My hero Mark Twain once quipped that there are lies, damned lies, and statistics. The estimable humorist could've substituted "maps" for "statistics" and his joke would ring just as true.

Trouble is, it's hard to faithfully depict a globe on a flat surface like a printed page. That creates abundant opportunities for mapmakers to, if not lie per se, then at least to shape perceptions for aesthetic or political effect. The best way to keep an accurate view, short of keeping a globe handy, is to consult a variety of different maps that portray the world from different vantage points. The more perspectives the better.

The venerable Mercator projection is an egregious offender, if only because it's so ubiquitous. It distorts the size of geographic features in extreme northern and southern climes, exaggerating not just their dimensions but the landmasses' seeming importance. And where should the map be centered to catch the observer's eye? Patriotic American cartographers once inscribed the prime meridian through Philadelphia, New York, or Washington, DC, signaling that the new republic lay at the origin of a new, better political system. Maps sold in the United States long showed North America at the center while splitting Eurasia, and the Indian Ocean, between the extreme left and right sides of the page. That makes sense if you're a business selling maps to American customers. But it can mislead.

Sometimes the effort to mold opinion is overt, meant to serve present political needs. For instance, the artist Richard Edes Harrison published a series of maps during World War II with the aim of exciting elite and popular sentiment for the war effort. Harrison's genius was figuring out the right projection to send a political message. My favorite is his map of the North Atlantic. Viewed from the right angle, the broad Atlantic looks like a roughly diamond-shaped inland sea. Message: North America and Europe occupy the rimlands of the same inland sea, so transatlantic unity is a must. The idea of a North Atlantic community carried over into the Cold War, helping make the founding of NATO possible when America might have retreated back into splendid isolation.

Why belabor such trivia? Think about the notion of a pivot to Asia. On a Mercator map, a pivot implies a wholesale, 180-degree shift of forces and policy attention from Europe to Asia. Looking westward to Asia means looking away from Europe, right? That's what a glance at the map implies. This thought is profoundly unsettling for many Europeans, who have protested their abandonment long and loudly.

But look at the pivot on a polar azimuthal equidistant projection centered on the North Pole. You're basically looking down on the top of the world. (Think the UN logo.) Seagoing forces from the west coast of North America trace an arc through the Pacific Ocean into East Asia. But forces bound from the east coast for the Indian Ocean trace an arc through the Atlantic Ocean, Mediterranean Sea, and Red Sea. Now plot the two tracks on the map -- one enclosing Eurasia along one coast and one along the other -- and it looks like America is hugging Eurasia. And we all love a group hug, don't we?

It seems the pivot needn't leave Europe so forlorn after all. To borrow from Mark Twain once again: reports of America's demise as an Atlantic power are greatly exaggerated.

So the U.S. Navy and Air Force chiefs of staff penned a good piece over at Foreign Policy last week, explaining the sister services’ AirSea Battle doctrine. Have a look.

Something struck me while reading it, namely that China is pursuing its own AirSea strategy under the guise of “counter-intervention” operations or, in Western parlance, anti-access and area denial. You might even call it AirSeaLand, since part of Chinese sea power resides in the Second Artillery Corps, the army’s missile force. But joint sea power is nothing new. History abounds with examples when coastal states alloyed land, sea, and eventually air into an implement of sea combat.

Nor do we have to look to exotic climes for examples. Here’s one from U.S. history that sounds strikingly modern. I’ve been reviewing my Spanish-American War history while piecing together some remarks for a Memorial Day speech next week in Newport. Hat tip to my colleague Professor George Baer, whose masterwork One Hundred Years of Sea Power (1994) reveals how eminent fin de siecle Americans thought about maritime defense and offense. Popular opinion deformed the U.S. war effort to a certain extent, in large measure because ordinary Americans entertained outsized fears of the Spanish fleet’s prowess. Citizens of seaports like Newport and New York clamored for protection from naval bombardment. Their pleas siphoned assets away from the main fights in the Caribbean Sea and Philippine Islands.

To appease public sentiment, the U.S. Navy formed a flying squadron for Atlantic waters. It also stationed long-in-the-tooth monitors — think of USS Monitor dueling CSS Virginia at Hampton Roads in the 1860s — in East Coast seaports. Alfred Thayer Mahan reports that the monitors boasted little military potential, but they did create a placebo effect. They were tokens of Washington’s commitment to the national defense, and they looked forbidding. How ships look determines their political impact on various audiences — especially when no gunfire is exchanged that could debunk the comforting image they project. The monitors were there. No Spanish fleet appeared off American shores to test their mettle. So these engines of war did their job despite their decrepitude.

That insight furnished Mahan with the opening discussion for his book Lessons of the War with Spain. We often berate Mahan for indifference to what transpires on land, and there’s some justice to such charges. In this case, however, he proposed harnessing land power for nautical purposes. Emplacing long-range coastal artillery at select ports would provide real defensive power. After all, a ship’s a fool to fight a fort. Army gunners would spare the navy from supplying warships — in effect mobile guard towers — for harbor defense.

Thus liberated from coastal defense, the fleet could roam the seven seas, executing such offensive functions as national leaders deemed fit. Call it LandSea Battle. The U.S. Army hoisted a protective aegis over Atlantic seaports while the fleet acted as the long arm of U.S. foreign policy. Or, as President Theodore Roosevelt put it, land power rendered the navy “footloose.” (Cue crappy old Kenny Loggins tune.)

That sounds remarkably like Beijing’s approach to sea power, but with a twist. Land-based PLA weaponry and short-range naval platforms hold off adversaries while the main PLA Navy fleet, like the U.S. Navy in the age of Mahan and Roosevelt, is footloose and fancy free. Here’s the twist, though: the reach of land-based sea power is now so great that the PLA Navy surface fleet can shelter within striking range of Fortress China while still remaining largely footloose. That reduces the urgency of China’s naval buildup, allows leisure time for fleet experimentation, and opens up manifold deterrent and coercive options for Beijing.

It’s rather as though Mahan’s coastal artillery boasted an effective firing range measured in hundreds of miles, as opposed to the few miles of offshore waterspace big guns actually could sweep. Such alt-history armaments would’ve granted commanders singular freedom to act beyond American waters. Or, Washington could have elected to remain on the strategic defensive, maintaining a small navy for constabulary duty and quelling local challengers. It appears you can accomplish a lot at sea with forces based ashore — and open up new strategic vistas for your navy in the process.

Maritime history: it’s the gift that keeps on giving.

Maj. Robert M. Chamberlain avers in Armed Forces Journal that land power "trumps" air and sea power in the Obama administration's pivot -- or rebalance, or whatever the term du jour is for this formidable yet soft and cuddly strategic venture -- to Asia. Or rather, he suggests that it should win out. Having broached similar ideas (along with my doughty coauthor Toshi Yoshihara) a couple of years back, I violently agree!

Well, mostly. To claim categorically that one thing trumps another is generally to overpromise. That's an ill-starred choice of term. Although ... let's bear in mind that editors, not authors, write the titles in many publications. Hype is commonplace when driving up circulation or web traffic is your goal. That may have been the case here.

Anyway. Maj. Chamberlin maintains, in effect, that air and sea power are intrinsically offensive and destabilizing in character, whereas the U.S. Army could anchor a defensive posture in places like Japan or the Philippines. By developing land-based weaponry, and by organizing to shape events on the high seas, the army could field its own, strategically defensive, relatively unprovocative anti-access capability.

And indeed, there is ample scope for quasi-static, land-based defenses in the Western Pacific. They could deter war. The United States and its allies must mount an anti-access strategy of their own.

How? Surface fleets are increasingly vulnerable to shore-launched weaponry. That idea constitutes the substructure on which China's anti-access strategy is built. But reciprocity is a good thing. Beijing hopes to deter U.S. forces from attempting forcible entry into the Western Pacific in wartime. The PLA will field strong anti-ship capabilities, and few doubt the political leadership would use them under certain circumstances. Beijing hopes Washington will balk at the heavy price of access. Ergo, deterrence.

The U.S. Army can repay the favor by plausibly threatening to deny access to its own offshore waters and skies. And the army can do so from dispersed, dug-in sites that are far less exposed than a ship or plane. Mobile missile batteries, moreover, are exceedingly hard to find, target, and dislodge -- witness coalition air forces' fruitless Scud hunt in western Iraq in 1991. Hide-and-seek is a game U.S. and allied troops can play as well.

Deterrence is negotiation through credible threats. The PLA can threaten allied movement at sea; the allies can tacitly reply that Asian waters will become a no-man's land should war come. The prospect of mutual assured destruction of surface navies will make for sobriety. So by all means, let's harness the logic of anti-access for the defenders of truth, justice, and the American (and Japanese, and Australian, and ...) way.

But let's not overstate the ease with which this metamorphosis will occur. A journal article is not enough. Operating from more or less fixed island sites on a more or less permanent basis would run counter to the U.S. Army's big-war tradition, whose proponents beseech the service to return to its roots as a conventional fighting force after a decade-plus of unconventional Middle Eastern conflicts. That's one influential group of opponents.

It would also run afoul of counterinsurgency and counterterror proponents, who see Iraq and Afghanistan not as wars that have come and gone but as harbingers of things to come. They too could find turning seaward a novel and unwelcome if not foolish prospect. In short, both major schools of thought within the ranks could align against the anti-access cause.

I wish advocates of land-based sea power well, then, but any serious effort along those lines is apt to encounter fierce bureaucratic headwinds. Finding a sponsor -- say, a maritime-oriented four-star or civilian secretary -- would be a good start as access deniers beat into those winds.

Army Strong!

This week the Naval Diplomat wings his way to Honolulu for a "Track II" conference with Indian and Chinese delegations at the Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies, an academic institution based within the U.S. Pacific Command. The theory behind Track II meetings is that unofficial diplomacy -- gatherings where the interlocutors are hostage to no political constituency and thus can speak their minds -- spurs creative thinking and debate.

Having exchanged views, participants then return home to act as opinion makers vis-a-vis their governments and fellow citizens. Track II negotiations at Oslo were widely credited with advancing the cause of Arab-Israeli peace during the 1990s. I'll let you know if we achieve peace in our time this week.

But I digress. Hawaii is fascinating not just for the obvious reasons -- the tropical setting and so forth -- but because of its eventful history, which owes much to its geostrategic value. It has captured attention even in China, where some sea-power pundits portray this Eastern Pacific feature as Asia's third offshore island chain. (I guess that makes the Americas the fourth.) During the 19th century, ambitious seafaring states -- the United States, Great Britain, Japan, and occasionally Germany -- jockeyed for power and influence in the archipelago.

Alfred Thayer Mahan mounted a tireless lobbying campaign in his writings, imploring the U.S. government to acquire the islands. In so doing, it could assure access to Honolulu while preventing some hostile power from acquiring the islands and, perhaps, denying access to American seafarers crisscrossing the Pacific Ocean. Mahan ultimately got his wish following the Spanish-American War, which wrought a revolution in American thinking about national power and purposes.

Congress had vacillated over whether to annex Hawaii, while President Grover Cleveland quashed a previous annexation bid. The defeat of Spain, however, delivered a modest Caribbean and Asia-Pacific empire into the republic's hands. Island acquisitions were suddenly a matter of expediency. Imperial management demanded way stations along the sea routes between North America and Asia. The "splendid little war" thus unclogged the political works in Washington, which proceeded with annexation in the months afterward.

In geopolitics as in real estate, it's all about location, location, location. Hawaii occupies a particularly auspicious location some 2,400 miles southwest of San Francisco. It lies along the sea lanes linking Panama with Asia. That was a big deal for sea-power advocates who fretted about where to stage the main U.S. Navy fleet -- Atlantic or Pacific? -- and for officials charged with administering the Philippine Islands. It took months to combine the fleet for action in the days before the Panama Canal opened. In 1898, for instance, the Pacific-based battleship Oregon had to undertake an epic voyage around South America to get into the Caribbean fight. Reaching the combat theater was an ordeal in itself.

Hawaii also lies astride the sea lines of communication connecting North America with Australia. That accentuated the islands' importance during the age of British maritime supremacy, and of course during World War II. Ships transiting between Canada and Australia commonly tarried at Honolulu for provisions and, after the onset of the age of steam, to quench steam engineering plants' thirst for fuel. Admiral Chester Nimitz masterminded the Pacific War from Pearl Harbor.

The other reason Hawaii was a magnet for diplomats and strategists' attention was that it was the only geographic feature around. Mahan depicted it as a lonely outpost on a featureless plain hundreds of miles across. Competition for control of the archipelago was inexorably zero-sum, simply because warships and merchantmen had no alternative port of call.

So the Hawaiian Islands aren't all about sun, fun, and ukuleles. They're about politics and strategy.

So let me try out a hypothesis on you. This week was Vietnam (and Malay Emergency, and Huk Rebellion) week in our course. Each time I review or write about these historical cases, it strikes me afresh that you could sum up the insurgents' strategy in a bumper sticker: start cumulative, go sequential. As Admiral Wylie counsels, echoing Clausewitz, pounding away at enemy forces repeatedly -- landing blow after blow until they succumb -- is the key to victory. For Wylie and Clausewitz, then, it takes a sequential campaign to bring the ultimate triumph. Cumulative operations -- scattershot actions unrelated in time or space -- make a useful adjunct but are indecisive in themselves.

Or, put more simply, an opportunistic though weaker combatant does what it can, where it can, to whittle a stronger antagonist down to size while amassing the wherewithal to prevail. Over time the weak may weary the strong while building up sufficient strength to meet the adversary on his own terms -- and win.

Isn't that the gist of Maoist theory? Mao maintained that Japan commanded only one advantage during its prolonged war in China, namely military supremacy. Sounds like enough, doesn't it? But the Japanese army was strategically adrift, while China's defenders held all of the remaining cards. Territory, resources, manpower: these latent assets would all work in China's favor provided it had enough time to tap them. Mao foresaw long, grinding, intrinsically cumulative struggles against superior foes.

Chinese forces, that is, would deny the enemy a decisive battle while looking for opportunities to mount small-scale tactical engagements against isolated or otherwise outmatched enemy units. In the meantime insurgent captains would recruit manpower, establish base areas, accumulate supplies, and so forth. They would tauten the sinews of armed might. Ultimately the trendlines would come to favor the weaker side defending its home turf. Mao's Red Army would seize the offensive and defeat the once-superior, newly beleaguered foe in conventional -- sequential -- fashion.

Ergo, start cumulative, go sequential.

This helps explain the course of the Vietnam War. The U.S. war effort was largely cumulative in nature. Bombing campaigns such as Operation Rolling Thunder and Linebacker I and II were cumulative; so was hunting insurgents in the hinterland or urban areas; so even were conventional-seeming search-and-destroy operations, since the communist adversary determined when the vast majority of actions started and stopped. American commanders passed up their sequential options, such as invading North Vietnam, for sound political and strategic reasons. Doing so nonetheless left the United States and its South Vietnamese ally fighting at a disadvantage. They seldom lost on the battlefield but couldn't quite win the war, either.

So if the insurgents can keep it cumulative until they're ready to go sequential, what's the bumper sticker for the counterinsurgents? Alas, there doesn't appear to be one. The counterinsurgent should look for opportunities to force the campaign into sequential mode, the realm where conventional victory is attainable. Short of that, it has to fight on the insurgents' terms. There's no substitute for patrolling, ambushes, building and rehabilitating infrastructure, and all the myriad of cumulative tasks that befall an incumbent regime -- and its allies -- that wants to consolidate its legitimacy. And political legitimacy is what insurgencies and counterinsurgencies are all about.

Maybe that disparity helps explain the frustrations and setbacks are inherent in unconventional warfare.

Imagine, if you will, a congress of the League of Mad Strategists. Huddled around a world map in some nondescript, dark-paneled room are Prussian soldier and theorist Carl von Clausewitz, Center for Strategic and International Studies scholar Edward Luttwak, and intellectual gadfly Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Together the theorists debate the nature of international competition and warfare, and identify some solutions to -- or at least ways to think about -- timeless problems.

Clausewitz starts. He's the prophet of interaction, yet he's all about rationality. Indeed, the precept that cost/benefit analysis must govern any war effort lies at the heart of his landmark treatise On War. But events have a way of confounding the most level-headed soldier or stateman. That's because the enemy gets a vote in competitive endeavors, and he invariably casts it to thwart our goals.

Compounding this clash of wills is the inexorable human tendency to overextend oneself amid the throes of combat. Which is where Luttwak weighs in, invoking the "paradoxical logic" of competition. Combatants that press their advantage further than they should expose themselves to "ironic reversals" of battlefield fortune. Overextension results in a local mismatch of forces.

Even the strong are prone to ironic reversals. They attenuate their strength when fighting far from home. A weaker power defending its home ground can raise the costs to its adversary to prohibitive levels, or even prevail outright. But the defender is hardly immune to overextension. If it succumbs to temptation, the conflict takes on a seesaw character. That's why Clausewitz likens armed strife to a wrestling match on a grand scale. The belligerents grapple constantly for strategic advantage. The momentum lurches back and forth erratically, like mercury.

To take a real-world example, Luttwak believes China has let hubris -- outrageous arrogance that begets self-defeating behavior -- get the best of it. By picking fights with its neighbors simultaneously, he maintains, Beijing risks uniting a hostile coalition that can push back. I concur.

Finally Taleb gets into the act. The keeper of the Black Swan -- the notion that human beings are linear thinkers highly susceptible to the unforeseen -- suggests a remedy for ironic reversals of fortune. Or rather, he suggests how leaders can arrange things so as to benefit from fateful, and unavoidable, turnabouts. His latest theory goes by the ungainly term "antifragile." Taleb points out that we usually assume the opposite of "fragile" is "robust," or "resilient," or some other synonym connoting the ability to withstand unexpected setbacks.

Not so, says this mad hatter of social science. In reality some systems actually benefit from Black Swans. Leaders sort through the wreckage, reflect, and improve. A fragile system shatters when struck a sharp blow; a robust system lumbers on; an antifragile system reaps positive gains. Big, ponderous, centralized organizations tend to be fragile. Decentralized, nimble organizations can recoup their mistakes, which are many but remediable. They adapt to and learn from Black Swans.

Memo to statesmen and commanders: decentralize your organizations, push authority down to junior people, and watch marvels commence.

Bearing in mind the old adage that a camel is a horse designed by a committee, the Pentagon's latest report on Military and Security Developments Involving the People's Republic of China is a worthwhile read. There's nothing especially new or scintillating in the report's review of PLA hardware or doctrine, but there are a few nuggets in its commentary on Chinese strategy. Herewith, my list of the Top 3 Takeaways from the Pentagon's China Report:

3. Windows can slam shut. The report's authors note that Chinese leaders see the early 21st century as a "strategic window of opportunity," and that they're in the habit of publicly promising to reach certain milestones by certain dates. They "routinely emphasize the goal of reaching critical and economic and military benchmarks by 2020" in particular. Now, any negotiations specialist worth his salt will caution political leaders not to commit themselves to definite achievements or timelines. Doing so raises popular expectations. It makes leaders look bad in their constituents' eyes when those constituents compare performance with promise and performance comes up short -- as it often does. Popular sentiment could goad Beijing into unwise actions in stressful times, as the leadership tries to uphold its pledges -- and maintain its credibility as the keeper of China's interests and aspirations. What will it do should the window appear to be closing?

One hopes China has genuinely reconsidered picking a fight with India, a great power with which it shares a long land frontier. Beijing has created headaches aplenty for itself through its conduct in the South China Sea and East China Sea. The last thing it should do is open another axis along which to disperse energy and resources. Why am I venting my spleen? Because last month a Chinese military patrol encamped several kilometers on the Indian side of the "line of actual control," which delineates the de facto border. It's doubtful the intrusion was a mistake. The patrol set up camp 10-20 kilometers on the Indian side of the line, depending on the news source. That's a heckuva navigation error.

The LAC is an artifact of a long-ago conflict, the 1962 Sino-Indian border war. The 1962 defeat is engraved on India's cultural memory. Chinese officials forever bemoan their century of humiliation; you'd think they would foresee the repercussions of dredging up bad memories among the Indian state and society. Yes, I understand neither Beijing nor New Delhi accepts the line of actual control as the precise boundary between the two countries. But that's beside the point, isn't it? The LAC represents a stable status quo. Neither side has any compelling interest in upending it. Yet China seemed intent on doing just that until Sunday, when the two governments agreed to pull back their forces.

Strategic theorists were probably turning over in their graves during the impasse. Given the rock-star status Alfred Thayer Mahan enjoys in China, decision-makers there should understand the perils of waging simultaneous strategic competitions on land and at sea. Mahan concedes that a nation can be a great sea power and a great continental power for awhile, but he also warns that the good times won't roll for long. China has mounted an impressive naval buildup precisely because it quieted disputes along its distended continental periphery. By reopening its territorial quarrel with India, Beijing risks having to redirect resources from sea power back to land defense. Needlessly draining your national treasury is self-defeating behavior.

Carl von Clausewitz expresses this commonsense idea -- conserve and focus your resources by conserving controversies and antagonists -- with his customary analytical rigor. The Prussian sets a high bar for opening new theaters or endeavors. Such an effort should be "exceptionally rewarding" without placing the main theater or enterprise in jeopardy. Before taking on a new commitment, therefore, statesmen and commanders should ensure they command "decisive superiority" at the places that matter the most. Again: don't multiply problems for yourself the way Clausewitz's and Europe's great enemy, Napoleon Bonaparte, did.

Harvard professor Joseph Nye wrote a column not long ago pointing out that Russia and China don't grasp how soft power works. And how! If it keeps unsettling its surroundings, Beijing shouldn't be surprised in the future when nervous giggles -- instead of admiration and amity -- greet its efforts to court foreign audiences. Why Beijing deliberately junked a promising charm offensive ranks as one of the wonders of the age. Hopefully the end to the Himalayan standoff marks a real retrenchment in Chinese strategy -- not just a temporary tactical withdrawal.

Yes, I know this time last week I was admonishing you gloom-and-doom types out there not to take counsel of your fears. Mine is not a universal view. Washington Post pundit George Will jokes that it's good to be a pessimist: you're either right in assuming the worst, or you're pleasantly surprised. I reject that as a general rule for living the good life. Still, a measure of pessimism is prudent if not indispensable when practicing to combat fires, floods, or mass casualties. That's even truer in human conflict.

In a past life the Naval Diplomat served as fire marshal in a major surface warship. In port that meant overseeing the duty fire party. We drilled constantly while responding to any actual emergency that took place, fires and flooding being the most common. While underway it meant making sure ten repair parties were properly outfitted, installed fire-suppression systems were in working order, watertight fittings were actually watertight, you name it. But the job was mostly about the human dimension. Hardware is important. Skillful, motivated people are more important.

Even so, it's easy to fall into bad habits when designing and executing a training regimen. Scripted training projects the trainer's assumptions onto reality; it unwittingly tries to predict the future. But you know what they say about assumptions, while history is extraordinarily unkind to attempts at prophecy. Disasters are predictable only in their unpredictability. Fires erupt and spread in strange ways. People get hurt, potentially depriving a team of its leadership or of specialists in certain functions.

Accordingly, it behooves trainers to hold exercises at odd times, to change the exercise conditions in midstream, and, perhaps most importantly, to simulate casualties among the leadership so that more junior personnel get the opportunity to exercise leadership and improvise under strain. In short, training is about preparing for intrinsically mercurial situations. It's about preparing for the worst while hoping for the best. In short, it demands a pessimistic outlook.

Incidents in which there's an adversary are doubly difficult. Stressful events have a way of defying the best-laid plans, whether through ill fortune, friction, or the intervention of Murphy's Law. In the case of military operations, law enforcement, or counterterrorism, human drive and determination come into play. Natural disasters or equipment failures are indiscriminate; an adversary actively tries to make things worse. An interactive clash of wills is a tough problem because the opponent keeps innovating in his effort to win or cause mayhem. Scripted training does even less good under such circumstances than it does when the "enemy" is an impersonal force like a fire.

Realistic training, then, ought to assume the worst. If the worst doesn't befall us, let's reserve the right to be pleasantly surprised along with George Will.

There's wisdom in science fiction. The conceit behind the reboot of the sci-fi epic Battlestar Galactica was that networking military forces exposes them to disaster unless commanders and weapons designers think ahead to the repercussions should an enemy exploit or break the network. The mechanical Cylons, arch foes of humanity, are able to crush the humans' battle fleet and bombard their home worlds with nukes by insinuating viruses into networked computers. They sever contact between capital ships and their fighter forces, and they shut down the fleet's and planets' defenses. Having lost the habit of fighting without networked systems, human crews make easy pickings for Cylon predators. The Galactica escapes only because its commander, a throwback to a low-tech age, refuses to permit networked computers on board. Any viruses are quickly compartmented and create little mischief.

Sci-fi aside, interrupting networks or other connections among fighting units is nothing new. For instance, my colleague Williamson Murray and his coauthor Alan Millett relate how in 1940 the invading German Army seeped through weak spots in French defenses, leaving "clots" of nearly intact units that nonetheless found themselves isolated and combat-ineffective. French soldiers and their gear remained; the French Army was gone. The same goes for scattered naval bases. There's a symbiosis between bases and the deployed forces they support. Unless a base can provide for itself, it depends on resupply by air or sea. Cut the air and sea routes, and it withers on the vine. That sad fate befell Japanese defenders during the Pacific War, when U.S. forces leapfrogged past their island redoubts. In its effort to cordon off vast swathes of the Western Pacific, Tokyo overtaxed the capacity of its merchant fleet to support forward outposts, and of its navy to protect merchantmen shuttling between rear areas and the defense perimeter.

Lesson: take a skeptical view of military hardware or doctrine that promises to choreograph the actions of ships and aircraft scattered across broad distances, clear away the fog of war, or exempt one side from harm. Sometimes revolutionary innovation delivers; it often doesn't. Part of my objection is philosophical, I suppose. If an innovation claims to strip battle of its essence -- combatants striking blow after blow against one another, inflicting pain and death in pursuit of political gain -- I apply an extraordinarily high standard of proof. That's mainly because the enemy gets a vote. Even successful schemes and technologies can be undone by determined adversaries. As Clausewitz teaches, opponents are not inert masses on which we work our will. They are thinking beings who deploy their own energies and ingenuity to balk our efforts.

That being the case, methinks a fatalistic attitude toward high technology is the healthy attitude. Let's embrace gee-whiz technology. But let's do so while trying to foresee how an opponent might frustrate GPS and other capabilities in combat, and while practicing doing without them. We may have to when it counts.