“We don’t have a proper national debate about strategy.” — The complaint seems universal. I’ve heard it in America, in Britain, in France, in Germany, and elsewhere. But here in Israel that complaint is even louder. The IDF is known for its “bitsuist” culture, preferring doing over thinking. And Israeli academia, leaning far to the left — so the cliché — shuns all things military like the devil runs from the holy water. Except, it’s not true. An impressive number of current and former officers write about strategy, academics too. In Hebrew as well as in English. And some are really impressive. Of course they have no shortage of questions to ponder.

One of the most difficult questions facing the State of Israel today is Iran. Should the IAF strike Iran’s nuclear program or not?

Now, many people outside Israel have very strong opinions about this question. So let’s start with some humility: Iran has not repeatedly threatened to wipe New York off the map. Iran is not delivering advanced weaponry to terrorist organizations a few miles way from London. And Teheran is not training infiltrators to sneak into Paris to kidnap soldiers there. Israel has far higher stakes in this game than the rest of us. So what do the country’s most careful strategic thinkers say?

One of them, as far as I can tell, is Ron Tira, a lieutenant colonel and reservist in the Israeli Air Force’s Campaign Planning Department. He’s also author of The Nature of War (2009), an excellent book reviewed by H.R. McMaster in Survival not long ago. Tira just published a paper at the INSS in Tel Aviv, “A Military Attack on Iran?” It is by far the best text on this weighty question that I’ve seen.*

The paper is densely written and there is no way I can do it justice with a summary. It starts off with some important assumptions (for instance that an attack could take place with a “red light” from Washington) and sober points of departure (“The attempt to generate internal processes in Iran is too unpredictable and unreliable to serve as the basis for a plan”). I’d like to highlight one point and one question.

Politically, Iran is shrewdly playing for time. Tira:

Iran conducts a threshold policy that renders the world accustomed to its positions, while red lines are eroded and Iran gains time. It adopts a defiant position, reexamines it, withdraws from it, returns to it in response to some Western move, and so forth. Thus, Iran’s position is — intentionally — unclear.

Militarily, Teheran’s potential seems to be overrated. Iran, apparently, has an outdated military “with limited operational capabilities and middling missile and naval capabilities.” Its indirect capabilities have been demonstrated by its proxies in Iraq and Lebanon. An attack would, Tira argues, undermine Iran’s shield of deterrence and expose the limitations of its military response, “probably.” He discusses possible response scenarios in some detail.

The point, and one of the main contributions of Tira’s text, is to connect the two arenas, the military and the political arena. An Israeli attack could create “desirable post-attack processes.” He compares the situation with what Sadat did in the Yom Kippur War, which turned out to be a significant political gain for Egypt. But this time, with respect to Iran’s nuclear program – unlike in 1973 —  Egypt and Israel are on the same strategic side, together with Saudi Arabia and the Gulf emirates. “This is one of Israel’s most important strategic assets today,” Tira points out. An attack, in short, might only delay the nuclear program — but it might upend Iran’s cat-and-mouse game with the West.

The note of caution has to be part of any consideration, of course:

it may perhaps be possible to sketch out the first developments that would occur after an attack on Iran or after it has become nuclear, but it is difficult to characterize the long term strategic trends that would be set in motion by each alternative. The [Israeli] leadership must choose which Pandora’s box to open while the contents and volumes of the two boxes are difficult to estimate.

Which leads me to the towering question: if Israel strikes, how would it demonstrate success? Iran would certainly not admit that a strike was successful. Third parties would not know if it was successful, we can assume. And even Israel might not be entirely sure. Demonstrating success, in short, will need extraordinary political skill, superb diplomacy, and first-rate international communicators, all in very little time. Given the government’s recent track-record in these disciplines, I’m afraid that Israeli leaders might not be able to pull this off, even if the IAF performs superbly. – If I would be sitting in one of these F16s, that would be my biggest concern. After returning home.

Again, keep in mind the stakes here. They may be far higher, I would venture to say, than the stakes in Afghanistan and Iraq next door. And not just for Israel. Again Ron:

A nuclear Iran that emerges in face of unequivocal American and Israeli opposition would undercut the strategic credibility of both nations, weaken their deterrence and power projection, hasten the waning of American influence in the region, and undermine the regional order we have known since 1991.

* Please read before commenting on this post.

I like making reading lists. Actually, I don’t like it, I love it. Name the occasion and I’ll make the party-mix. How much do I love making reading lists? As much as these guys like making music top 5′s. 

High Fidelity Top 5

So I was pretty excited to see General James Mattis’s reading list posted on Small Wars Journal. I met the man a few years ago at the RUSI Land Warfare conference and was very impressed. It’s easy enough to be impressed by a Marine general in full dress uniform but I found him particularly enthralling. I invited him to come join the War Studies Department after he retired and we spoke for a few minutes about books. It was rapidly very apparent that this guy knows his books. I had a fleeting ‘I’m not worthy’ moment when he graciously and diplomatically said that he could think of nothing better than spending a year or two at King’s as a scholar. Which makes me wonder about how much he really had to do with this list because, well, it’s pretty mixed. There are, in my opinion, some absolute must reads in there alongside, frankly, a fair bit of blah. Anyway, my point is not to dissect the list–have at it in the comments here or at SWJ, if you wish.

A few years ago a more senior colleague was explaining to me his philosophy when putting together a course reading list. His were minimal. Basically a handful of books, his theory being that students got far more out of reading, really reading, just one excellent book than they did out of reading a dozen mediocre ones. He taught international relations so his students really read Hedley Bull’s The Anarchical Society. Now here’s my suggestion for CENTCOM. The static reading list feels kind of stale; what I think would be absolutely fascinating, what I would pay money for, would be to hear General Mattis talk about his top 5, or even his top 1 in the categories already on the list. Half an hour to an hour of his time then put it out as a podcast. What does he think people think should read and why. What did he get out of reading it? What does he hope that they would get out of it? That would be pretty illuminating and it would probably also tell people a lot about commander’s intent. (General Mattis, we’d love to have you here at King’s War Studies! Stop by when you are next in London. I also know where all the best pubs are to be found). 

Anyway, for what it’s worth here’s my Top 5.

1. On War by Clause… Naaa, too easy! It’s not that kind of list. My first choice is C.S. Forester’s Rifleman Dodd and I choose it for three reasons. A/ it’s under 150 pages and a ripping read that any private who can manage Penthouse Forum can get through in a weekend. B/ the Rifleman in question is one of Wellington’s troops who gets stuck on the wrong side of enemy lines hanging with the Spanish insurgents fighting against Napoleon during the Peninsular Campaign–a useful insurgent perspective. And C/ I think that Dodd exhibits what I reckon is one of the supreme soldierly qualities–equanimity, the quality of being even-tempered and calm despite crisis. Unfortunately, the latter is at the moment even more vital than usual because the chances are good that this war is not going to end well.
2. For reasons stated on KOW earlier, John Mackinlay’s The Insurgent Archipelago.  
3. Either Manuel Castells, Information Age trilogy or just his Communication Power. Insurgency is the quintessential bottom-up form of warfare; it naturally reflects the society from which it emerges. If you want to understand insurgency in the Information Age then you need to start by understanding the precepts of the Information Society in which it operates and upon which it preys. This is hard. So far, Castells is your best guide.
4. Quintan Wiktorowicz, Islamic Activism: A Social Movement Theory Approach. Not all social movements are insurgencies but all insurgencies are social movements. Your enemy is not so much Al Qaeda, or the Taliban, as it is the mood of sullen resentment that animates the peoples who these groups purport to represent. Understand that mood. Learn about ‘social capital’ and what makes messages resonant; study how successful social movements work, it’s not all that different from successful insurgencies.
5. Clifford Bob, The Marketing of Rebellion: Insurgents, Media and International Activism. Of all the books I’ve read in the last year this is the one that I found the most consistently thought provoking. ‘How do a few Third World political movements become global causes célèbres, while most remain isolated?’ The Taliban is not one of the case studies in the book (if you’re looking for a PhD topic, hint, hint) but it well could be. A very mature, balanced and non-hystrionic analysis of the insurgent-media-NGO nexus, particularly notable for dealing with NGOs which are normally forgotten about. I have to say that Bob’s book has helped me more than any other to understand why groups like Amnesty International, at least the UK branch, have cozied up with Islamists and people like that creepy egotistical prat Julian Assange of Wikileaks act the way that they do.

I could go on but I won’t. Make your own list! We can have a mature debate about in comments. Like these guys:

Monday mix tape

I see the discipline of International Relations increasingly as just one of several branches in the social sciences that more properly ought to be a sub-discipline of psychology.

Rational actor?

When I read economics as an undergraduate, the rational actor model was depressingly ascendant. It probably still is, though it was shaking even before the current recession. When I came to IR, I found a familiar scene – ‘rationality‘ underpinned both neo-realism and liberal institutionalism, then the dominant traditions. Constructivism was the coming force, but while it challenged theoretical rationalism, it did so in an airy sort of way, and one that was too often conflated with a critical theorist’s crusading desire to change the world rather than understand it. In frustration, more than expectation, I settled on political psychology as a good place to pitch my tent.

It was a good choice, though not, of course, ‘rational’.

IR is about the relationship between groups – states mostly , though not exclusively. We’re interested in how they form, what their ideas are, and how they behave. To my mind, that makes the discipline essentially concerned with the same questions as psychology. Security, power, decision-making: these are all key psychological themes.

Hitherto, much psychology in IR has concentrated on the key decision makers. And moreover, it has presented a cognitive psychological account of their decision making. For example, how do they use mental shortcuts to reach decisions when they are up against time and information constraints? This made psychological IR largely irrelevant to neo-realists who argued that structure was more important than agency – that the anarchy of the international system explained all, not statesmanship. That was a specious argument, similar to the idea that market forces are all there is to economic behaviour.

The larger failing was that narrow, limited view of psychology as cognitive, in which the mind is depicted as analogous with a computer, albeit one with some buggy software. Equally constraining was the concentration on the elite leadership, or at best on a small group of policymakers deciding things. At a real push, the circle extended outwards to the bureaucracy, to see how the leadership had got its existing attitudes and beliefs. We can remedy both these shortcomings, and recent work has set about doing so.

To get a richer picture we ought, for example, to consider things like emotion: what role is there in shaping behaviour for emotions like fear, anger, distress, disgust, jealousy, envy, revenge, trust, empathy, apathy and so on? Take just one example: international regimes and co-operation. Regimes built on rational actor models are always cold-hearted affairs, involving much careful cost-benefit calculus. For some realists, while the hegemon is around to enforce compliance, well and good. But as they decline, watch out. The real world, however, doesn’t seem to be like that – and it’s not just that actors miscalculate gains, in ways that a cognitive psychologist might analyse through Prospect Theory. Rather it’s that habit and sentiment play a part in shaping the behaviour of individuals and groups alike. Some classical realists understood this, allowing emotion into their accounts of human interaction in much the same way that William James and Adam Smith did.

Or take another example – the argument that we had better tough it out in Afghanistan because of credibility and reputation. Critics argue that this is not rational – the stakes there are too low; when it comes down to it, our credibility isn’t contingent on our willingness to build expensive mud-block schools while China builds aircraft carriers. And yet we persist. Why? Because emotion is involved in our decisions, perhaps. Or because having made a commitment, we want to behave consistently with it. Or maybe because it’s usually harder to accept losses than it is gamble on a gain. Those are established findings from psychology, incidentally. And they capture some older thinking – that while policy shapes war, the relationship is two-way.

In addition to emotion, we could do much more with social psychology. The state is just another group – so how do the social processes in statehood relate to other group processes? Here prominent social psychology theories like Social Identity Theory and Self-Categorisation Theory might be useful additions to the social psychological repertoire in IR that has hitherto concentrated on Groupthink. For example, how is social influence achieved? How do authority or emulation shift group norms? Is the strength of Chinese nationalism automatic, or manufactured, and what does it mean for Chinese behaviour abroad? Or some other examples: Why is it unacceptable to use chemical weapons? Why is it becoming more acceptable to intervene in the sovereign affairs of other states? What does it mean to be European? We know from a body of constructivist IR work that norms can wax and wane, and that they can help account for strategic behaviour. But we know less about how these ideas are transmitted and internalised – shaping our view of ourselves and others. Social psychology can help.

When it comes down to it, we’re pretty awful at understanding why things have happened, still less predicting what might, though of course, we seem disposed always to search for cause and effect. Consider one of the more prominent examples studied by IR scholars: Why did LBJ escalate in Vietnam? Was it his anger and frustration at a pissant enemy? Was it his fear at being thought weaker than JFK? Was it his innate tendency to be overoptimistic about what could be achieved (an extremely common trait, incidentally)? Did he miscalculate the resolve of the North Vietnamese? Was he part of a group consensus about monolithic Communist dominoes, or about what American military power could deliver? One thing’s for sure, he didn’t engage in a rational, deliberate assessment of objective, material military power, or what the implications of using it would be for the wider balance of strategic relations at the time. A strategist might hope that he would, but then that strategist should probably read some Damasio.

We revisited an old chestnut this week, during a KCL colleague’s fascinating seminar on Kenya during the Mau Mau revolt: what’s the point of using theory in an essentially historical account?

In an interdisciplinary department, this is always good for a laugh. I was heavily outnumbered by historians, who, you’d think, would have learned by now that that they have to apply concepts in order to avoid being ad hoc storytellers. Apparently not. I tactfully pointed out that they were suffering from groupthink, but to no avail.

Don’t get me wrong, too often you see spurious theorising jammed in ahead of some more-or-less detached primary material – very often that’s true of work converted from the PhD. Nonetheless, I don’t think you need to see history as social science rather than as a humanities subject in order to conceive of it as a theoretical exercise, rather than an old-fashioned trawl through the archive material, presented in engaging prose style. Aside from beach reading, we left narrative history behind some time ago – even in military history. Indeed,  Clausewitz gave a good kick up the behind of atheoretical military historians some years ago, even if it thereafter took some time for the message to sink in.

Anyway, I picked up Bruce Berman’s book on Control and Crisis in Kenya, recommended by Huw Bennett in the seminar. Here’s what a man who includes the dread word ‘Dialectic’ in his subtitle has to say on the matter:

The historical evidence with which we have to work consists largely of the unavoidably subjective records or observations of human experience, whether in official or private archives, the accounts of journalists or travellers, interviews with surviving participants or traditional oral accounts. And such evidence, as any scholar who has worked with it well knows, is almost always incomplete, if not fragmentary, and often maddeningly inconclusive or contradictory.  Pattern, process or structure in history do not emerge from the evidence through a process of inductive inference. The facts, as sociologists of science have repeatedly demonstrated in recent years, do not speak for themselves, but only through more or less explicit theoretical concepts and assumptions that guide their selection, suggest their relationships and render them meaningful. This intellectual apparatus must be supplied by the analyst, as explicitly as possible, before the collections and evaluation of the evidence begins. Otherwise our ability to develop a reflexive, self-awareness of the conceptual and methodological bases of historical analysis and critically evaluate the results of employing one or another theoretical approach are seriously compromised.

Quite so. Those who disavow explicit theorising in their research are nonetheless engaged in theorising – they just don’t want to admit it. I consider that a gauntlet dispatched to the feet of my historical friends, and look forward to their thoughts.

Unplugged

This blog has a small but loyal readership in Israel. If you happen to be in the country right now: I’m giving a talk tomorrow in Bar Ilan University in Ramat Gan by Tel Aviv, at the BESA Center, one of Israel’s finest strategic studies institutes, headed by the impressively prolific Efraim Inbar. At 5pm, here’s the invitation.

The pitch for the presentation — and the article — goes somewhat like this:

Israel and America today face a similar blend of threats, non-state militant groups and pariah states, sometimes acting in conjunction. In the closing decade of the 20th century, after the pivotal Persian Gulf War in 1991, both states were conscious of their own peerless conventional military might, the United States globally and Israel regionally. But the time of hope and confidence in the late 1990s was short. In the opening years of the 21st century, both countries were confronted with terrorism on a sweeping scale, with 9/11 and the second intifada respectively. Soon, on the western shores of the Atlantic as well as on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean, terrorism and political violence, fuelled by religious extremism, were identified as the main and most significant security risk. The war on terror united threat perceptions in Washington and Jerusalem to an unprecedented degree. Four days after 9/11, in a principals meeting in Camp David, George Tenet, then the head of the CIA, concluded that “Our situation is more like that of the Israelis.”[1]

But the opposite is true for the response to the common threat. America’s and Israel’s reactions to that situation could hardly be more different. In just one decade, it seems, Israeli and American strategic and operational thinking have parted ways. Politicians, advisers, and generals do not speak the same language any more when it comes to the most fundamental concepts of national security policy: they agree neither on goals, means, nor philosophy. This division has roots that go much deeper than the occasional row between a liberal American administration and a conservative Israeli government. How does this parting look like? Why is it happening? And what does it mean?

Seems like there are some people out there who have this Afghanistan thing cracked.  Two of them, conveniently, have their reasons condensed neatly into packages of ten points.  Let’s have a shufti, shall we, Dear Readers?

First, from Victor Davis Hanson, a list of “ten considerations that suggest that Afghanistan is hardly lost”.  For the most part the logic and content speaks for itself:

General Petraeus.  [Ed: 'Nuf said.]

The mission…President Obama needs to remind America of the mission. We seek to foster a stable constitutional system in Afghanistan that will keep radical Islamists from offering sanctuary to international terrorists.

Losses…Afghanistan is no Iraq, much less a Vietnam. In a war nearly a decade long, the United States has been remarkably adept in not losing its soldiers.

Karzai in perspective…He cannot have been so good in 2004 only to suddenly have become so bad in 2010. [Ed: Yeah, about that...]

Afghanistan was not always so…We hear that the country has always been ungovernable. But the British achieved their aims between 1878 and 1919 in preventing chaos.

Eye off the ball?…We are doing well, then, on two fronts [preventing terrorist attacks on US soil and stabilising Iraq], and it would be a mistake to give up on the third.

Executive inconsistency…Artificial deadlines for withdrawal convey the sense that the commander-in-chief is not fully committed to a successful Afghan strategy. The window for blaming Bush for Afghanistan has long been closed, and we will do far better when the administration accepts this.

Diplomatic mess….Should we find one — and only one — diplomat who can partner with both General Petraeus and President Karzai, things will improve.

Obama’s advantages.  Wilson, FDR, Truman, Kennedy, LBJ (for a time), and Clinton were all seen as reluctant warriors in a way Nixon and the Bushes were not.  [Ed: May you be judged by the company you keep...]

Now, you may or may not appreciate this nonet of ‘considerations’.  But you have got to love VDH’s finale:

10. We have no choice but victory.  Either we stabilize the country, with all the accruing advantages from that achievement, or we withdraw in defeat and expect to reap a bitter harvest from that defeat.

Well, thanks for that, then, Vic.

Not to be outdone, Ralph Peters, took the time to compile his ‘Top Ten’ list, too.  His is somewhat more ‘directive’, shall we say, perhaps reflecting his status as a ‘get it done’ kinda guy, as opposed to the more cerebral tone of the classical scholar that is VDH:

1. Define victory down.  We cancontinue to gut al Qaeda across the border in Pakistan and gore those Taliban who cooperate with bin Laden’s butchers.
2. Push the Pakistanis to stop harboring terrorists.  Petraeus sees the Pakistanis with refreshing clarity. The problem is that senior administration officials have drunk Pakistani Kool-Aid by the vat.
3. Team with Ambassador Karl Eikenberry in Kabul.
4. Streamline the rest of the team.  Richard Holbrooke, Obama’s special envoy to the region, needs to go. Petraeus must be the go-to guy in AfPak.
5. Quietly build relations with alternatives to Karzai.   We need to start removing some of our eggs from the Karzai basket.
6. Rethink operational priorities.  Planting alternative crops doesn’t work; planting the bodies of dead terrorists does.
7. Loosen the rules of engagement.  Better dead Afghans than dead Americans…More-sensible ROE would be a huge morale booster for our troops.
8. Take the fight to the enemy.
9. More special operations, please.
10. Insist on a long-term detention policy for dangerous captives.

Lots in that list to love: gut, gore, plant dead bodies, relax ROE to improve morale.

Who knew it was going to be so easy?

In other news, Andrew Bacevich has come out with his assessment on the health of American civil-military relations.

In an article published in the Washington Post, he looks at the impact of protracted war on both civil-military relations.  He states that The Long War–and long wars in general–has had a corrosive effect on the interplay between generals, politicians, and society. 

Bacevich uses this opportunity to underline his point (again!) that the ‘all volunteer force’ (that is, an armed forces that are not the product of compulsory service or conscription) is to blame. 

The Long War is not America’s war. It belongs exclusively to “the troops,” lashed to a treadmill that finds soldiers and Marines either serving in a combat zone or preparing to deploy…To be an American soldier today is to serve a people who find nothing amiss in the prospect of armed conflict without end. Once begun, wars continue, persisting regardless of whether they receive public support.

American society is not engaged, they are not shouldering any part of the burden; therefore, they do not act as a brake on the militaristic jugernaut.

To be an American soldier today is to serve a people who find nothing amiss in the prospect of armed conflict without end. Once begun, wars continue, persisting regardless of whether they receive public support…Throughout history, circumstances such as these have bred praetorianism, warriors becoming enamored with their moral superiority and impatient with the failings of those they are charged to defend.  The smug disdain for high-ranking civilians casually expressed by McChrystal and his chief lieutenants — along with the conviction that “Team America,” as these officers style themselves, was bravely holding out against a sea of stupidity and corruption — suggests that the officer corps of the United States is not immune to this affliction.

A sobering read, especially when spiced up with anecdotes from serving officers, who assert that McChrystal was not alone:

Pretty soon you have an entire organization believing that their leader is the ‘Savior’ and that everyone else is stupid and incompetent, or not committed to victory…Senior officers who condone this kind of behavior and allow this to continue and fester…create generation after generation of officers like themselves — but they’re generally so arrogant that they think everyone needs to be just like them anyway.

I guess Bacevich’s source was not a part of Team America.

What to do? Bacevich paints a stark choice:

The responsibility facing the American people is clear.  They need to reclaim ownership of their army.  They need to give their soldiers respite, by insisting that Washington abandon its de facto policy of perpetual war. Or, alternatively, the United States should become a nation truly “at” war, with all that implies in terms of civic obligation, fiscal policies and domestic priorities. Should the people choose neither course — and thereby subject their troops to continuing abuse — the damage to the army and to American democracy will be severe.

I’m no Delphic cephalopod, but I’d put my money on door number 3.

I always wondered why social scientists were so confident about the conceptions of human behaviour that underpinned their models. Typically, either the structure of whatever social system you were considering would bear the weight of explanation, so you wouldn’t need to worry too much about the internal motivations of actors; or alternatively, you would go for some abstract idea of rationality – most likely through a theory of utilitarianism or revealed preference. All these ways of looking at human nature and social interaction have some pretty serious shortcomings. To get round them, ostensibly ‘rational’ theoreticians would make all sorts of subtle reference to underlying human desires and beliefs. Trust and fear, for example, crept into even the most parsimonious neorealist accounts of strategic behaviour.

That was then. Nowadays, exciting developments are afoot in the field – particularly in relating human nature to experimental findings from psychology – both cognitive and social. Beyond that, still more radical rethinking of what it means to do ‘social science’ is looming. Our discipline has has only recently started to connect with neuroscience – a field with great potential to expand our understanding of why people think and behave the way they do. A good place to start is Antonio Damasio’s fascinating classic, Descarte’s Error. Today though, I’ve been enjoying Rose McDermott’s lively prose in her paper on ‘the case for increasing dialogue between political science and neuroscience’. Read in conjunction with Jonathan Mercer’s 2005 paper on ‘rationality and psychology in international politics’, it’s a good overview of the possibilities, and the need to grasp them.

When Hobbes, Thucydides and Machiavelli were contemplating the nature of man they did so as keen observers of human behaviour, but as naive scientists, at best. The haphazard nature of that philosophizing is one reason why Hobbes and Rousseau drew different conclusions about man in the state of nature. Or, similarly, why Thucydides can be interpreted as arch realist or social constructivist – his writing supports either interpretation.

We can do better today. Why do people co-operate? Where does trust come from? How does anger, or envy affect our decision making? Why do we stereotype? What groups are salient to us, and why? These are the sorts of questions that interest neuroscience and social science alike. To the scanner, comrades!

Clearly, the professional reading list for senior American commanders needs some reviewing.  Whether one prefers Huntington, Janowitz, Feaver or Bland, there is no way that calling the highest civilian political authorities in the chain of command, ‘wimps‘ can be considered appropriate.  Given that McChrystal apologised rather than denied, we must assume there is at least a kernel of truth to the article.

In reading something about civil-military relations, a commander would find that, as Fever puts it, civilians (in the civil-military relationship in liberal democracies, at any rate) have the right to be wrong.  It simply doesn’t do to believe that ‘they just don’t get it’.  McChrystal is way off base here and being ‘recalled to the capital for consultations’ is the least of his worries.

Looks like someone started to believe their own PR.

The last decade has seen two big developments in the academic discipline of International Relations. First and most prominent, the rise of the constructivists – scholars who reflect on the importance of meaning and discourse. Power is not just a material factor, it depends on perception. Less tangible factors like prestige and credibility are important in shaping strategic behaviour, and understanding it. Anarchy, famously, is not a given, but what states make of it. Cultures matter.

The second development is related, but comes from a different wellspring. This is the rise of political psychology. The rational actor model that dominated social science, particularly American social science, is on its way out, superseded by accounts that draw on lab and field research from psychology. Social influence and conformity; the role of emotions and of automatic, instinctive cognition; or our inbuilt cognitive biases — all these shape the way in which we perceive the world around us and reach decisions within it. That’s as true of choosing what to have for dinner, who to vote for, or indeed which countries to invade. Newcomers to the field can start with a range of popular, accessible reads, available from all good airport bookshops: Nudge, Predictably Irrational, Linked, Tipping Point, Blink. All these give a great digest of relevant research, and won’t induce a headache. Despite a long tradition, psychology remains distinctly a minority interest in IR, and more so within the sub-discipline of strategic studies. But that’s changing quickly, led by the rapid surge of interest elsewhere in social science – particularly economics.

The two genres are related – in fact, to my mind they say much the same thing: the way in which humans see the world is rational, but it is not rational in the sense beloved of utilitarian economists or game theoreticians. In large part, it is a constructed world. The world in their minds, you might say. And here’s where a third strand comes in: we’ve been here before. Go back and read Aron and Morgenthau. Take a look at the writings of the English School. Or even dig out the Illiad and the History of the Peloponnesian War. There’s much here that chimes with the new school: what about fear, honour, interest, just to cite Colin Gray’s favourite example? Scholars of strategy have been fishing these waters for a long time. Now, after a brief digression into the world of maths and systems analysis (which reminds me very much of the military’s abortive dalliance with Effects Based Operations), IR and strategic studies are returning to a richer portrayal of the relationship between individuals, groups and violence. This time though, they can draw on science in a more sophisticated way to inform their understanding of how humans behave.

Still, while constructivists and political psychologists are dusting off their EH Carr, they’d do well to remember that realism has endured so long as a tradition (as long as recorded history, really) not just because it is immensely flexible, but also because at some level it says something profound about the ways in which we construct reality and see the others with whom we interact.

On Saturday 26 June it is Armed Forces Day 2010 here in the UK. The lead event is in Cardiff with many others going on around the country. You can find out more about the day, the events and other activities on the Armed Forces Day website. The day provides an opportunity for members of the public to say thank you and express their support for the Armed Forces. There’s more detail here too. In the meantime this is a shot of me ca. 1974 on Armed Forces Day (or whatever we called it in Canada). The moment when my ideal career path crystallized in my mind…