.

It is important for me to state that I haven’t spoken with Vladimir Putin, and I have not had access to transcripts of his phone calls or any technical surveillance or intelligence on his personal communications.  My suppositions come from observations of open-source material since the Russian invasion of Ukraine that commenced on 24 February 2022.  With that statement made, let me begin.

Vladimir Putin misread the narrative space of Ukraine in that he seemed to have believed that the Ukrainian national government was weak, and that the president of Ukraine held a tenuous grasp on leadership that could be broken by a large Russian invasion oriented on the Ukrainian capital.  It also appears that the Russian leader perceived the West writ large, and NATO more specifically, to be weak and divided and that a strong and aggressive action, if objectives were accomplished quickly, would result in no effective action against Russia.

Putin had many reasons to believe such things.  CNN provided a poll on the day before the invasion that showed responses from Russians and Ukrainians on a range of questions regarding the issues associated with the anticipated invasion:

• Would it be right for Russia to use military force to “reunite Russia and Ukraine”?
• Would it be right for Russia to use military force if Russia feels threatened by foreign activity in former Soviet countries?
• Do you view Russians and Ukrainians as “one people?”
• Should Russia and Ukraine be one country?
• Do you consider the Soviet Union to have been a positive or a negative thing?
• Does this politician (Volodymyr Zelensky, Vladimir Putin, Joe Biden) embody each of the following characteristics? (Dangerous, Clever, Strong, Decisive, Pragmatic, Responsible, Friendly, Reliable, Trustworthy)

Would it be right for Russia to use military force to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO?The responses are interesting in that 50% of Russians believed that it would be right to use force to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO and if Russia felt threatened by foreign activity in former Soviet Countries.  Additionally, Ukrainians saw Putin as stronger, more decisive, and more dangerous than Zelensky.  Data from different Ukrainian political polls showed Zelensky with a 32% approval in November 2021 and 31% approval in December 2021.  That number soared to 91% by February 2022 (I believe that data came after the Russian invasion though the report challenges that reading).

In addition to the numbers, Ukraine was perceived by many people as a corrupt and poorly run country.  Readers may recall that accusations of Ukrainian government corruption were very close to the center of the first impeachment of U.S. president Donald J. Trump.  In addition to perception of Ukrainian corruption, the country had been successfully invaded with little effective resistance in 2014 and 2015, losing Crimea and portions of the Donbas region to Russian aligned or Russian forces.

In addition to perceptions of Ukrainian weakness, the world in early 2022 was just coming out of COVID lockdowns and much of the Western world was torn by political divisions within countries, regional associations like the European Union and NATO, and globally.  It seemed as if every country wanted to move forward and not deal with another tragedy.

Finally, in this regard, the American and NATO withdrawal from Afghanistan that concluded on 30 August 2021 tore the alliance and humiliated the superpower.  Members of the British parliament called out the United States leadership for abandoning its responsibilities to the Afghan people and to the alliance and debates raged within the United States about the embarrassing images and the ineffectual response to the Taliban regaining control of the country.

I give these points of data to explain why Vladimir Putin might be excused from misreading the narrative space terrain.  His reading seems to have been that Ukraine wouldn’t fight, the leadership of the country would flee, and the West would be too ineffective to stand up against his actions.  Most of that turned out to be wrong.  The Ukrainians have fought, the Ukrainian leadership has stood strong and gained in popularity as a result, and the West has opposed Russia’s actions, though not singularly or effectively.  What did Putin miss?

I reference a poll that was published in The Kyiv Independent in December 2021; the same time as the lowest approval ratings for President Zelensky.  In this poll the Ukrainian people were asked “In the event of an armed intervention by Russia in your city or village, would you take any action and if so, which ones?”  The options included put up armed resistance, civil resistance, go to a safer region of Ukraine, go abroad, do nothing, do not know.  More than half of the respondents said that they would resist in one form or another.  Armed resistance was the single largest response for every region of the country (west, centre, south, east).
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Putin failed to grasp the narrative space of his opponent.  He missed the changes in Ukraine since 2015.  He failed to see that Russians and Ukrainians saw the issues associated with Ukraine and NATO from radically different perspectives.  This meant that his initial plan, as I understand it to have been, was doomed from the start.  That said, he wasn’t all wrong, which leads to the second example.

It is interesting to note that both sides got the same thing wrong.

I do not have a significant social media presence.  If I interact on social media, it is mostly through LinkedIn where I have a network of subject matter experts who often provide really informative material and recommendations.  As Russia invaded Ukraine, I immediately started to see on LinkedIn a lot of comments on the moral outrage of such an invasion and praise for the Ukrainian defenders and the leadership of President Zelensky.  Vladimir Putin was often characterized in many of these posts as a villain.  In addition, there were those who characterized his acts as doomed to failure.  They regularly pointed to the Russian military failures in maintenance, logistics, or tactical accomplishment covered by the media without taking the time to question media accuracy or sourcing.  I warned in those initial days and weeks that it was too early to predict how this would end up.  In response to one article that claimed that Putin’s actions would fail, I replied with the following:
While the author may be right, it is still possible, and maybe probable, that Putin does succeed. This campaign is just a week old and there is much of the story to be told.
My students believe that Americans are impatient for success and that they demand rapid, decisive victories. What this conflict is showing is that the media (of seemingly all nationalities) is impatient and seeking to predict final outcomes from limited data.

About three months later, I expressed the following in posting an excellent summary of the first 100 days of the fighting:
I am concerned that this war will end badly for Ukraine as it becomes the first “Virtue Signal War.” What I mean by the term virtue signal war is a war where people and states make bold pronouncements of support but do little with respect to action. I know that the United States has spent a lot of money on this war and that is a good thing, but nearly 32 years ago, we sent nearly three quarters of a million service members halfway around the world to defend and regain a small sheikhdom that few Americans had ever heard of.
The purpose of our commitment to Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm was to demonstrate to the world and global bullies that it is unacceptable for the Melian Dialogue to be enacted in the post-Cold War world.
It still amazes me that we haven’t properly stood up and committed ourselves to expelling an invader and reestablishing the borders of a state, not in the Middle East or Africa or Southeast Asia, but very much a part of Europe. This is the place about which we developed the UN charter that informs the world that aggressive war is illegal and not to be tolerated. And, here the world and the United Nations sit and tolerate it.

Russia has a narrative that includes national suffering.  The Great Patriotic War (World War II in America) saw the Soviet Union lose as many as twenty-seven million people (a significant number of which were inflicted by its own government).  The people in Leningrad (now St Petersburg again) were under siege for nearly two and a half years.  Many starved to death, and those who lived shared stories of surviving off roots and shoe leather.  Vladimir Putin was born to a family who lived through that siege.

George Kennan, a U.S. diplomat and historian who served as the deputy chief of mission in U.S. Embassy Moscow in 1947, wrote a long telegram to explain Soviet thinking that was later edited and published in Foreign Affairs under the pseudonym X and with the title “The Sources of Soviet Conduct.”  In that article Kennan gave one of the best expressions of then Soviet narrative space.  My interpretation of his writing is that the Soviet leader was paranoid because Russia, and later the Soviet Union, was always surrounded by enemies, but the Russian and Soviet people persevered through patient suffering.

My primary point is that the Russian narrative has built in a conception of the ability and need to endure suffering for the sake of the state.  Russians are narratively prepared for a war of attrition.  They believe they will win such wars, because they have won such wars.  The Russians defeated the will and the force of the French armies of Napoleon Bonaparte in 1812 through drawing him into the heartland of Russia, wearing his army down physically, and exhausting the leaders emotionally.  The Soviet Union defeated the armies of the Third Reich Wehrmacht of Adolph Hitler by drawing them into the Soviet heartland, wearing the force down physically, and exhausting the leaders emotionally.  By 1945 dozens of Soviet armies were breaking through German units and attacking toward Berlin.

Russians endure and Russians persevere because they must.  It is a core element of their societal narrative.
The West lacks a similar societal narrative.  American military doctrine calls for decisive operations.  The NATO alliance is designed to deter aggression, not to stand up to a military hegemon with control of continental energy supplies and global food security.  This is what the West got wrong.  It misread its own narrative space as it signaled support for a war that it wasn’t willing to actually fight: only support.  All of the media personalities, pundits, and early proclaimers of Putin’s folly and Russian defeat failed to understand the power of power.  Military commitment means something.  The willingness to inflict violence month after month and year after year means something.

If the West wants to defeat Vladimir Putin and see Ukraine as a viable and capable part of Europe, then it will require more than virtue signals.  It will require troops on the ground, aircraft in the air, and ships opening and controlling the free flow of grain and energy.  It will also require the disentangling of European energy resources from a single oppositional provider.  Is the West actually willing to do that or will it simply continue to virtue signal its support for Ukraine until Ukraine is attritted and/or exhausted?

Narrative isn’t just about words and stories.  It is about understanding the narrative space terrain on which one operates.  Who are we and who is our opponent?  What is our narrative regarding war?  How much are we willing to suffer for what we say we want?  Understanding yourself and your opponent is why narrative matters.  If narrative space terrain is understood, it can inform us how we will behave and how our opponents will behave.

Narrative war is about shaping and changing the narrative space terrain.  China and Russia have waged a seventy- and hundred-year war, respectively, to change the American narrative space terrain.  They have been successful in achieving some significant gains.  I cite two different Quinnipiac polls.  One that showed shortly after the beginning of the invasion that only 70% of Americans said that U.S. troops should get involved if Russia invaded a NATO country.  While that number may seem high, it should be much closer to 100% given that this is a treaty obligation.  The other poll, taken more than a week later, showed that number had risen to 80% when the question reminded participants of NATO obligations, but it also showed that 38% of the American respondents would leave the country rather than stay and fight if the United States were invaded.  It is important to compare that with the fact that two-thirds of the U.S. military in the Vietnam War era (1964-1973) were volunteers and only one third were conscripts which often contradicts what most people think about the military draft during the Vietnam War.  The questioning of defending an allied country or fighting for one’s own country shows the success of transforming the American narrative space terrain.

A proper understanding of narrative space terrain is crucial for any conflict that will involve suffering whether that suffering is economic, emotional, or physical.  This is why a proper understanding of one’s own society matters.  Who are we?  The answer to that question matters.  If you believe that your country is corrupt and systemically flawed, then why would you be willing to suffer for it?  On the other hand, if you believe that your country is the bastion of freedom, the arsenal of democracy, the shining city on a hill, then you will probably be willing to make those sacrifices.
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Vladimir Putin didn’t understand his opponent’s narrative, but he did understand his own.  Volodymyr Zelensky’s popularity has risen, but so has Putin’s.  Can Zelensky rely on a Ukrainian narrative of long-term suffering for success?  Putin knows that he can rely on Russia’s narrative of stolid perseverance.

Ruminations on Combined Arms Maneuver as I watch training battles in the Mojave Desert and read about real battles in Ukraine.

I am writing this while I sit in a hotel room at Fort Irwin, California in the middle of the high-altitude Mojave Desert.  I have had the privilege to regain an appreciation of the power and challenges of combined arms maneuver while I watch dedicated American soldiers fight each other with an expensive form of laser tag.  I, like many others, have also been consuming information on what is happening in Ukraine as these simulated battles occur.  Some of what I have heard from Ukraine includes the importance and value of infantry carried antitank weapons, the need to protect ground forces and civilians against attack from the air, and the ever present need to support and sustain combat forces for day after day fighting (what we often simply call logistics).  Interestingly, these same imperatives or problems play out in the Mojave Desert.  Logistics and maintenance matter, ground forces have to be protected against air attack, and anti-tank missiles are powerful killers of armored systems.

None of these systems are crucial on their own.  They matter most as part of a combination of the various types of capabilities present on a battlefield.  This combination of a variety of forces with different strengths and weaknesses is what we call combined arms.  It is an old concept.  Alexander the Great combined his cavalry with the relentless advance of his infantry phalanx.  As we learn when we read about Alexander, or any of the great commanders of the past, it isn’t about the capabilities as much as the timing of their use.  What made the cavalry charge of Alexander so effective was its connection to opportunities created by the relentless effort of the heavy infantry.  Timing, or synchronization, makes all the difference.  An unsupported cavalry charge is just a slaughter of men and horses – see the charge of the Light Brigade from the Crimean War for such an example.  The best armies combine the effects in time and space to create opportunities where each arm can then maximize the advantages they possess.

Alexander’s infantry advance forced the enemy to use their shields against the sarissa (sixteen-foot-long spear) points which then opened the enemy up to arrows and sling bullets coming down from above.  Adjustments to the line to compensate for fallen fighters created gaps in the line that allowed an opportunity for a rapid advance of the cavalry.

This is the power of combined arms.  A modern battlefield is this simplified version plus a lot more.  The modern mounted force requires tens of thousands of gallons of fuel a day, repair parts, food and water, and ammunition.  There are also attacks on communication networks, indirect fire that ranges tens of kilometers, and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs).  All of these more recent capabilities add to the complexity of creating synchronization – a word that means to make things happen at the same time.  Maybe not at the exact time, but in such a way as to create the benefits of the combined capabilities in near simultaneity.

This explanation is offered to address a problem that is being expressed in assessments of the incomplete data coming out of the fighting in Ukraine.  The problem is that the main battle tank is being made obsolete by individual shoulder fired anti-tank missiles.  The Javelin missile has become quite a popular brand of these missiles in this current war.  A similar thought was expressed in 1973 when Israeli tanks were stopped by AT-3 Sagger missiles carried by Egyptian infantry.  The thought came back in 2020 as reports came out of the Nagorno-Karabakh fighting.  On that occasion, the primary culprits were UAVs that dropped charges onto the top of tanks.  As I watch battles at Fort Irwin, I also note that the anti-tank systems, whether mounted on a HUMMWV or carried by infantry, are also some of the biggest killers on the battlefield.  Is the tank dead?