Michael Vlahos is a Fellow at the National Security Analysis Department of APL, and a professor of strategy at the Naval War College. His most recent book is "Fighting Identity: Sacred War and World Change." He also formerly served as Director of the U.S. State Department's Center for the Study of Foreign Affairs and as Director of Security Studies, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. He received his A.B. from Yale College and his Ph.D. from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.
In 2001 America was the G1. Now we say, G20. But what if another transfiguration is so underway as to be far gone? Remember Bobbitt's "market state?" If Walmart were a nation-state, it would be China's 8th largest trading partner. Maybe Bismarck's maps (and the nation-state elites that still exalt in their resplendent meaning) don't mean as much anymore.… Read more
Chimerica (ChiCom) Chimera? Perhaps Homer and Hesiod is after all a good place to begin: A fantabuous creature that Billy Mumy might have cobbled together in the dark reaches of the Twilight Zone from the parts of multiple animals: the body of a lioness, a tail ending in a snake's head, the head of a goat rising from her back at mid-spine. That would be Chimerica. I write this looking back from the chiaroscuro terror of the early 1950s. A movie I must have seen at age 6 — Steel Helmet — existentially attuned me in my nightmares to a… Read more
Michael Scheuer is eloquent as he shakes us by the shoulders: That damn dog has been barking nonstop for eight years! But what to make of the question — which is posed really as an all-American trope — That there was no next bark? 9-11 was a work of art the likes of which we have not seen since Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph des Willens. If war is a liturgy of identity, then war’s theater is truly religious art. Walking through its bloody gallery across the Anthropocene, it will be hard to find a more compelling and transcendental masterpiece. 9-11 shifted… Read more
Updated at 8:58 a.m. on Sept. 4. Honestly: This has been my July-August reading. But there are several flavors here, colorations and sensations from very different stations on the smorgasbord of knowledge. Think of these are five tranches — “slices” as the French would say — in our compass of thought. Martin Murphy, Small Boats, Weak States, Dirty Money: The Challenge of Piracy. Steven Metz, Iraq and the Evolution of American Strategy. David Kilcullen, The Accidental Guerilla. Timothy Challans, Awakening Warrior: Revolution in the Ethics of Warfare. Richard Koenigsberg, Nations Have the Right to Kill: Hitler, the Holocaust,… Read more
Foreign policy is a mysterious literary artifact. Try comparing it to foreign relations. “Relations” are the stuff of the day-to-day between states, rooted in a mutually acknowledged lineage of national interest tied to the familiarity of daily processing. Think of foreign relations as reality-TV. Think of foreign policy in high brow contrast as theater: grand stage and proscenium, company and sets — and toney audience. Maybe such a foreign policy production, if it is really good, even rises to opera. Every ruler or elected head of state wants his opera. Moreover the people want it too: They need to be… Read more
When asked a question about a weapon system it is hard not to talk about the weapon in question. Yet that is what I will try to do. Military societies are not really about weapons or even strategy. They are about identity. The US Military, if we were to position it in history, would jump out as an inconceivably vast soldier-enterprise: With no counterpart since the beginning of military civilization. Even the mobilization of nations for the great religious wars of the last century cannot come close. After all they were there but for a season: saisonarmee. Unique in history… Read more
All wars end, so we say. But perhaps some never do. Wars of identity can span centuries. From time-to-time there may be formal suspensions of hostilities, and fighting will die down for a while. But war is not just about fighting. A bigger lens will show us how war is ritual and even sacred activity — a celebration of identity. War’s ritual creates both a shared narrative and a collective passage for a people: Thus war is a transforming agent of identity itself. This was true of America’s sacred wars: Revolution, Civil War, and World War. It is also true… Read more
Do we really want to see war’s meaning? Do we really want to know what makes a good war? Can we accept the answer? American religious nationalism enshrines war as a celebration of identity. But war for us has also been deeply instrumental: For much of our history war advanced the sacred narrative. America’s wars were the vessels of our national passage: Revolution was our war of creation, Civil War our war of self-redemption, and World War II to be our apocalyptic redemption of humankind. Our sacred wars not only advanced the national narrative, but their message of sacrifice and… Read more
The key to our relationship with the Ummah (and I mean the community of all Muslims) is kinship. Today in contrast we treat Muslims as the other, the stranger. They are not of us, and we broadcast our terms to all who will listen: We welcome and embrace their converts to our Democratic American faith, titular Muslims though they may remain. But we remain at heart, Crusaders. Not in 12th century mode, surely, but nonetheless on 12th century terms. Here I am not reflexively invoking racism or “orientalism” or any of the other sins of Western Modernity as it has… Read more
Torture is the anti-sacral ritual positioned within our American liturgy like a black Sabbath. President Obama just enunciated “sacred principles” guiding the American ethos. But former Vice-President Cheney at the same time declared a dark and perhaps necessary counterpoint: Torture may be celebrated as America’s satanic mass. What do I mean? We do not appreciate how Western modernity made religious nationalism the successor of medieval Christendom. Hence our sacred identity in modernity has been invested in the nation state, as the President’s invocation of the sacred — speaking in our most sacred space, before our most sacred texts — shows.… Read more
The United States looks at Korea through the prism of the Cold War: the filtered image we see is of a fledgling democracy standing alongside us on the “frontline of freedom.” But that era is over, and ending with it are the longstanding roles of “good” South and evil North. Korea is undergoing a transformation — of identity. What we describe as the problematic politics of reunification are really about the changing politics of identity. 1-A New Stage of Identity. The end of the Cold war also signaled the end of foreign domination. Both North and South were freed to… Read more
Winners and Losers — How refreshingly American! Surely the deck is being reshuffled as we speak. Perhaps even the goal posts will be moved. Perhaps a gamesman’s or sport fan’s metaphors are a positive sign. They show a certain dispassion and detachment. The coming years will challenge whether analysts can keep their cool. But there is a downside to great power gamesmanship. Sure it makes for easy fun, but it is also fleeting — Declaring a “victor” in the race risks missing the stakes themselves. What do I mean? Let’s take two contrasting examples, one a winner and one a… Read more
Like congregant responses during a liturgy, incanting “failed state” has a ritual function. Its invocation highlights how we embrace a homiletic vision of American history. The homily is intended as public celebration of our national sacred narrative. Listening, we hear blessed words like “destiny” — so jubilantly voiced after the invasion of Iraq — but also terms of dread sanction like “failed state.” Notice how “failed state” represents a loss of virtue: a burning brand on nation states fallen from grace. Notice too how we have sculpted the gargoyle “failed state” — like Somalia or Sudan — as a place… Read more
The greatest warship of the 18th century was built not in Great Britain or France, but in Cuba. It was the Santissima Trinidad, 136 guns, whose strong island cedar gave her a 36-year career not to be undone by rot and age, but by Nelson’s guns. From 1700-1800 Havana built 74 navíos for the Spanish Navy: a third of all of this world empire’s battleships. This is no arcane factoid. It begins to tell us something about Cuban national identity itself. Cuba was the first and last, and always one of the most essential elements of Spain’s world empire. Even… Read more
I actually interviewed some real experts on this — who will remain forever unnamed — and this is what I got: One view is that Defense Acquisition represents a failure of process. This failure does not always show itself in big ways. In the Navy for example, it shows itself in putting off necessary class-updates — like letting the Aegis CG-modernization slip and slide. Or it shows in failing to build in big margins in a new ship-class, so it becomes worthless in just a few years because it cannot grow to assimilate new systems. Or maybe it is just… Read more
America, the system-leader, finds itself on what it fears as the historical defensive. The last pillar of our world authority is our supreme military power, which we must effectively orchestrate to ritually sustain that authority. The other NATO states are only too happy to let the leader take most of the burden. But then there are the difficulties. Andy Bacevich pointed out in Wednesday's LA Times that “as long as the United States sustains the pretense that Europe cannot manage its own affairs, the Europeans will endorse that proposition, letting Americans foot most of the bill.” So from the… Read more
I was listening to the White House Press phone-in on Saturday. Taking on the parade of perfectly parsed, anointed phrases, I suddenly realized that NATO is no mere military alliance. Rather it represents something altogether grander and more necessary — to American identity. NATO came as second best aftermath to the sacred narrative of World War II. As the millennial vision of San Francisco and “broad, sunlight uplands” shifted quickly into Cold War, NATO became the core cargo, the treasure-promise of world hopes deferred. On its face it was an existential bulwark in the new Manichaean narrative of Free World… Read more
The United States looks at Korea through the prism of the Cold War: the filtered image we see is of a fledgling democracy standing alongside us on the “frontline of freedom.” But that era is over, and ending with it are the longstanding roles of “good” South and evil North. Korea is undergoing a transformation — of identity. What we describe as the problematic politics of reunification are really about the changing politics of identity. 1-A New Stage of Identity. The end of the Cold war also signaled the end of foreign domination. Both North and South were freed to… Read more
Like Dan Gouré I too resisted responding to this question. But Dan’s comment raises a fundamental issue — not just of how we think about Al Qaeda — but more revealingly how we treat the guiding belief constructs of other cultural systems. Revealing, because it is clear that American and its Defense World prefer to live in the space of the operational/grand tactical and call this: “strategic.” We have had seven years and more to properly position Al Qaeda in the still-evolving belief system of the Ummah. We have had the benefit of every cultural resource that might take us… Read more
The economic crisis is a classic “shock” in a Mature, Late-Stage Globalization Epoch – Its role can help reveal the real global change dynamic This crisis is an encouragement: of deeper things. It represents a shock to the system, but shock in itself is not the threat or even the thing to fear. Shocks always come, whether self-inflicted or simply force-of-nature-divine. This one, riffing off panics and bubbles and credit runs of yore, is our own doing. But shocks are also system-tests. A world system will be tested. A strong system shrugs off shocks, or better yet they make the… Read more
Here is why the very idea of “winning” or “losing” in Afghanistan is irrelevant. Counterinsurgency ideology — COIN — is infinitely extensible both in practice and objective. Not to forget, it is infinitely extensible even in its definition, which extends especially to its definition of success. But COIN also suffers from — no, it inflicts — an almost irresistible seduction on all who circle its flame. COIN you see is a way of life. Once you enter its narcotic precincts, you never want to leave. But this is not the old “war of the flea.” Surely there was the “Old… Read more
Related Link: http://www.jhuapl.edu/newscenter/pressreleases/2009/090203.asp 
