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Sweetbriar
01-14-2009, 10:58
Link (http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/strategic-collapse-at-the-army-war-college/?print=1) to full article.


If you know your enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.

This famous maxim by the ancient Chinese general Sun Tzu is familiar to every student of military science and strategy. His counsel is simple: understand your enemy, understand yourself. Nearly eight years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, however, important segments of our military infrastructure dedicated to training and educating the next generation of military leaders have woefully failed to heed Sun Tzu’s advice. Two recent blog posts by Washington Post military correspondent Tom Ricks related to policies and publications by the U.S. Army War College give evidence to this strategic collapse in the War on Terror.

Two weeks ago, Ricks [1] reported on a new [2] publication by Army War College research professor Sherifa Zuhur on Hamas and Israel that informs readers that Hamas has been misunderstood due to the misreporting by “Israeli and Western sources that villainize the group.” Zuhur concludes that Hamas isn’t so bad after all, so we all just need to get along and embrace the terrorist group through negotiations — a view apparently endorsed by the Army War College when it published her defense of Hamas.

A second post last week, “[3] Fiasco at the Army War College: The Sequel,” records an exchange between Ricks and defense expert and author [4] Mark Perry. Assessing the academic state of affairs at the War College, Perry informed Ricks:

It’s worse than you think. They have curtailed the curriculum so that their students are not exposed to radical Islam. Akin to denying students access to Marx during the Cold War.

This is hardly the first complaint that the military has failed to investigate and assess the strategic writings related to radical Islam and Islamic war doctrine. William Gawthrop, former head of the Joint Terrorism Task Force of the Defense Department’s Counterintelligence Field Activity, says in a military intelligence journal article that:

As late as early 2006, the senior service colleges of the Department of Defense had not incorporated into their curriculum a systematic study of Muhammad as a military or political leader. As a consequence, we still do not have an in-depth understanding of the war-fighting doctrine laid down by Muhammad, how it might be applied today by an increasing number of Islamic groups, or how it might be countered. (”The Sources and Patterns of Terrorism in Islamic Law,” The Vanguard: Journal of the Military Intelligence Corps Association, 11:4 [Fall 2006], p. 10)

One effort to remedy this strategic deficiency identified by Gawthrop was undertaken by Joint Chiefs of Staff analyst Stephen Coughlin, who published his finding in his master’s thesis at the National Defense Intelligence University, [5] “To Our Great Detriment”: Ignoring What Extremists Say About Jihad. In his thesis, Coughlin examines texts from multiple schools of Islamic jurisprudence to evaluate the respective traditions on jihad and their contemporary use by Islamic terrorists, concluding that failing to investigate these sources has left our military “disarmed in the war of ideas.”

Coughlin’s thesis had barely seen the light of day before he was [6] sacked from his position with the Joint Chiefs, having running afoul of another Pentagon official, Hesham Islam, a top-ranked Muslim advisor to Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England, who took issue with Coughlin’s academic analysis.

Sigaba
01-14-2009, 12:55
Sweetbriar, thanks for posting this article and the link.

For what it is worth, my issue with the criticism offered by Ricks and Perry is that it seems impressionistic. The logic seems to be that if a subject that should be taught (at least in the opinion of Ricks and Perry) is not taught then it isn't learned. At best, this description of the learning environment at the Army War College suggests that the students are only motivated to learn what the faculty teaches and that the faculty lacks creativity and judgment.

Did Ricks or Perry do their 'due diligence' to establish for a fact that students at the AWC are "not exposed to radical Islam"? Did they look in the library? Did they talk to students themselves? Did they interview professors and other faculty members? Did they evaluate the curriculum at the AWC in the context of that school's mission? Did they consult the AWC's journal Parameters <<LINK (http://www.carlisle.army.mil/usawc/parameters/parahome.htm)>>? Did they take an opportunity to visit the AWC's Strategic Studies Institute's URL that has available not a few papers written on the Middle East? <<LINK (http://www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/middle-east-north-africa/?show=pubs-list)>>

Or did they just follow up their fire-from-the-hip-with-knowing-nods with slap-dash blogging about how the Army is (allegedly) getting it wrong (allegedly) again?

And as for the glib reference to Sun Tzu, there are two parts to the equation. Is it possible that the existing curriculum at the AWC centers around knowing one's self?

A quick word about full disclosure. Mark Perry is a director of Conflicts Forum, a consultancy that aims "to engage and listen to Islamists, while challenging Western misconceptions and misrepresentations of the region’s leading agents of change" <<SOURCE (http://conflictsforum.org/what-is-conflicts-forum/)>>. In short, Mr. Perry is hardly a disinterested observer who wants the AWC to have the best curriculum for its students.

afchic
01-14-2009, 13:34
Even if the Army War College is not offering these types of classes, that does not mean this is prevalant throughout DoD. Having just come from NPS, and spending all of my extracirricular courses studying radical Islam, I can tell you there are a lot of people within DoD that are taking this seriously.

Sweetbriar
01-14-2009, 17:56
The chief reason for posting it is that it being Ricks and PJM, we will be hearing more of it, and quite probably in the mainstream media. There is an argument being built and it will have to be examined.

Sigaba
01-14-2009, 19:05
The chief reason for posting it is that it being Ricks and PJM, we will be hearing more of it, and quite probably in the mainstream media. There is an argument being built and it will have to be examined.

Sweetbriar--

I hope my contribution to the discussion didn't come across as shooting the messenger.

Sweetbriar
01-14-2009, 19:18
Nope. All warm and fuzzy.

:cool: