21st century military theory

[Anonymous No.10171068]

Looking for modern military theory books written by experienced brass hats who know how to not be pulverized in Iraq.

[Anonymous No.10171095]

>>10171068
Honestly?
Clausewitz. Most modern military theory has been utterly thrown into the garbage and burned ever since petraeus and we've been in an infinite loop of tactical proficiency with the total lack of strategy.

There's tons and tons of academic papers addressing this; but I can't really point to any one thinker in general besides Clausewitz that really addresses this.

[Anonymous No.10171138]

>>10171068
Sun Tzu and Clausewitz for starters. Then some deep battle stuff, I prefer the soviets and germans, after that just read academic papers.

[Anonymous No.10171151]

>>10171095
>Most modern military theory has been utterly thrown into the garbage and burned ever since petraeus
Not OP but could you elaborate on this?

[Anonymous No.10171152]

John Boyd - Science, Strategy, and war.
aka "muh ooda loop"

[Anonymous No.10171157]

I know "On War" but it is two hundreds years old. "On Thermonuclear War" by Herman Kahn was satisfying, but I'm still looking for something addressing more modern stuff (Middle East, Ukraine). Can you tell me more about those "papers" and how i can get them?

[Anonymous No.10171169]

>>10171151
Well without getting into too much of the weeds; I think we can both agree on the general point that the United States has the absolute ability to beat any opponent we're facing on a tactical level. However we've utterly abandoned any sort of goal to these conflicts.

We're basically says "we're gonna beat IS". I mean, what does that even mean? What is the standard of defeating IS? You would have to set the political stage in order to prevent any sort of instability, grow the economy, and utterly eradicate Islamism as an ideology. Taking Raqqa while being splashy for CNN does absolutely nothing to achieve our stated political goals. It would be like if you bombed Hiroshima and then declared the war over, it lacks any sort of political resolute and setting of conditions for a resolution for your tactical actions.

We can raid ISKP in Nangarhar to our hearts content, but it won't do shit unless you manage to actually set political conditions.

But I can expound on this a lot more if you want.

[Anonymous No.10171266]

>>10171169
>But I can expound on this a lot more if you want.
Yeah absolutely, go ahead.
>However we've utterly abandoned any sort of goal to these conflicts.
So your point here and in the paragraph that follows is that the US has no well-defined conception of "victory"? And/or that the tactical aspects can't be delineated from the political?

[Anonymous No.10171365]

>>10171266
https://ctc.usma.edu/posts/october-2016

http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/uploads/Documents/opeds/Knights20170817-CTCSentinel.pdf

So in order to preface I'd cite these two research papers in support of my argument as the most recent ones that come to mind, but I can come up with more if you're interested. So I work in Intel, so I'm no professional on this by any extent, but I'd like to think I have a decent overview of the problems of our lack of strategic view.

So I think your second point that our tactical aspects not being delineated from the political is largely the answer to this. I'd use IS as the primary example of this, although AQ also would be valid.

So I'll strictly keep this in reference to Diyala province as that is what is featured in the articles. Our campaign in regards to IS insurgency amounts to essentially targeted kinetic strikes along with raids; both of which are extremely effective at their stated goals, basically targeted killings. However our "strategic" goal is the total defeat of IS. Nowhere in history has low casualty killings, and low casualty killings alone ever been sufficient in order to achieve the goal of a total defeat of an ideological political movement.

I would cite the Japanese Empire as a relatively equal enemy in terms of ideological fanaticism among it's adherents. So you can clearly see here the disconnect of how we are using our tactics, essentially we are without strategy. It took the total destruction of the Japanese ideology through the use of tactics, followed very importantly by the setting of political conditions in the follow of WWII in order to create the nation-state of Japan we see today. In order to have a strategy of total defeat of an enemy ideology; it must embrace the political realm, i.e. economics, social-political, and philosophical in order to bring about a change.

There's an interesting books called Blood Year I happened to read around a year back in which the author assesses our conflicting strategies of amalgamation and de-amalgamation as little more than pushing one group to a different area.

In a historical context I would point to the endless Hussite wars as a comparable example, it lacks the political component to be anything other than taking a group and pushing it to a different geographic location. I.E. it lacks a strategy.

[Anonymous No.10171594]

>>10171068
Gilles Deleuze was not a military man, in fact, he was one of those unwashed counterculture types, nonetheless, his spaced out acid ramblings are studied by IDF officers. Cool buzzwords like 'nomads', 'rhizomes'. 'warmachines', 'smooth and striated spaces' can give your military theory that fancy continental gloss.

http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/art-war-deleuze-guattari-debord-and-israeli-defence-force

[Anonymous No.10171634]

>>10171365
What if modern warfare is not about 'winning'?


>Vladislav Surkov was born Aslambek Andarbekovich Dudayev in the Chechen-Ingush Autonomous Republic, and later changed his name to Surkov. He is a Russian businessman, former Deputy Prime Minister of the Russian Federation, and current close advisor to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

>Under the pen name Dubovitsky, Surkov has published a number of works of science fiction, including the “gangsta fiction” novel Okolonolya (“Near Zero”). Surkov initially denied that he was the author of Okolonolya and wrote a preface to the novel stating, “The author of this novel is an unoriginal, Hamlet-obsessed hack.” Surkov was subsequently discovered to be, in fact, the author.

>He is one of the Russian government officials recently sanctioned by President Obama. The Guardian quoted his reaction: “The only things that interest me in the U.S. are Tupac Shakur, Allen Ginsberg, and Jackson Pollock. I don’t need a visa to access their work. I lose nothing.”

>“Without Sky” is a science fiction short story, first published as an annex to the magazine Russian Pioneer, No 46 (May 2014).

http://www.bewilderingstories.com/issue582/without_sky.html