Perhaps we need to rethink this asymetrical warfare. If you read histories of war, the victor often traps the enemy into fighting the battle on grounds and at times predetermined by the victor. There are famous stories from Julius Ceasar of the timing of battles due to forced marches, or in the Bible of battles with the Sun in the eyes of the enemy, or our own battle with Britian in the revolutionary war where we used trees to hide behind or the night to launch battles. Western armies excel in "conventional" war-- the Israelis famously defeated combined Arab forces in the six day war. Our enemies have learned from these defeats, and now fight guerilla wars, seeking to hide among civilians, kill our civilians, manipulate our media, and use increasing sophisticated and mobile weapons. We need to rethink this war, and choose the ground of battle to our advantage. For example, it seems that increasingly sophisticated and smaller weapons (think portable missile launchers) favor insurgents. But wars have always included attackes on supply lines. In ancient and medieval times, sieges were a common tactic against walled cities. We have overwhelming technology advantages. Battles in the past were decided on these kinds of advantages-- for example the devastation inflicted by the long bow by the English on the French. We need to rethink our current battle, and begin to choose the ground to our advantage. If supplies to southern Lebanon were disrupted (the old siege approach) how long would the "civilian" population remain? What if the Israeli army planted IED's on all the major roads into southern lebanon? Is there any way to turn the tactics of the enemy against them? Could food deliveries be disrupted without the outcry for "humanitarian" aid? Could army units include video documentation, much as the police in this country now have cameras in many police cars? Instead or real TV with the police, think real TV with war coverage. The enemy has an entrenched, very old tribalistic patriarchal society. Could this be exploited? In Japan, the Samurai's adherence to ancient weapons resulted in their extinction. Islamic fighters have updated their weapons, but not their social structures. Are there potential weaknesses here? Certainly there is the potential for a divide and conquer strategy, given the large number of factions. But I believe there are many more innovative approaches available to us and the Israelis that would play to our strengths.

When I visited the Holocaust museum in LA, there was a brief snippet of a recording by Joseph Stalin, saying something like " Ideas are weapons, too. Why should we allow them to our enemies?"

Nietzche said " Around the creators of new values revolves the world: -- invisibly it revolves"

I love reading blogs by Hugh Hewitt, Powerline, Captain's Quarters, and others, and it strikes me that they are engaged in the battle of ideas-- and their posts are  always articulate, cogent, and often thought provoking. But what drove me to finally begin my own blog was an article by Mark Steyn that I read tonight: http://www.suntimes.com/output/steyn/cst-edt-steyn30.html. Also, of course, the fact that Hugh Hewitt, in a brilliant move, has lowered the barrier to creating a blog, making it easier for people like me to actually write something.

But Mark Steyn's essay framed a fascinating issue, which I hope to explore in greater detail throughout this blog: the effects of our own culture on our ability to wage war. He echoes in part a theme I first read in Victor Davis Hanson's excellent book,
Why the West Has Won: Nine Landmark Battles in the Brutal History of Western Victory

namely, (to use a locution of philosophers) that great armies of the past (such as Athens') had an army made up of all citizens. He also expressed concern in this book that the US now has a professional army, and that citizens no longer are required to serve, no longer required to defend their land and personal property.

I think this is not the issue at all; rather it is what my post began with: the war of ideas. In Mark Steyn's post, he references a story about a writer being attacked for using the tools of a liberal arts education in the defence of the country. I belive that ideas are central to the defense of this country, and that is the theme of this blog.

Much has been written about the self destruction of western civilization with its embrace of leftist ideas that include moral equivalency, denigration of western values, rejection of Judeo Christian morality, etc. Often the self-loathing exemplified by these leftists is contrasted with the focused attitudes of todays Isamic fundamentalists. The conclusion frequently drawn is that Western civilization may be losing the vitality and sense of self preservation required to survive. Europe is cited as the example of where we may be headed.

Yet this is an entirely too passive approach to the issue. Remeber, ideas are WEAPONS. Islamic fundamentalism is a system as well. It may well have a similar capability for self loathing and weakness. I am reminded of one of the most philosophically powerful metaphors in the western tradition, Goedel's incompleteness theorem: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del's_incompleteness_theorem.
 For any consistent formal theory that proves basic arithmetical truths, it is possible to construct an arithmetical statement that is true ¹ but not provable in the theory. That is, any consistent theory of a certain expressive strength is incomplete.

To the point of this discussion, it implies that large, complex, self-referential systems will have weaknesses (although this is not explicitly what the theorm states). I've also been influenced by Richard Dawkins' idea of memes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme. Again, to the point of this post, large, complex, idea systems are subject to infection from other ideas.

It strikes me that the work of Hugh Hewitt's blog project is to encourage meme's that will strengthen western culture. He has created a petri dish for these new ideas, with I believe the unspoken hope that in this laboratory of culture new ideas will emerge that will have the ability to influence others toward values of western civilization. My addition to this discussion, to net it all out, is that we should also be thinking about ideas that will infect and weaken our opponents.