PiSigma
"the engineer"
Correct. But those 31 and 41 also mostly live underground ...
PLA strike strategies in westpac HIC
- Thread starter SEAD
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Colby has started his own think tank/contractor op after leaving government called "The Marathon Initiative", which I will now will be referring to as TMI. One of the guys who is a fellow is Edward "tons of Americans will die in the Gulf War" Luttwak, who also wrote a poorly researched and racialized book on China and some other not very accurate books about the Roman Empire. But hey, he's a "strategist", not an area studies historian, so I mean, who cares about writing books with bad history, am I right?
Now, I'm not sure which USG branch provides TMI with its funding (their site simply says they take grants or contracts from the USG-not sure of their exact contracting vehicle-some enterprising SDF users can go do some digging I suppose). But Luttwak's rise was closely associated with Andy Marshall's long leadership tenure at DoD's Office of Net Assessment (the Pentagon's internal think tank).
Here's where things get a little loony: ONA has an (unearned) mythical rep, but during its last twenty or so years of existence, it basically just became an outlet for Andy Marshall-driven nepotism, with Marshall funding various trash-quality level social "science" studies about "strategy" and "warfare", of which Luttwak and some other notorious hucksters have published their work (Bradley Thayer comes to mind). Operations research and formal operational modeling this was not.
So in short, Colby has is a solid member of the DC foreign policy class, who has made a career out of writing Bad Social Science And History books for a living, and associating with others (like Luttwak) with the same vocation.
A *lot* of social science literature produced by think tankers in DC land are designed as entry points to get a further gravy train of funding from deep-pocketed benefactors (and they will often admit as much in private if you corner them about it). This is actually one of the more banal reasons why non-hawkish literature doesn't get much airtime in DC: funding is so heavily dependent on DoD/defense contractor sources that it is simply not economical to produce it.
So who are they fooling, really? The Congress? The Pentagon? The American public? Themselves? Their allies?
Or any of the above combinations?
I jokingly call them the "deep state", although I'm probably not that far from the truth. I believe the appropriate phrase is "foreign policy establishment".
I believe the term is "grifter".
Got to give Obama his props on this one, he coined the perfect term for them: the blob.
I once asked a Taiwanese friend of mine who works in the Taiwan natsec policy space what he thought of Easton and he smiled at me and just said "propaganda".
I left behind my career aspiration to be in this field when I realized what the norm for "quality" was, and what you had to do to become "successful".
The quality of the US's foreign policy intellectual capacity got kind of screwed by the downsizing of in-house analysts post Cold War and the outsourcing of all that work to think tanks. Now the foreign policy apparatus is in the business of selling fantasies wrapped around a veneer of "big ideas" and "thought leadership" rather than hard hitting, concrete, sober, comprehensive, and thoughtful analysis.
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There's an unflattering review of Colby's book at Asiatimes here
asiatimes.com/2022/01/ex-pentagon-strategist-elbridge-colby-bells-the-dragon/
The problem is that "hard hitting, concrete, sober, comprehensive, and thoughtful analysis" comes to very unpopular conclusions as to:
1. The current limits of American power
2. The continued trajectory of relative American decline vis-a-vis the rest of the world
Patchwork mentioned that in the event of a US-China war, both sides would see an economic depression in the region of 25-35% of GDP. Yet we haven't seen this widely reported in the US foreign policy media.
Nor has the media mentioned that a majority of the global population (who also comprise a majority of global economic activity) has not joined the West in imposing sanctions against Russia.
These are just 2 recent examples, but you get the idea.
Ooof!