BAY: 'Rheostat warfare'

General Petraeus is using a the nonlinear approach to the war in Iraq. The linear approach ended with the capture of Saddam, a nation state entity and then transitioned to a nonlinear because the terrorist entities are not nation state connected and we had to deal with the complexities of international "rules of engagement" imposed for dealing with them. The laws don't exist yet. The objectives are to achieve a specific amount stability. The end state is to have a network of stabilities. Doing things iteratively requires constant feedback to a point of equilibrium. That system equilibrium must have the ability recover from interruptions to be defined as stable. Thus, the objective is to maintain stability for a certain amount of time in order to transition to the Iraqi's and the end state is to connect all transitioned stable systems together. That is what Congress doesn't understand and General Petraeus thoroughly understands and diplomatically interprets to the them. It's not necessarily mil speak, its thinking in complexity as Klaus Mainzer would say.

This me see the end of WWII in a way I had never thought about. We had VE day on May 8, 1945 and VJ Day on August 15. And we think history shows the war was over. But Russia and China and Japan continued fighting. England occupied Hong Kong. China regained Formosa. Russia gained strength, and on to the cold war it went. The active military engagements stopped. But history marched on in the wake of the war. The world is still working through ramifications of WWII. I hadn't ever considered it this way before. People looking for an "end" to the Iraq war will be disappointed. It will have an even more nebulous end than WWII. That will make many many people very very unhappy. But there is no other way. History has very few "light switch" moments.

People celebrated the "end" of WWI just as they celebrated the "end" of WWII, yet history reminds us that WWI never really ended, it was merely delayed and WWII in Europe was a continuation of that first, great war. We see other similarities in history. The various wars of Rome never really ended until the fall of Rome itself. Time after time, Caesar after Caesar, wars were fought, and supposedly won, with the same opponents. Even after the fall of Rome, wars between the Kingdoms of just about every country in Europe were fought time and time again across the centuries. The Kings may have changed, but the wars remained the same. Even the great empire of Chine was not free of war after the First Emperor fought, and supposedly won, his unification wars. Smaller struggles within that “unified" country continued during, and long after, the Emperor's reign. China also suffers numerous attacks from outside their territory, hence the Great Wall. Yet despite this, historians like to say that the Emperor united China and ended warfare there for millennia. But this isn’t true. When it comes to war, there are no true victors, just as there are no true victories. War itself is not something that can be easily defined, or even delineated. It s endemic to our nature, part of the very makeup of mankind, and I doubt that we will ever be completely free of it.

I found the full interview program with Gen. Patraeus. The site it's on takes the interview and adds, background and details. Made it a heck of alot easier to follow what the General was talking about. http://austinbay.thearenausa.com