Comments on: 4GW: A solution of the second kind

By: Wolf Pangloss

Wolf Pangloss — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 14:01:22 +0000

Fabius:
How would an effort under the imprimatur of the Congressional powers “To define and punish Piracies and Felonies committed on the high Seas, and Offenses against the Law of Nations” appear?

Would it involve the very next phrase in the Constitutional list of Congressional powers? “To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water”?

This would mean a much larger role for companies like Blackwater, and an interesting commercial aspect to the present global Counterjihad.

Note that I agree that Congress has been sadly deficient in asserting its powers and duties in the current situation. Rather than declaring War Congress passed an authorization for the use of force to the Executive branch and fobbed off oversight to the Judiciary, thereby abandoning its Constitutional roles and responsibilities.
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Fabius Maximus replies: That’s an interesting idea! Perhaps one for Chet Richards, who believes in privatizing more of our defense apparatus. I was thinking of applying traditional law enforcement and intelligence methods — perhaps even covert ops — against overseas entities responsible for terrorism. That is, treating it as “enhanced crime” not “war.” I never developed the idea, but your analogy brought it back to mind.

By: Wolf Pangloss

Wolf Pangloss — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 07:07:17 +0000

How does this grand strategy fit into the hot war against the new Barbary pirates? Europe doesn’t seem to think they are any more of a threat than they thought they were the first time the US went to war in Tripoli, when Jefferson was President. They have made their redoubts in every Muslim country this time, and in Muslim ghettos of many non-Muslim countries. And by aiming to be popular the US leaves itself even more vulnerable to the pirates’ masterful manipulation of the media by use of the management of savagery. How can the US avoid the perception it is at war with Islam when it is actually at war with the pirates who fight under Islam’s black flag of Jihad? Can it? How tightly bound is Jihad to Islam?
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Fabius Maximus: Interesting analogy. After 9/11 I wrote that the fight with al Qaeda was not war in any meaningful sense, but crime (Chet Richards discusses this at length in his new book If We Can Keep It). As such Congress could act under its powers to “To define and punish Piracies and Felonies committed on the high Seas, and Offenses against the Law of Nations”.
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As for your questions about the nature of the jihadists, and the role inside Islam, the web is filled with folks confidently chattering on about this — having no real knowledge on the subject except what they get from other equally ignorant Americans. They are the equivalent of the folks ranting about the evil Hun during WWI. It is one of the essential questions of this conflict, and requires deep knowledge to answer. I have zero expertise in this field, so will not join the chorus.

By: Fabius Maximus

Fabius Maximus — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 00:12:45 +0000

An even better comment on Brimley’s proposed strategy, posted by Dan Kervick at Matthew Yglesias’ blog:
“Another “Grand Strategy”. Awesome. Let’s make room on the shelf next to all the other grand strategies.”

By: Anthony J. Alfidi

Anthony J. Alfidi — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 15:56:48 +0000

“Structural: policies result from constellations of powerful private interests that gain from them, and will actively resist change.”

One key to implementation would be to sell the elites on how they can profit from structural changes to American grand strategy. How to sell them on 4GW? Argue that imperfect occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan have hampered development of those countries’ resource sectors. Thus, better 4GW = efficient occupation = multilateral investment = resource extraction = record profits.

A 4GW-capable military will also allow the Anglo-West to project power into more areas, Venezuela, Nigeria, Sudan, etc. where elites covet access to resources. Selling anything to decisionmakers must hit their pain points. For the ruling class, these pain points are often greed-based.
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Fabius Maximus: That’s useful advice! In fact, that’s the sales pitch of those advocating DoD use methods and insights of the social sciences to further a neocolonial program — and in a few years they have succeeded on a scale probably beyond anything they imagined.

By: judasnoose

judasnoose — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 02:23:54 +0000

“Folks just do not have the necessary information about costs and consequences.”

Also, for many situations, the information is very subtle, and rationality leads to perverse consequences. E.g., there are some biologically anomalous humans who smoke tobacco cigarettes and suffer no ill effects. Is it genetics, nutrition, some other factor? We don’t know. Unfortunately, these anomalies get noticed and *imitated* by the broad masses of people who will get cancer from smoking, and thus the oncologists stay busy.

In the context of 4GW, this means that perverse information will get noticed and acted on, leading to major catastrophes that theoretically should have been avoided.

Physics is simple, chemistry is a little quirky, biology is very quirky, ecology is computationally infeasible, and economics is incalculable. Systems of increasing complexity become less and less amenable to fixing by giving folks the “necessary information.”
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Fabius Maximus: This was a methodologial recommendation for the “4GW community.” Any thoughts about it? Or about the odds of this happening?