Off the (Electronic) Shelf

 In this book review written for Joint Force Quarterly, Kirby Dennis’s perspective of Mark Moyar’s A Question of Command veers 180 degrees from a critique of the book recently posted at Small Wars Journal. If you’ve read the book, tell us whose opinion you share and why.

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A Question of Command: Counterinsurgency from the Civil War to Iraq
By Mark Moyar
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009
301 pp., $19.80
Reviewed by Kirby R. Dennis

Among the long list of military historians who have examined the art and science of battlefield leadership, few can match the accomplishments of John Keegan. Perhaps best known for his classic The Face of Battle (Penguin, 1983), Keegan’s analysis has proven relevant over decades of evolving conflict and remains instructive to this day. In a follow-up to Face, Keegan produced an equally important analysis of generalship in times of conflict. In The Mask of Command (Viking, 1987), Keegan examines the evolving nature of wartime leadership and posits that a confluence of factors—among them, societal norms and technology—influences the nature of command and ultimately affects the manner in which leaders make decisions. Now, over two decades later, Mark Moyar offers A Question of Command, a counterargument to Keegan’s analysis of counterinsurgency warfare. Moyar extracts 10 attributes of effective counterinsurgency leadership from a historical analysis of 150 years of conflict, and in doing so, applies what Keegan refers to as the traits method of analysis—a notion that universally applied, common characteristics can determine success or failure on the front lines of battle.

START Me Up

Today’s guest blogger is Dr. Stephen J. Cimbala, Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the Pennsylvania State University–Brandywine and frequent contributor to Joint Force Quarterly (http://www.ndu.edu/press/lib/images/jfq-57/cimbala.pdf) (http://www.ndu.edu/press/lib/images/jfq-55/8.pdf) (https://digitalndulibrary.ndu.edu/u?/ndupress,20659). Recent discourse on the pros and cons of ratifying New START has prompted Dr. Cimbala to share some salient observations about the roles that politics, geostrategic interests, and military realities play in the ratification process in particular and in the formation of deterrence concepts in general on both sides of the ocean.

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Mitt Romney’s recent broadside against the New START agreement, with rejoinders by Fred Kaplan and Senator John Kerry, among others, reminds us that the ratification of New START and follow-on progress in nuclear arms reductions are more predictably accomplished in Moscow than in Washington, DC. New START comes up for Senate approval in the midst of a congressional campaign that is already overheated by partisan wrangling over responsibility for climate change and oil spills, for unprecedented deficits, for the conduct of two major wars in Afghanistan and in Iraq, and most of all, for stagnation in the American economy. New START could fall victim to the toxicity of the political climate regardless of its contents with respect to limitations on nuclear warheads and delivery systems.

Domestic politics matter in Russia, too, with respect to New START ratification, but the Kremlin commands the necessary parliamentary majorities to pass the agreement through the relevant committees and the Russian Duma. Nevertheless, twitchy Russian military conservatives, skeptical publicists with tacit Kremlin backing, and other New START opponents have signaled that later rounds of U.S.-Russian nuclear arms limitation will not go as easily as did the first Obama-Medvedev agreement. And with respect to Russian geostrategic perspectives, there are a number of important issues related to nuclear arms reductions in the background of current and future discussions, including U.S. missile defenses, NATO enlargement, and Russian military reform.

More on MISO

Today’s guest blogger is Dr. Christopher J. Lamb, interim director of the Center for Strategic Research in the Institute for National Strategic Studies at National Defense University. Dr. Lamb, who knows a little something about special operations and PSYOP (https://digitalndulibrary.ndu.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/ndupress&CISOPTR=14166) (http://www.cup.columbia.edu/book/978-0-231-13190-2/), adds to the discussion about the PSYOP-to-MISO name change shell game.

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Confused Chickens Come Home to Roost

U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) recently announced that the term psychological operations (PSYOP) is being replaced with the term military support to information operations (MISO). Stephen Walt writes amusingly in his July 7 blog for Foreign Policy that this is a classic George Carlin moment of euphemism trumping clarity. Yes, it is, but it also reflects a decade-long lobbying effort from some PSYOP practitioners who are confused about the purpose of their own operations.

In 2003, after prolonged internal debate and review, the Pentagon approved the Information Operations Roadmap that focused PSYOP on “support to military endeavors in non-permissive or semi-permissive environments (i.e. when adversaries are part of the equation).” Many PSYOP professionals refused to accept these constraints designed to draw a clear distinction between PSYOP and public diplomacy (PD) and public affairs (PA). They argued PSYOP could be benign and employed for a wide range of information purposes and that it could include friendly forces and populations.