Fighting Identity: Sacred War and World Change (The Changing Face of War)

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This work highlights a national ethos infused by a sacred narrative of divine mission. This deep association leads to a narrow approach to conflict relationships, built around an Us vs. Them distance from the enemy, in which their submission is achieved through kinetic effects and their subsequent redemption through our good works (reconstruction). Vlahos contends that America's difficult engagement in the Muslim world demonstrates urgently that different operational approaches and tactics (like counterinsurgency) are not enough. Alternative paradigms of strategic engagement are needed, but their very consideration requires deeper cultural rethinking about how we assess world change and other cultures, and how our national ethos makes war.

Why are terrorists and insurgents we fight so formidable? Their strength - and our vulnerability - is in identity. Clausewitz knew that geist (spirit) was always stronger than the material: identity is power in war. But how can non-state actors face up to nation states? The answer is in globalization. This is the West's 3rd globalization. Two centuries of intense mixing has torn down old ways of life and created a growing demand for new belonging. There is also a decline in US universalism. America's vision as history's anointed prophet and manager is now competing head-to-head with renewed universal visions. Like Late Antiquity and the High Middle Ages our globalization begins to subside. We may be in the later days of American modernity. We can see this worldwide, as emerging local communities within states and meta-movements find their voice - through conflict and war. Identities struggling for realization are always the most powerful. Add the diffusion of new technology and new practice, and even the poorest and seemingly most primitive group can now make war against those on high. They are successful because of a symbiotic fit between old states and new identities. Increasingly, old societies no longer find identity-celebration in war - while non-state identities embrace the struggle for realization. Hence non-state wars with America become a mythic narrative for them. Our engagement actually helps them realize identity - and we become the midwife. This book offers another path to deal with non-state challenges, one that does not further weaken us.

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Fighting Identity: Sacred War and World Change (The Changing Face of War) Review

Sun Tzu wrote "Not knowing the other and not knowing oneself, In every battle certain defeat." Michael Vlahos has written an important book if we are going to be able to avoid that defeat. Most importantly, he recognizes that we have to take a hard and honest look at ourselves to understand our enemy. The conventional wisdom is that our enemy, the "other," is separate from us. Vlahos, however, understands that just because the other is different (culturally, economically, or otherwise) does not mean that it is separated from us. Indeed, we need to understand how we shape them and that there is a symbiotic relationship that we ignore at our own peril. Ultimately, "Fighting Identity" is not about how to fight the identity of the other, but about coming to grips with our own identity of what it means to be American beyond the shallow jingoism of politics and punditry. Even if one doesn't completely agree with Vlahos's prescription of national service (and I don't, but I understand and agree with the underlying reasons that lead him to call for it), his diagnosis of the problem is absolutely correct. What Vlahos so clearly and eloquently grasps is that the real defeat we have to worry about is not one inflicted by the enemy but one we would bring upon ourselves.

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