
The 7 Survival Habits of Byzantium - robg
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2009/10/19/take_me_back_to_constantinople
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pg
I'd include: have really good walls. Those saved their bacon time after time.

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tomjen2
Regrettably, that tactic is properly near impossible to use today - the US
can't defend her own borders, and the world is so interconnected that stopping
all foreign trade would result in mass starvation.

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nostrademons
The U.S. has awesome walls: the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. They saved our
butt numerous times in WW2, and arguably are the reason that we're a global
superpower today.

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tomjen2
Sure, but today all it takes is a few people determined to kill themself -
with all the technology that is available today, the power of a small
dedicated group is vastly bigger today that it was 65 years ago, and it is
only likely that it will get even bigger.

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eugenejen
Those 7 habits has exact spirit from Sun Tzu. It seems that given similar
environments, evolution process fosters similar way of thinking.

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bh23ha
_I. Avoid war by every possible means.._

Yes, they call Basil II (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basil_II>)
Boulgaroktonos because he avoided war so much.

 _IV. Replace the battle of attrition and occupation of countries with
maneuver warfare_

Riiiiight.... is it just me or is that not in fashion today and was not in
fashion when Byzantine occupied most of the freaking ex-west Roman empire.

 _V. Strive to end wars successfully by recruiting allies to change the
balance of power._

Oh that worked out real well with the Ottomans, they didn't turn on the
Byzantines at all.

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gaius
_is it just me or is that not in fashion today_

The advanced militaries of the world (British Army, USMC, IDF etc) are set up
for maneuver warfare. This is what is known as third generation warfare (see
William S Lind), and it has its roots in the Blitzkreig practiced by the
Germans in WW2. When a third-generation military meets a second-generation
military (one that thinks in terms of position-holding and massed formations)
in a stand-up fight the result is always a rout (e.g. Six Day War, Gulf War 1,
even Rommel virtually conquering France with a single armoured division). The
Soviets knew this. Their genius strategy in WW2 was to force the Germans to
fight in a second-generation style (and the Germans fell for it). This is also
a major reason the Soviets were reluctant to enter Western Europe. All Western
militaries thought very hard during the Cold War about how to defeat the Red
Army, but the Prussians knew it all along.

Unfortunately the Taliban are a fourth-generation military (adept in psyops
and propaganda, insurgency, guerilla tactics, information warfare) and the
West is not well configured for that (and can't become so easily, as there are
still second-generation potentials enemies around - we have to _think_ in
third-generation terms still).

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barry-cotter
The Afghan military structure has not changed all that significantly in the
last 200 years. We know how to beat them.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinks_War>

Aerial bombardment of population centres works fine, collective punsihment,
having minimising enemy military and civilian casualties come behind 1\.
Casualties you care about 2\. Cost 3\. Extending treatis meant to only rule
under reciprocity to people who don't give a fuck about the Geneva Convention.

If you can't follow standard U.S. Small Colonial War tactics pre-WW2 (kill
them until they give up, then and only then give them sweeties) you can use
the Strategic Hamlets doctrine that worked fine in Vietnam, and in Afghanistan
for the Soviets after they7 stopped trying to run the country and would settle
for not having any one unsympathetic to them running it.

[http://yorkshire-ranter.blogspot.com/2009/10/arguing-
about-a...](http://yorkshire-ranter.blogspot.com/2009/10/arguing-about-
afghanistan.html)

As both the Soviets and the Americans show this probably isn't possible for
demotic states. Imperial commitments aren't popular.

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gaius
200 years ago it would not even occur to Joe Afghan that he could advance his
strategic goals by communicating directly with the civilian population of his
enemy. Now the Taliban has it own channel on Youtube. That's why I say they're
4th-generation; this is high level information warfare and it has very
successfully fulfilled the strategic goal of preventing the West from bringing
its full firepower to bear.

Reagan bankrupted the USSR by forcing them to compete with Star Wars. Will the
Taliban bankrupt us by forcing us to spend all our money on UAVs? Maybe not,
but they can still make making war on them prohibitively expensive.

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barry-cotter
Joe Afghan doesn't have strategic goals, he wants to live his life in relative
peace. Joe Afghan Warlord really is in much the same position as they have
been since the arrival of the firearm; they have warbands based on a fluid and
changing mixture of religious, linguistic and ancestral ties.

The Taliban does not exist in the way that the US government exists. There is
no continuing organisation with a command infrastructure, the US and its
allies are fighting the Pushtun culture.

Your first paragraph above, I conceded before you wrote it "As both the
Soviets and the Americans show this probably isn't possible for demotic
states. Imperial commitments aren't popular."

 _Will the Taliban bankrupt us by forcing us to spend all our money on UAVs?
Maybe not, but they can still make making war on them prohibitively
expensive._

I have studied military history for less than sixty hours total. I feel
confident in saying that the Afghan war is unwinnable as it is, and will
continue to be waged, for the same reasons Vietnam was unwinnable. The US will
never win a war against guerillas, ever, because the tried-and-true strategies
that work are illegal under US law, and far more importantly, repulsive to the
US populace. Oh, and because the US's only existential war was with itself.
That a country with an ocean to the sides and mostly deserts to the top and
bottom has the world's biggest military is ridiculous.

Seriously though. How to Win the War in Iraq

Any time your convoys are so much as fired upon bomb the nearest population
centre into a smoking crater. This'll even work if you evacuate everyone in
said population centre before you destroy it. This way, you don't have to do
intelligence work to figure out who did whatever it was that pissed you off.
Everybody nearby has an incentive to dissuade, lethally if necessary, the
local hotheads. Collective punishment, it works.

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dsplittgerber
Well, the romans have it all written down as well. In the writings of their
most prominent thinkers. To state otherwise, is just plainly wrong. You can
learn so much from them, you just have to dive in and read a couple dozen
books first, instead of all the wisdom being lazily presented to you in just a
single manual and a single book. Far easier to learn, check. Far worthier to
know about? I have my doubts.

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zaphar
I. Avoid war by every possible means.. (otherwise known as "walk softly and
carry a big stick")

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philwelch
This is a few years old, but it really goes over the USA/Rome comparison well:

<http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/us_rome.htm>

It has a silly comparative timeline that runs into speculation but it's
slightly interesting in its own way.

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mynameishere
The US is employing all those methods. Strange confusion on the part of
whoever wrote that.

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roundsquare
It seems most people here disagree with you. Can you give examples for
some/most/all?

