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Strategic manhunting and understanding the second order effects

I was reading this article in Foreign Policy about what the author termed strategic manhunting. (HT to the On War and Words Blog.) He has also completed a soon to be published book on the subject.

I think that a key point in the article was in the conclusion, my emphasis added:

And yet there is a danger in relying too heavily on such operations. Forcing an individual to go to ground renders him strategically ineffective and creates space for other actors to step to the fore. The successful targeting of an individual is probably less important from a strategic standpoint than successfully targeting the network that supports him or will carry on the struggle in his absence.

Confucianism and war in East Asia

I recently read David C. Kang's book East Asia before the West and was very interested in his argument that there were less wars between the Sinic states (China, Korea, Japan and Vietnam) in East Asia during the 'Middle Ages' and early modern historical period than in Europe during the same time period. This argument was not a 'why Asia is superior to the West' diatribe but an observation. He believed that the reason that there were less wars was that there was a dominant hegemon, China, and that the Confucian system that China followed was essentially adopted by the other states, although to a lesser extent in Japan. I have included below the table that he used in his book to demonstrate his idea. Note that he is talking about wars between Sinicised states as there were constant raids by nomads and pirates that could be described as wars or raids depending on definitions. I think that he has a point. In western military history there is almost an assumption that inter-state war (100 Years War and 30 Years War as easy examples) were part of the natural course of events while amongst the states of East Asia that assumption would not hold so true, inter-state war was not regular.

 

   

David Kilcullen on tanks

A number of years ago David Kilcullen wrote a very thought provoking article about tanks on the modern unconventional battlefield. It was originally for internal use only and I was fortunate enough to be sent a copy by a colleague. The article is titled Bombers and Tanks: Understanding the Myths and is available with downloading the Australian Army Journal Volume III Number 3. (Sorry I could not find a link to the single article.) The article is written from an infantryman’s perspective about why tanks are still useful on the battlefield today. Events in Iraq have no doubt confirmed a lot of what Kilcullen wrote here. I recommend this article as a good read about tanks on the modern ‘low intensity’ battlefield.