Thoughts on a Book Sale

Over the weekend the local Friends of the Library had their annual book sale. While the books on sale were fairly diverse (including many hard-to-find, out-of-print titles), surplus bestsellers were very prominent in the stock, making it a good representative of the market of recent years, and seeing it reminded me of two things:

1. How much of the section of books devoted to "Business and Economics" consisted of self-help nonsense.
2. How many of the "big" books on public affairs, politics and the like have appallingly short lives before they cease to be of significance to anyone but historians wondering "What were they thinking back then?" In my mind, the prize for this sort of ephemeral writing goes to Dick Morris for his anticipation of the 2008 presidential election, Condi vs. Hillary, but Kenneth Pollack's The Threatening Storm (about which I'd forgotten until my eye fell on a copy there) certainly fits the bill.

Despite all its flaws, the publishing industry gets out a fair number of good books. Unfortunately, the trash-to-gold ratio is very high, and probably worsening, especially in this area. But what else could you expect given the direction of the business, and the dominance of public intellectual life by the lobotomized punditry of television and radio?

On the Use of the "D" Word

I noted in an earlier comment that the word "Depression" is rearing its head in the mainstream commentary on business and economics.

When people use it, however, most listeners assume the word to simply mean a Very Bad Thing, with little concept as to the magnitude of the event-let alone how our situation since has compared with it.

According to the National Income and Product Accounts Tables of the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the U.S. economy shrank by roughly a third between 1929 and 1933. It recovered afterward, to its 1929 level, by 1936. From 1936 to 1940 the economy then grew at an average rate of 4.7 percent a year above its 1929 level.

In other words, for the decade thought of as the Depression as a whole, U.S. GDP expanded at an average of 1.7 percent a year during the 1929-1940 period-or 0.93 per cent per capita.

That is only very slightly less than the 1 per cent per capita growth the U.S. saw during the 1973-1995 period as a whole, which virtually no one in the mainstream refers to as a Depression. Growth improved after that (1995-2006 seeing 1.6 per cent per capita growth), but the figures for the 2000s have been frequently criticized for understating inflation, with some suggesting little or no real GDP gain in the years since the '90s boom had run its course; and even the official data now has the U.S. in a recession from December 2007 on.

Put plainly, the period since 1973 has, when taken as a whole, seen a rate of economic growth roughly comparable to that of the 1929-1940 period.1

Now, the idea that we have been in something like a Depression for so many decades may seem ridiculous, and it would be a mistake to overlook some important differences. One is that nothing like the sharpness of the shock of 1929-1933 has been evident since 1973. Rather than a sharp, deep drop in output, followed by a period of rapid growth later, these years have seen prolonged, very slow growth.

Another reason is the severity of the blow to private investment as a share of GDP during these years. It fell from 16 percent of Gross Domestic Product in 1929 to a mere 2.2 percent of it in 1932. By the end of the decade, it still hadn't returned to its earlier level, returning to just 13.4 percent by 1940.

Instead, the growth of the late 1930s reflected the massive expansion of the U.S. government. Government expenditures went from $9.4 to $15 billion between 1929 and 1940, nearly doubling in real terms (from $119 to $232 billion in today's dollars). In particular it was a matter of the growth of Federal spending and investment, which nearly quintupled from $22 to $100 billion, after adjustment for inflation-expenditures paid for by borrowing that raised the ratio of national debt to GDP from 16 percent in 1929 to 52 percent by 1940 (which, of course, enlarged the demand that enabled and propped up the recovery of private investment, unsteady and incomplete as it was).

Private investment has never fallen as low in the post-1973 period as it did then, the worst moment perhaps 1991, which roughly matched the level of 1940, at the Depression's tail end. Nonetheless, government has been about twice as big a part of the economy as it was in 1940, the Federal government three times as big, a factor that should not be underestimated in any attempt to draw a parallel between the two situations. Some observers argue that the only reason things have not been worse is because of these large public shares, and particularly the stabilizing effects of the transfer payments they facilitate (an idea Paul Bairoch mentions in his book Economics and World History). And both the public and private investment of recent decades have entailed a massive, Depression-scale accumulation of debt.

One might also point to the employment picture. The figures provided by the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that 24.9 percent of the labor force was out of work in 1933, and still 14.6 percent in 1940-figures with no recent parallel. Official postwar unemployment only ran in the double digits between September 1982 and June 1983, peaking at 10.8 percent in November and December 1982. In October this year, it was a mere 6.5 percent.

However, "unofficial" estimates of American unemployment since the 1970s commonly produce much higher figures than that. Simply including BLS statistics on marginally attached workers (who recently had a job and want another one but are not looking), discouraged workers (who are not seeking work because of the state of the market), and part-timers ("who want and are available for full-time work but have had to settle for a part-time schedule") raises the October 2008 figure to 11.8 percent. Much more expansive definitions are possible, and these commonly result in Depression-level numbers.

In short, the idea that we are in a quasi-Depression is not totally groundless-or unprecedented. Such a view is a commonplace among long wave theorists, whose work frequently recognizes an analogy between the post-1973 period and the 1920s and '30s.

It also suggests strongly that we have been on the wrong track economically these past several decades, in the U.S., and around the world (where the picture has not been much better, and similarly evocative of the '30s in many commentaries). One theory, espoused by many (though by no means all) of the aforementioned long wave economists, is that the revival of growth commonly requires active state intervention, perhaps of a Keynesian type-exactly the opposite direction to the "courtesan state" practices pioneered by Augusto Pinochet's Chile, Margaret Thatcher's Britain and plain old Reaganomics.2

Given the changed rhetoric of recent weeks, it may be possible that the sorts of policies which, in this reading of economic history, get growth going again, will be enacted by governments. However, it would be a real mistake to jump the gun on that score. Following the fad for neo-mercantilism in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Asian financial crisis of 1997-1998, the bursting of the tech bubble and associated corporate scandals, the end would be declared-and yet, the TINA ("There Is No Alternative") mentality soldiered on.

So it might again after the sense of crisis has passed.

1 It is worth noting that measures other than GDP, such as the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI), report poorer performance than that. According to the 2006 report by Redefining Progress, U.S. GPI stagnated in the area of $15,000 per capita in 1978, the U.S. economy as a whole making no meaningful progress in three decades. It is also worth noting that according to Alan Freeman's analysis in 2003's "Globalisation: economic stagnation and divergence," even going by GDP the world economy was static between 1980 and 2002, and actually shrank between 1988 and 2002.
2 I explore that idea in a somewhat more academic manner here, in my article, "A Long-Term Trend Toward the Depletion of Fiscal-Macroeconomic Slack in the World Economy?", where I argue for the wage-productivity gaps, financialization, short-termism and resource misuse fostered by neoliberal policies as the causes of the stagnant growth and mounting debt seen since the 1970s.

The Future of War: Power, Technology, and American World Dominance in the 21st Century, by George and Meredith Friedman

New York: Crown Publishers, 1996, pp. 464.

The grandiosely if uncreatively titled The Future of War does not concern itself with insurgency and terrorism; with state failure, peacekeeping or nation-building; with rogue states and organized crime; with resource conflict and environmental security; with biological weapons and computer warfare; with the growth of the private military sector.

Rather this book's focus is squarely on conventional, interstate warfare, and even then its focus is not on making predictions about the balance of power in the international system, or laying out specific conflict scenarios (for instance, there is little on the rise of China), but on the theoretical and historical (their single geopolitical prediction, that the future will be an "American epoch," aside).

Simply put, the Friedmans posit that the modern (post-1500) era was the age of firearms, centered on the massing of explosive power. This culminated in the dominance of the battlespace by "hydrocarbon-driven, gunned weapon platforms" like battleships, tanks and planes. These systems, however, are increasingly "senile," meaning that the measures taken to insure their survival on the battlefield are overwhelming their offensive value.

The reason: the precision-guided munitions which will dominate the coming epoch as surely as the gun dominated the one preceding it. The ultimate expression of these will be hypersonic, intercontinental-range cruise missiles with the versatility of manned bombers (their discussion of missiles shading into what we today commonly term drones).

Meanwhile, the world's military center of gravity is shifting skyward, to space, global dominance meaning space dominance, to be won by manned command platforms in space, and fleets of space vehicles that can see and attack anything on the surface.

There will be little place for tanks, warships and traditional combat aircraft in this new military order, or even for massed infantry because while "boots on the ground" will still be necessary for close-in combat and holding territory, they will more and more resemble the "starship troopers" of Robert Heinlein-small, elite units whose individual members have been made far more deadly by advanced armor, sensors, communication systems and weapons.1

In short, the book is an explanation of the then-fashionable thinking about what is commonly called the "Revolution in Military Affairs," albeit a very thorough, comprehensive and accessible one. Indeed, it made quite a strong impression on my own thinking about these subjects when I first read it back in 2000, and much of my early writing and publication cites its ideas.

I find myself looking rather more skeptically at the book now, however. While we have perhaps gone overboard in the degree to which we have overlooked great power politics in the last decade or so, this book's focus is too narrow, not only in its considering just one level of warfare while ignoring all the others, but in its particular technological focus. It was not the gun which gave Europe its ascendancy, but industrialization, and that ascendancy was also briefer and more precarious than the half millennium suggested here.2 Their vision of a "European epoch" based on the mastery of a particular weapons technology therefore seems a poor basis for arguing for a similarly founded American epoch extending far into the future (even without considering today's much more rapid technological diffusion).

Additionally, where the key technologies themselves are considered, this is at best a long-range vision, rather than a guide to practical policymaking. The day when militaries serious about fighting conventional wars can finally dispense with their tanks and warships is still a long way off. The space dominance visions described here remain technically and economically infeasible, and can be expected to remain so for decades.

Even precision-guided munitions seem likely to make much slower progress than they imagined. There has been surprisingly little progress toward really fast, really long-range cruise missiles in the decade since they wrote their book, and it is not really that surprising. Many of the areas of technology relevant to realizing the idea (like propulsion systems) have been seeing fairly slow progress for quite some time. Besides, the PGM itself might become senile sooner than imagined, if directed-energy weapons become ubiquitous, an outcome that may be in real doubt, but still seems more likely than the realization of the space capabilities envisioned here.

The authors are also too dismissive of the importance of mass in future warfare, erroneously predicted so many times before-not least, by Basil Liddell Hart after World War I. Even if armies get smaller because of the cost of their equipment, numbers will still count, and the political units able to raise the resources to support those numbers will count for a great deal. Indeed, the size of the space forces necessary to achieve really workable, continuous coverage of the whole planet will be staggering.3

While this is said with all the advantage of hindsight, the book remains more interesting as an expression of the thinking on these topics in its day, and for the thoroughness of its extrapolation from a (flawed) theory, than as a comment on contemporary concerns, or a fully-rounded vision of things to come.

1 As for nuclear weapons, these will remain, but as a factor of declining significance-simply guarantees of state survival, and as checks on the nuclear weapons held by other actors-enabling the conduct of limited wars. (Notably, the authors count both the world wars as having been limited conflicts.)
2 After all, Asia had its own gunpowder empires, which did much to limit (and at points, even reverse) European expansion at the expense of India, China and the Ottoman Empire until late in the eighteenth century and often after; while Russia and Japan successfully resisted colonization.
3 One study indicates that as many as 1600 interceptors may be needed to stop a single ICBM. See American Physical Society, Boost-Phase Intercept Systems for National Missile Defense: Scientific and Technical Issues (College Park, MD: APS, 2003). Cited in Nancy Gallagher and John D. Steinbruner, Reconsidering the Rules for Space Security (Cambridge, MA: American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2008), pp. 66-67. It has also been estimated that as many as 1200 satellites would be needed simply to image every point on the planet once an hour. Gallagher, p. 69.

On The Prospects for a "New" New Deal

Check out this article by Ralph Nader in the Christian Science Monitor outlining a "new" New Deal for America.

I don't think it will happen. The last election was no referendum on neoliberalism, and the Democratic Party certainly has not abandoned Clintonomics, which were really not much different from Reagonomics, except in their comparative fiscal discipline. (After all, the Clinton administration's most significant economic legacies were free trade-NAFTA and GATT, welfare reform-the 1996 Welfare Reform Act, and business deregulation-the 1996 Telecom Act and the repeal of the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act in 1999. He reappointed Ayn Rand devotee Alan Greenspan to another term at the Fed. There was never a shortage of corporate welfare, not the least of it big bailouts like the peso rescue of 1994-5. I could go on, but you get the picture, the results of which we're all living with now.)

Even were things different, despite all the hoopla, the election of 2008 was not some profound realignment of the kind Kevin Phillips describes in his books. The popular vote went 52-47, and for the most part the red states stayed red, the blue states blue, the main difference the tipping left of "swing states" like Florida (which went for Obama by less than 3 percent) and Ohio (which did the same by less than four). The Democrats have a majority in Congress, but not an overwhelming one, and anyway they don't exactly have an impressive track record of uniting behind liberal initiatives-something certainly not changed by their conduct in the last two years. And Obama's recent appointments (yet more Clintonomics, including an actual Clinton!) don't exactly point to the "change" endlessly promised.

On balance, the evidence says that those who hoped the 1992 election would reverse the legacy of Reagan-Bush I should expect another four years of disappointment-while hoping dearly that I'm wrong.

The Falling Price of Oil

The price of oil right now is sixty percent off its July record price. Speculation certainly played its role in the rising prices of the last few years, as Amy Myers Jaffe (with whom I had an exchange in the journal Survival last August) pointed out-and I agree that the abandonment of oil by the speculators played its role in the recent drop. So did the smothering of the earlier, strong demand growth by the stiff $150 a barrel price tag (and a global economic crisis).

Nonetheless, while providing some much-needed relief, these developments do not change the essential picture. Even if demand is slightly down in 2008-9 from earlier years, this will not last forever. Indeed, the lowered prices are setting the stage for new consumption growth-just as world demand grew again in the 1980s (though, as the current economic crisis demonstrates, there are plenty of reasons to think the road ahead is going to be a rocky one, the availability of energy supplies only a part of that). And barring unlikely regulatory measures, the speculators will be back.

More importantly, the old causes for concern that got another, long overdue hearing during the price rises of 2003-08 remain. Known oil supplies continue to be used up much more quickly than new supplies are being discovered, and the process of getting production up and running at new fields (a decade or more) remain as long as before. No new reason has appeared to think that the reserves of the OPEC countries have not been significantly overstated. The theory of peak oil is no less (or more) valid than it was back in July. And the potential for unconventional oil to fill the gap between supply and demand that peak theorists have long expected to emerge in the next decade is unchanged from what it was not too long ago (10 or 11 million barrels a day, no more).

This makes the question, as I put it in August, not whether the price of oil will drop (as it already has), but how far, and for how long? And when it starts going up again, as it almost certainly will, how far and how long will that go on too? The end of the oil age was never going to be a linear thing, and the worst mistake we can make at this moment is to pretend that things were really fine all along, that the calls for sounder energy policy in the last few years were nothing but hysteria, and abandon conservation efforts and the development of alternative energy sources-the way we did in the 1980s, when R & D and other efforts in this area fell off, resulting in a pattern of underinvestment that set us back decades, particularly in the U.S., but internationally as well.

Those mistakes, which set us up for later difficulties, must not be forgotten by anyone purporting to guess at the future. I only hope they will not be repeated.

Violent Politics: A History of Insurgency, Terrorism & Guerrilla War, From the American Revolution to Iraq, by William R. Polk

New York: HarperCollins, 2007, pp. 304.

As readers of the recent literature on guerrilla warfare, this is a highly contentious subject. It may be a mistake to overlook the role of non-material factors like politics and morale in any type of warfare, but in interstate conflicts, wealth, technology and numbers make themselves felt in a way that is not the case with guerrilla warfare, which frequently sees the weak defeat the strong. Additionally, what constitutes "victory" tends to be more ambiguous, so that there is profound disagreement over what to make of particular campaigns. For instance, is one to chalk up Britain's counterinsurgency efforts in Malaya as a victory or a defeat? (The Communists were prevented from taking over the country--but the British also departed.)

Accordingly some writers present the guerrilla as virtually invincible, others as inherently futile. Max Boot's The Savage Wars of Peace, a self-described history of America's "small wars," for instance, depicts a few thousand American soldiers, sailors and marines venturing out, pacifying a country in short order, and going home time and time again, with the implication that counterinsurgency is a relatively simple matter, and success historically routine. By contrast, when Martin Van Creveld's books address the subject, they tend to read like listings of great power humiliations. His latest, The Changing Face of War: Lessons of Combat From the Marne to Iraq, is no exception.

William R. Polk's recent study, Violent Politics: A History of Insurgency, Terrorism & Guerrilla War, From the American Revolution to Iraq, leans strongly toward the latter view, albeit with important qualifications having to do with the fundamental assessment of the problem. Polk's book characterizes guerrilla warfare as a nationalistic response to the presence of a foreign occupier.

Unchecked, this response proceeds through three phases. In the first phase the insurgency, tending to begin with what may seem like a preposterously small number of active combatants "fight as terrorists" because they are "too few to fight as guerrillas." The actions they take may attract others alienated by the situation to them, and certainly generate government repression, reinforcing the process as embittered citizens also sign up. A successful outcome of this phase (for the insurgents) is their attaining a "critical mass for extended operations and achiev[ing] recognition as a national champion."

The conventional wisdom is that this "political" phase is eighty percent of the conflict, and Polk does not differ on that point. However, Polk offers a more nuanced view of the remaining twenty percent, which other authors often characterize as simply a military component, in his characterization of the next two phases.

In phase two-which accounts for another fifteen percent of the conflict-the guerrillas act to disrupt the functioning of the state as such, and substitute their own "counter-state" for it. They keep the government from being able to maintain order, collect taxes or operate basic services while the guerrillas may attempt to do some or all of these things. This is not a matter of holding ground for the guerrillas, the objective rather to "take control and win over the people."

The third phase-a mere five percent, though also entailing the bulk of the fighting-involves a turn to larger-scale military operations on the part of the guerrillas. This means an end to "small-scale, hit-and-run" and a shift toward regular warfare.

Polk's analysis is much stronger in its consideration of the first two phases than the third, and in particular what makes for a successful phase three. The selected historical examples do not clarify that part of the issue. Where many of these insurgencies met with success, as in the Spanish struggle against Napoleon, or the Yugoslav and Greek resistance during World War II, the guerrillas were often players inside of a much larger context of interstate conflict. (The same might also be said of the American Revolution, or the insurgency in South Vietnam.) In other cases, an exhausted and collapsing empire was fighting a rear-guard battle to hold on to its colonies (as with the Spanish in the Philippines, the French in Algeria and post-World War II Vietnam, or the British in Kenya). Little explanation is offered as to why post-World War I Ireland and Afghanistan-where in the 1980s, massive foreign support was certainly a factor-constitute exceptions to that pattern. (In the case of Ireland, a brief word about public opinion is presented as the decisive difference.)

Additionally, while this book's emphasis is on long-standing historical patterns, some more consideration would have been due the changes that have occurred during the two centuries of history this book surveys. There is virtually no discussion of the impact of urbanization, which has been strongly correlated with the prospects for rebellion and revolution occurring (as in Jack Goldstone's Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World), but which in the analysis of some observers, makes it almost impossible for guerrillas to win (as Anthony James Joes contends in his recent study, Urban Guerrilla Warfare).

Nonetheless, it would be a mistake to linger on these shortcomings, because of the importance of what the book does get right, in particular its recognition that combat operations constitute a relatively small part of the conflict. In this, Polk's study echoes the assessment of contemporary conflict advanced by General Rupert Smith in his book, The Utility of Force (my review of which for Strategic Insights you can read here). Phase One is ultimately where the war is won or lost, the rest just a matter of putting off defeat-and so to be avoided barring a readiness to fight such a war indefinitely.

Are Territorial Military Occupations Becoming More Difficult?

By Nader Elhefnawy

Neoconservative Max Boot's 2002 book The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power, a self-described history of America's "small wars" intended to sell the idea that empire is feasible and worthwhile, depicts a few thousand American soldiers, sailors and marines venturing out, pacifying a country in short order, and going home time and time again.

When I first read it, something seemed off about Boot's analysis. He made it seem too easy, and the events of recent years have helped clarify why that was. In the operations Boot describes, U.S. objectives were very limited, quashing an immediate, perceived threat, and otherwise leaving the countries much as they were, so that American forces were likely to return again in the not-too-distant future to do it all over again. By contrast, "proper" nation-building today entails the setting up of a stable government and functioning economy, then leaving with little expectation of a near-term redux.1

In short, territorial occupations are expected to accomplish far more than before. Of course, advocates of such operations point to the cases of Germany and Japan in the post-World War II period. However, these were anomalous in already having been economically viable industrial states, with significant, recent experience of modern civil society and democracy, and a high degree of ethnic homogeneity, eliminating the danger that ethnic or sectarian tensions would exert centrifugal forces in a moment of weakness. In short, it was a matter of getting the country up and running again, rather than building up what was never there in the first place (or dismantling what was there before and building up something entirely new), a much taller order.

The occupations of the immediate post-war period (of which the occupations of Germany and Japan were a part) represent exceptional rather than typical cases. U.S.-led occupations in Western Europe and Northeast Asia during those years represent six of the seven successful occupations that David Edelstein found out of a total of twenty-four he studied.2 A critical factor appears to have been the occupier's guarantee of the occupied nation's security against an external threat, specifically the Soviet Union, which quelled internal opposition.3 In other words, the rapid onset of the Cold War following the end of World War II created unique opportunities which are unlikely to recur in the foreseeable future.

Many observers also forget just how demanding the occupations were. The American presence in West Germany alone (and it should be remembered that there were also British and French zones) involved four hundred thousand troops. The U.S. occupation of Japan involved an even larger number of soldiers, four hundred and fifty thousand at its height--approximately one soldier for every 180 Japanese citizens.

Meanwhile, a number of developments have made occupation more rather than less difficult. Several of them have to do with changes in the countries to be garrisoned themselves, related to their modernization:

* Demographic expansion.
* Urbanization.
* Social mobilization.

Put simply, the populations to be administered and policed in the course of an occupation are larger; and are concentrated in much more complex environments. To give but one example, the population of Baghdad expanded twenty times between 1932 and 2006, producing a metropolis sprawling over some three hundred square miles, and containing seven million people.

That same urbanization, as well as higher levels of education, and greater access to media in virtually all locations, results in a population that is at least potentially more engaged politically, with predictable results. Moreover, all of these count for more in an age where conflict is characterized less by "industrial war" than "war amongst the people," to use General Rupert Smith's terms.4 Battlefield decisions count for far less, as do arms in general, these becoming more clearly just a way of creating conditions in which other "means and levers of power" can be brought to bear to produce the results. And given how slowly those levers work, conflicts "tend to be timeless, even unending."

All of this comes just as a number of other factors have combined to make it more difficult for the major military powers (and especially the developed states) to raise the kinds of military forces needed for long-term occupation:

* Again, demographics, or the graying of populations. Smaller youth cohorts mean smaller (relative) pools of manpower from which to draw armies. This trend is globally evident, but most advanced in North America, Europe, Russia, East Asia and Australasia, the regions containing the countries with the bulk of the world's military capability, and also the ones most likely to stage such interventions-with the countries where interventions are most likely usually in earlier stages of the process, resulting in a significant disparity.5
* Professionalization. The claim that modern armies can only be professional armies is an old one. Basil Liddell Hart made it after World War I, and again after World War II.6 He was proven wrong each time, but it may be that the claim is more valid today. Professional forces are necessarily smaller forces.
* Diminished civic militarism. This extends not only to the willingness to serve in the armed forces, but the willingness to pay for large defense establishments, or politically support operations, particularly when they are messy, lengthy and open-ended. That those operations are much less likely to relate to traditional territorial defense, and more likely to consist of constabulry missions, also makes such operations less gratifying to traditional patriotism, so that this is not simply a function of more pacifistic culture.7
* The "rising cost of war." As societies develop, they afford more (and often more attractive) career opportunities in civilian life to the ambitious. Nonetheless, this is offset somewhat by the reality of high structural unemployment and underemployment, especially among the young.
* Task specialization. It is arguable that there is an increasing divergence between the kind of army necessary for fighting and winning conventional conflicts; and one that might be effective at the tasks entailed by occupation duty. (Modern conventional forces have high support-to-combat ratios, and an emphasis on high-performance equipment of marginal value to such operations, for instance.) Responding to this reality, strategist Thomas Barnett has gone so far as to suggest the U.S. develop two, different forces (the "Leviathan" and "SysAdmin" forces, respectively), one for each task.8

Some observers will also point to the pressure on militaries to preserve their forces, and the enlarged role of the media. It is likely the case that the sensitivity to casualties has been exaggerated in the past, and that the same goes for the scrutiny to which the media subject such operations.9 Nonetheless, these too are factors, despite the exaggerations.

In short, there are very considerable, structural reasons why occupations have become more difficult, and the plain and simple truth is that there is no tactical, technological or political "silver bullet" which will resolve those difficulties. The only reasonable response for the foreseeable future is the recognition of the limits of military power in general, and in particular the capacity of even the strongest military powers to perform these sorts of missions. This means not undertaking given missions with unrealistic ideas about the size or length of the commitments they entail if they are to be done right, or overselling what occupations can do, in the course of moving toward a sounder balance between means and ends.

1 Incidentally, this was never an object for the British Empire (so often held up as a model imperialist by neoconservatives like Boot, and Niall Ferguson), which was ready to go to the greater lengths of permanently garrisoning its possessions and in cases, transplanting significant numbers of colonists.
2 The sole exception was France after the end of the Napoleonic wars. David M. Edelstein, "Occupational Hazards: Why Military Occupations Succeed or Fail," International Security 29.1 (Summer 2004), pp. 49-91.
3 Edelstein, p. 81.
4 The core of this argument can be found in chapter seven of Smith's The Utility of Force: The Art of War in the Modern World (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), pp. 269-307. You can also find it summed up in my review of the book for the journal Strategic Insights, which you can access here.
5 In 1950 the developed states accounted for about a third of the world's population; today they account for less than a fifth, with most of the world's population growth continuing in poorer and less developed states.
6 See Liddell Hart, Paris, or the Future of War (New York: Garland, 1925); Liddell Hart, Defence of the West: Some Riddles of War and Peace (London: Cassell, 1950).
7 One can also argue that where civic militarism has not decreased, it has been redefined, Andrew Bacevich arguing that militarism has actually risen in American society in recent decades, pointing to a shift from an emphasis on service to politically "supporting the troops." See Bacevich, The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced By War (New York: Oxford, 2005)
8 See Thomas P.M. Barnett, Blueprint for Action (New York: Berkeley, 2006).
9 As Martin Van Creveld recently put it, "'media' has become an excuse for failure." See Van Creveld, The Changing Face of War: Lessons of Combat From the Marne to Iraq (New York: Ballantine, 2007), p. 217.

A Russian Resurgence? (Part One)

By Nader Elhefnawy Originally published in the SPACE REVIEW, November 10, 2008

"RUSSIA RESURGENT" read the cover of the August 16, 2008 issue of The Economist, which depicted a giant Vladimir Putin towering over advancing ranks of flag-bearing Russian soldiers as fighters and attack helicopters streak past.

This none-too-subtle image was, of course, a reaction to the Russian invasion of Georgia, which signaled the country’s return as a military heavyweight to many, a reading of events reflective of the usual media exaggeration. While it may still be too early for a really thorough assessment of the Russian military’s performance in the conflict, there is little reason to believe that the Russian armed forces have been seriously rehabilitated, despite the unveiling of schemes like the State Armaments Program—still in its very early stages—and gestures like the resumption of long-range bomber flights, and a handful of high-profile military exercises (like the recently announced joint exercise with the Venezuelan navy in the Caribbean). The Russian military’s success in a limited war with a much smaller and poorer neighbor is also a long way from the "long-range power projection" capability that some of those hyping Russian military power describe as a foregone conclusion by 2020, like Barry McCaffrey in a recent pitch for an ambitious aircraft procurement program in the Joint Force Quarterly.

Nonetheless, the perception marks a dramatic turnaround in the view of Russia compared with ten years ago. In 1998 Russia was widely regarded as a basketcase, and able to look forward only to more of the same. Today, it is seen as a vigorous, economically dynamic state that may not be the superpower it once was, but a much more substantial actor in international affairs, and with brighter prospects, than might have been guessed a decade ago. It seems only reasonable to wonder, then, if Russia's "resurgence" will translate to the country's position in space, as some are already arguing, notably Brian Harvey in his recent book, The Rebirth of the Russian Space Program.

The fall of a great space power
The Soviet Union had the world’s second-largest economy until at least 1980, and perhaps until the end of its life, which enabled it to be the space superpower that it was. Not only did it have a striking list of "firsts" to its credit from Sputnik on, but its vast infrastructure in space, its satellite networks and space stations, had no peer save the United States. And not even the US matched it in certain respects, like the sheer rate of satellite launches it was able to sustain.

Of course, this state of affairs did not continue. Following the country’s collapse in 1991, the division of the Soviet Union into fifteen states, and the disruption of the break-up, left Moscow with the trappings of the ex-superpower, the space program included, but just a quarter (or at most, a third) of the national income that had sustained them.

Predictably, the Soviet program collapsed after the country that had built it up. In 1992 the worldwide seaborne tracking fleet was recalled to Russian ports, for lack of the hard currency to pay for their stays in foreign harbors. The Buran shuttle program was cancelled the year after that. The GLONASS navigation system decayed, the 24-satellite constellation shrinking to a mere six craft by 2001 for lack of replacements. The plans to build on the Mir space station were never realized: Mir barely remained operational up to its deorbiting, and the remnants of that program were absorbed by the International Space Station. As Russian military launches fell from 28 in 1992 to a mere five in 2000, the country’s senior officers would increasingly complain of periods of "blindness" and "deafness," in which the number of Russian photo- and electronic reconnaissance satellites in orbit at a given moment dropped to zero.

This is not to say that Russia was totally without successes in this period. That the program was able to stay alive on its old capital (and the income secured from commercial sales of its services) was by itself an achievement. Russia remained the world’s most active satellite launcher during the decade, and around the turn of the century a turnaround began. The Russian government initiated a restoration and modernization of GLONASS, and pioneered space tourism (just one of the ways in which the country has been an important player in the commercial services market), which optimists expect to see become a significant business. Most symbolic of all, Russian Soyuz launches have proven essential to the continued functioning of the International Space Station, especially after the Columbia disaster in 2003—during which it was the only nation in the world with an established manned spaceflight capability, a status to which some think it will return given the uncertainties about the shuttle’s future.

Nonetheless, the tendency in the media was to pay far more attention to the failures than the successes, in line with the generally bleak view of Russia’s situation, while doing exactly the opposite in the case of China (expected by everyone from science fiction writers to defense analysts to be the US’s great competitor in the future). Predictably, where Soviet space activity had once loomed so large in Western imaginations, in some ways, preposterously so (see "Space war and Futurehype," The Space Review, October 22, 2007) it is now easy to forget that this was ever the case. However, things have already started to turn up, and the Russian government has accordingly committed itself to an ambitious ten-year program, on which it hopes to build in the decades to follow.

The Russian Federal Space Program (FSP), 2006–2015
The program, first announced in July 2005, included not only the rehabilitation of GLONASS, the meeting of Russia’s commitments to the International Space Station program and the launch of a number of earth-monitoring and communications satellites, but the development of the Kliper space shuttle, the Parom space tug (a system long seen as a requirement for ambitious space development projects), and the Angara heavy-lift launcher; an upgrade of the Soyuz rocket; and a host of scientific programs, including the dispatch of unmanned missions to the moon and Mars, and a terrestrial experiment intended as part of a run-up to an international manned mission to Mars, perhaps in the 2020s.

Of course, all of this was to be funded by a substantial increase in the space budget. According to the best available data, Russia is to allot over $20 billion to its various space programs, $12 billion of them to the Federal Space Agency (with the rest going to military endeavors, and additional appropriations for GLONASS). Another $4.5 billion in commercial revenue are expected to go to the Agency, bringing the expenditures on the FSP up to $16.5 billion (out of some $25 billion going to space in total). Counting in the usual Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) factor, this may give the program the equivalent of $25 billion (out of a PPP-adjusted total of $40 billion on Russian space activity).

In other words, at best, the Space Agency budget may grow from the $1.4 billion commonly cited for 2007 to $2–3 billion by 2015. This means that the plan is for Russia to catch up with the levels of expenditure of France and Japan by the middle of the next decade. The ten-year program budget, even counting the supplementary commercial revenue, comes to what NASA spends in roughly one year (and the total space budget substantially less than what NASA and the Defense Department together spend annually). It is inconceivable that any of those other programs would accomplish so much with so little, and there have already been disappointments in this regard. The design and development bill for the Kliper ran five times as high as the Russian government’s original estimate.

Moreover, it cannot be taken for granted that even the sums discussed here will actually be available. Along with the inevitable ups and downs of the commercial market that is expected to carry a large part of the tab, this raises questions about the availability of the will and the means to keep the budgets at the planned level. It is worth noting that government allocations for the program already fell into arrears back in 2006. Additionally, given Russia’s rate of inflation (15 percent earlier this year), which frequently exceeds any announced plans for funding increases, the Space Agency budget may actually fall in real terms during this period.

Consequently, Russia will not only have to live up to these commitments, but spend more, or do less (perhaps trimming costs by using existing launch systems for a bit longer than hoped, or curtailing the scientific and exploratory programs in favor of priority services like GLONASS), or some combination of both. The government's ability to do any of these things will depend greatly on the performance of its economy. So will its ability to share out the costs of projects like the Kliper (in which the European Space Agency has taken an interest), since this will determine the view of Russia as a reliable partner, even more than international approval or disapproval of its actions. It only seems appropriate, then, to take a look at Russia’s renewed economic growth, rarely examined in any detail, but of crucial importance to any analysis like this one: the subject of part two of this essay.

Continue to Part Two.

Rethinking Military History, by Jeremy Black

New York: Routledge, 2004, pp. 258.

The main themes of Black's Rethinking Military History, which readers of his other work are likely to have run across elsewhere, are that the writing of military history, especially as consumed by the broader public,

1. has focused overwhelmingly on Western Europe and the United States, to the neglect of the military history of other regions.
2. has been biased toward technological explanations for capability (and other developments).
3. has focused on "leading powers and dominant military systems, leading to a paradigm/diffusion model of military capability and change."
4. has separated the understanding of war on land and on sea.
5. has focused on interstate wars rather than war within states (with only a few exceptions, like the U.S. Civil War).
6. has failed to pay enough attention to "political 'tasking' in the setting of force structures, doctrines and goals, and in the judging of military success."

For the most part, I find it impossible to argue with his view of the state of military historiography, and on the whole I think he did a good job of offering a corrective in the book (except perhaps for point number four, which got comparatively little attention).

I also enjoyed the discussion of the writing of "pop" military history in the book's second chapter. Quite accurately, I thought, he analyzed the focus not just on Western history and interstate conflicts, but the tendency of writers to treat the same handful of wars over and over again while virtually ignoring every other subject. (Because he devotes so much time to the British market, the discussion of the status of Napoleonic era and World War I historiography is far less representative of the United States, but the principle is pretty much the same.) And of course, he notes the emphasis on biography, memoirs and operational accounts, at the expense of other kinds of writing.

You only need to check out C-SPAN's BOOK TV one weekend to see how much this is the case.

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This is one of my (Nader Elhefnawy's) two personal blogs. (The other is Raritania.)

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