Hat tip to Mal for pointing out this lengthy article in Policy Review: Extremism, Terror, and the Future of Conflict By Michael J. Mazarr. There's both a lot and a lot of nothing here. Like others before him, Mazarr attempts to reconceptualize warfare in the hope of getting us to re-think our manner of conducting conflict and find more effective means of achieving goals. Know thy enemy and thyself, know the nature of the conflict, and you will find the most effective tools to use.

To that extent -- getting the reader to think, it is interesting. One flaw here, however, is that there is no way to "know" these things -- there is often no "right" answer. Mazarr is really telling us that human systems are exceedingly complex and that no single strategy -- particularly a military one alone -- will win a likely war in the modern age. So how do we develop the necessary intelligence about "the other" to derive a strategy effective enough to neutralize him? There's the rub. Edward Said built a second career telling us that even the most in-depth studies of foreign societies are nothing more than caricatures on a good day. Though he overstated and added demonic motivations, in this at least, Said had a point.

Mazarr's prescription (which he admits will not happen):

Several of these -- direct foreign aid, debt forgiveness, public diplomacy -- have dubious track records, and in some cases a strong argument can be made that they exacerbate problems. Further, the weakness of the argument comes on display when trying to apply it to on the ground trouble-spots:

Huh? The psychopolitik view is all about balancing all those issues and trying to move the whole in a desirable direction -- a necessarily messy, difficult and unpredictable business. We were also stuck already with many of those dilemmas ever since 1991. In psychopolitik, there isn't a lot new. The "Neocon agenda" (somewhat as the caricature has it) also took a psychological, "root causes" approach -- it just came up with different conclusions as to action. What was Mazarr's prescription for a way forward in the mid '90's? We don't know because it is by no means obvious from his essay what his choices would have been, other than a root cause, "peace, love, cash give-aways" approach. We've heard that before, though this essay would seem to argue that, "no, this time there's a lot of thought behind it," it strikes me that the end resulting prescription would be pretty well the same, though unlike most who promulgate that view, Mazarr at least has a somewhat more realistic view that the "soft approach" is not always enough.

This essay is a good one for Democrat political candidates and advisers to quote from so as to pretend to have a different and more nuanced approach. But while a good read for the purpose of recalibrating the mind -- a sort of cranial palate-cleaning -- I'm not sure there's much new here in the way of substantive policy prescription.

Here's the essay link again: Policy Review: Extremism, Terror, and the Future of Conflict By Michael J. Mazarr