THE RUSSIAN FRONT

Anyone who’s spent time around academia has had a close encounter of the unpleasant kind with academic jargon. To be sure, all fields have some necessary technical vocabulary required to allow for precise expression of meaning. Even history, which can generally use standard English, has some terms of art. “Historicism,” for example, has a clear and specific meaning which is handy to have at our disposal. One of my objections to casually throwing around “socialist” and “fascist” as political abuse is that I’d prefer to have those terms reserved for their relatively clear and distinct historical referents.

But most of us can agree that a lot of academic jargon simply serves the purpose of claiming erudition and membership in the club of Great Thinkers. I just read (hat tip to Ralph Luker at Cliopatria) a marvelous takedown of unnecessary jargon in Simon Blackburn’s review of John Searle’s Making the Social World:

“Sometimes the mountains labor and bring forth something not much larger than a mouse. Here is a salient example. Suppose we enter on a joint enterprise. Together we are to shift a rock, carry a coffin, or row a boat. I cannot perform the task solely by myself, and neither can you. In Searle’s pleasantly old-fashioned example we set about getting a manual-shift car with a flat battery to start, by means of my pushing and you letting in the clutch at the right moment. I will only push if I expect you to let in the clutch–and if you do not let in the clutch, I will stop pushing and be annoyed at the waste of effort. Here is Searle’s account of this situation, in what he bills as his canonical notation for representing the structure of intentionality:

a collective B by means of singular A (this ia causes: A car moves, causes: B engine starts). In English this is to be read as: I have a collective intention-in-action B, in which I do my part by performing my singular act A, and the content of the intention is that, in that context, this intention-in-action causes it to be the case, as A, that the car moves which, in that context, causes it to be the case that B, the engine starts. Notice furthermore that the free variables “B” and “A” are bound inside the bracket by the verb phrases “car moves” and “engine starts,” that follow the respective letters.

It may be that Searle is right that this paraphrases the original. He may even be right that the sentence said to be in English is indeed so, although I must say that it is a rather strange and unfamiliar dialect of English. But how, exactly, are we to understand this dialect? Putting my hand on my heart I should say that for all my gray hairs and many years’ experience of fearsome bushwhacking through tangled thickets of logic and philosophy of language, I myself understand it by supposing that it means more or less that we are together trying to start the car by means of my pushing it and you letting in the clutch, which is where we started.”

Mitt Romney launched a blistering attack in today’s Washington Post on the April 2010 New START treaty, aimed at limiting strategic nuclear weapons. On balance, I think the treaty is a good thing, though I certainly recognize that there is room for reasonable debate as to its merits. What bothers me, though, is that Romney resorts to the worst kind of intellectual dishonesty in making his case against the treaty. In particular, he is alarmed by the fact that “Russia has expressly reserved the right to walk away from the treaty if it believes that the United States has significantly increased its missile defense capability.”

Romney is either ignorant of the workings of diplomacy or engaging in demogoguery in weighty issues of foreign policy. Neither explanation suits a potential presidential candidate. ALL treaties include clauses allowing the signatories to opt out. The United States can back out of New START as easily as Russia can. Russia’s reservation with regard to missile defense only makes explicit something which has clearly been part of Russian foreign policy since Gorbachev.

Need proof that opting out a treaty is nothing new?

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What have we learned from the arrests of accused Russian spies?

I need to be sure to say that coming to historical or present-day conclusions about intelligence is very difficult. To borrow a concept from Donald Rumsfeld, the known unknowns are bad enough and the unknown unknowns are nightmarish. If it turns out that a bunch of Russian sleepers work in the Department of Defense, then I’ll look quite silly.

That said, I think there are some conclusions we can draw.

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Robert Coalson, one of bloggers over at Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty’s Power Vertical, has an excellent sense of timing. Just this week, he pointed his readers to the Czech domestic counter-intelligence service’s report on strong and ongoing Russian efforts to recruit agents and gather scientific and technical intelligence. While it notes a substantial number of intelligence operatives working using diplomatic cover, it also points out that “In the past, activities of Russian intelligence services were by no means limited to those of the abovementioned legal residents. In the opinion of the Security Information Service, Russian intelligence services have in some cases smoothly picked up where their Soviet predecessors left off.”

And now the issue is hitting much closer to home. More commentary on THAT coming soon.

I’ve been reading quite of bit of military theorist Alexander Svechin over the last couple of weeks, and came across a nice observation of his on the nature of future war. It fits well with a phenomenon I’ve always found fascinating, which is the disintegration of encircled Soviet forces in the fall of 1941. When Soviet troops were encircled en masse by the Germans, as at Vyazma, say, or Kiev, some managed to keep their cohesion and break out through the stretched-thin German encircling forces. Most, however, marched off meekly into German prisoner-of-war camps–some 600,000 at Kiev alone. It’s difficult to know for certain, but the experience that drove Andrei Vlasov into collaborating with the Nazis may well have been the disintegration of his 2nd Shock Army when it was trapped behind German lines outside Leningrad and eventually disintegrated.

The contrast is quite striking with the German experience at Moscow in the winter of 1941-1942, where cut-off German formations maintained their cohesion and held on until they broke out or were relieved. It’s also a contrast with the Soviet experience of spring and summer 1942, when the Germans were advancing as quickly through Ukraine and southern Russia as they had through Belorussia and western Russia in fall 1941, but not were getting nearly the same haul of prisoners. Soviet troops were much more likely to retreat in good order out of German encirclement.

The reasons for the difference don’t seem especially mysterious to me–the Red Army in fall 1941 was badly-commanded, inexperienced, and not particularly thrilled with Stalin. By spring-summer 1942, the Red Army’s high command was getting better and the genocidal nature of the German war effort was increasingly clear. Svechin’s observation is quite striking, and a damning indictment of what Stalin’s regime had done to the Red Army:

“The typical battle of the future is fighting in encirclement, when the enemy will be on all sides and above . . and any sort of precise information on the location of one’s own troops and the enemy will be lost. The greatest achievements of military technology have put the center of gravity back on the human material—on the soldier’s consciousness and dedication to the banner under which he fights.” from Front nauka i tekhniki # 7, 1934, republished in Postizhenie voennogo iskusstvo (Moscow, 1999), p. 423.