Wampum

Throughout my pre-teen and teen years, where Calle de los Helechos ended in forest, and Monterey, Bill Mandel's show on KPFA was a must-listen. Bill knew the Union inside and out, and that was worth the time to listen in on. All the intracacies of the Show Trials, the Purges, and also the Five Year Plans and the military affairs -- the NATO facing Soviet ORBAT, the Fleets surface and subsurface combatants, and the Strategic Missile Forces throw-weights and device yeilds. Seperating the real from the surreal was ... not optional. Not everyone lived inside the Navy School however, and eventually, pursuit of the youth-demographic by Pacifica pushed Bill, and a lot of good listening time -- the stuff that's become blogs -- off of Pacifica, to be replaced by ... easier listening.

Res Publica's piece �and �trendy� �buzzwords� in �quotes�! mid-October left me tipsy from giggles, but the past comes back to bite. Read it. Then come back. Please.

John Hannah has just moved up from principal deputy assistant, to assistant to the Vice President for national security affairs. He used to ride tandem with Capt. William J. Luti, Ret., now Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Special Plans and Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs. Luti in turn came into the real world via Albert Wohlstetter, then mentor to Paul Wolfowitz, and Richard N. Perle, among others.

It is a rediculously small world. And in the Navy, making Captain is the big jump, as the manpower cut is at Commander. Having made Captain, why didn't Luti make Flag?

Albert Wohlstetter was at Rand when my mom was at Rand. He even flirted with one area I thought the Soviet schools were well ahead of the American - mathematical modelling techniques in military planning. My sample set was my Mom's students, who on average were given a "mercy pass" in Operations Research and then sent back, slightly improved and mostly unharmed, to the Fleet. She gave me their thesii to read and critique. That was 1965 - 1972. The NPGS had a wonderful library. (So does Ft. Leavenworth.) My card ran through the late '80s, when I switched to Le Monde Diplo's occasional coverage of doctrine, and whatever else I could get my hands on.

Aside. Google for +mathematical-modeling +military-planning still gets the ORD at the NPGS. Nothing changes.

Wohlstetter co-chared with Fred Ikl� the Commission on on Integrated Long-Term Strategy. That lead to the Future Security Environment (FSE) working group, which lead to the Office of Net Assessment within the Office of the Secretary of Defense and its 1989 reassessment of the military-technical revolution, the MTR, and that lead to the big bang, or at least, the pseudo-intellectual defense everyone from Ollie North to Donald Rumsfeld find comfortable.

Wohlstetter mined the Soviet mil-lit for the shape of things to come -- the military-technical revolution, the MTR, now the Revolution in Military Affairs. Really he was cribbing from the works of N.V. Ogarkov, Directorate for Strategic Deception, and later chief of the Soviet General Staff. It is all there in Vsegda v Gotovnosti k Zachtchite Otetchestva, Voenizdat, 1982, which has been translated into French, as well as plagerized into American, and earlier papers that made it into various Red Army pubs, that were translated. Pre-google. Mom and I could never agree on whether Ogarkov ment revolution tending towards special ops, the North/Rumsfeld vision, or revolution at the theater-and-above level. Now we talk about Chinese medicine and family tribal histories.

Chernenko fired Marshal Ogarkov, an advocate of less spending on consumer goods and more spending on weapons research and development. Guns over butter was not something the Union could afford in Chernenko's year, nor did it need to.

From Ogarkov to Wohlstetter to Luti to Hannah. Promoted today. These aren't rhetorical NeoCons. These are targeteers. These are believers in part (but not all) of the RMA, and it is important to remember that Chernenko fired his for ... failing to put butter ahead of guns, and being too fond of mobility and swiftness.

It is also important to remember what Lenoid Brezhnev said at the XXVI Congress of the Communist Party of the USSR in 1982, that the equilibrium between the USSR and the US, between NATO and the Warsaw Pact, objectively served to maintain peace on the planet.

It is just as important to remember what George Bush said in September, 1999

�This opportunity is created by a revolution in the technology of war. Power is increasingly defined, not by mass or size, but by mobility and swiftness. Influence is measured in information, safety is gained in stealth, and force is projected on the long arc of precision-guided weapons. . . . The best way to keep the peace is to redefine war on our terms.�

The Wars in Afganistan, and Iraq, and Syria or Iran or both, and the yellow cake boogie men simply wouldn't be the same if Bush had to pick up the red courtesy phone. Because it is ringing. And there is no equilibrium.

Note to self: +Voenizdat +Ogarkov fr/ru/en