Wars of Blood and Faith: The Conflicts That Will Shape the Twenty-First Century
Ralph Peters. Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 2007. 384 pp. Maps. $27.95.
Reviewed by Eric Osborne
Ralph Peters, a retired U.S. Army officer, asserts that leaders in today's America are ill-suited to the task of dealing with wars in the 21st century. Calling them "prisoners of education," the author believes that their adherence to theories pertaining to humankind in today's world leads to a lack of understanding of the reality behind today's conflicts. He believes there is a more effective approach. This work is not a history, but rather one of opinion based on the author's theories.
The author advances his objective through a series of essays and columns that detail American involvement in various conflicts, primarily in the Middle East, and the pitfalls of the conventional course. In Peters' mind, grand strategy must be reshaped to deal with current themes steering world events, which includes the idea that today's conflicts are governed by religion and ethnicity.
Another conviction is that today's world continues to struggle with the effects of the end of empire, specifically the creation of borders that do not take into account the ethnicity or religious tendencies of peoples in the Middle East. Consequently, the conflicts that the United States faces are manifestations of a world that is trying to return to its natural state, being one based on ethnicity and religion rather than artificial political boundaries.
These essays and columns comprise five sections. The first, which deals with the nature of current conflicts and the failure to deal with them because of adherence to past strategy, is the foundation for the rest of the book. Peters believes that the United States is handicapped most in its current military efforts through the belief of leaders that war is never necessary and that the country should fight with restraint while looking to a negotiated settlement. He believes that negotiated settlements do not stand when dealing with matters of religion and ethnicity, while eradication of opponents is more effective. He also rejects the past theory of winning "hearts and minds" as a way to secure a firm negotiated peace when dealing with matters of religion or ethnicity. Subsequent sections of the book treat various portions of the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. The author asserts ultimately that the United States must be willing to militarily defeat opponents rather than limit capability through the outdated beliefs of the past.
All told, this work offers a basis of discussion for those interested in international studies, but is problematic in places. It does not take into great account the world's history, which often undercuts the book's theories. For example, prevalent in this work is the idea that religious fanaticism, such as Islamism, can be quelled primarily by force. Force alone only deepens the convictions of those who believe in such radical causes and consigns the United States to generations of unremitting warfare through swelling their ranks, as its adherents see the United States as an enemy of Islam and the way of life within it. Rarely in history has military power been able to suppress a people motivated by religious conviction.
Another example where history would serve Peters well concerns his idea of redrawing the borders of the Middle East along religious and ethnic lines to ease tension. This solution has been tried in other places before, as European powers—disastrously—tried the same thing in the Balkans attempting to deal with the force of nationalism.
Aside from the need for historical context, while Peters is right that a country should have the will to go to war when necessary, it is questionable that peace is not a condition that humans strive to achieve. Diplomacy still has its place in today's world, as radical Islam is not a force embraced by the entire Muslim world or even the majority. Nevertheless, at the least this book is a good read for those interested in exploring the approach of the United States to security problems in the world.
Transforming Military Force: The Legacy of Arthur Cebrowski and Network Centric Warfare
Dr. James R. Blaker. Westport, CT: Praeger Security International, 2007. 248 pp. Illus. Index. $44.95.
Reviewed by Scott C. Truver, Ph.D.
I interviewed Vice Admiral Art Cebrowski when he was on the JCS staff as the Director, Command, Control, Communications and Computers (J-6), for an article on something he had dubbed "Network Centric Warfare" (NCW). I was on his schedule for 30 minutes, but the interview ran to nearly two hours. As I departed his office, his assistant asked, "Everything make sense?" Not really, I admitted, so another hour or so was spent to explain "What the Admiral meant was . . . and no, NCW was not just the Navy Tactical Data System on steroids."
In this well-researched and clearly written book, Pentagon insider Jim Blaker serves a much broader audience that might yet be inspired or perplexed or skeptical or confused or infuriated by the torrent of claims and counter-claims about Defense Transformation——particularly as embraced by the George W. Bush administration and especially former Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld. If "Rummy" was the President's high priest of Defense Transformation, Cebrowski was his major prophet or, better yet messiah, announcing the New World Order just on the horizon. Blaker prefers "prime architect" to clarify Cebrowski's role as the first director of the Office of Force Transformation and a direct-report to Rumsfeld in the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD).
Blaker explains how Cebrowski's nearly 40-year career as fighter pilot and uniformed Navy leader, his experiences in the joint environment, his deep moral convictions about the nature of man and conflict among nations, and his intellectual curiosity about the dawning of the Information Age channeled his energies to "transform U.S. military power in order to bring all militaries more in line with moral purpose." While the previous 15 years' focus on radical defense change had its origins in the Soviet concept of the Military Technical Revolution, Cebrowski understood how militaries that "value continuity, conforming to rules, and maintaining tradition" would be reluctant at best to embrace revolutionary change, but it had to be done. "Transformation" thus would appear less strident than "revolution," and he clearly envisioned evolutionary change—not only in technologies, systems, and platforms, but also in strategies, doctrine, tactics, techniques, and procedures.
That said, Cebrowski believed radical change would happen much faster in other nations' militaries and in ways that would enable them to challenge, asymmetrically, America's traditional military power. The result for him was the need for a new theory of war that was, Blaker notes, "a grand theory, rooted in assumptions about the nature of man and morality, community and conflict, war and peace, perdition and salvation."
Words are important, and, ultimately, Rumsfeld's Senior Level Review Group, which included Cebrowski and other top military and civilian OSD leaders, defined Military Transformation as "a process that shapes the changing nature of military competition and cooperation through new combinations of concepts, capabilities, people, and organizations that exploit our nation's advantages and protects against our asymmetric vulnerabilities to sustain our strategic position, which helps underpin peace and stability in the world." Certainly, the devil would be in the details in moving from process and rhetoric to reality, but Cebrowski was convinced that those details would result in wide-ranging and significant changes in the structure, organization, size, components, use, and effects of U.S. military forces.
Important for the future, Blaker outlines Cebrowski's understanding of the barriers to change and fulcrums ("stimulants to accelerated change") that would shape how transformation could be institutionalized within the U.S. military. About his stimulants, Cebrowski stated, "They are related . . . And there is a synergy among all six. Get all of them instituted and you enhance and multiply their combined effects." More details are needed, to be sure, and Blaker strives to provide them.
Blaker wonders about Cebrowski's enduring impact on the nation and its military. The Office of Force Transformation lingered on for about 18 months after Cebrowski's death on 12 November 2005. With Cebrowski gone and Rumsfeld's resignation, however, the office has been reorganized and its director in essence downgraded to the third-echelon within OSD. The effect of the office is likely to wane, but Cebrowski's almost messianic vision of what could be continues to reverberate throughout the "triangle of stasis."
Perhaps Cebrowski's most fundamental and persistent influence will not be in notions of Information-Age rules, net-centric C4ISR models, sensor-to-shooter nodes and nets, self-synchronization and the like, but what Blaker calls "his search for a different approach to the use of military power and the sense that Cebrowski had the solution. It is that epiphany, driven by the intersection of his conceptual framework with a real world military challenge and the eternal quest for the moral use of military power that probably elevates Cebrowski's legacy to the status of grand theory."
Unholy Terror: Bosnia, Al-Qaida, and the Rise of Global Jihad
John R. Schindler, Zenith Press, 2007, 368 pages, $27.95.
Reviewed by Sol Schindler
John Schindler, a former Balkan analyst at the National Security Agency and later professor at the Naval War College, examines in detail the Bosnia that emerged after Josip Broz Tito's death and the collapse of Yugoslavia. His background qualifies him to present a picture different from that normally shown by the media and to question some cherished but unsubstantiated beliefs.
The author agrees that the urban Muslims of Bosnia are more secular than most but makes the case that the Party of Democratic Action (SDFA), which sprang into being to represent the Muslims of Bosnia in the wake of Tito's death, was strictly Islamist in nature and philosophically not far removed from al Qaeda. He lists the visits by top al Qaeda officials during the early formative years and quotes the German journalist Renate Flottau, who described several meetings with Osama bin Laden, one even taking place in the office of the president, Alija Izetbegovic. As others have pointed out, the president was an enigma, saying highly inflammatory things to a Muslim audience, while at the same time making contradictory and peaceful observations to the Western media that surrounded him.
During the fighting, jihadists, or holy warriors, poured in; a large number from Afghanistan. For young men to go abroad to fight for a cause they believe in is in many cases commendable; but what was being preached in Bosnia to attract recruits was basically anti-Christian, anti-Western, and anti-American. The Serbs were simply tools of the infidel West. Saudi Arabia was a great source of both money and preaching imams, but Iran was at least equally active, supplying not only money but arms and secret police personnel. Their presence could be seen throughout the area.
The jihadists did not join existing Bosnian military units but formed their own in which they were virtually self-governing. Unsupervised, they committed a number of criminal acts including the robbery and murder of several European relief workers. Because the murder of foreigners bringing money to the country is hard to ignore, the perpetrators were arrested, but all managed in one way or another to escape incarceration.
What rankles the author is the blind adoration the American media gave to the Muslim side. True, the Bosnian Serb leadership was less than attractive. The psychiatrist who headed the government seemed often in need of psychiatric advice himself. But because one is not an angel does not mean one's opponent is. David Owen, a former British Foreign Minister, who had been requested by the Europeans to find peace in Bosnia, wrote: "Never before in over thirty years of public life have I had to operate in such a climate of dishonor, propaganda and dissembling." It would have been helpful if American journalists on the scene had been as perceptive.
Bosnia today, after years of international government, and the expenditure of multi-millions of dollars, euros, and pounds, is still an economic basket case overshadowed by ethnic hatred. What is particularly unfortunate for America is that the current situation there came about through the efforts of Richard Holbrooke, one of the wunderkinds of the Clinton administration. It is time to drop the dichotomy—Democrats for the situation, Republicans against it—and give serious thought concerning how to guarantee Bosnia becomes economically and politically viable. Such stability would ensure Bosnia's not becoming the radical Islamist state its Iranian benefactor would like it to become. Schindler's book helps clarify these aims.
The Depths of Courage: American Submariners at War with Japan, 1941-1945
Flint Whitlock and Ron Smith. New York: The Berkley Publishing Group, 2007.
386 pp. Illus. Notes. Bib. Index. $25.95
Reviewed by Samuel Loring Morison
A quote on this book's dust jacket from William Tuohy declares The Depths of Courage "A lively account of wartime U.S. Pacific Submarines . . . a rousing good read." I do not know which book Mr. Tuohy was reading, but this one wasn't it. Compared to works by renowned authors who have written on the subject, this book is dull, its writing lacking passion. With the exception of the time co-author Smith spends on the USS Seal (SS-183), reading a law book is more exciting.
A well-known statement by Admiral Chester Nimitz is misquoted. Strangely the same quote is correctly cited four pages later. This immediately raised red flags.
If this book had focused on Ron Smith's experiences on board submarines, and was written in a style akin to James J. Fahey's 1993 Pacific War Diary about his life in the USS Montpelier (CL-57), it may have been worth reading. In that case The Depths of Courage would have been an apt title. Instead, Flint Whitlock, who did most of the writing, tried to make this a book about World War II submarine warfare in the Pacific as well.
Therein lies another failing. The book gives the impression that too much information was put into too small a package. It lacks continuity and emotion. The descriptions of Lieutenant Commander Howard W. Gilmore of the USS Growler (SS-217) and his last order—"Take Her Down"—and the USS Sculpin's (SS-191) last battle read like an instruction manual. Compare these examples to Theodore Roscoe's descriptions in United States Submarine Operations in World War II (Naval Institute Press, 1949), or Clay Blair's Silent Victory: The U.S. Submarine War Against Japan (Lippincott, 1972). The comparison is stark. By trying to make two books into one, Whitlock succeeded at neither. The majority of the book is repetitious and does little but paraphrase other authors.
The genuinely engaging portions of the book are those concerning Smith. These are the only sections with emotion and value. Unfortunately they are in the minority. One gets the impression that Smith, Clayton Deck, a survivor of the Tang (SS-306), and others were brought in for the human aspect in a book on World War II submarine warfare. Footnotes cite interviews with these people; some are second-hand.