An updated version of my earlier piece on Virginia Tech and doctrine is up on the Examiner website.

Comment away.

Go over to Blackfive and check out Grim’s post on ‘The Gravity Well’ it’s great stuff … and dammit, Grim!! This blog is for serious theoretical COIN stuff. Blackfive is for hoo-ah-ing and talking about whiskey and manly things. Get that straight, will you?

Seriously, a post I wish I’d written and that you should definitely read. That right there’s the path to victory, folks…

Obama gave his ‘Big Foreign Policy’ speech yesterday, and a transcript is up on his website.

Rhetorically, it’s a good speech. I agree with a lot of what he says, and love his reclamation of the American role:

I still believe that America is the last, best hope of Earth. We just have to show the world why this is so.

He says other things that ought to resonate with the readers here – he wants a bigger, more lethal military, and he expressly reserves the right to act unilaterally if he believes the justification is there.

The elephant in the room remains his – I believe – fundamental misreading of the roots of the challenge we will face in the next decade.He says:

A recent report detailed Al Qaeda’s progress in recruiting a new generation of leaders to replace the ones we have captured or killed. The new recruits come from a broader range of countries than the old leadership – from Afghanistan to Chechnya, from Britain to Germany, from Algeria to Pakistan. Most of these recruits are in their early thirties.>
They operate freely in the disaffected communities and disconnected corners of our interconnected world – the impoverished, weak and ungoverned states that have become the most fertile breeding grounds for transnational threats like terror and pandemic disease and the smuggling of deadly weapons.

Some of these terrorist recruits may have always been destined to take the path they did – accepting a tragically warped view of their religion in which God rewards the killing of innocents. But millions of young men and women have not.
…
Delivering on these universal aspirations requires basic sustenance like food and clean water; medicine and shelter. It also requires a society that is supported by the pillars of a sustainable democracy – a strong legislature, an independent judiciary, the rule of law, a vibrant civil society, a free press, and an honest police force. It requires building the capacity of the world’s weakest states and providing them what they need to reduce poverty, build healthy and educated communities, develop markets, and generate wealth. And it requires states that have the capacity to fight terrorism, halt the proliferation of deadly weapons, and build the health care infrastructure needed to prevent and treat such deadly diseases as HIV/AIDS and malaria.

He’s right and he’s wrong here, I believe. The movement we face is both something that is fertilized by the kinds of conditions he describes above – and yes, we would go far in choking it off if we were to fix these conditions, and we should.

But it is also carefully nurtured by state actors who harbor, support, and subsidize its growth for their own relatively Westphalian reasons.

I believe we face a movement seeded and nurtured by both the conditions in the ‘edge states’ and by carefully executed support from states which are not and should not be considered ‘failed’.

When I understand how Obama proposes to deal with that, I’ll be able to unqualifiedly support his foreign policy.

The French elections just pushed forward a center-left (by French standards) and right (by French standards) candidates to the final elections.

Heather Hulbert, writing at democracyarsenal.com says:

And the far-right Jean-Marie le Pen falls to 10%, far below the second-place showing that so embarrassed France last time. So much for the SPECTER OF ANTI-IMMIGRANT SENTIMENT LEADING TO RIGHT-WING TAKEOVER.

Um, Heather – do you know was racaille means? Or the implication of nettoyer la cité au Kärcher??

Sarko is popular in no small part because he’s mainstreamed Le Pen’s positions, and wrapped them in a palatable personal history.

Hulbert’s source – a immigrant to France – even makes this point, but somehow it got missed:

Maybe the biggest story is the (relative – sadly not total) collapse of the Front National, which slid back down to 11.1%, about what it used to score in parliamentary elections in the 1980s and early 90s. Probably partly a reflection of the tendency to flee the fringes, but also maybe due to Nicolas Sarkozy taking over much of the security and immigration discourse of the party and making it his own.

When people ask me why I don’t have more respect for my betters – for the people who make their livings as policy analysts in areas where I’m a rank amateur – it’s because I keep reading nonsense like this.

I’m not afraid of an Islamic takeover of Europe. I’m much more afraid of a resurgence of European racism and violent nationalism. they’re much much better at that than we are. And I’m even more afraid of our clueless foreign policy apparachniks and their patent inability to see or think clearly.

Look, Newt’s position on the cause of this tragedy is just silly (skip ahead to 3:38). The rate of murder and nonnegligent manslaughter in the US was 5.1/100,000 in 1960 (surely the idyll of the Country Club Republican). In 2004 it was 5.5. We’re hardly Sodom, Newt.

I’m someone who thinks there are interesting intersections between anomic young men and modern philosophical thought that may lower the barriers to bad behavior, and provide a kind of ideological armature for the nihilistic acts of rage they choose to commit. But to blame the kind of acts the VT murders represent on any philosophical position – be it postmodernism, liberalism, or Rotary membership – is just stupid and foolish and skirts being disgusting. The killer was an insane young man who could and should have been identified and helped (or at least stopped) long before last week, and no philosophy, political position, or educational fad made him crazy and evil.

We have had evil people who have done horrible things since there have been people. Newt’s a Christian, he ought to get that.

(‘The Devil In A White City‘ is the violence-porn bestseller about a charming mass murderer active in Chicago during the World Fair of 1893. I’d also suggest ‘Everything Bad Is Good For You‘ as a followup.)

(h/t The Moderate Voice)

So it’s been over a year since I’ve bought a motorcycle. And I’m not using the KTM fully by riding offroad. And I really like Triumphs, and Triumph has come out with the new Tiger 1050.

I’m hoping mine will be here in a week.

Scorched Yellow with ABS, it’ll look pretty much like this:

Which gave me the problem of naming it.

I’ve always named my bikes, and given them vanity plates with their names,.

My MuZ Baghira is “Thalia“. The KTM is “Metternich“.

So what to name the Tiger?

My first thought was Montecore, the tiger that attacked Roy. It’s a cool name, and ironic, and a good reminder that the bike is dangerous. But it felt like bad karma. A friend suggested Chompawat, after the famous man-eater, but again – bad karma.

Hobbes? great – a twofer – Calvin and political theory. But no way to get it – and kind of cutesy.

Think, think, think. Think about great cartoon tigers – and hey!!

Thomas Nast and Walt Kelley!!

Meet Tammany Tiger.

Law Prof. Eugene Volokh engages a friend:

I was corresponding with a friend of mine — a very smart fellow, and a lawyer and a journalist — about concealed carry for university professors. He disagreed with my view, and as best I can tell in general was skeptical about laws allowing concealed carry in public. His argument, though, struck me as particularly noteworthy, especially since I’ve heard it in gun control debates before:

Forgive me, but I’m old-fashioned. I like the idea of the state having a monopoly on the use of force.

I want to claim that this echo of Weber (who said “Today … we have to say that a state is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory”) is utterly inapt in gun control debates, at least such debates in a Western country.

Volokh proceeds to make a strong set of arguments as to why individuals should be allowed to use force even in light of the Weberian claim, and you ought to go read them.

But all he needed to do was to quote Weber accurately.

Here’s the part everyone cites, from ‘Politics As A Vocation‘:

‘Every state is founded on force,’ said Trotsky at Brest-Litovsk. That is indeed right. If no social institutions existed which knew the use of violence, then the concept of ‘state’ would be eliminated, and a condition would emerge that could be designated as ‘anarchy,’ in the specific sense of this word. Of course, force is certainly not the normal or the only means of the state–nobody says that–but force is a means specific to the state. Today the relation between the state and violence is an especially intimate one. In the past, the most varied institutions–beginning with the sib–have known the use of physical force as quite normal. Today, however, we have to say that a state is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.

Here’s the part everyone leaves off:

Note that ‘territory’ is one of the characteristics of the state. Specifically, at the present time, the right to use physical force is ascribed to other institutions or to individuals only to the extent to which the state permits it. The state is considered the sole source of the “right” to use violence. Hence, “politics” for us means striving to share power, either among states or among groups within a state.

There’s no need to explain the freedom of an individual to use force appropriately (i.e. in a state-sanctioned way), as opposed to the ability of an agent of the state to use force in a state-sanctioned way. We’re all agents of the state, in a sense.

…and that undergraduate Political Theory education is worth something!

I’ve said frequently that 9/11 was not a failure of our security systems, or of the passengers and crew who were hijacked, but rather was a failure of doctrine. “Doctrine” is defined as “code of beliefs, or “a body of teachings” or “instructions”, taught principles or positions“. On 9/10/01 we had a standard doctrine about response to aircraft hijackings which included directives to the passengers and crew to be compliant, not confront the hijackers, minimize exposure to violence, and get the plane onto the ground where negotiations or intervention by highly-trained persons would resolve the issue.

Similarly, the Columbine murders did not represent a failure by local law-enforcement to act; it was a failure of the doctrine they had been trained to act within. because most hostage situations within buildings are resolved with minimal force and patience, the doctrine was to cordon, wait, and talk.

Both doctrines have changed. I do not believe that any passenger airplane will be hijacked again anytime soon except by multiple hijackers with guns – and possibly not even then. Police departments have now trained their officers to “go to the active shooter” and aggressively move to attack – as it appears the police did in responding to the VPI shooter.

Similarly, the discussions around the responses of the students in the comments to the post below seem to imply that those of us who are suggesting that the students could have done other things which may have changed the outcome are, in essence, blaming the victims. No, we’re not. We’re blaming the doctrine the victims were trained to operate under, and arguing that we – all of us – should rethink it and start implementing other ones, just as airline passengers and police officers have.

This doctrine isn’t only applicable to the thankfully rare cases where a deranged person walks into a school or office and starts shooting. It is applicable to all the not-so-little crises we are liable to face.

As commenters have noted this isn’t the time to dig deeply into this, both out of respect for the dead and their survivors and because we don’t yet know enough unambiguous fact to make conclusive judgments. I’ll come back to this issue soon, obviously, but don’t think that today is the time.

MENTAL REHEARSAL:
“Mental rehearsal can be a valuable tool in preparing you for a life threatening encounter. Mental rehearsal has been around and practiced since the early 1940’s, however, studies linked to mental process and physical skills can be traced back to 1892.” (Duran & Nasci, 2000, p. 29).
Mental rehearsal is the process of mentally visualizing and rehearsing how something should be done prior to actually doing it. What this rehearsal does for the body is it connects thought processes with physical activity. Most of us are equipped with the physical tools, (ex. defensive tactics, shooting skills, etc) to get the job done but, if we cannot connect them to a mental rehearsal under stress, a life and death decision process may occur to slow, with hesitancy and with errors. The concept of mental rehearsal is to experience the situation before it actually occurs. By creating “real life” scenarios to different situations, you can walk yourself through the decision making process. The scenario can be played over and over adding or changing the situation causing changes in decision making processes. Mental rehearsal should be done with things you’ve never encountered or thought of before. Scenarios should incorporate situations that cannot be included in training sessions due to safety issues or practicality. Make the scenarios as true to life as possible!

Probably the most important issue in mental rehearsal is to “always visualize yourself winning or never being killed.” Part of this rehearsal is training yourself to never give up even in the event you do get shot, stabbed or hurt. By anticipating stressful situations you can prepare for them.

– Survival Stress in Law Enforcement (pdf), Steve Drzewiecki

It’s been interesting to watch the members of the commentariat play their designated roles in the aftermath of Virginia Tech. I wish they wouldn’t just yet. We don’t know enough, and anyone who has genuine feelings about it is still too raw to think clearly much less talk intelligently.

But the news cycle demands its sacrifices, and our good sense is probably the first one.

I don’t typically read Michelle Malkin – I pretty much know what she will say on an issue, and while I respect her intelligence and ferocity, she skates a little close to Ann Coulter sometimes. So I caught this via a post on Outside The Beltway.

Wanted: A Culture of Self-Defense

Enough is enough, indeed. Enough of intellectual disarmament. Enough of physical disarmament. You want a safer campus? It begins with renewing a culture of self-defense — mind, spirit and body. It begins with two words: Fight back.

Steven Taylor, at OTB (and PoliBlog) writes:

More Asininity (This Time from Malkin)

What in the world is going on? First we have Derbyshire and Blake and now this. First, why do we have to find blame in places other than the fact that a truly disturbed individual simply did an unthinkable act and cracked. There is only so much that can be done in a free society to prevent such situations. This attempt to blame a general “liberal” attitude at universities and that this somehow has led to a culture of “conflict avoidance” that somehow, by inference, led to people not defending themselves on Monday – that is utterly ridiculous.

There’s a lot to unpack here.

Michelle is strongly advocating more people carrying weapons. James is strongly opposed to it.

That’s a topic I’ll talk about more later on, not today.

Michelle is very specific in her blame of campus culture – specifically progressive campus culture – for the apparent passivity of the students, and blames the passivity of the students – in some part – for the scope of what the evil madman was able to accomplish.

I’ve also talked about the roots of the modern terrorist movement as being closely aligned with mainstream academic thinking, and will have more to say about that later, as well.

But I want to talk about one simple thing tonight. I’ll evoke the immortal words of noted right-winger Michael Moore, who gave a lecture in Cincinnati in 2003:

Near the end of his lecture, Moore invoked the memory of Sept. 11, 2001, transporting his audience to the seats of a hijacked airplane.

“Two or three men holding box cutters paralyze 100 people,” he said. “How can this happen?”

There’s fear, certainly, from seeing some of the first class passengers’ throats sliced open. The smell of death, the blood, the rasping breath of misery. But something else had to be in play. Maybe the forbearance that comes from living comfortable lives. Surely someone would take care of this, as surely as policemen always rushed to aid them in times of need.

“Could the 100 passengers have stopped the men with box cutters?” Moore asked. “Sure, of course. Three guys with blades against a hundred unarmed fighters? The hundred win every time. Maybe not easy, maybe a few die, but the hundred win. We know it because those brave fighters on the Pennsylvania flight got up from their seats. And they beat the hijackers!”

Then Moore asked the audience to replace those passengers with 100 people from the Bronx or Over-the-Rhine or any not-so-comfortable community — the kind of neighborhood where calling 911 won’t necessarily bring the police running to help you.

“And maybe when the police do show up — if the police show up — they take you away instead,” he said.

Now, Moore asked, do you think 100 people from the Bronx would sit there?

“They would fight back,” he said. “They would rise up out of their seats and fight.”

He’s right. The good folks don’t fight. They don’t because, to be honest, they never have in their lives – if you’re my age or younger, fighting in elementary school isn’t normal, it’s the end of your school career. It amazes me how few of my peers have ever had a real altercation.

Obviously, by virtue of my willingness to own and use arms – and martial arts of other kinds – I made the decision a long time ago that I would fight. I’ve argued in the past that fighting bad people is an obligation society places on good people as a way of raising the cost of being bad.

And the reality is that in extremis, people freeze, flee, or fight. Two of those reactions are useful. I’ll quote my law enforcement officer friend:

By design, Universities are filled with idealists wishing to take the higher road of understanding and compassion when it comes to dealing with the dangers people often pose toward their own species.

…

Most importantly, if you find yourself in an active shooter situation and you can access real shelter or cover, waste no time running full speed in that direction. If you are trapped, in a room with an assailant who is picking off victims as he/she finds them, FIGHT.

No, I do not blame the victims in Virginia. The only person to blame is an insanely evil young man who isn’t here to receive his just punishment.

But I have advice for those who would prefer not to be victims. And it lies in the simple fact that the State cannot, and will not guarantee your safety. You are the ultimate guarantor of your safety. You should act that way.

So here, I’ll side with Michelle, and my cop friend, and Michael Moore (who would have thought it?) and tell Taylor that to call Malkin’s views asinine is – well – I’m too polite to say asinine, so I’ll just say foolish and wrong.

Update: fixed dumb conflation of names.

Update 2: Anne-Marie Cox takes a swing at the issue too; she’s indignant that John Derbyshire would suggest that someone might try and do something in the face of an active shooter:

If I had to choose a favorite insane statement here — like, say, if someone was holding a gun to my head — I think it’d be the idea that, “At the very least, count the shots and jump him reloading or changing hands. Better yet, just jump him.” Or, best yet: you could always try the ol’, “Shoe’s untied!” bit. Works with my theoretical mass shooting murderers all the time.

Um, Anne-Marie, it’s like this. One of the ways that you train for things that haven’t ever happened to you – and I’m so tempted to put in an assf**king reference here – is to imagine them, and pattern a response. real grown up people – like pilots, musicians, and yes, people who fight for a living – do exactly that.

Along with real training, it has a nice benefit, to which I can testify – which is that you’ll respond better if you’ve got a pre-made plan (and better still if you practice it) than if you don’t.

I’ll bet that no one today gets on an airliner without thinking a little bit about how they’d react to a hijacker. Which is one reason there won’t be any more hijackings without serious weaponry.

So thanks for playing, Anne-Marie, and please go back and comment on things you actually know something about, like what midlevel Washington wannabe politicians do for relaxation.