What I've been reading

I've been toting around Gen. Rupert Smith's The Utility of Force the past week or so, and I'm getting pretty close to finishing it.

It's been a wonderful read, and I recommend it to any military policy geeks I've got out there.

Writing a book in 2005 dealing with "non-conventional" warfare and future conflict does enable an author to seem especially prescient - let's understand that. But Smith frames the current situations in Iraq and Afghanistan interestingly.

Sometimes a change of terminology can cause you to look at things differently. In considering recent non-industrial warfare, he refers to "confrontation" and "conflict" as two different beasts which may actually occur at different levels.

Viewing our operations in Iraq and Afghanistan (and, in fact, Iraq in 1991 and bombing Libya and showing a presence in Beiruit) as tactical or theater-level conflicts within a larger confrontation is interesting. It leads me to think of goals - what are the goals of these conflicts, and how do they support the desired outcome of the larger confrontation? How does failure to meet a goal (that is, failure to achieve success in a conflict) impact the liklihood of meeting our larger goal?

And, by the way, what is our larger goal? Even if we take the fifty-years-from-today long view, what does "victory" in the War on Terror (or the conflict with militant Islam, if you prefer) look like? A middle-east populated made up soley of respresentative governments? A middle-east with no Muslims and lots of recent converts to Lutheranism? A middle-east full of angry despots who are content to leave us the Hell alone?

I dunno. Interesting to think about. Hard to achieve goals that haven't been defined, and even harder to applaud them when they support an overall mission that's never been clearly articulated.

Anyway, I'm disgressing too far from the book report. I'm rapidly closing in on the part where General (Sir) R. Smith (Ret) will pose his solutions to our modern confusion about the wars we fight. That may be interesting, but the framing has been fantastic, and I recommend the book. I've been turning down clever pages as I've gone along, so perhaps I'll share some tidbits later to further tease you into laying out some cash for it.