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I was recently invited by Jarret Brachman, professor and head of research at West Point’s Center of Combating Terrorism, to give a talk to his students in the department. Below is a transcription of the talk itself, which was given on November 13, 2007. In the days to come I will detail the response of students and teachers, the questions that came up, my impressions of West Point and of the students I met there, as well as talks with other members of the department.

All in all, it was a great experience. Professor Brachman is an expert on Al Qaeda’s inner workings, particularly its use of technology and the Internet. He is only twenty-nine-years old and someone to keep an eye on, a rare sign of intelligence among the Inspector Clouseaus who determine our current policy on terrorism.

The Terrorist Dilemma: A Talk to West Point Cadets, 11/13/07

I want to begin today by talking about a general whom you have probably not heard of, unless you have read my book. His name is Frederich Ludwig, Prince of Hohenlohe. He was born in Prussia in 1746 and came from one of Germany’s oldest and most aristocratic families. The Prince served in the military under the Prussian King Frederick the Great and slowly rose through the ranks.

The Prince was a great believer in the style of warfare created by Frederick the Great. This style was based on having an extremely disciplined army; on always assuming the offensive; and on certain creative maneuvers that the King had invented. Led by Frederick, the Prussians had emerged as the most feared and successful fighting force on the continent, and it stayed that way after Frederick’s death in 1786.

In 1796, the Prince was made a general, at the age of 50, young by Prussian standards. In that same year, the 27-year-old Napoleon Bonaparte was also named general and commander of the French forces fighting in Italy. Over the next nine years, Napoleon would dominate Europe, all of this culminating with his stunning victories at Ulm and Austerlitz in 1805. To the Prince, Napoleon was merely lucky. He was matched against weak and decadent countries (Austria and Russia) that could not withstand his aggressive style of warfare. If he ever met the Prussians on the battlefield, he would be revealed as a military fraud. And with that in mind, the Prince secretly worked on a battle plan in case their two countries came to war.

Well, in 1806, the Prussian King finally declared war and in September of that year, the Prussian generals were asked to prepare a campaign against Napoleon. The Prince trotted out his carefully crafted battle plan. The other generals made their changes to the Prince’s plan and finally they all agreed on it and presented it to the King. But as the Prussian troops were mobilizing, word reached the Prince and his fellow generals that Napoleon’s swift moving army had already entered Prussian territory, coming in scattered directions that were hard to predict, and massing in the south of the country.

There was no time to react. The Prussians were forced to retreat. They would reassemble to the north and attack the flanks of Napoleon’s army as it marched on Berlin. The Prince was put in charge of the rear guard, protecting the Prussian retreat. Only a few days later, a division under Napoleon himself caught up with Hohenlohe, near the town of Jena, and the first battle between these two powerful forces took place. It was like a meeting between the past and the future. The Prussians formed lines in parade fashion to advance, in a ritual that went back to Frederick’s day. Napoleon’s army scattered in all directions and sniped at the Prussians from rooftops, and behind houses. The Prussians were quickly overwhelmed by this totally chaotic form of battle and quickly succumbed. By the end of the day they were routed.

At almost the same time, a French division under Field Marshall Davout defeated a large Prussian force at Auerstadt and within days the entire Prussian military edifice crumbled, as one castle after another fell into French hands. It was one of the most stunning collapses in the history of warfare, a great power destroyed almost overnight.

After this battle, the Prince was totally disgraced and retreated to his ancestral castle. For the last 12 years of his life he tried to make sense of this ignominious fall. He blamed the other generals for slowing down the Prussian response to Napoleon’s attack by their squabbling and their egos. He criticized the Prussian army for its breakdowns in discipline as it retreated. He credited Napoleon’s spy system for giving them a beat up on the Prussian strategy and catching them by surprise. He maintained that the French form of warfare was unethical and gave them an unfair advantage because they were willing to fight dirty.

Now if you think about it, this is all rather astonishing. The Prince was no idiot. He was a great student of military history. He had been able to study the French army for nine years before meeting it in battle. He was able to witness it firsthand at Jena. All he had to do was open his eyes and think. And yet with all this evidence staring him in the face, and with years and some distance to analyze it, he continued to completely misread the essence of Napoleonic warfare. He could only come up with clichés, and the usual conventional excuses. His eyes could only focus on the tactics, the details; he could not see the forest for the trees.

In the aftermath of this debacle, another Prussian was trying to come to terms with the Napoleonic revolution in a much different way. You might have heard of him. His name was Carl von Clausewitz. At the age of 26 he had witnessed the collapse first hand, was captured and held by the French for several years. He and other reformers within the Prussian military, men like Scharnhorst and Gneisau, were determined to gain the right lesson from what had happened to Hohenlohe and the Prussian military. What von Clausewitz did in the wake of Jena-Auerstadt represents a defining moment in military theory and strategy. Based on analyzing Napoleon he came up with a method, one that would lead to all of his great discoveries.

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Reading and watching the news lately has inspired a few strategic tidbits I would like to share.

Force them off the negative: It is always easier to argue from the negative side–criticizing other people’s actions, dissecting their motives, etc. And that is why most people will opt for this. If they had to describe a positive vision of what they want in the world, or how they would accomplish a particular task, this would open them up to all kinds of attacks and criticisms. It takes effort and thought to establish a positive position. It takes less effort to work on what other people have done, and poke endless holes. It also makes you look tough and insightful, because people delight in hearing someone tear an idea apart.

Facing these negative-mongers in a debate or argument is infuriating. They can come at you from all angles. Hit you with sarcasm and snide comments, weave all kinds of abstractions that can make you look bad. If you lower yourself to their position, you end up like a boxer throwing punches into thin air. These opponents give you nothing to hit. (In war, it is always easier to hold ground than take ground.) Your task is to force them off this position by getting them to commit to some positive position. Now, you have a target. If they resist or refuse to do this, you can attack them for this resistance.

With the Iraq War, it is quite simple for President Bush to stand ground and shoot down all of his opponents by playing the doomsday card: quitting Iraq will mean all hell will break loose. The terrorists will come to America and unleash their jihad here. Bush’s pose is not particularly effective over time, because we have grown so tired of it and it has been revealed to be totally devoid of content. But he holds on to it like a hedgehog because it works well with his base and saves him from a worse option–having to iterate his goals. The strategy here would be to force him on to the positive: what is his vision for Iraq now? How long exactly will he commit the troops? Is it open-ended? Force him to put some flesh on his nebulous talk of the future–the Iraq he is trying to establish.

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Read Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 of the Russia essays.

I am a contrarian by nature. When I hear anyone espouse an idea or a belief, my mind immediately floats to the opposite. “Perhaps what you are saying is in fact not true at all. I could see it from the opposite side, and so I will try it out.” I don’t know where this trait comes from; it is my form of mental warfare. I do it with my own ideas as well. Its value lies in making me test out opinions and never accept what others say is true. Better to think it through on your own. It is my personal counterweight to stupidity.

Before leaving for Russia I devoured articles on its political situation, particularly bios on President Putin. The prevailing opinion in the West is the following: Putin was a KGB apparatchik who had risen through the ranks. Consequently he is secretive and anti-democratic. He and his cronies are monopolizing political and economic power in Russia. The Russian people are tired of all the turmoil from the Yeltsin years and have been bought off by oil money flooding the country; they have been brainwashed, have fallen under the spell of yet another iron-fist ruler. Russia is now exercising its muscle on the world stage, turning into a bully in Eastern Europe. We have much to fear from an ascendant and anti-democratic Russia.

With some analysis of my own, and some reading between the lines, I was able to create the opposite viewpoint in my mind: Russia is an almost impossible country to govern. It is vast, comprising more ethnicities within its borders than any other state in the world. It has just emerged from one of the most radical changes in government in modern times. In the late 90s it was on the verge of chaos. Putin saved Russia from something far worse than a centralized government. He is struggling to reconstruct the country, working on his knowledge of Russian psychology and what the people need. His goal is to reestablish Russian prestige, and create the groundwork for a period of stability, some 20 years in which Russia could become an economic power.

Armed with this strategic viewpoint, I landed in Russia. My first interviews were with various newspapers. To my surprise, these journalists were quite critical of the government, and were rather taken aback by my moderate defense of Putin. This allowed for a lively exchange, since we were both caught off-guard. I was later to learn that many of the newspapers in Russia are what we would consider liberal. They do not like many of the maneuvers of President Putin, particularly his curtailing of press freedoms and government control of the main television stations.

Several days later I was on one of the most famous Russian radio programs, Radio Echo of Moscow, hosted by the head of the station, Alexei Venediktov. Alexei is quite a celebrity in the country. In the days of the fall of the Communist government, when almost everything was shut down, he continued to broadcast his show and provide a voice of reason. Alexei has long gray hair that sprouts in many directions. He reminded me of me of the March Hare in Alice in Wonderland.

Alexei is a staunch liberal. He was amused by my analysis of what was happening in Russia, particularly my critique of the Bush administration, and how it was playing into the hands of the Russian hardliners. I went through my ideas of what motivated Putin, the real reason for his various maneuvers. I said that it is easy at this point to look back and criticize, but if a strong hand had not intervened in 2000, Russia could very well be a lot worse off than now. Alexei treated much of what I had to say with great irony, since his audience already knew his own opinions. At the end of the interview he said that since I seemed so interested in Putin, perhaps I could take him back with me to the States and keep him there. I would do that, I replied, if he would return the favor by bringing Bush to Russia.

I was to encounter these “liberals” everywhere on my trip. They could be found in the strangest places. The official government liaison who lead me through the Duma for my meeting with Zhirinovsky (see last blog) managed to take me to the side and tell me she heard me on Radio Echo. She was surprised to hear my defense of Putin. She disliked him. His government had engaged in criminal activities. I was startled by the strength of her critique.

I was later told that these liberals can be found throughout the media, and are in the upper echelons of many of the television stations. They looked back fondly on the 90s when the press had incredible freedom. They are biding their time, and when a thaw comes in the relationship between the government and the media, perhaps when there is a new president, they will come out of the woodwork and express their opinions. Russians are used to waiting and to playing such double games.

The liberal position as I could understand it is more like the traditional use of the term in 19th century England–the government should only have a loose hand in social and economic affairs. In reality, however, they seemed to really only coalesce around their dislike for Putin and his heavy-handed approach to politics. They wanted the freedom to openly dissent and affect political life. In general, I did not find a single one among them who could really articulate a positive vision for Russia, or how they would have handled differently the many crises afflicting the country at the turn of millennium.

In truth, liberalism is a kind of repository for feelings of frustration, a safe place from which to criticize what is going on. The liberals seem oddly detached and naïve about power. (In many ways, they resemble liberals in America.) They are in the minority, but there are more of them in Russia than one might imagine, or that is reported in the Western press.

Accompanying me almost everywhere I went was my interpreter Andrey Isserov. Already at the age of 28 Andrey is a professor of History at a prestigious university, his specialty being early nineteenth century United States. His knowledge of Russian history is equally formidable–he could explain the story behind almost every important piece of Moscow architecture that we passed on our many drives through the city. He was not a pedant; his ideas on literature and culture were quite stimulating.

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