Boats Against the Current - Peter J. Munson

The Responsibility of Civilian Policy Advocates: Syria and R2P

2012-03-04T07:56:00.003-08:00

(MAHMUD TURKIA/AFP/Getty Images)

My views on the responsibility to protect concept and its advocates cavalier promotion of their cavalierly acronymed (R2P) construct previously boiled over into a debate on civil-military relations. When I rhetorically asked on Twitter if they were ready to head down to the recruiting station to back up their convictions, I was accused of stepping afoul of the dictates of civilian control of the military. I had no such intentions, as I subsequently stated. Instead, I was asserting that R2Pers' moral certitudes were not backed up by a sufficient and sober counting of the costs. Thinking of the "sacrifice" in the sterile terms that have accompanied a decade's worth of airport thank-yous and sporting events kickoffs is not the same as the heart-rending, gut-wrenching feeling of losing someone close to you; the flesh-tearing, life-changing pain of being maimed or killed by war; or the numbing, mind-altering experience of searching for parts of bodies, pulling dead children from rubble, and the like. These are not a prerequisite for policy prescription, however the very terrible realities of war should not be glossed over in an attempt to sell lethal policy. The advocates will state that these things are on-going in Syria, that they have contemplated them, and that we have a responsibility to stop it. They will also state that the military has signed up for such things and that it must stand ready to make such sacrifices. They also believe, against the weight of recent experience and longer historical example, that this will somehow be different. That nifty technology will somehow make it easier, cleaner. That aseptic corridors will be acceded to by a dictator determined not to find his end in a roadside ditch under the blows of his once-subjects, a gunshot, and the slow bleed, in great pain, during which he knows he is dying. This image is undoubtedly seared into Assad's mind and that of his coterie. But, surely, he will play fair with us.

All the more reason to take him out, they will say. He is craven and cannot be allowed to continue this crime of epic proportions. They do not see that their desire for a limited and humane intervention faces the vote of a determined enemy that will want to draw us into the quagmire, will want our precision-guided munitions to fall into the ambiguous targets of war, where cameras capture the wreckage of children, bright clothes smeared with blood and dusted with the gray remnants of a home collapsed upon them. A father with tears in his eyes stands, hands pointing to the body, palms outward in helplessness. Why, he asks, why do the Americans keep doing this? Suicide bombers, IEDs, or missiles will cross lines on maps in op-eds and journal articles and we will call them cowards. Meanwhile, drones or manned aircraft will loiter tens of thousands of feet above in impunity after the destruction of Syria's integrated air defense system with a bombing campaign that shocks all of the interventionists in its ferocity and breadth. As the map lines blur, the bombs will fall silently, following the invisible beam of a laser. They will fall into the ambiguity on the other side of the line and our moral certitude will shake, shudder, and eventually crumble as a civil war spreads in the murk. We will look at the lines, now covered in dust, and bicker over what to do and how to do it.

Actors in Syria and in the region will tell us that they never wanted us there in the first place. People scarred by war, their earliest memories marked by the smell of seared hair and flesh, burning plastic and rubber, the wails of mothers and sisters, a father, a grandfather, a brother transformed forever into a wrecked corpse, will march to the charge of another invasion, another occupation. These will be the ones that survived by the lessons learned in a decade of war. We will stand, the lines now vanished, trampled by the movement of patrols into the ambiguity, not wanting to press beyond our conception of a limited intervention, but unable to leave. The R2Pers will not be in the midst of this. They will be writing from their study, incredulous that military and civilian officials could have botched such a simple mission once again. Wondering why we hadn't learned all the lessons of the better wars we could throw.

Surely, it cannot be as bad as all that, you might say. True. It may not be as bad as I say, but it will surely be more messy than the glib op-ed that Anne-Marie Slaughter threw together for the New York Times last week. CNN reports that the military is looking at using as many as 75,000 troops just to secure potential Syrian chemical weapons sites. The realities of a Syrian intervention are far messy than Dr. Slaughter is willing to countenance in her infantile fantasy masquerading as policy prescription. Therein lies the rub. Dr. Slaughter is a respected policy elite and people take her ideas seriously. Therefore, she has a responsibility to be honest and open in her advocacy with regard to the risks and complexities of her proposal. Dr. Slaughter tweeted a few weeks ago that those outside of government could partake in one-sided advocacy, leaving policy-makers in government to sort out the details. This is the height of irresponsibility. Essentially, she is saying that people like her are free to sell the American people on a policy in NYT op-eds without fully disclosing the costs and complexities, leaving the unhappy recipients in government with the task of dealing with the unstated costs and risks, while public debate shaped by dishonest people like her has closed off some of their policy options.

Slaughter states that simply arming the opposition would lead to destabilizing civil war. However, arming the Free Syrian Army to create "no-kill zones," that is enabling the FSA to control swathes of territory just within the sovereign borders of Syria would somehow bring an end to the butchery. Not mentioned is how the FSA would take or hold this territory against the likely violent disagreement of the regime. We are talking about battle here. Not potshots against regime forces, but the taking and holding of territory. This is not just glossed over in the Slaughter plan, but completely ignored. She speaks blithely of the use of special forces to enable the FSA, and how they could enable the FSA to cordon population centers and rid them of snipers. What you don't see here is the bloody battle and likely airstrikes needed to push the bulk of the regime forces away from these population centers to be cordoned. Nor does it discuss the brutal and psychologically exhausting game of counter-sniper operations.

Slaughter next discusses locating tank and artillery units. What she does not discuss is what is to be done once they are located. Will they be showered with leaflets? Or will she expect us to neutralize them? That is a clean term. It involves using aircraft, which means destroying an extremely capable integrated air defense system (IADS). While there has been commentary to the contrary, this is much different than slipping through once or twice on raids as the Israelis have done. Rest assured, any use of air in Syria will require an elaborate take-down of the IADS that will shock the bleeding hearts in our midst. Even with the use of new technology to electronically disable the system temporarily, any attacker will use bombs to take them out permanently. Also, no matter how precise the weapons, whether used against IADS, tanks, or artillery, the amount of explosive and shards of metal required to destroy such targets creates a deadly bloom that extends well beyond their intended target. When missiles, artillery pieces, or tanks are located in and amongst civilian structures, collateral damage (as described above far more messily) will occur.

Slaughter asserts that all of this will be done only defensively and only against those that "dare" to attack the haughtily termed no kill zones. Defensively is not defined here. Does defense include taking out the IADS? Does defense include taking out artillery in range of the no-kill zones? Does defense include taking territory inside Syria to establish no-kill zones? Does defense include counterattacking against Syrian forces that mass in preparation to push these "foreign fighters" (as they will be termed) out of their territory? Does defense include pushing farther into Syrian territory when these no-kill zones fail to stop the killing beyond their neat lines?

Slaughter then goes completely off the rails of credibility when she states that Turkey and the Arab League should help the opposition more actively through the use of remotely piloted helicopters, both for logistical missions and to "attack" Syrian air defenses and mortars (she leaves out artillery here, not sure why) that can range the no-kill zones. First, we see here that even Slaughter cannot sort out her charade of a purely defensive operation. How is an attack purely defensive? Second, if Slaughter was informed to an extent just one step above dangerous ignorance of military affairs, she would realize that her call for the Turks and Arab League to use remotely piloted helicopters for logistical and attack missions is roughly equivalent to a call to use sharks with lasers on their heads to do the same. She cites American use of remotely piloted helicopters in Afghanistan. True. The U.S. has used two prototype remotely piloted helicopters to perform logistical missions in Afghanistan. These are prototypes, however. They have not been used in an attack role. Using drone helicopters in an attack role against sophisticated air defenses or artillery positions is so far off even for America right now that she may as well have advocated using teleporters and phaser guns. To imagine that the Arab League and Turkey can obtain and use such technology operationally in any meaningful numbers is so ludicrous as to be a lie. I don't expect Slaughter to be a military expert, but stepping back from the technological aspects I do expect her to understand that concerted action by the Arab League, even in the most circumscribed situation, is not immediately forthcoming. Advanced military operations using breakthrough technology is completely out of the realm of credible policy prescription.

Thus, the last few paragraphs of Slaughter's vapid essay indicate that it is completely out of touch with reality. She states that it is up to the Arab League and Turkey to adopt a plan of action. That simply is not going to happen in any form similar to what she advocates. The only way that such a plan will be implemented is if the U.S. twists arms and stands ready to do all the heavy lifting. In reality, then, Slaughter's neat plan will degenerate into the U.S. sticking its nose into yet another quagmire.

I do not believe that only those with military experience are qualified to advocate military intervention. Nor do I object to the primacy of civilian control over the military. I do object to policy advocation so simplistic and incorrect as to be deliberately misleading. War and military force is a brutal and imprecise instrument. It is ugly, destructive, wasteful, and stupid. It makes no clean cuts, creates no neat solutions. Sometimes it is the only option and sometimes the terrible horrors of war are required to prevent catastrophe. We must be brutally honest and circumspect, however, in our advocacy of policy. If the benefits truly outweigh the costs, let us discuss and air the best estimates and make an informed decision. Advocacy like that of Anne-Marie Slaughter, however, is so disingenuous and so powerful with the pulpit that she commands as to be its own sort of evil. It is an evil that I hope she corrects.

Which One is Not Like the Others?

2012-03-03T10:36:00.001-08:00

This week was a marathon of 13-hour days for me. I've done longer and more stressful days and I know many of you have, but I've never before done consecutive 13-hour days making info papers, powerpoint briefs, and other products. I'll not descend into a post-mortem of what led to the long days, but one can assume that a failure of management led to the crisis, adding another set of data points to the posts I've written on those topics. At one point, nearly cross-eyed after turning in the last brief of an afternoon, I was discussing the finer points of just what bullet scheme was appropriate on a powerpoint slide with a retired lieutenant colonel, now contractor. Well, really I was saying that the focus on such inanities was stupid. The point I was making was that the reviewers of such products, paper graders, paid little attention to the substance of the products, only the superficialities. I'm not talking about glaring errors, here, but very small details. The retired lieutenant colonel said, "I used to feel the same way, but after I worked at PP&O I came to see that if there isn't attention to detail on the little things, the content is going to be off too."

I'll come back to that statement in a moment. First, let's talk about the little things. I'm amazed by the eyes of one of my paper graders. He could spot a sentence with only one space after it at fifty yards. On our raft of about 25 papers/products for a trip book this week, he was able to spot differences between similar products (e.g., in the transliteration of Arabic names) at a glance. I get it. Products for high level officials need to be flawless. The frustration on the action officers' part was not so much with the demand for excellence as it was with the staff failures that let to this being an emergency rather than an iterative editorial process. Also, I know (I hope) that once the superficialities were corrected, someone looked over the papers for content. I never heard a word about content, though. I'm hoping that this silence was because we focused on high quality content on a short timeline over the superficialities that were corrected by the system.

Back to the statement that forcing a focus on the little things forces a focus on content. I thought about that for the rest of the day. At face value, I rejected it. I value the content of my ideas and my writing far more than I do the superficialities of formatting. Substance over superficialities. Not everyone has the same thought process. They are less rigorous or perhaps have less of a background or interest in the topics they are working. Or they are less intellectually attuned. For these people, the knowledge of close paper grading based on attention to minute details of formatting, etc, are the stick that forces attention to detail on both substance and superficialities.

This got me to thinking about the raft of issues that I have with the inanities of military life. I've had the same back and forth regarding attention to detail at the Marine Corps Gazette blog regarding whether attention to detail in junk-on-the-bunk inspections, uniform issues, and drill really impact our core mission of combat readiness and winning the nation's battles. I maintain that attention to detail can be taught by focusing on what matters - battle drills, excellence in your specialty, quality in content in an information paper, etc. Yet, I think I am missing something. As a commenter on the Marine Corps Gazette blog wrote, maybe I am over-thinking this.

The Marine Corps, for all its propaganda about being small and lean, is a massive bureaucracy of over 200,000 active duty troops and who knows how many civilians and contractors. Massive bureaucracies, nonsense about centers of excellence notwithstanding, must produce a sufficient quality and consistency across their ranks. They do not have the luxury of encouraging excellence in one division (here I mean business division generically, not a military division) and shutting failing divisions down. Big bureaucracies must quality-spread. The flip side of quality-spread is dumbing down or mediocracy. We can't let all the high performers aggregate in the successful divisions with good leadership because we can't allow other arms to fail. Thus, we must seek an average and standard level of performance. We must utilize incentives and disincentives that encourage the average, or really the lowest common denominator, to perform to this standard. In a few elite units, the high caliber of personnel means that they will relentlessly pursue pure excellence without paying any attention to the superficialities of traditional military discipline. When you descend to the median or below, this simply won't be the case. If you let a subpar soldier slip on inane standards, he'll slip on the standards that really matter in combat. At the lowest common denominator, the pea-brained cannot distinguish between drill, hands in pockets, and parking on the grass on one hand, and battle drills, weapons proficiency and maintenance, and combat discipline on the other. Those who don't have pride in their intellect will not put out quality content if you do not hold their feet to the fire on the superficialities as well.

This is why we have supervisors that can sniff out the differences in a set of products like a hound dog on a bone. This is why our promotion boards won't elevate talent ahead of its time, nor will they select uniquely talented people who don't measure up on things like their photo or their PFT score. Mediocracy sucks, but it is better than a force with peaks and valleys - units who are truly excellent on one hand and those that are mission failures on the other. Different is bad in a large bureaucracy. Additionally, this is why our military is tending toward centralization and standardization. Yes, by taking initiative for training, administration, and evaluation out of the hands of the commander, you stifle the ability of the best to excel. More importantly, you make it harder for the marginally competent to fail as he or she might if left to his/her own devices.

So, in my process of maturing as an officer in the Marine Corps, my views are coming around to reflect those of my seniors in the bureaucracy. They said, somewhat condescendingly, that I'd understand once I grew up. Well, I'm starting to understand. I also understand that I do not want to become another neutered bureaucrat who upholds the standard of mediocracy and calls it excellence. I do not want to be just another gray body in a cubicle. I chafe, I rage against the standards that uphold an acceptable level of performance across a large bureaucracy. This is not healthy.

A lot of articles have been written about how the military fails to retain and reward talent. These articles, I'm coming to see, are rot. In all honesty, I interact with some blindingly incompetent people on a daily basis, but I've also had the honor to work with and for truly talented and excellent officers, leaders, managers, and practitioners. There are very talented officers who choose to remain in the service and buck the trend of mediocracy. These talented officers tend to be placed in key billets, often in the operating forces. Often, these officers must turn to the tools of enforcing inane standards in order to get the mediocre in their midst to perform. The military retains plenty enough talent to keep the machine going at the required standard. However, there are a good number of very talented people who reside far above the median line that are simply unable to happily conform to the norms and concepts required to maintain the standards of the large bureaucracy. These people are going to leave the service and no reforms suitable to a large bureaucracy can be made to entice this population to stay in. They are simply unsuited to work happily in such a beast. They will go off to do other things and this is good both for them and for the service. Like a missing space after a period or a text box that sits too close to the line under the title on a powerpoint slide, they are out of place and the right eye can spot them a mile away. Either these individuals will eventually move themselves down five clicks and over five clicks and be modified with the right bullet scheme and font, or they'll delete themselves from the presentation altogether.

Toward at Typology of Military Dysfunction

2012-02-19T10:05:00.000-08:00

Cross-posted from the Marine Corps Gazette blog.

In previous posts, I've explored some organizational and incentive factors as to why the military acts the way it does. Actions at the individual level, though, are often the most perplexing. For instance, why would people who have risen to senior levels with 20 years or more of experience in the organization exhibit such toxic personalities as to drive middle managers to homicidal or suicidal contemplation. I haven't actually seen a case of actual suicidal thoughts, but I have heard more than one officer say, "I wish they would just fire me and put me out of my misery." The screaming, belittling, and insecure; the email all-caps yellers (who cc the world); the control freaks; the incompetents; the indifferent... What is the pathology behind this behavior, I wondered. I reached out to some friends to test their reactions to the question, has a decade of the stress of combat operations caused irreparable psychological harm to our senior officers? While the answer is undoubtedly yes in some cases, I think that some more salient factors have contributed to the dysfunction and may move us toward understanding (I doubt rectifying) the situation.

Many of you have no doubt wondered if a senior officer was literally mentally ill. I have personally witnessed multiple superiors exhibiting behaviors that seem to rise to a level of dysfunction that could only be explained by disease. These are not solely personal musings about bad bosses, but rather are suspicions voiced by multiple subordinates exposed, over time, to extremely erratic behaviors. Beyond my personal experiences, I have heard similar stories experienced first hand by trusted sources. When one reads some of the accounts of the rash of Navy commanding officer reliefs, for example, these behaviors shine through in some cases. Applicable personality disorders include paranoid, schizotypal, borderline, histrionic, narcissistic, and obsessive-compulsive personality disorders. Some of these behaviors are to be expected in the Type A personalities common in the military, however the behaviors I am thinking of rise beyond the level of the abrasive but productive Type A. Furthermore, while these behaviors are not prevalent in the force, they are disturbingly common: most people will run into such toxic leaders on a fairly regular basis during their time in the military.

In an attempt to understand a number of dysfunctional interactions I've witnessed in the past years, I have been wondering if perhaps the stresses of ten years of wartime service have permanently damaged some of our leaders. While no one has been in combat for ten years straight, many senior officers have been in positions of significant responsibility under heightened operational tempos and demands constantly throughout the past decade. In discussing these demands with a good friend, we shared a number of stories. Most of them involved the erratic behavior of officers under conditions of significant stress and extremely limited rest. These included screaming bouts, incoherent phone calls from combat operations center floors, erratic decisions, and fainting spells. These are not examples of personality disorder, but they do demonstrate the toll of extreme stress and exertion and turned a lightbulb on for me. We discussed the episode of BG Mark Kimmitt, the top U.S. military spokesman in Iraq passing out during a news conference in 2004 and Gen David Petraeus fainting during Senate testimony in 2010.

What discussion of these episodes drove home was that the problem is the "big man" theory of organizational success. Our senior leaders are, for the most part, undeniably impressive individuals. These impressive individuals have met a perfect storm in the past decade, putting them up against "wicked complex problems," with limited resources, and a political climate in which Americans expect their government to be able to forestall every calamity, while seeking to pin the blame for any failure to attain perfection to single individuals. This means senior officials are individually pilloried if they fail to accomplish nearly impossible missions. The flip side of this is the hagiography that imagines that people like Gen Petraeus can single-handedly turn around dire situations with little regard to the surrounding factors and the odds of pulling off such feats again in the future.

This cultural fairy tale trickles down from the top, and we have officers who imagine that the only way to lead is to work 18 hours a day, PT for another 2, and sleep maybe 4 hours. In combat, reduce the sleep factor even further. This certainly produces both acute and chronic psychological and cognitive dysfunction. Even when the formula is less extreme, however, the big man theory is extremely corrosive. It drives the micromanagement we all disdain, it erodes the trust between subordinate and superior, it robs organizations of initiative, it leads to the setting of unobtainable and poorly considered goals, it creates a single point of failure, it inhibits communication, and scuttles collaboration, just to name a few. By promoting supermen to positions of prominence, our organizations chase the myths of omniscience and invulnerability. We imagine we can do anything. As our erstwhile heros have demonstrated, however, there are finite limits to the hours of the day and the ability of the body to defy the laws of physiology, physics, and gravity.

In our commands, then, we have the supermen. Some of these are truly extraordinary, exhibiting not only superhuman endurance and intellect, but also a steady and mature leadership that inspires subordinates. Many attempt to follow in their footsteps, however, and fall short. Acute and chronic fatigue, accumulated stress, and the realization that they cannot live up to the big man theory of leadership weigh down, leading to behaviors that tend toward the personality disorders noted above. Especially prominent are lack of trust in subordinates bordering on paranoia and attempts to portray the big man persona that fall disastrously close to borderline, histrionic, and narcissistic personality disorders. In the face of such behaviors, subordinates tend toward dysfunction, as well, in attempts to avoid the abuse that is almost certainly forthcoming.

At the other end of the spectrum, though, lies a very different, but no less harmful beast. The explosion of the higher headquarters bureaucracy in the past ten years has created a demand for staff officers that is not met by quality supply. This demand is met both by contractors and activated reservists. I will undoubtedly get into uncomfortable territory with some readers here, but will nonetheless press on. Many reservists and contractors are true patriots, highly qualified for their billets. They have chosen to take challenging jobs, in the case of reservists sometimes at considerable personal, financial, and family hardship, in order to serve the country during a time of war. This is sadly not always the case, however. Too many reservists and contractors work in headquarters because they are unable to find a job that combines such good pay and such low expectations elsewhere. While they are nonetheless subjected to the same stress as the rest of us, too many reservists have been promoted far beyond the ranks at which they topped out on active duty. Too many contractors have slid into positions that they are woefully unprepared to fill. Add to this the at least 10 percent of active duty officers who are habitually worthless. They are quickly sniffed out at lower-level positions and tossed up to the big bureaucracy where demand outstrips quality supply. These individuals can be found at most headquarters these days. You can pick them out watching YouTube or pontificating, coffee cup in hand, while others (both active duty and the conscientious and capable reservists and contractors) scurry around them, trying to avoid the roadblocks of incompetence they throw up. The reason why I take this seemingly tangent rant is both because I need to do it for my own mental health, but also because this is the reality that surrounds many senior officers on headquarters staffs these days. This only further heightens their big man theory - that being that they are surrounded by incompetence and must carefully guide every action. At the same time, it deepens their mistrust and even disdain for the capabilities of their subordinates.

So, at one end we have the big man. At the other end, we have the incompetents, who are often pathological in their own right, deftly avoiding the figurative shotgun blasts to the chest that would send them packing. In between, you have the masses. In this middle falls the range of mildly to extremely capable officers that make up the bulk of the force. They seek to negotiate the rapids that course between the two poles that make their lives most difficult. Within this group are several types. Some are able to swallow their pride, go along to get along, make the "ham sandwich" and generally avoid negative notice and soldier on with their heads down. Others live their days in a smoldering rage at the incompetence that surrounds them, wishing they had a way to fix it, and dying inside a little every day because they cannot. Still others cope amazingly with the dysfunction, seeming to be able to remain cheery in even the most ridiculous of circumstances. These people are often those that immerse themselves in the mythology and ritual of the organization like members of Opus Dei, and say things like "Every day is a holiday" or "I'm living the dream" and have convinced themselves that they truly mean it. This may be the case for more individuals outside of higher headquarters and doing what they dreamed of in the operating forces, but at the staff level you have to be delusional to believe it. The theme, here, is that these are all coping mechanisms that people use to survive dysfunction. More than one of my colleagues has referred to their situation as one of an abused child.

How to remedy this situation? The biggest targets are the two poles of dysfunction: cull the incompetents and reduce the belief in the big man myth. The culling of the incompetents will be taken care of in part by the drawdown of the wars, the drying up of OCO money, and the coming reductions in force. Leaders must take these as a positive opportunity to make intelligently targeted cuts to both individuals and bloated structure. As for the big man myth, leaders must watch themselves and their subordinates for these tendencies and seek to return to more collaborative, trusting, and healthy staff interactions and processes. As for those in the middle, we will continue to gut it out, but leadership must realize that their talent will be looking for the door more and more as the force shrinks and the sense of wartime duty lifts with the end of our involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq. The way in which our forces are reset in the coming years will resound in the health of the force in the coming decades.

Talent Management

2012-02-14T19:19:00.001-08:00

Aaron MacLean at WaPo bemoans the military's lack of talent management (via @Doctrine_Man). Many readers may disagree with the below comparison, but I challenge them to do some introspection as to whether they are mediocre beneficiaries of the military welfare/jobs program who use the lock-step promotion metric to justify their existence and satiate imaginations of grandeur or truly exceptional performers. For those crying "experience," I have news for you: top performers with the right assignments can absorb in a decade what most didn't learn in 20 years.

Imagine you are the CEO of a major American corporation. One of your executives, who is responsible for operations in, say, Kansas, is a phenom. ... If this wunderkind is so good in Kansas, it stands to reason that he could provide the same profitable results for your shareholders on a larger scale. Based on these considerations, you decide to make him manager of all Midwestern operations.
Now imagine that you are not a CEO, but a senior leader in the United States armed forces. Faced with a comparable situation—instead of a statewide manager, our hotshot is now an infantry company commander achieving remarkable success in Afghanistan—your options are far more limited. In fact, you are prohibited by both policy and regulation from exercising anything near the flexibility available to your private sector counterpart. This is the case despite the fact that your firm’s wages are uncompetitive compared to what top performers could earn elsewhere, and that you demand sacrifices of your leaders and especially of their families far in excess. Most importantly of all, your hands are tied despite the fact your charge is not just to produce the best profit for your shareholders, but to win a war for your country.

Gordon Gekko, DoD, and the La Brea Tar Pits

2012-02-09T12:41:00.000-08:00

It would be good for the stockholders in DoD, Inc. to remember Gordon Gekko thundering in the original Wall Street: "You own the company. That's right, you, the stockholder. And you are all being royally screwed over by these, these bureaucrats, with their luncheons, their hunting and fishing trips, their corporate jets and golden parachutes. ... Teldar Paper, Mr. Cromwell, Teldar Paper has 33 different vice presidents each earning over 200 thousand dollars a year. Now, I have spent the last two months analyzing what all these guys do, and I still can't figure it out. One thing I do know is that our paper company lost 110 million dollars last year, and I'll bet that half of that was spent in all the paperwork going back and forth between all these vice presidents. The new law of evolution in corporate America seems to be survival of the unfittest. Well, in my book you either do it right or you get eliminated. In the last seven deals that I've been involved with, there were 2.5 million stockholders who have made a pretax profit of 12 billion dollars. Thank you. I am not a destroyer of companies. I am a liberator of them!"

Just as Gekko wondered about what the vice presidents of Teldar Paper did, I often wonder the same thing as I look at all of the lieutenant colonels, colonels, and general officers that populate our staffs, each with twenty years or more of military experience, and each shuffling paper back and forth. This is not an attack on individual officers, but rather on their collective profusion and the resultant choking effect on the organization. Over and over again, I have heard senior officers state that certain generals are “action officers,” meaning that they want detailed cognizance of the inner workings of projects once left to majors. Paperwork and “staff processes” proliferate in these top-heavy commands, as papers and policies are staffed and staffed again, round and round to all the vice presidents of Teldar Paper. Our military, for all the centralization of control bemoaned in professional journals, rules by committee decision at the upper levels. As a result, decisions take months if not a year or more to come by, as the proliferating staff power centers guarded by colonels and general officers seek to have a cut on every policy, put their fingerprints on every initiative, and jealously guard their position and that of the bevy of contractors, activated reservists, and hapless active duty officers that chase their every whim. This bureaucratic accumulation of seaweed and barnacles slows down the organization tremendously and proliferates tasks and information requirements by the day. Thus, your government flies lieutenant colonels, colonels, and a general across the world to meet for days, costing hundreds of thousands of dollars, but with nary a decision or any really measurable progress made.

The critics of my criticism and cynicism will say that I do not understand. That below the surface, important things are happening. Understanding and “buy-in” are gained. The stage is set for future action. I say, “Bullshit!!” I understand the power of such intangible things, but the reality is that these intangibles can be gained along with real actions and decisions if we have leadership capable of action and decision and senior middle managers capable of driving a working group. In this I mean, someone who comes prepared with an agenda and a predicted outcome, but ready to be guided by the intelligence of the group, rather than standing for hours and pontificating off the cuff, spouting platitudes about crawling, walking, and running, et cetera, ad nauseum. For this to begin happening again, however, these officers must be given the power and trust to be decision-makers, or at least decision-shapers, rather than insignificant cogs in a massive bureaucratic decision machine. The lack of initiative is due to the vast scale of the institution and the remote and diffuse locus of power and focus in the institution.

Our staffs are trudging, more so every day, into deeper and deeper sections of the La Brea Tar Pits (if you haven’t been, I highly recommend the real deal). Their legs grow heavier with each step, but unlike the mastadons beset by dire wolves and saber-toothed tigers, these slow, giant mammals do not know their demise is near. They stand woodenly spouting buzz words and imagining grandiosities, many blissfully ignorant of their pathetic state. Not only have they been lobotomized, they have been neutered, emasculated even, by the incredible inertia of a pathologically bloated defense establishment. It isn't that the people are bad, it is that the institution they inhabit cripples them. It was the tar in the pits, not the big dumb animals that did the trick.

When I sit watching such things, seething through my anger issues, I do a silent and motionless rain dance, hoping for sequester rather than rain. I invoke the gods of the budget axe to come and strike down the giant choking weeds in our midsts, to end our monopoly, to deregulate our industry, and to let us start down the long road to recovery. Whether sequester kicks in or not, a house-cleaning, an undoing of the entropy is dearly needed. Even once the cuts start to come in, we have a long row to hoe. My mentor (via print) Richard Rumelt writes in Good Strategy/Bad Strategy that organizations on the rebound from monopoly positions or regulated industries have a difficult time in adjusting because of the “inertia in corporate routines and mental maps of the terrain.” They also lack cost data because they have “developed complex systems to justify their costs and prices, systems that hide their real costs even from themselves.” It thus takes years to “wring excess staff costs and other expenses out of its systems.” The first step in breaking cultural inertia is to simplify. “This helps to eliminate the complex routines, processes, and hidden bargains among units that mask waste and inefficiency. Strip out excess layers of administration and halt nonessential operations – sell them off, close them down, spin them off, or outsource the services. … The simpler structure will begin to illuminate obsolete units, inefficiency, and simple bad behavior that was hidden from sight by complex overlays of administration and self-interest.”

If you think like I do, this sounds therapeutic. If not, join the growing line of people who are hoping for my head to be lopped off. Let me tell you, though, more and more people in our esteemed defense establishment, and people senior to me in these, are hoping for a mercy killing, the sharp cut of the scythe to their neck, to relieve them of the suffering imposed by dysfunctional institutions and toxic leaders.

R2P and Civil-Military Relations

2012-02-07T20:17:00.000-08:00

Those of you who follow me on Twitter may have noticed a discussion over the weekend with several parties, including Steven A. Cook and Steven Saideman. I'm in contact with Cook via email to discuss the Syria issue in more detail and Saideman and I have had a few posts back and forth to flesh out the issue in more than 140 characters. You can see my other post on the issue here, his post here, and my response to him was posted at his blog and below:

Steve,
I understand your concern about civ-mil affairs, but I think that your charge that I am dangerously suggesting that debate should be closed off to non-military types is an overreaction and a bit of a strawman. Part of this can be explained by my annoyance with the R2P crowd, the nature of Twitter, and the barb attached to my statement. I don't literally mean that academics should head down to the recruiters, nor do I mean that they don't rate an opinion. More than a rhetorical jab, it was a rhetorical question, to which the answer is "no." The advocates for intervention will not be materially invested in this course of action. This does not mean that they cannot advocate such a course. Many who aren't materially invested have done the same in the past, from all spectrums of the political and ideological rainbow.

The real barb in my jab/question, though, is at both the civilians and the military. I want the civilians to consider their calls for intervention much more seriously because I do not trust the generals to sufficiently and properly inform debate. Some of this is due to flaws in some generals' conception of the strategic environment in past conflicts. Some of this is due to generals' civ-mil duty to stand back from shaping debate. So when civilians say that they can advocate certain actions, then leave it to the experts to inform policy-makers before a final decision is made, this is disingenuous. The civilian policy elites will shape the debate and hand policy-makers a narrowed set of options. If policy elites have not properly laid out the costs and risks in their advocacy, then the politicians and generals are left with a skewed "decision environment," which institutional factors predispose them to further bollocks up.

So, my rhetorical question was more of a call to the civilian elites to step up to their responsibility of considering the real consequences and second/third order effects of their desires than to really ask them to head to the recruiters or shut up.

Syria, R2P, and the Real World

2012-02-04T15:08:00.000-08:00

For more on this back and forth see this post.

I annoyed several people today on Twitter when I mused as to whether those who were touting our responsibility to protect (so glibly abbreviated by people who want this to be a "thing" as R2P) the people of Syria were going to be heading down to recruiting offices to join in the effort. This was a rhetorical jab and one that some took umbrage to, saying that people who aren't in the military have a right to an opinion, as well, and that such questions are too important to be left to generals. The sensitivity of these Ivy Tower champions of the utility of force to such jabs drives me to distraction, but it also misses my point. I do think such issues are too important for generals. They are also too important for people who have neatly packaged conceptions of the world, designed to fit through the narrow funnel of academic theory and confirmed through "research trips" consisting of friendly conversations sitting cross-legged on a dirt floor or in a coffee house or university, plus maybe a few years working to churn out policies that practitioners shake their heads at from the bowels of the Pentagon or Foggy Bottom. One need not have served to have an opinion, but I do think that people signing others up to "protect" with glib assumptions of easy and limited interventions and quick success deserve the rhetorical jab. And this is not a jab at all who inhabit the ivory towers of academia and rarified policy, because some understand the sordid reality of the world just from others' accounts of them. The ones I aim at, however, have missed them in their quest for elegant theories and policies. Finally, even for those who vow to "understand the sacrifice" involved in such interventions and have "counted the cost," this is a sterile, abstract, and academic accounting that I think would be far different if they were rallying to the gunfire as idealists once did in a different age, as volunteers in World War I and II or the Spanish Civil War, to take examples in which the U.S. was not involved (initially in the first cases).

One tweeter lamented that, if nothing is done in Syria, then R2P is just an idea. What he and others like him do not understand, clearly, is that R2P is just an idea. It is an idea that is attractive to me as an idea. The depths of the barbarity in Syria are sickening and I would ideally very much like to see it stop. I do think that the world has a responsibility to protect human life to the extent possible. However, the facile assumptions that the R2P crowd is making about a way ahead in Syria betray the unreality of their understanding of the world writ large and the region in particular. First, they talk about making "buffer zones" or "cordons" around specific cities, stating that this is a limited intervention. Supposing that this would be neat and limited is the height of foolishness. This calls for a full-fledged invasion of a sovereign nation and the taking, holding, and ultimately administration of its territory. In using the term sovereign, I am not as concerned about the concept of sovereignty and whether the Assad regime deserves to have its sovereignty respected as I am concerned with the fact that the Syrian military still has the capability to resist such an invasion of the country's territory. It cannot stop an invasion lead by first rate powers, but it can inflict significant casualties. Additionally, even airstrikes, the darling of liberal interventionists, will have to be extremely robust and wide-reaching just to defend limited cordons due to the fact that Syria's air defense system is much more significant than that found in Libya, or even in Iraq in 2003, due to a decade of strikes. Setting that aside, once in, what does one do if the Syrian military is harrying the defenders of these cordons from beyond? Do we sit under the barrage or will we be obligated to strike out farther and farther in self-defense? I could go on, but the idea that this will be limited quickly falls to pieces upon further thought.

Note that I said that the Syrian army cannot stop an invasion by a first rate power. Here, we must note the second gaping flaw in the R2Pers construct for Syria. They promise that no U.S. troops will be committed. We all know that means no Europeans will be signing up either. That leaves an Arab League intervention. Students of the region will note that the Arab states have had some troubles, to say the least, in pulling together to conduct any sort of coordinated policy, much less a military intervention. The members of the Arab League have very different interests in Syria and seek very different outcomes. Even if a coordinated intervention in Syria could be put together, which is doubtful, the end result may be even greater tensions across the region than currently exists.

This is before we consider the very real possibility of a Syrian regime "death blossom." Some of my readers know what I mean with this term, but for those who don't, a death blossom is what someone with little control of himself does when faced with the threat of death from small arms or other fire. Generally, this someone is the holder of an AK-47 with the trigger mashed down through gross motor control and pirouettes through at least 360 degrees of motion, spraying death at everyone around. The Syrian regime holds far more significant weapons than AK-47s. What is more, this isn't crazy Muammar out in the middle of the desert, this is a regime in a very densely packed region bordered by a lot of dry kindling: Iraq, Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, and Israel. Syria has threatened to reach out and touch all who may be seen as interfering in its affairs, and it has the means to do so. Let's not forget, too, the alliance between Syria, Iran, and all of their nefarious proxies. An intervention in Syria, no matter how limited it is in intention, could spiral very, very rapidly out of control, spreading conflict across the region and making good of all the glib buzz phrases people have come up with since 9/11.

As for the argument that a civil war may cause a bigger conflagration than an intervention, a question just posed by @SlaughterAM, a full-fledged civil war is no likelier to be avoided by an intervention than to be caused by it, in addition to the complications of the third-party and second/third-order effects mentioned above. What is more, it will be easier to contain a civil war, if it does come, from outside than it will be to extricate ourselves from the middle of one.

In sum, I absolutely believe that in an ideal, linear, and rose colored world, we have a responsibility to stop the horrific loss of life in Syria. However, in the real world, the dimensions of what is required to conduct even the "limited" intervention suggested by R2P fans is far greater than what they imagine. This is because many of these advocates have not though through the problem in any detail because they are more concerned with the idea of R2P than with the reality of the use of force, its costs, and its limitations. This is what my tweets were getting at today. For all who think we can do things better this time, I beg that you read my article at Foreign Policy and this extremely resonant article from the April 1968 edition of The Atlantic. We all want peace, but it has eluded us since the dawn of time. If we truly want to intervene, we must make an informed decision that counts the likely costs, rather than relying on facile assumptions and acronym imperatives to drive policy. If an intervention is to be successful, it must be based on realistic assumptions and get a realistic investment from the get-go.

From the Atlantic article:

Long before I went into government, I was told a story about Henry L. Stimson that seemed to me pertinent during the years that I watched the Vietnam tragedy unfold—and participated in that tragedy. It seems to me more pertinent than ever as we move toward the election of 1968.

In his waning years Stimson was asked by an anxious questioner, "Mr. Secretary, how on earth can we ever bring peace to the world?" Stimson is said to have answered: "You begin by bringing to Washington a small handful of able men who believe that the achievement of peace is possible.

"You work them to the bone until they no longer believe that it is possible.
"And then you throw them out—and bring in a new bunch who believe that it is possible."

No Regrets

2012-02-03T02:47:00.000-08:00

I read an article yesterday from the Guardian entitled "Top Five Regrets of the Dying." It records the observations of an Australian palliative care nurse and her recounting of the great clarity of people facing the end of their life. She said that there was great consistency in their regrets, which doubtless many of us can see that we might share some day:

1. I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.When people realise that their life is almost over and look back clearly on it, it is easy to see how many dreams have gone unfulfilled.
2. I wish I hadn't worked so hard.This came from every male patient that I nursed. They missed their children's youth and their partner's companionship.
3. I wish I'd had the courage to express my feelings.Many people suppressed their feelings in order to keep peace with others. As a result, they settled for a mediocre existence and never became who they were truly capable of becoming.
4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.Many had become so caught up in their own lives that they had let golden friendships slip by over the years.
5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.Many did not realise until the end that happiness is a choice. They had stayed stuck in old patterns and habits. The so-called 'comfort' of familiarity overflowed into their emotions, as well as their physical lives. Fear of change had them pretending to others, and to their selves, that they were content, when deep within, they longed to laugh properly and have silliness in their life again.

I had been thinking along these lines before I came across this article, but the wisdom here validated my thoughts. The path is often clear, but often untaken. What would you do differently if you knew you only had five or ten years to live? So why aren't you doing it when you could be dead tomorrow?

There are things in my life that make me profoundly unhappy, often angry. It is time to chart a course clear of those things and to a life of fewer regrets, but perhaps more fearful uncertainty...

Chaff at the Onset of G

2012-02-01T03:18:00.000-08:00

I know this isn't chaff, but you get the point.

Both Malcom Gladwell's Blink and Michael Lewis's The Big Short made me recognize that the way people think and act is somewhat determined by the make-up of their brain. Sometimes, it is easy to think that someone is misinformed, unintelligent, or simply lost when they do not see the world as you do, but there are very significant physiological reasons why people think the way they do. This is true to the point that healthy, well-informed people can often see the world so differently that no amount of discussion, debate, or education will bring the two sides together. I think this is sometimes a function of the way our brains are wired to see the world, in addition to the myriad of "nurture" factors that take our thinking down one path or another.

This is why innovative organizations encourage debate and even dissent. Additionally, these organizations encourage people to get a wide range of experiences and to bring those experiences and viewpoints to bear on important issues in the organization. As Steve Jobs once said, those with more varied experiences often have "more dots to connect" when it comes to problem-solving and considering difficult problems. If all of our thoughts fall along a certain party line, it is easy to group-think an organization into oblivion. This is why the Marine Corps Gazette's editor, Col Keenan (Ret) encouraged participants in the journal's blog to leave the political correctness at the door when posting there. He noted the example of "Pete" Ellis, the Corps' legendary thinker. This month's print Gazette has Ellis' portrait on the cover. Col Keenan noted on the MCG blog that Ellis was smoking in the original photo, but the Corps omitted that detail when they commissioned the portrait. Col Keenan is convinced of the value of varied viewpoints, as evinced by the publication of LtCol Grice's article "What Color Are Your Socks" in this month's edition. Many, especially those outside the Corps or on the fringes, do not want to see such dissent, but this is essential to a well-functioning, innovative, and thinking organization especially when fat-tail risks, such as the cancellation or curtailment of a critical program or the imposition of new budgetary realities, come to roost unexpectedly.

Set the G, chaff, chaff...

Article at Foreign Policy

2012-01-27T16:35:00.000-08:00

Visit Foreign Policy's Af-Pak Channel to see my article, "Small Wars, Big Prices" about why the debate over COIN is misplaced.

"Before arguing about counterinsurgency as a tactic or a strategy, we must first acknowledge a key point: America did not enter any of these wars (going back to Vietnam) as a counterinsurgent or a nation-builder. America entered these wars with ill-defined strategic goals, the result of lowest common denominator bureaucratic negotiations. These goals were not sufficiently thought out, clearly stated, or properly subscribed to by the government writ large, resulting in nearly immediate drift. This fact should point us toward the true roots of the problem."

Maybe Friday

2012-01-24T20:02:00.000-08:00

Readers, I hope to have a new post up by Friday. I've started work at Small Wars Journal and have been trying to get a post for another site and an article submission together, so I don't have anything for you right now. In the meantime, head over to Small Wars Journal and see the articles I've posted at the site. There are still some more good ones in the submissions inbox that I'll be getting to through the rest of the week.

Getting Real About STOVL

2012-01-21T06:58:00.000-08:00

This is a cross-post from the Marine Corps Gazette Blog. For more background behind my thoughts, see this post and this Marine Corps Gazette article.

Thom Shanker from the NYT reports this morning about Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta's decision to take the F-35B Lightning II off of probation. The B variant is a short take-off/vertical landing (STOVL) jet capable of taking off from short landing strips or the deck of an amphibious ship (as opposed to a catapult-assisted launch and an arrested landing on a full-sized carrier). The Marine Corps' story is that STOVL is needed for (a) use in amphibious scenarios and (b) expeditionary scenarios where landing sites are limited. Shanker alludes to this in discussing "the importance to the Marine Corps of coming up with a replacement for its Harrier jump-jet, which has proved its value in countering insurgencies and terrorists in rugged, remote areas."

But has the Harrier really proven its unique value in countering insurgencies, etc? The Harrier has surely been a large part of Marine aviation since 9/11, but its STOVL characteristics were rarely, if ever, critical to the conduct of operations. If anything, the capability was a liability when it came to the requirement for long on-station times, multiple ordnance options, and tedious scanning of compounds and cities with targeting pods in support of troops on the ground. Marines often refer to the plane by saying "one man, one bomb, one hour." It is not that the Harrier has been incapable or has failed in its support of Marines on the ground. However, the STOVL capability forces a tradeoff in terms on-station time and weapons carriage. The F/A-18, especially in the two-seat D version, is far more capable of staying on station longer, conducting better scans using targeting pods, and carrying more weapons to give the ground units more options in these fights where one might need to level a building or might need to take out a small group of insurgents not far from a civilian-inhabited compound.

While Harriers have conducted some forward rearming and refueling at shorter strips, these were more driven by the Harrier's limitations and the desire to validate its expeditionary capability than a value added to the fight. That is, while a Harrier was rearming and refueling, a Hornet would be overhead, sensor still on target, refueling from a KC-130, more weapons still on the wing.

So, when the program hits a rough spot again, which I think it will, and when the budget adjusters come knocking, the Marine Corps needs to be honest about how much STOVL capability it really needs to maintain its close air support capability aboard amphibious shipping, how soon unmanned aerial systems can fill that gap, and what the best option is for the rest of our close air support needs.

Accountability Starts at the Top

2012-01-21T05:35:00.000-08:00

This comment came from Bumperplate this morning on an old post that most people wouldn't revisit. The post he commented on was about my back and forth with LtGen Neller. I don't agree with all he says, especially starting completely fresh, as some of the transgressions lying in personnel files deserve consideration, but I do agree that this reset needs to start at the top. And no, these people didn't all get to the positions they are in because they are stellar. Their irresponsibility got us into the position we are in today: recalcitrance in the face of operational and strategic realities, building fiefdoms with tax payer dollars, breeding a culture of profligacy (e.g., you must spend X by the end of the quarter), focusing on "standards" that don't really matter while letting toxic leaders slide, administering acquisitions programs that my middle schooler could tell you weren't well considered, etc. On these charges, read my other posts on management, resources, leadership, etc. Here are his comments:

We see some similar comments in the Army from some of the GOs. Heard a two-star the other day telling everyone about haircuts, finger nail polish, stuff like that: "standards". They tell us there will be tough choices, that we have to select the best, "burn the deadwood" and so forth. Well, it has to start at the top and it must be public: The GOs and the SGMs/CSMs need to be ranked, dirty laundry aired, and the bottom of that cohort needs to be discharged.
Those at the top need to start being more "efficient". Rather than directing us to command our little piece of the pie with less, yet find a way to do more, it's time to have less E9s and GOs and demand that they do more and lead the way here. Not seeing that at all right now. For years they demanded that we spend, spend, spend - must spend that GWOT money. Now they tell us we spend too much, have spent too much, and that we don't understand supply discipline, or how to be a judicious custodian of our resources. The most senior E9s and the 3&4-stars were all senior leaders when 9/11 hit: they were BDE Cdrs, BN CSMs, and now are Corps Cdrs, Post CSMs, and so forth. They were the leaders that trained the force that went to war, they are the ones that lead the force at high levels during the war, and now they're bringing us back from war. If they're telling us that things are broke, that we need to get back to "standards", and so on - then the first thing they must do is look in the mirror and ask themselves: "what did we do wrong?" These leaders told us just a few years ago that we were the most disciplined and lethal force the world has ever seen: now we're overpaid, we get too many benefits, we have too many people, we're out of shape, we've lost our ability to follow and enforce standards. Best thing for the top leadership to do, since we know they're not going to enforce this 'getting back to standards' on each other, is for them to clearly define standards and expectations, forgive all past transgressions (ie: don't data mine personnel records to find someone with a blemish in order to reduce end strength), and start fresh. If we truly want to rebuild our military, heal old wounds, preserve capabilities, define a new future, we must start fresh, with a new perspective. Our entire military needs to heal up after these wars end - assuming they do actually end. We have to learn how to conduct training and build our capabilities with true guidance and vision, not just Joe on the ground figuring it out. And, we have to train for combat, not canned scenarios aimed at a war we are unlikely to fight. Also, it means resetting our equipment, which cannot be done overnight. It means getting our wounded back to full speed with smart training and proper care, not pressure to perform that leads to more injury or inadequate performance getting them kicked to the curb; it means we are going to have to understand that war is tough, people do bad things and they are not perfect, so we can't view a person's one-time incident as if it's a lifetime of guilt. Treating our people like garbage, when we have an all-volunteer force - is a great way to ensure the volunteers will go away and that quality replacements will not step forward. Our transition to peace is as important as our transition to war and will most assuredly affect our next transition to war. We need to get it right.

The Arc of Enterprise

2012-01-20T03:05:00.000-08:00

In an email between colleagues yesterday, one pointed out an article in Joint Forces Quarterly and labelled it as subpar. That's putting it nicely. My sole contribution to the discussion was to state that this is what happens when we are overspecialized. I didn't elaborate in the email, but I will here. I'm still working through Richard Rumelt's Good Strategy/Bad Strategy, which I highly recommend, and a few days ago encountered a section entitled "The Arc of Enterprise." What we are seeing today in the military, and in the government more generally, is a familiar phenomenon in business, and in health for that matter. When you get too fat for your own good due to an advantageous "resource position," you start to not only lose the race, but to lose your own vision of how to run the race. This need not be a terminal decline, but it must be recognized to be corrected.

The U.S. government and the Department of Defense in particular have benefitted from an extremely advantageous resource position over the past half-century. This strong resource position, meaning that the DoD has had the advantage of having more resources than any competitor due to America's position as the world's leading economy and innovator, is not unlike Xerox's position in the middle of last century due to its plain paper copying patent. Rumelt notes that "a strong resource position can obviate the need for sophisticated design-type strategy." If you are the clear leader and the competition cannot touch you, there is no need to strategize. Even if things begin to get tough, the answer most commonly turned to is to mobilize more resources. More cowbell.

While Rumelt is writing about businesses, the words are all too familiar. "Success leads to laxity and bloat, and these lead to decline. Few organizations avoid this tragic arc." While organizations with few strategic resources are forced to "adroitly coordinate actions in time and across functions," as these organizations gain a strategic advantage, they will "loosen their tight integration and begin to rely more on accumulated resources and less on clever business design. ... They will lose the discipline of tight integration, allowing independent fiefdoms to flourish and adding so many products and projects that integration becomes impossible."

This last statement is key to understanding DoD today. Many observers bemoan the profusion of general officers and note that these numbers are not planned to be cut as deeply as the overall force. The ratio of general officers to troops has grown and will continue to grow during the drawdown. This does not simply mean that we have more generals hanging around existing headquarters. It means we have new fiefdoms pushing new products and guarding pots of resources that are not integrated with the rest of the force. We have the director of this center of excellence and the commanding general of that command, each with a flashy name and each with a new age explanation as to why we need them in modern warfare. Meanwhile, they pursue programs and supposed solutions in single-minded vigor, guarding and expending resources in a rabbit hole rather than pursuing business and military strategies integrated across functions and time. Look at a professional journal and see who is publishing most of the articles you don't read. Directors and staffs of these agencies are constantly justifying their existence and their pot of money. This, my friends, is the path to hell, decadence, and strategic decline. And all for a billet and fitrep and award bullets. While each believes he or she is doing his best to save the world, the rest of us know most of this is a joke. The joke is on us, though, because no one cares to impart discipline on the system that got them to where they are and their interests have been so fully entwined with the interests of the organization and of the nation that there is no discerning them anymore.

Meanwhile, Rumelt observes that it is this fairly predictable trajectory that opens the door to strategic upstarts.

Reform is not coming from within the military ranks of DoD. The budget crunch may help to remove some of the resource advantages and force more thinking, but until a truly visionary and iron-willed civilian reformer comes along with a machete and a blowtorch, I don't think the rabbits are coming out of their holes.

Editor, Small Wars Journal

2012-01-17T15:11:00.000-08:00

I found out today that the Board of Directors of the Small Wars Journal agreed to take me on as the new editor there. I'm looking forward to the challenge and the opportunity to meet and interact with a lot of great people thinking about the challenges we face. That being said, between the pro bono editor duties, my other writing, and my real job, I may not be able to post quite as much here. I will give my best effort to get at least one decent post a week, if not more, up on this pages.

Parole at 15?

2012-01-16T06:09:00.000-08:00

For more on the problems in management and leadership behind my views see my previous posts here and here and here and here.

The rumblings about a 15-year retirement are growing, but so far there is no indication that it will actually be used soon. While Congress approved the use of the "Temporary Early Retirement Authority," the Services can take or leave it, and so far they have not given any indication, that I know of, that they are about to use it.

TERA could help cull expensive mid-grade officers and SNCOs, while giving them benefits, but at a less-costly rate. Military.com is running an article on their front page that it is a bad deal for troops. Instead of 50 percent of base pay at a 20-year retirement, a servicemember would receive 32.5 percent of base pay if he or she retired at 15 years. The article points to a difference of over $600,000 for a major who left at 15 instead of 20 and lived until 77. One Air Force major says, "Who's going to take that deal unless they are in a nasty circumstance or a tough family deal? It doesn't make sense." I'll tell you who is going to take it. Those who are toiling away under a promotion system that will, at best, reward their talents with only one more promotion in those five years, most of which time will be spent doing relatively useless staff work under a broken bureaucratic system that rewards inefficiency and allows the mediocre to stay on, and in key positions, well after they should have been put to pasture.

High performers, especially those with managerial or programmatic experience, advanced degrees, and certifications such as program management professional or lean six sigma know that those five years are five years that they can be climbing the corporate ladder much more quickly. They also know that while the morons (not all are morons, but enough) they have to work for for the next five years on the inside don't have the drive or education to get a truly good job on the outside very easily, companies are still hiring qualified talent. The economy (at least until the Euro Zone crisis starts to spin off to the U.S.) is tentatively improving and skilled professionals are at a premium. High performers are in short supply. Furthermore, while calculations made to convince people to stay in emphasize that it is nearly impossible to make up the difference in money in those five years, they look at the first five years of the wedge, not the last five years in the civilian workforce that a professional wouldn't necessarily get to if he stayed on until 20. Even if one can't make up every dime, it is quite possible to make enough money that the retirement problem is irrelevant, especially if one has used Thrift Savings Plan and IRAs during his or her time in service.

So, who is going to take the 15-year retirement if it comes to fruition? Some of it will be people with poor family circumstances, etc, but far more will be those itching to put their talents to best use and maximum profit and tired of languishing under a system that stifles their creativity, capabilities, and drive. DoD is a welfare system for far too many people, even if it is peopled by staunch conservatives. The most talented are likely to want to bet on themselves, especially as the wars are winding down and they can feel that they have more than done their duty to country.

The Woes of the Euro Zone

2012-01-15T07:37:00.000-08:00

The following is from my forthcoming book, War, Welfare, and Democracy: Rethinking America's Quest for the End of History, due out from Potomac Books in fall of this year. This is a first draft and will have to be updated a bit during the editing process, but provides some background on the Euro zone crisis as I see it.

The EU’s share of world GDP has fallen by nearly half since 1990, from over 21 percent to 13 percent in 2010. It is a relative decline, but the EU and the Euro area are facing existential challenges. These owe to the unprecedented supranational hybrid that is the EU. Governments and their citizens have only partially subordinated their sovereignty to the EU in the form of a financial union. This union significantly constrains governments’ monetary policy in a way akin to the gold standard. The EU, however, is not a full political or fiscal union, meaning that politics and economic policy are disconnected from the monetary reality of the Euro. Lower performers in the union, indelicately termed the PIIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, and Spain), are tied to the currency of the efficient manufacturing powerhouse of Germany.

The Germans, afraid that careless spending by southern European countries would sink the common currency, led the way in setting stiff rules and penalties for members. These conditions sought to force countries to adhere to fiscal targets and resist the temptation to give in to voters’ calls for increased public spending, with the intent of keeping Euro-zone inflation at low levels. The PIIGs were not keen on the arrangement, but promises to distribute EU structural funds secured their acquiescence.[1] It is clear now that the “draconian conditions” were not stiff enough. Even the core countries found it difficult to live up to their own expectations and the PIIGs were able to run up crushing debts through a combination of deceptive accounting and the inability of the EU to enforce its mandate.

The issue runs deeper than sterner enforcement, however. It is plain that the EU runs on at least two speeds. Germany was emblematic of the higher speed economies: more competitive and export-led with lower domestic consumption yielding current account surpluses. In Germany, the surpluses made their way to people’s wages and ultimately into the country’s banks. These banks then loaned money and invested in bonds and other ventures in parts of the eurozone where weak export sectors and relatively higher consumption and public spending resulted in deficits. Due to European integration, credit for these deficit countries was priced deceptively low at a eurozone rate rather than one more appropriate to the specific country’s risk. Private borrowing “ran amok,” inflating asset bubbles and yielding a construction boom in southern Europe and Ireland.[2] When the carousel stopped spinning with the onset of the recession, governments were left holding the bag as unemployment skyrocketed and revenues plummeted, leaving Portugal and Greece on the brink of default and Spain, Ireland, and Italy close behind. The debt linkages throughout the eurozone will make for broader trouble than many think, in perhaps a minor echo of the role played by the gold standard and the web of war debts and loans in the Great Depression.

The seemingly inevitable defaults in southern Europe (Greece and at least Portugal seem to be doomed in mid-2011, with Italy keeping investors’ rapt attention) will stir up complex issues for the eurozone. Few are eager to write off huge amounts of debt, yet strapped countries are equally unenthusiastic about transferring cash to bail these countries out. The EU is increasingly referred to as a “transfer union.” These foundering states are likewise finding it difficult to muster the domestic consensus required to follow the more stringent austerity programs needed to win their neighbors’ generosity. At the same time, core states’ banks are significantly extended into the southern European credit markets. In a way, a bailout of the PIIGS is also a bailout of key German banks.

This crisis, at the end, will be a referendum on the EU. A decision to decisively intervene in southern European debt is an affirmation of the continued union. Even more than that, Europeans recognize that the only way to maintain union after this upset is to draw even closer, into a fiscal union. That, in turn, requires a true political union: the United States of Europe, in essence. The alternatives are either a partial or complete return to national currencies. Such a move would be hugely disruptive in the European economy, but is being mooted as a real possibility by serious European thinkers today.

Strains on the union go beyond the southern European debt crisis. The challenges of aging and shrinking populations coupled with the political chaos across the Mediterranean pose incredibly difficult policy questions ranging from retirement ages and pension schemes to immigration and nationalization. Many of these challenges were described in Chapter IV, but it is important to note their implications here for the EU. When you combine the centrifugal forces of a two-speed union with the perceived threat of immigration that is beginning to make governments rethink the open borders policies of the Schengen Pact, we can begin to see that the foundational idea of the EU is in real trouble. Far right parties are growing in power across Europe, although still small. More importantly, nationalist and somewhat xenophobic ideas are gaining traction more towards the center. From the French law banning the burka in public places to Marine Le Pen’s call for the rejection of binationalism and Angela Merkel’s avowal that multiculturalism is failed, European openness is in retreat.

Even within European countries, strains are showing. On a cab ride from Verona Airport to Vicenza, Italy, my wife’s benign question about local cuisine led to a lesson on Italy’s historical divisions and cobbled together identity. “Italy is imaginary,” the driver told us. What is more, northern Italians were productive, while facing the highest taxes in Europe, all of which go to Rome “and foof,” he said, blowing in his hand. They disappear. The driver, once a project engineer for a major European corporation who took up driving his father’s cab rather than move to the big city for his job, was sincerely advocating northern Italy’s secession. This is not an isolated sentiment in northern Italy. Books about Italian disunion are prominently displayed in bookstore windows in the north. Inequality across the eurozone is straining the bonds of taxes and welfare transfers (both cash flowing out and immigrants flowing in) and undoing the political compromises that created nations and supranational unions. F.A. Hayek stated the fundamental flaw in the idea of a transfer union in the 1940s: “Who imagines that there exist any common ideals of distributive justice such as will make the Norwegian fisherman consent to forego the prospect of economic improvement in order to help his Portuguese fellow, or the Dutch worker to pay more for his bicycle to help the Coventry mechanic, or the French peasant to pay more taxes to assist the industrialization of Italy.”[3] The unraveling of the EU, if it does happen, may be the most significant outcome of this trend, but Europeans are not the only ones to face these issues, as we saw in Chapter IV.

Domestically, as at the international level, growth is improving most people’s lot in life, but is benefitting some more than others. In the OECD, top earners are most likely to see their income increase at faster rates than the rest of the populace. On average in OECD countries the top 10 percent of the population earns 9 times that of the bottom tenth. Israel, Turkey, and the U.S. have a 14 to 1 ratio, while in Chile and Mexico, the inequality is 27 to 1. The Gini coefficient increased in 17 of 22 OECD countries in the two decades after the mid-1980s. Interestingly, some of the more equal countries, such as Finland, Sweden, and Germany, recorded the largest jumps in inequality, meaning that the level of inequality is converging between the 0.25 and 0.35 levels.[4]

Just as political consensus is needed more than ever to address these issues, inequality feeds electoral polarization, as discussed in Chapter IV. Weak leadership is the trend of the day in Europe and America, underpinned by highly divided voting publics. Recent election results in Europe demonstrate this polarization. Conservative coalitions are doing well because the center-left is splintering as it loses votes to the far left. Furthermore, center-right parties are adding more social welfare policies to their platforms, thus shifting left. Finally, far right parties are doing better as well, constituting the other pole of politics and adding elements of xenophobia and racism to parliamentary bodies. The “big two” parties’ share of the vote in many states has declined sharply over the last decade as outlier parties begin to pick up their votes. Declining social cohesion and the polarization and fragmentation of political preferences has broken up historical blocs, making government formation and legislation far more difficult.[5] The hollowing out of the center of European politics means that leaders lack the consensus and support required to take bold steps to face down crisis.

[1] Judt, Postwar, 715.

[2] Martin Wolf, “The Eurozone Needs More Than Discipline from Germany,” Financial Times, (December 22, 2010).

[3] F.A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom: Text and Documents, the Definitive Edition, edited by Bruce Caldwell, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007 (1944)), 225.

[4] “Growing Income Inequality in OECD Countries: What Drives It and How Can Policy Tackle It?” OECD Forum on Tackling Inequality, (Paris, May 2, 2011), http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/32/20/47723414.pdf, (accessed May 4, 2011), 5-6.

[5] For example of faulty analysis, see Steven Erlanger, “Europe’s Socialists Suffering Even in Downturn,” New York Times, (September 29, 2009). “Time to Start Fretting: Scary Elections in Eastern Europe,” The Economist, (June 13, 2009): 59. “New Bosses: Business in Japan under the DPJ,” The Economist, (September 5, 2009): 69-70. “Germany’s Elections: A Black-Yellow (and Purple) Triumph,” The Economist, (October 3, 2009): 63:64. “The Shrinking Big Tents,” Economist, (April 30, 2011): 56.

Notes

2012-01-14T19:58:00.000-08:00

I was looking back at my notes from when I was in Afghanistan a little over a year ago. Evidently, after a mission on which the controller tried to lead me to believe I'd dropped 26,000 lbs of supplies in a firebase in the middle of the night, I read a little Steinbeck. As for the air drop, the supplies actually hit the intended point of impact outside the FOB, but from the controller's vantage point looking up at a plane going by at 1000' and 150 mph blacked out in the night and with the wind blowing the bundles away from the FOB, what came out over the radio was, "Be advised, you just dropped on my pos." The only thing that saved me from a heart attack was the fact that they were sparkling the point of impact and I knew we were going to hit it. There was still a lot of confusion and doubt and the thought that there's no way 26,000 lbs of crap is going to land in a FOB without killing someone. But it didn't. It hit where it was supposed to and I got an apology by phone the next day. Anyway, the quote I noted from Steinbeck's East of Eden is of interest to those who are more academically minded. Heed the warning:

“Maybe, kneeling down to atoms, they’re becoming atom-sized in their souls. Maybe a specialist is only a coward, afraid to look out of his little cage. And think what the specialist misses – the whole world over his fence.”

Black Friday the 13th

2012-01-13T16:59:00.000-08:00

In a stunning, but not really surprising (if that makes sense) Friday move, the ratings agency Standard and Poor's downgraded nine Euro Zone countries. Most prominent were France and Austria, who went from AAA, the highest rating, to AA+. Italy, Spain, Portugal, Cyprus, Malta, Slovakia, and Slovenia were also downgraded. Italy moved to BBB+, a rating held mostly by developing world countries. Portugal's short-term ratings were cut to B, with long-term ratings at BB. This is junk status, at least in the short term, with a negative outlook.

Additionally, Reuters reported that private debt talks seen as necessary to avoid a Greek default ended without resolution. Added together, these developments will disturb the quiet that has dominated since the holidays. Nothing, so far, has been bold enough to warrant the recent prevailing calm. Europe is still headed toward catastrophe and Germany is looking increasingly lonely and unenthusiastic as the sole savior of the union. The downgrades will likely shake up the issue and could very well set of a cascade of events that set the whole contraption over the cliff. Every day, bolder action is required to save Europe, yet with every day the news worsens, undercutting the trust and collective action needed to enact such a solution. What is more, even a bold solution to the immediate debt problem will do nothing to address the structural imbalances that underly the balance of payments crisis, or to forestall the coming crisis of the welfare state. In the near term, analysts confidently state that these downgrades have already been "priced in" by the market, but I think this underestimates their possible effect on public sentiment. The continent will have the weekend to digest the news, but I think that Monday will be the start of quite a wild ride.

Gunshot 66, We Will Never Forget

2012-01-11T21:17:00.000-08:00

I just returned from a night of drinks with friends that I have not imbibed with since B Co 2-98, that meaning the second company of officers in fiscal year 1998 to go through the Marine Officers' Basic Course in 1998. We met 14 years ago pretty close to the day. While we have done many things since then and each has had his path, it seemed as if not a day had passed. Over the six months of The Basic School, we formed a bond that cannot ever be lessened. While we were out tonight, we called a few friends who went through training with us and each was happy to be part of the reunion in their way.

Our class was lucky. In our recounting, the only Marine of our class we know to have perished in our wars (although each of us know many more enlisted and officer who gave their life) was Maj Michael Martino. Mike was my best friend through flight school. I will never forget the last time I saw him when I departed Pensacola, FL for advanced training in Corpus Christi, TX. My wife and I went out of our way to travel to Milton, where his new apartment was for helo training, to bid adieu. He was building a model of a World War II airplane at the time, and none of us doubted that we'd reunite in the future. We were never to see him again.

Mike, a ground veteran of the first battle of Fallujah as a Forward Air Controller, was shot down and killed in his AH-1W Super Cobra over Ramadi, Iraq on 2 November, 2005.

Tonight we lifted our glasses to him. Gunshot 66, we will never forget.

Middleweight Force? Relevant Force?

2012-01-11T13:34:00.000-08:00

Today, I sat in on a discussion about the Marine Corps' future and how to define that role. (Disclaimer: I had exactly zero role in that discussion, but the thoughts represented here are my own as spurred by the topics they discussed. I'm not representing anyone else's views here). While Marines feel that the Marine Corps is relevant, I don't believe there is agreement on how to define that relevancy. A lot of the debate revolves around buzz phrases and what those buzz phrases really mean: middleweight force, expeditionary force in readiness, nation's 911 force, forward deployed crisis response, amphibiosity/expeditionary, applicable across the ROMO (range of military operations), working in a ROMO sweet spot of crisis response, interoperability (with special operations, with coalition partners), etc. I think that there is a sense that we need to fit the Marine Corps back into a box, and that box is defined roughly by amphibious lift capacity in terms of weight, cube, etc. This box will also be defined by what the Corps sees as its relevant role in what it can deliver to the nation in the way of capability. Few of you will be surprised that I have what is likely a contrarian view of this.

I'm reading a book called Good Strategy/Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why it Matters by Richard Rumelt. I'm just getting started on it, but the first example in the first chapter is Steve Jobs' paring down of Apple when it was on the verge of disaster. Rummelt summarizes, "He shrank Apple to a scale and scope suitable to the reality of its being a niche producer ... He cut Apple back to a core that could survive." This is precisely what the Marine Corps should be looking to do today. Before the budget cuts force our hand, we should pare back to a core that will survive. Not only is this a good survival strategy, but it will focus and improve the institution as well.

First, the Corps must define the niche that it intends to fill in a competitive market. That niche is primarily defined by its amphibious nature, but it is also defined by highly mobile, lightweight infantry forces, task-organized (MAGTF) and scalable to conduct independent operations (to a defined upper limit), utilizing combined arms and robust command and control capabilities to "punch above its weight", and capable of expeditionary operations in both littoral and inland areas (through use of strategic maneuver). The Marine Corps is prepared to operate independently to the extent that it is forward deployed and prepared to conduct crisis response (i.e. a MEU and nothing larger). This statement requires some work, but this should be what the Marine Corps does, period. Strip away everything that does not contribute to this niche and either trash it or hand it off to other services.

Why do we need to strip everything else off? Foremost among the reasons is that readiness is costly. If we are to be our nation's force in readiness, we will soon find ourselves making trade-offs between equipment procurement and organizational costs on one hand, and training and equipment maintenance costs on the other. Within the personnel and equipment readiness costs there will be competition, as well. If we are bigger than our market share merits, we are going to be using resources to pump blood through vestigial limbs we don't need, meanwhile atrophying the limbs we do need.

In stripping things off, we need to limit ourselves to our core missions and to a defined upper limit of independent operations. As an example of stripping off capabilities outside of our core missions, I would argue strongly that we do not need a Marine Corps Cyber Command. We are not resourced for that and it is not a core competency. Someone else should be doing that. As for capabilities that range above our ability to operate independently, I think that we should set the MEU as the highest level of truly independent operations. Can anyone truly envision a MEB-sized operation in which we would not have joint support? If the answer is no, and I think it must be no, then we should plan to leverage joint assets for support in MEB-sized operations and above and shed all duplicated capacity back to our sister services.

I am most knowledgable about aviation capabilities, so I will use them as an example. I think we clearly must retain all of our rotary-wing (RW) capabilities. On the fixed-wing side, we should keep only that which supports the statement above (expeditionary, combined arms, mobile) independently at the MEU level. Consideration must be given to shedding capacity required for MEB-level ops or above. I believe that our MEU level close air support (CAS) needs could best be filled by a combination of RWCAS and armed unmanned aerial systems (UAS). The unmanned platforms, with their lighter weight could more easily operate from amphibious shipping than manned CAS platforms. Their precision guided munitions are excellent for CAS. The fact that they are unmanned makes survivability less of an issue in more robust threat environments, within limits. We should limit our manned fixed-wing CAS to land-based platforms that could be flown in for larger operations, and of those only enough to make our combined arms doctrine work at the CAS and limited deep air support levels. In this, we must have some armed utility turboprop airframes so that we are not using our Ferraris to take the trash out (i.e., flying armed overwatch for hours in a permissive threat environment). Beyond defensive requirements, we should rely on Navy and Air Force assets for air-to-air roles. We should no longer participate in carrier based aviation, although we must be ready to work with carrier-based Navy aircraft for MEB-level ops or higher. We also must be ready to work with Air Force assets for our aviation requirements other than CAS. An obvious target for transfer to other services are our EA-6B electronic attack squadrons. This is already treated as a joint asset, so we should make it so in reality. As for the KC-130, these could be much more limited in number if we gave away more of our jets requiring refueling. As for the assault support role of the KC-130, this has significant utility for our expeditionary operations, so some could probably be retained, but more mundane missions should be shifted to the Air Force so these airframes could be reduced.

This is a cursory treatment, but provides some indication of a possible way ahead that would be far less costly and would best preserve our core missions, our niche. We would have to scrub our entire force for such savings. I would liken it to a multi-use tool that can be used in certain scenarios, but has to be folded into the larger joint force without significant duplication of capabilities for operations above the MEU level. Some may say that this is gutting the Corps and would ultimately kill it, but I disagree. I think this is the best way to save it and prove its utility. People never would have gone to Apple for printers, so Jobs killed their peripherals. Likewise, the Marine Corps should not hang on to capabilities that others can do better and it must plan to rely on those capabilities for any scenario that requires more force (and thus more time and deliberate preparation for other forces to flow in) than a MEU. This is the case for our tactical level units, as well as our headquarters and supporting elements. We must get rid of duplicated capabilities and commands.

A few more thoughts. As we try to figure out how to get our stuff to fit back into the amphibious box, we must consider the balance between risk to the individual and weight of vehicles. While it sounds callous, we are much more willing to accept risk to the individual when a conflict is of greater core interest to the nation. We should use that in planning for future operations. All the armor in the world won't help us if we can't get the vehicles to the fight.

And the final thought, in other discussions, someone brought up the fact that our force generation processes have shifted completely to making forces available with no consideration of costs. We have no "battle rhythm" to enforce cost considerations and spending discipline when we are staffing our requirements. I am not enough in the know on these processes to know if that is true, but I do know of many instances where people are fighting over who pays and how much it will cost at the last minute because it was not discussed up front. This is another dysfunction that years of easy OCO money have emplaced in our system and that will need to be worked out.

Attempt Two on the Welfare State

2012-01-10T14:07:00.000-08:00

The below offering is a quickly typed up draft of attempt two on my welfare state thesis. I need to work more on it but wanted to put it up before I head off to a meeting of sorts. In this writing, the welfare state is an intervening variable, but a critical one that renders the leading welfare states incapable of dealing with the massive transformation of the world economy. I'll keep polishing it and there is much more article to go with it, but here's a start. Thoughts?

Policy-makers face a bewildering array of challenges to the status quo with a dwindling portfolio of resources. These challenges are a seemingly disparate bunch, ranging from insurgency and illegal immigration to economic and political crises. Each is viewed and addressed with a separate lens, yet leaders of the status quo will be unable to make sense of their challenge until they recognize the common roots of the problems they face. The central, irreversible phenomenon of our time is the accelerating development and integration of massive Asian and South American markets into the global economy. Given the demographic preponderance and very low starting point of the developing world, this can only result in a huge flow of funds from west and north to east and south. This is accompanied by a relative decline in power of the status quo states vis à vis the developing world. This, in and of itself, is an incredibly destabilizing and disruptive process.

This period of instability will be significantly exacerbated due to the effects of the welfare state. The welfare state was critical to the postwar expansion. The safety net freed people to consume, helping fuel the economic boom. It was also the price paid to take national societies from autarky to the high wire of the international market economy. The welfare state requires collective action to function, yet is especially susceptible to the depredations of special interests. These special interests, in addition to demographic decline due to falling birth rates, are bankrupting the welfare state. In addition, while our current global economy enables the relatively free movement of capital, the nationally defined welfare state inhibits the free movement of labor. Added together, these pressures will culminate in a crisis of the welfare state paradigm as it is paralyzed by the internal and external challenges it faces.

Jobs, the U.S. Economy, and the Rest of the World

2012-01-07T06:54:00.000-08:00

The December U.S. jobs report showed the creation of 200,000 jobs in December. The strong growth was seen as good news that a recovery is picking up speed. I don't dispute this. However, it is important to note that some of the jobs were undoubtedly seasonal and will go away in January, that the labor participation rate remains extremely low by historical standards at 64%, and that the rate of increase is not sufficient to drive down the unemployment rate significantly. So it is a step in the right direction, but a small one.

The news is being spun positively, but this is to be expected. As Michael Lewis wrote in The Big Short, which I'm reading now, the analysts looking at the looming crash of the subprime mortgage market spun negative to neutral news positively and took positive news to stratospheric heights. The market makes more off of optimistic investors willing to buy. We must remember that.

Finally, even though the U.S. recovery is likely beginning to pick up steam, we have largely forgotten about the looming EU crisis over the holidays. Nothing has happened to warrant a change of heart and I think that the crisis will enter a new, more serious phase soon. No matter what happens in the U.S., a worsening EU crisis will have huge negative effects on the rest of the world economy, where political risks are already threatening great volatility in the Middle East (Iran, Syria) and Asia (North Korea), not to mention some indications, including falling land sales, that the Chinese economy is hitting a rough patch. Hold on to your hats. 2012 is likely to be a wild ride.

What He Said

2012-01-06T15:19:00.000-08:00

Go to http://www.davegranlund.com

Shortly after I wrote my post on the budget this morning, I saw this article at Foreign Affairs from Lawrence Korb, a former Assistant Secretary of Defense. His argument can be summed up with this paragraph.

[T]he Pentagon does not have a resource problem. As even the Pentagon's strongest supporters agree, it has a management problem. Norbert Ryan, the president of the Military Officers Association, summed it up well in a recent Washington Times op-ed: "Almost weekly we see reports of gross mismanagement and cost overruns in expensive programs, few of which have any relevance to the wars our troops are fighting today," he wrote. "The level of mismanagement is so severe that the Pentagon's books have been deemed 'unauditable,' and Pentagon leaders have said they won't be able to pass the test before 2017."

What he said. I guess that's why he was Assistant Secretary of Defense and I'm toiling away as a paper monkey on a staff. Then again, if I wasn't punching out my posts at 0530 before I drove to work and could do it instead of info papers no one reads, my posts would be more polished and less angry, too. In any case, the issue is clear. The outrage should be directed at those who have mismanaged the Pentagon and brought affairs to the state that they are in. We could do far, far more with the money we have spent and will spent if the organization was better managed. Korb notes that the Pentagon has been best managed when an Assistant Secretary of Defense with CEO or similar experience was appointed to manage the business of the Pentagon while the SecDef focused on guiding the policy ship and all else that comes with that job. Instead, we've recently had a string of pseudo-academic ideologues that have contributed to the profligacy and bloat that has us in this sad state of affairs.

Another decent article by Fred Kaplan at Slate reviews some of the hand-wringing over the coming defense cuts. In sort of deconstructing the language of the statement, Kaplan divines that the cuts are going to be borne by the Army and the Marine Corps. The Air Force and Navy will benefit from the focus on the vast Asian theater. The Marine Corps is certainly hoping that its naval and island hopping roots will give them some protection. We shall see.

In a quick aside, Kaplan speaks to an increased reliance on security assistance to build partner capacity. An important problem there is that DoD, under its Title 10 authorities, is limited in what it can do to actually train foreign militaries. Congress has limited the amount of effort and resources we can use to build up other militaries. Most of the authorities for training are contained in Title 22, which gives the State Department the authority to assist foreign militaries. They administer foreign military sales and training cases, the military executes them. I'd think that as we face these cuts, although the idea of force multiplying by conducting security assistance sounds good, the reality of diverting U.S. resources to train other militaries will be quickly less appealing. Additionally, it will be difficult to get either the Title 10 special authorities or the Title 22 funding required to do these things legally.

Another important thing that Kaplan touches on, but does not really elucidate is that the cuts do not include the savings to be realized by the close of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. It is important to understand that the military has used Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) funds like crack candy. OCO has been used for all sorts of things that touch at least tangentially on the wars. Sometimes, maybe not even tangentially... A good deal of the bloat in contractors, headquarters, equipment, and more can be traced back to OCO funds. When OCO goes away, so does a lot more than just the combat operations. So contractors go away and staffs shrink, but we can keep the equipment, right? True, but since some of this equipment was procured expediently, the normal spare parts and service requirements were never budgeted for. This will add to the sense of the depth of the cuts.

Finally, Kaplan notes at the end that the SecDef must maintain discipline on the services who will attempt to end around cuts by allying with legislators to protect programs important to both. This is the altruism of our system. Petty parochialism is much to blame for the sorry state of military management today.

In What World?

2012-01-06T03:04:00.000-08:00

In what world is spending more than the next ten nations combined on defense not enough? I believe that is the figure we will be at after the coming cuts. Right now we are spending more than the next 19 countries, only two of which could be called potential adversaries. After yesterday's strategic guidance announcement, the hand-wringing and incriminations were enough to make me ill. It started with on the ride into work with LtGen Dave Deptula, Ret, who has now been elevated to the man who designed the air war in Desert Storm, evidently single-handedly. I do not remember his exact words on NPR, but I believe the sound bite they pulled out was "disastrous." There were plenty of other hyperbolic epithets thrown around, my favorite of which said something to the effect of "it's all good until there's another Pearl Harbor." Maybe I am a naif, but I just do not buy any of it. I think the DoD needs deep, deep cuts if it is to escape the decadence of its ways that a decade of unconstrained spending has brought about.

Another comment I saw said something about the age and number of USAF planes already being on negative trends (older and fewer) before the cuts. This points to the heart of the problem. Everything in DoD is getting extravagantly expensive. From planes to people, the defense inflation rate far outstrips everything else. This, in part, is behind the idea that strategy is a holy thing and should not be affected by earthly matters such as the budget. This canard is a defense industry dream, but just doesn't make sense. Strategy must be informed by what is possible given a nation's resource. Grand strategy, as a matter of fact, can only be properly formulated with a keen eye on the political economy of a nation. If it isn't for the economy, there's not much point to strategy. People talk about amateurs talking strategy while pros talk logistics. Really, amateurs talk strategy while what really matters is the economy. With a strong economy and a relatively small, but strong military, you can build up when the writing is on the wall (it isn't now) that you are going to have to face down a peer foe. That won't happen for some time. With a big army and a crappy economy, that is really a hollow force.

Our interests would be better served with fewer players on our bench. Would it have been so bad if policy makers looked at the bench in 2003 and said, we really shouldn't do this Iraq thing right now, our bench is sparse, let's do Afghanistan and worry about Iraq later? I think it would have been ideal. And if we are facing a threat of clear national, existential danger, then you get everyone out of their bases, get the reserves mobilized, and you go until you git 'er dun, while churning up your economy to back it up and putting more people under arms. We don't need today a military to take on a peer competitor that may crop up in two or three decades. We need to maintain the industrial base to a degree, but most importantly, we need to maintain a strong economy so that we have the economy means to spool up later if required.

In the meantime, we need to put the fat, wheezy guy on a diet. DoD needs to bring its costs down, which the new strategic guidance speaks to explicitly. Rest assured, though, that this won't be attacked with the vigor it could. Trust me when I say that most people in the military are extremely well compensated. The vast majority take a pay cut when they leave service. This isn't always the case for some junior officers or enlisted with skills overmatched to their military service, but for the rest it is. We can curb the explosion of compensation and benefits to a degree. We also need to cut the non-monetary benefits way back. Service members never need to leave their bases. They have supermarkets, electronics and department stores, bowling alleys, theaters, great libraries, etc. We don't need the majority of this. We need our dining facilities, our gyms, and better transportation into town for the young members so that we can actually interact with the society we defend rather than staying on our bases and looking down on them. The commissary system grew up when army outposts dotted the frontier. We don't need them anymore. Yes, that will increase service members' costs, but do we want a strong defense or a welfare program? Bandsmen, armed forces sports teams, etc, it all needs to be cut back. At the same time, we must be more intelligent in our procurement policies, both controlling costs of our weapons systems and being prudent in buying what we actually need. Do we really need a fleet made entirely of F-35s? Could we have a reserve of F-35s for high end conflict, with options to crank up the line in a decade or two if it looks like we will need more, focusing more on light attack aircraft and armed UAVs in the mean time? I think we could.

Imagine what we could do if we turned some of these resources to recapitalizing our aging infrastructure... the infrastructure on which the lifeblood of our economy and our livelihoods flows. We are diverting resources to unproductive ventures, while real investment is needed to provide the public goods which underpin the economy that will eventually make or break us vis-a-vis the rising world powers.

And on a tangent, does Turkey really need F-35s? Maybe if we had not seen the F-35 as a one-size-fits-all solution, we could sell them something more appropriate.

I have to cut it short here, but you get the point. We need real, comprehensive defense reform, not hyperbolic claims that we are being sold out on defense.

Must Reading: The Great Deleveraging

2012-01-04T09:41:00.000-08:00

FT's Alphaville blog has must reading for anyone trying to understand our economy these days. They quote Bill Gross of the bond company Pimco, a market authority, in his attempt to describe the Great Deleveraging we are seeing. I touched on this in a previous post that tried to explain our balance of payments crisis and the underlying structural imbalances. Gross is talking about the private lending that buoyed the system and underwrote these imbalances.

Since 1971, when the U.S. went off the gold standard and the Bretton Woods system evaporated, banks have been able to use "credit and the expansion of debt to drive growth and prosperity" with no anchor. Credit became "a substitution for investment in tangible real things - plant, equipment, and an educated labor force." The Great Recession of 2008 marked the limit of this credit expansion, or leveraging. Gross goes on to say, "The financial markets are slowly imploding - delevering - because there's too much paper and too little trust." Because the system cannot create any more credit, it must deleverage.

The FT's blogger, Izabella Kaminska summarizes, "Whether it's via deflation or inflation, time depreciation of money (or wealth) is now guaranteed." That is scary stuff. What is scarier is that if capital continues to flow into safe securities, it will "lead to an inevitable giant tidal wave of deflation" just like the Great Depression.

The only out of this, in their telling, is for the government to encourage the money "to flow into productive assets," i.e., invested in real things such as plant, people, and infrastructure. This is the role that I think the welfare state must take, both investing in public goods and encouraging private investment in productive assets, rather than paper.

Green Storm Rising

2012-01-03T16:28:00.000-08:00

Red October or Green Storm Rising?

The saber-rattling continues in the Persian Gulf as the Stennis leaves the area and the Iranians taunt, "Don't you come back here again, or else." The back and forth game of threats and statements of resolve would be comical if it was not underpinned by such dangerous possibilities. Both sides are messaging in their own way, but they are speaking very different languages so the possibility for miscalculation is high. On the American side, the need to show resolve and toughness is driven by the desire to augment sanctions with additional threats (like covering obstacles with fire), the fear of a nuclear armed Iran, the fear of what Israel will do if America doesn't handle the situation, and the dynamics of domestic politics. Added together, this would create a cacaphony without any outside help.

As for the Iranians, there are layers of different policy preferences, from the civilian leadership, to the clerics, to the leadership of the line military and the IRGC. These various factions are each in competition with each other in ways, and they are all trying to deal with a host of issues. They have the normal issues of the prestige of a proud people, the desire to maintain credibility and freedom of action both in regard to the international system and their domestic audiences, and the desire not to back down to what they see as illegitimate pressure and infringement on their sovereignty. More pressing today is the plummeting death spiral of their currency. The rial was already beleaguered, but the tightening sanctions are really beginning to bite. Thomas Erdbrink, WaPo's Tehran bureau chief, tweeted an apt example: an iPhone 4S 16GB was 9,400 rial last week and is now 14,500 rial, about $650. People are feeling the pinch and won't be happy to suffer for long without strong action of one sort or another from the government. Some will want a climbdown, others will want war.

The Iranians may rationally calculate that the best solution is a limited confrontation, provoking the international community to devote more attention to solving the crisis and allowing them to accept a resolution while seeming to save face with their domestic audience. Given the posture of the U.S., this could easily spin out of control.

It really comes down, though, to kids (I do not mean this with disrespect) behind machine guns in the Strait of Hormuz. One 19-year old grew up watching FoxNews, the other listening to official Iranian radio and the mullahs at his local mosque. They are both scared and excited at the same time. They each probably want to kill the other. Their commanders have undoubtedly been building up the importance of their confrontation rhetorically. On the U.S. side, I can imagine the Cold War references as the older hands remember the stories they were told when they entered the service. Their vessels have been dancing well within killing range for some time now. The first one to shoot will wound or kill. Once that happens, all bets are off.

It reminds me of Fred Thompson's quote in the Tom Clancy movie, The Hunt for Red October: "This business will get out of control. It will get out of control and we will lucky to live through it." The war it provokes will not be between two nuclear armed superpowers, but it will nonetheless be tragic. Here's hoping that we won't stumble our way into another war in the Middle East.

Welfare State Thesis

2012-01-01T05:32:00.000-08:00

The below excerpt is my first attempt at the opening of an article I plan to submit to some premier journals. I know the thesis requires refinement, but I'm posting my first stab for comments and critiques. The thesis of the article is essentially the thesis of my book, due out in the fall, as well. The book has a pretty wide purview, so honing the thesis is important to the editing process. I'm hoping the article will help me with that, as well as sparking some interest in the book. This is a pre-print, pre-editorial excerpt of what may be an article in a journal this year.

"American policy-makers face a dizzying range of challenges with a shrinking portfolio of resources these days. These challenges are a seemingly disparate bunch, ranging from insurgency and illegal immigration to economic and political crises, each approached through a separate lens. Policy-makers can best deal with this array if they recognize and address its common root. A massive transition is underway in the structure of our world, causing a crisis of the prevailing national welfare state paradigm and shaking leading governments’ ability to deal with the array of challenges this crisis presents. The crises of the first half of the twentieth century led to a remaking of the domestic and international orders that had driven state-making and war-making for a millennium. The national welfare state paradigm stands at the center of this world system. Any successful attempt to address the world’s converging domestic and international crises must start with the national welfare state.
"Until the twentieth century, the prevailing logic of the world system was the calculus of the profit motive and the protection racket. Rulers sought to maximize the gains they could realize by protecting and charging tribute from commerce. By the twentieth century, the relationship had changed and the populace demanded protection from the vagaries of the industrial economy. The state was now beholden to its citizens, defined by nationality on a given territory, to provide a basic level of social welfare services, a reasonable chance at employment, relatively stable price levels, and a set of safety nets that protected workers from penury in the case of incapacity, layoffs, or old age. By assuring citizens that they would not be left defenseless in the face of international economic volatility, this national welfare state underpinned the recreation of global markets and the postwar boom. While this model became the standard expected by citizens and enabled an unprecedented consumption-driven boom, few governments could implement it well for long. The result was a massive change in the shape of the world and in how states interacted.

"The welfare state stood at the center of a massive, consumption-driven postwar boom. Welfare state taxation acted as a surrogate for saving for old age, medical misfortune, and the like. Along with improving economic conditions, this enabled consumption. As developed world economies climbed the value chain, they turned to cheaper developing world manufacturers for their consumer goods. The difference in tenor of welfare states within and between the developed and developing worlds contributed significantly to long-term structural imbalances between chronic consumer and producer states. The resultant flow of wealth from west to east would remake the world. The sharp discontinuity of well-being across welfare state borders, in addition to the constraints it put on the movement of labor, have heightened the tensions of this changing world order. Thus, the welfare state is central to the most prominent internal, cross-border, and international challenges faced today."

For the Itinerants

2011-12-31T15:22:00.000-08:00

For the itinerants out there, we have the opposite problem of my favorite movie character, Jack. As we go from one year to the next, you'd do well to watch "The Family Man" and think about where you fall out with all of the forces pulling on your life. We've chosen to live as itinerants. But we're not doing it to live for P.K. Lassiter. Far from it. These are a few lines near the end of the movie. If you haven't seen it, you should. It may change your perspective. It isn't a complex movie, but I think I finally figured it out.

-Don’t take Annie out of a school she loves. Don’t move us out of a house we’ve become a family in...

Maybe I was being naive but I believed we’d grow old together in this house. That we’d spend holidays here, have grandchildren visit us here. I had this image of us all grey and wrinkly, me working in the garden, you repainting the deck...

Things change, right? People change...

(pausing)

If you need this, Jack, I mean really need this, I will take these children from a life they love, and take myself from the only home we’ve ever shared, and move wherever you need to go. I’ll do that because I love you...

I love you, Jack. And that’s more important to me than our address...

Kate smiles lovingly at Jack...she walks over to him, kisses him gently on the forehead.

-I choose us.

What We (Should Have) Learned from 2011

2011-12-30T08:44:00.000-08:00

From the book Arabic Graffiti by Pascal Zoghbi and Don Karl

The whirlwind that was 2011 is quickly drawing to a close. I have a feeling that the epic nature of the historic events that occurred this year will lead to even bigger changes and challenges next year, however. The year leaves us with many lessons that I will briefly identify here in the hope that someone will learn them.

Artificial Suppression of Political Volatility Plus Rapid Economic Change Leads to Explosions. Across the Middle East, we saw an unprecedented wave of revolutions. Like dominoes, dictators fell in rapid succession. Some, however, weebled and wobbled but wouldn't fall down. Not yet anyway. What should this teach us? It should teach us that the hope that the artificial suppression of political volatility can be a useful tool in managing change is false. For all the talk of Twitter and Facebook and new technology leading to revolutionary social mobilization and change, these mechanisms were at best tangential to the movements. The market penetration of the internet and these social media services was very low in the countries in question. While it may have helped some elites to mobilize, the true roots were far deeper and more significant. The bottom line is that the rapid economic changes of the past decade or so created a socio-economic dynamic that the political apparatus could not accommodate. Just a few years ago, analysts were crowing at how rapidly Egypt was coming along and how economic development there would lead to stability and positive, managed change. Wrong. Economic development under a skewed political system benefited the elites quite disproportionately. The wash of hot money into North Africa went into real estate projects out of reach of the common man and into bigwigs pockets. While high rises and Mercedes flourished, the average guy saw his fixed wages eroded by the inflation that this development caused. Next thing you know, the downturn happens, putting an extra pinch on the population and the government as credit dries up and starts to pare back these projects. The people are fed up with a corrupt system that leaves them on the edge of starvation while the elites continue to party. Add a spark and you get an explosion. The sclerotic political systems and skewed distribution of socio-economic power that they create mean that they cannot effectively manage economic development. The string of dictatorships propped up to suppress volatility in the region made the explosions bigger and will prolong the transition and unrest.

The Dictators Go, but the System Lives On. We saw this to some extent in Iraq, but it is becoming very apparent in Egypt these days. Long-standing dictatorships turn the entire political and socio-economic organization of a state to their ends. To get ahead, people must play within the system. Once they have staked their claim within the system, they have significant incentives to maintain a similar order. Thus, while a dictator may fall, there is an incredible amount of change required in the rest of the system to get to a different order. This is a painful and often violent process that elections alone will not fix. One of the reasons why elections in Egypt so far are going very well for the Islamist parties is because they claim allegiance to a higher and incorruptible order. People are so fed up with the corrupt system of elites, that they will be happy to see a seemingly more altruistic set of actors come to power. If that means closing down bars and clubs, all the better. Do you think your average Egyptian has the cash to frequent these places? As the pashas wise to this, their incentive to tilt the playing field back in their favor is growing by the day.

If You Are a Dictator and Don't Want to Die in the Street, Have WMD and a Decent IADS. While the cases are very different, you can certainly see a learning process in the progression of events in the Middle East. After seeing Mubarak in the dock, there is no way that the far more criminal Qaddafi was going to give himself up. With NATO assistance, the people overthrew Qaddafi and he ended up dying in the street at their hands. As Bashar al-Assad watches this, he knows that he will end up dead, too, if he loses the upper hand. As a country with alleged biological and chemical weapons (search this on the internet for details), medium-range missiles, and a fairly credible integrated air defense system, Syria is a much tougher nut to crack than Libya. For all the outcry over Syria's repression, there's no stomach for touching off a regional conflagration to hasten Assad's demise, largely because Assad's regime has openly threatened to go Iraqi death blossom on the region if they are messed with.

We Can't Solve Everyone's Problems. This lesson is a bit messier, so I can't think up a catchy way to best encapsulate it. As we walked away from Iraq and it immediately began to fall apart, the incriminations of the Obama administration began immediately. These incriminations forget a number of key facts. When we went in there, the Bush Administration never had a decades long commitment in mind. Thus, they rushed to set up a sovereign government to hand over power to and walk away. That didn't work out so well, with the insurgency and all. Additionally, the rushed political process entrenched those religious and sectarian parties that could organize most quickly, denying the possibility of a more inclusive political order. As a result, the constitution and the political system did not address critical issues of contention between the Sunni, Shi'i, and Kurds. We struggled to push these issues to resolution during the years when we were there, but they went nowhere given the gridlocked and weak political system. Move to 2011, and the sovereign nation that we rushed to set up as a matter of previous policy no longer wants U.S. troops there. This is in response to the overwhelming sentiment of their people, at least at face value. So, what would those bemoaning our departure have us do? Ignore the sovereign wishes of a government that we transitioned power to after the invasion? Become, once again in reality occupiers? We couldn't stay. Nor should we. While Iraq is still a mess, it is relatively stable for now. We couldn't move them to political resolution while we are there. They are once again at the brink, which was going to happen sooner or later anyway. Our presence was, at best, holding it off. It is up to them, now, to come to a resolution acceptable to all. The way ahead is clear, if they choose to take it. The threat of all out civil war may focus their minds. If it doesn't, I don't believe we can change that. As callous as it sounds, we need to let them come to their own resolution, which is far more likely to be lasting than an artificial stasis produced by foreign presence.

I will probably write another post that focuses on the economic trials and tribulations of 2011 and what we have to look forward to in 2012, but I'll leave that for another time.

Ohio Night

2011-12-26T15:32:00.000-08:00

It would be years before he went back. On a winter night just after Christmas, he tended a fire in the backyard. He looked over his shoulder, knowing his father-in-law was no longer there. It was his. At the edge of the clearing, the embers rose into the night. He watched as they climbed against the black lines of the winter stripped trees backlit by the deepening blue. They rose, dancing left and right and winking out like so many souls in the night sky.

Holiday Thoughts

2011-12-24T04:58:00.000-08:00

As we head into the holidays, I leave you with a few melancholy literary reminders to make it count.

“I look at the people queuing at the till [in Gatwick], and I wonder are they going home, or are they going far away from the people they love. There are no other journeys.” - Anne Enright - The Gathering

“Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don’t know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life. It’s that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we don’t know, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that’s so deeply a part of your being that you can’t even conceive of your life without it? … How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? … And yet it all seems limitless.” - Paul Bowles - Sheltering Sky

“It’s never too late, they say, but sometimes it is. Sometimes, you learn, but then you are always able to forget, as Hem said. Sometimes you don’t figure it out until you’ve read the whole book and it is over and you can never pick it up again. Or maybe it’s over well before you figure it out as you lie in the dirt of some shitty compound in Afghanistan with your blood spurting out in minutes through the stumps of two legs and an arm. You never know when it will be too late, but rest assured, it will be. Don’t live the lie that it won’t.”

Low Standards?

2011-12-23T18:55:00.000-08:00

I posted this at the Marine Corps Gazette blog. If you are a Marine and have opinions you want to air, please visit and comment. You can find me on the global and email, or email the editor at the Gazette (see their site) to get permissions to post there. We want this to be a space for balanced dialogue, so please join in.

I received my January Gazette in the mail today to see a letter to the editor from SgtMaj Johnnie Orris (Ret). Titled "Low Standards," the letter bemoans Marines that don't know how to wear uniforms, walk and park on grass, etc.; ceremonies and the like held in utilities; spaces that look like locker rooms (?); and more. He accuses us of having low standards and states that the CGIP should be brought back (it never left), to include junk-on-the-bunk inspections. Commanders who don't uphold his high standards should be relieved, he says. I was at Cherry Point and in a squadron in MAG-14 when SgtMaj Orris was there in 2001-2002. I really do not see the glaring change in standards between then and now. Perhaps I am too focused on trivia like combat readiness and professionalism. I sent off a letter in response, as I am insulted by some "old timers" episodic suggestions that we just aren't living up to their expectations. I note that SgtMaj Orris served in long peacetime period of our Corps' history. Does this explain the difference in mentality?

Really, even though everyone has their pet peeves, can one truly say that the Marine Corps today is any less professional than it has been at any time in its past? Maybe there is less focus on uniform issues, but when has the force been more combat experienced, better equipped, etc? Are we really to believe that the Marines who served solely to go to war during WWII or Vietnam were any more spit and polished? I find SgtMaj Orris's letter insulting. I wonder what other views are out there.

Gleeful Finger Pointing - Iraq

2011-12-22T03:04:00.000-08:00

I've seen some almost gleeful finger pointing about the Obama administration's decision to pull out of Iraq and the near-immediate crisis of charges against VP Tariq al-Hashimi, the condemnation of MP Saleh al-Mutlaq's statements, and today the bombings in Baghdad. Things are seemingly falling apart quickly and decisively, with deadly sectarian overtones.

This may be true. It is not yet clear in a country of hyperbole, constant violence (the toll of today's bombing is so far less than one in August, when we were still there), and shameless brinksmanship, if Iraq is really headed over the edge this time. Civil war is fully possible. But then, it has been possible for years. We must remember that few in America have stomach for wasting more money and lives to suspend disbelief in Iraq, to put off the inevitable, to let people pursue petty ends at the expense of American lives. We must also remember that Iraq has a sovereign government and a public that, at least as expressed through their political institutions, does not want us there any longer. Are we to ignore their wishes and become, once again, invaders of a sovereign country? Are we to continue wasting American dollars and lives?

What is more, the proximate cause of the crises may be the pullout, but it is not the root cause. The root cause is the flawed political structure emplaced in haste in 2003-2005, empowering illiberal parties, entrenching sectarianism, marginalizing Sunnis, and creating an impotent government prone to grabs of power like the one Maliki is conducting. There is much more to write, but I have other commitments. I will close in saying, stop the simplistic and gleeful finger pointing, as many of those who are pointing are the ideologues who created the inevitable crisis we may be seeing today.

Shouting Match of the Deaf

2011-12-20T17:05:00.000-08:00

A debate rages at the Small Wars Journal, Foreign Policy's Af-Pak Channel, Tom Ricks' blog, and Carl Prine's Line of Departure over the postmortem our recent counterinsurgency (COIN) adventures and the prospect for future applications. My contribution to this debate, a refined version of this post at LoD, will be posted at the Af-Pak Channel after the holidays. In short, I think they are missing the broader point, which is that we are predisposed to screw these small wars up. No matter how many lessons we learn, our national security decision-making apparatus will churn out suboptimal policies.

Another aspect of the debate centers on economics, our attempt to buy loyalty, and the creation of dependent populations, or a culture of entitlement, as debated at this SWJ post. I really do not think that COIN can be anything but armed state-building. I also believe that we should avoid involving ourselves in such a project of folly, especially given our propensity to underinvest, flail about, then leave. State-building takes time. Our impatience and our profligacy only further distorts fatally flawed socio-economic orders. Whether you are trying to leave a country capable of defeating the remnants of a civil war/insurgency, or a country capable of fending off its northern neighbor's powerful conventional army, you must create an economy that creates revenues, a populace that consents to state taxation, and a state that is capable of extracting resources from the economy without imploding it and turn those resources to beneficial ends. Principally, this includes securing its borders and holding a monopoly on violence within them. This is a massive undertaking in both resources and time. By pouring money out onto the ground in a firehose that cannot be absorbed, you are only washing more of the soil away and beating down the sprouts you want to nurture. You can't do COIN on the quick or cheap. We aren't interested in long term investments. We need to not do armed state-building unless we are going to be honest about the costs and requirements. We won't be honest about the costs and requirements unless they are clear and compelling matters of core national interest.

The slogans about dollars and ballots as more important than bullets are all so much nonsense. You cannot weaponize economic and political development. This is a long, complex process. Weapons create simple, first order effects. They rend flesh and splatter blood and tissue everywhere, if they don't vaporize it. This is easy to understand and to control. Dollars and ballots have effects we cannot understand, even with great study. Dollars float around, changing hands over and over again, often only strengthening skewed socio-economic power structures. This feeds into the political realm, where ballots do not always create great democratic virtue. Often, money, power, and organization favors those very forces that have appropriated the resources of economy and society. As a result, the state can be even weaker after the election than before it. The danger in elections is not the illiberal Islamist bogeymen we love to demonize. The danger is the legitimization of kleptocracy, sectarianism, and the like. None of this, can we control as we so arrogantly lead ourselves to believe.

By shouting about the fine points of COIN, people are missing the broader lessons. We cannot do these wars well at the grand scale. We can adapt to the tactical realities, we can create a lot of local successes, but in real state-building, we have nothing but a record of failure. This is the lesson.

Additional comments after input from readers:
-I was rightly called out on my line "in real state-building, we have nothing but a record of failure." This runs against the history of the postwar reconstruction under the Marshall and Dodge Plans in Europe and Japan. These support my language above that in cases of compelling core interest as perceived by the public, the friction of the bureaucracy can be overcome. Additionally, these were cases of state rebuilding, not state-building. We had credible partners to work with, who in fact did most of the real work of rebuilding, supported by U.S. funds to address the capital crisis in these countries postwar. While there are lessons to be gleaned from these cases, my assertion holds that we will not be able to put these lessons into practice in the case of small wars of peripheral interest as the phenomena described above will dominate. See the comments for a bit more discussion.

-For the commenter on Doctrine Man's Facebook page who asserts that COIN is not state-building and therefore I wasted electrons, this is, in a way, right, but also irrelevant. The tactics of COIN (TM) are not state-building. However, in order to wage a successful counter-insurgency and to leave a state behind that no longer needs to be propped up, you have to successfully conduct state-building. A bunch of CERP projects, a flawed vote, and tons of aid dollars only distort the socio-economic and political entities you leave behind. COIN may not be state-building, but you have to state-build to truly and finally defeat an insurgency. If we are honest with ourselves about this, our appetite for COIN and scenarios where insurgency is likely to pop up will be far more circumscribed.

Leading Change and Managing Stasis

2011-12-15T03:17:00.000-08:00

It has been a while since I posted my two missives on leadership and management in the military. Overall, they were well received, but could use some refinement. I'll lay out some caveats, then talk about what I've learned from a cursory dive into the literature, then discuss how this impacts my recent commentary about the institution, the budget battle, and Goldwater-Nichols. I'll break this up into two posts, the first covering the background, the second talking about the application.

First, some caveats. This message is targeted at the battalion-level and above, though some of its lessons could be used at lower levels. Overall, I think we do a decent job of leadership at the small unit level and real management is not required for the most part in smaller formations. Second, my background is from aviation, which brings significant requirements for management at the squadron/battalion level. We have our own maintenance in the Marine Corps, a significant budget/flight hour program to manage, plus the detailed training and qualification of hundreds of aircrew, for a C-130 squadron. This perspective is different than a ground-based battalion, however I still think that the unit sizes require management and leadership.

Unsurprisingly, I could not find any one prevailing "doctrinal" definition of leadership or management. There are different interpretations, but the most useful dichotomy I found was managing stasis versus leading change. Some did make the distinction between managing things and leading people, but this was not universal and I find it unhelpful. The best summary I found was from John Kotter in a Harvard Business Review article titled "What Leaders Really Do." The summary was particularly helpful in making a dichotomy between managers (first) and leaders (second). When you read this, I implore you to realize that both are absolutely critical to success.
-"Planning and budgeting versus setting direction."
-"Organizing and staffing versus aligning people."
-"Controlling activities and solving problems versus motivating and inspiring."

In this dichotomy, managers run the trains, leaders map out new plans and align people and their aspirations to attain those plans. Realize that in most organizations, these functions are conducted by the same people. In the military, I think that we have a massive problem with all of the activities in the management "column." We really don't care for them and often don't give them the attention they deserve. In the leadership column, we institutionally ignore the first two major bullets, and focus on the third with little to guide what we're motivating and inspiring about. Of course, we write up service visions and commander's philosophies, but these are far too often lofty and vapid statements with little real meat. Our leaders, at various levels, do not take the time to get with their middle management to pass their vision, their direction, the important communications from the institution, etc. In 15 years, I cannot think of a time when a leader of the rank of colonel or above ever called his career officers together to express vision, to explain policy, or to define a way ahead, except for officers who had just taken command or were on their way out, or for safety standdowns. Perhaps this is unique to the air wing. I know that some high performing outside institutions make it a point to ensure that senior leaders regularly pass such vision and guidance to their key middle management to ensure that the institutional culture is properly conveyed and that the institution's vision remains fresh and updated in this critical sector's minds.

Returning to the management column, this is the bread and butter of "stasis." If we are not instituting new processes, management is what must be done in order to ensure the trains run. If we don't properly plan, budget, staff, and control activities, chaos ensues. Continuous crisis mode. Sound familiar? Budget deficiency letters? Who are we going to send to that next class? That next IA? Have we submitted the budget? Our TEEP? Document x, y, or z? That was due last month? That's due tomorrow? This is all a failure of management.

Sometimes we are in crisis mode because our processes are broken or because we need to overhaul our way of doing things. Change requires leadership. But in keeping with the stop-doing approach of Matthew May, which I've referenced previously, we have to decide what really needs changing and doing and to stop doing and changing what doesn't. So, leaders must set priorities and be honest about what can really be done. The literature says that an effective leader-manager only focuses on one task at a time. I don't buy that, as some tasks take quite some time and must be run concurrently with others. I believe this is more of a recommendation to delegate. The boss can't be laser focused on everything all the time, so if he wants his organization to do multiple tasks concurrently, he needs to properly delegate so that a principal can focus sufficiently on the one or two tasks that the boss has prioritized for him and delegate others to his subordinates. Note, if you only focus on one or two tasks at a time, you can't micromanage!!

Avoiding micromanagement and promoting effective management and leadership goes beyond that. Another HBR article by Torbert and Rooke lays out the "Seven Transformations of Leadership." In this they lay out seven types of "action logic" and their strengths and weaknesses and suggest means to transform from the weaker types to the stronger types. The military personnel system tends to produce mostly the weaker and few of the former through its rewards and metrics. The sort-term nature of assignments and our grading scale mean that there is a bias for short-term outlooks, immediate results, and little long-range thinking. These are characteristics of their opportunist category. The system rewards those who make no errors and do not rock the boat: their diplomat. The system rewards experts through its focus on MOS proficiency and the touchstone of "experience" and tactical proficiency. They warn that the expert action type often lacks emotional intelligence and "lacks respect for those with less experience." Familiar? The system rewards achievers that meet strategic goals. The authors warn that these sorts lend themselves to managerial work, but are unable to think outside the box. While we might not think that their individualist type is rewarded in our system (ignores rules, irritates colleagues by ignoring process and people), this is the type where people shake their heads and how s/he advanced and others say, "Well, he gets things done."

Their ideal types are the strategist and the alchemist. The other types can be transformed into these types, but the focus on long-term vision and change, sometimes at the expense of short-term results, militates against these transformations. Additionally, the constant reshuffling of personnel works against leaders settling into a role for long enough to really develop these characteristics. Here, I'm certainly not arguing for longer promotion timelines. I'm arguing for being more honest about who might develop these skills and to plop them down into key positions for longer, rather than lacking the moral courage to break people out and running everyone through a seat to get their "check in the box." What is more, the short term focus of our assignments, commands, and fitreps means that no one is going to follow the "stop doing" approach. Every assignment is a 6-18 month dead spring of creating new initiatives for fitrep bullets, meaning that the ship is listing all over the place as we continually change tack, shift priorities, drop initiatives of our predecessors, and start new ones. This has to stop.

There is much more literature out there and if you want a deeper, less rambling education, I encourage you to search on the titles I've referenced and branch out from there. I'll include a few "actionable items" drawn from the above, brief intro.

-Leading for change requires SETTING PRIORITIES. Set your priorities and remind your people what they are.
-Leaders focus only on one or two key projects. Other projects should be truly delegated or set aside. Again, PRIORITIES. For real.
-True delegation means you let someone else deal with the issue and report back. Don't micromanage.
-Management is not a dirty word. Management is the planning, budgeting, staffing, control, and other functions that keep a situation in stasis. Manage stasis, lead change.
-The short-term nature of our assignments militates against the long view. Commanders, have moral courage, identify your real performers, and put them in the seat for as long as possible. We don't need more incompetent majors, lieutenant colonels, and above. We're good on those.
-Stop doing. Follows from prioritization. Instead of a whole bunch of fitrep bullet programs that your successor will drop, focus on a few long-term projects that will truly be enduring and beneficial. If nothing needs or can be changed, manage stasis. It is ok.
-Even if we do not institutionalize 360-reviews for fitness reporting, we should have a periodic "gut check" to inform leaders. I had to do one of these for a boss who went to NDU. Maybe this should be a requirement for each level of PME?
-For each level of PME, we must add some management literature. We are managers/leaders during much of our career. We don't know anything about it. We need education.
-Senior leaders must do a better job of communicating, truly, with their middle management. There is a huge disconnect. We never see you guys (not that any of you are reading this). A periodic email to majors and above? Captains and above? would be nice. What are your priorities? The services? The latest feedback from the theater, the Pentagon, etc? What should we expect in the coming year? How do you want us to develop as officers? A brief, personal note would go a long way, even just in an email. Find time to address your career officers periodically in person. Institutional leaders, you could do the same. Even a video, and not a flashy, vapid address, but an honest talk about your vision to professional peers, to be broadcast for all PME students, tailored to level, in their seminars around the country would be worthwhile. Don't bother if you are not going to be truly frank. Or, send your local senior leadership to these seminars once a year.
-Revise the fitness reporting system, once again, to focus more on management skills, specifics of leadership, and the action logic of officers. Stop the forced inflation (a whole other topic) by purporting that my statement "Capt X is an average officer" is adverse. By definition, most of our officers are average. We have to be able to say so. Include a required comment on the officer's key weakness. This would help see through the smoke. "Maj Y consistently produces superior results, but his drive for results sometimes comes at a cost to readiness/his Marines/his family/his fitness/his health." If we force officers to provide one comment for constructive criticism, it both provides a basis for improvement and gives the board a more developed picture.
-Select and assign fewer, better key billet holders who sit for longer.

Kennan, Morality, and Leading by Example

2011-12-13T07:58:00.000-08:00

In writing about the early formation of American foreign policy, historians Robert Tucker and David Hendrickson contrasted the dichotomy between the roles of crusader and exemplar. Early statesmen like Thomas Jefferson believed that America should stick to the exemplar role. They feared that if America became a crusader for her principles, she would sully herself in the effort and therefore lose the unique qualities she sought to impart on the rest of the world. Nonetheless, even these early statesmen of a country much less powerful in the world than we are today were unable to resist the crusading impulse. With the release of a new biography, much attention has been placed on modern statesman George Kennan. The author of containment, Kennan might be cited by those setting up new cold wars around our globe. They should read carefully, however, as Kennan had words of warning in the Long Telegram that would provide the basis for his “X” article in Foreign Affairs. “[W]e must have courage and self-confidence to cling to our own methods and conceptions of human society.” He saw America’s strength in its power of example and its self-confidence.

Kennan took up this issue again in a 1985 Foreign Affairs article entitled “Morality and Foreign Policy.” He urged America to concern herself with the “interests of the national society” it governed, particularly “military security, the integrity of its political life and the well-being of its people.” This, in and of itself, was such a daunting task in Kennan’s mind that the government would have little capacity for other issues. This was a warning. He specifically stated that, “Democracy, as Americans understand it, is not necessarily the future of all mankind, nor is it the duty of the U.S. government to assure that it becomes that.” He indicted the tendencies of special interests pursuing their moral objectives as a major cause of America’s crusading bent, and of our overextension, stating that it was a duty to limit the country’s commitments to those which it had a reasonable chance of actually and predictably influencing the international environment. He was skeptical, however, (as am I) that this capability for influence was nearly as broad as many thought it.

Nonetheless, the country’s crusading bent had produced military spending “badly out of relationship to the other needs of its economy,” representing no less than a “national addiction.” He condemned the “feeling that we must have the solution to everyone’s problems and a finger in every pie…”

Instead of moralizing crusades, Kennan suggested an inward focus and some humility. “A first step along the path of morality would be the frank recognition of the immense gap between what we dream of doing and what we really have to offer, and a resolve conceived in all humility, to take ourselves under control and to establish a better relationship between our undertakings and our real capabilities.”

While some may quibble, claiming that his approach is immoral because it seeks to be amoral, or that it is too hard-nosed and unsympathetic, or that we ignore moral issues at the peril of our military security, I think that his call for humility and realistic appraisals of our capabilities is spot on. His missive should be required reading for all budding cold and hot policy warriors.

Droning on About Drones and This Week's Hopes

2011-12-12T02:55:00.000-08:00

This week, I'm hoping to have another post out about my trip to Lebanon. Part of it will be posted at the Marine Corps' blog about foreign area officers, so I'll talk a little about what FAOs are and do, as well. I'm also going to push something to the USNI blog. Finally, within the next week or two, I might push something to SWJ on our national security decision-making in order to color the debate about lessons learned as they discuss COIN, Iraq, and Afghanistan there.

As for drones, Doctrine Man is hosting a lively echo (not debate) session on Facebook with his posting of David Axe's article about there being something wrong with the drone in Iranian hands. While this may be true, the mindless echo chamber of folks positing that there's no way it could be real and that they knew something was amiss just depresses me somehow. Of course, they could never get our plane, we couldn't screw up, and if we are deadly silent on the issue, it must be some sort of Trojan horse for stealth technology or something of the sort. Have they missed the past ten years? We blunder plenty enough. Let's remember, Gary Powers was supposed to self-destruct, too.

Movie Quote

2011-12-11T14:59:00.000-08:00

The Greeks didn't write obituaries when a man died. They asked only one question. Did he have passion?

Balance of Payments Crisis

2011-12-09T09:48:00.000-08:00

I tweeted the other day about Martin Wolf's FT article "Merkozy Failed to Save the Eurozone." In it he posits that the crisis facing the Eurozone, and the world, is not a credit crisis but a balance of payments crisis. Those countries that ran high current account deficits prior to the seizure of the credit markets in 2008 ran into massive sovereign debt problems afterward. In layman's terms, the current account is the balance of a country's purchases from abroad versus its sales to abroad. This rendering may make economists cringe, but it is a good-enough understanding for those who don't really care about the nuances. This figure also may be increasingly distorted for those advanced economies moving more into the complex services sector, but it is nonetheless the best figure we have right now.

When a country runs a current account deficit, it is importing more than it exports. When it runs a current account surplus, it exports more than it imports. Neither situation is indefinitely sustainable and each has positive and negative effects on the country's overall financial and fiscal health. If you are going to be off balance to one side or the other, though, you'd rather have a persistent current account surplus. In an integrated international economy, persistent imbalances in current accounts means that the structure of the international economy is flawed, skewed, off balance. We have perrenial creditors and perrenial debtors. The system, sooner or later, must find balance and money has to stop flowing from one country to another. Ideally, all countries would fluctuate between deficit and surplus, with each offsetting the other. We do not have such balance in our world system today, which is why we are faced with the balance of payments crisis. The balance of payments consists of the current account and the capital account, which represents the net in or outflow of money based on the changing ownership of assets. If the current account is sales, the capital account is financing (borrowing or loaning money and buying or selling assets).

In order to perpetuate this imbalance in the name of artificially supressing volatility, countries, companies, and individuals have been using credit to finance the imbalance. At the macro level, surplus countries lend to deficit countries. The incentive for this is that surplus countries want consumers in deficit countries to continue consuming the products surplus countries produce. Money flows in a circle from Asian creditors to European and American consumers to Asian producers. From northern European creditors to southern European consumers to northern European producers. Sooner or later, this treadmill will come to a crashing halt.

The first recent hiccup to this system came in the 2008 recession. While bad American loans were the proximate cause, the seizures in the private debt market threatened to bring the entire treadmill to a grinding halt. In order to avoid catastrophe, the federal government had to step in to shoulder the debt load that the private sector shedded, sustaining the unsustainable for a while longer. Figures from the Federal Reserve's Z1 Flow of Funds Report show this picture in the figure above, which charts percentage increase in non-financial debt year-on-year. As private sector lending crashed in the 2007-08 timeframe, public sector debt soared.

The same thing happened in Europe, tipping the countries with the largest current account deficits into crisis. Italy, Ireland, Spain, Greece, and Portugal all had current account deficies, with the last three all exceding five percent of GDP on average from 1999-2007. The U.S., too, has run a very high current account deficit in recent years, ranging toward seven percent of GDP. The difference is that the U.S. has its own currency, which happens to be the world's reference currency, its own fiscal and monetary policy, and remains a risk haven. The U.S. enjoys an "exorbitant privilege" that stems from its central economic role, meaning that this imbalance is sustainable for far longer than that of the mere mortals of southern Europe. Additionally, the southern European states are linked to the monetary policy of the EU, which is controlled by Germany, which desires to guard its productivity and export power, along with its current account surplus.

In sum, as credit markets begin to seize up in Europe over the impending doom of the EU, we must realize that governments have a key role in sustaining the unsustainable in order to prevent a crash. That preventative measure will not hold back the tide for long, however, if the structural imbalances between world economies are not corrected by promoting consumption in the surplus countries and production in the deficit countries. None of that is happening soon, so hang on for a wild ride.

Munson Burner?

2011-12-07T13:13:00.000-08:00

Please see Carl Prine's blog, Line of Departure, for my guest post on sequestration, catastrophes, and why foisting budget cuts on a DoD used to the easy life of unconstrained gluttony at the OCO trough.

As for the title, Munson Burner, Carl chose that again (as he did the picture, which is replicated here. Note that S. Claus is sans belt of conformity). Funny he should, though, as I was discussing bunsen burners the other day with a colleague. I work in the realm of security cooperation and we know that the budget cuts are coming. Despite that, many want us to ramp up our engagement in the short term. I likened that to turning up a bunsen burner (chemistry major) to full roar, then quickly cutting it back. It will go out more quickly if you blast it then cut back quick than if you keep it at a lower roll and just tweak it back a little bit. Maybe not the slickest analogy, but the point is that expectations need to be managed smartly.

The Stop-Doing Approach

2011-12-05T03:05:00.000-08:00

My posts on management and leadership struck a chord a little while back, but I have yet to make the time to put together a polished article about management, leadership, and the military art that states the problem properly. In my reading, though, I came across a book called In Pursuit of Elegance: Why the Best Ideas Have Something Missing by Matthew E. May. The book is an easy read and some people would probably think it lacking intellectually, but I highly recommend it for those in positions of leadership who have not done a lot of reading on management, problem-solving, or thinking. May goes into things like Leonardo da Vinci's sfumato, his smoky technique of blurring lines and letting viewers fill in the blanks with their imaginations, as well as a few illusion tricks. Some of these may leave cynics nonplussed, but the book is worth the read for his discussion of the stop doing approach alone.

The main example he uses to illustrate this is in traffic design. Designers of urban traffic areas found that accidents were reduced and safety increased when you took away the rules and controls. When you forced people to actually pay attention to what they were doing by making things seemingly more chaotic, they were far more likely to be attentive to their surroundings, to be more prudent in how they operated (from the examples he uses I don't think cautious would be the right word), and to actually flow more efficiently through an area.

He elaborates on this idea in the book, as I would in a full article, but the inference I gleaned from it was that our action-oriented approach - i.e., we must do something in order to fix a problem - is often exactly the wrong method. Especially when it comes to social behaviors, such as the off-duty risks we constantly battle with in the military, less rules and less doing may actually be more effective. In his words, "The counterintuitive dynamic at work is this: the more we try to control and regulate our risk, the more exposed and at risk we are, because the more protected from hazards we think we are, the less conscious of potential dangers we become." This one requires some more thought, but more generally, our society in the U.S. demands new rules and safeguards every time someone does something stupid. They demand this from government, which is no small part of our debt and disgust with the government today. The military falls into this trap, too, sometimes willingly, sometimes at the direction of Congress. We should think more about the stop-doing approach.

At a minimum, we should spend a bit more time observing before acting. One example on this that May uses is the engineer from Toyota (I can't find the name or confirm Toyota in my limited time this morning) who would tell his subordinates to go examine a problematic process in the factory. He would draw a chalk circle on the floor and tell the investigator not to leave it, meaning the guy would have to stand there all day without intervening. Painful at first, the investigator would often recognize that the first impression was not fully correct and that the fixes he would initially have put in place would have been wrong. Given our limited time and patience and our overloaded and un-prioritized schedules, this is often all but impossible, but nonetheless worth emulating once in a while.

The Intersection of Self and Service

2011-12-03T10:00:00.000-08:00

Col Paul Yingling's essay in the Washington Post has drawn great attention today. In it, he explains why he is leaving the Army, walking away before he will get his full colonel's retirement, to teach high schoolers. Part of his decision is driven by choosing to do something he loves. Part of it is choosing to walk away from something that he loves, but is broken and will not change. Long an outspoken critic of the military and the policies that cripple its leadership, he realizes that continuing to rage against the machine will only drive him mad.

Many have praised his decision, while others call it grandstanding. This led to a heated debate between me and several others. I said that I would rather Yingling grandstanded for change on the WaPo broadsheet and walked away than for him to become a "mindless" general officer, then go make his money sponging off the taxpayers in the defense industry. These harsh words brought the wrath of some who retired from the military to work in said industry.

I do think that the defense machine is broken and that the industry generates much of our feeling of insecurity and our propensity to overspend on defense, but looking back on the heated exchange, maybe there is a bit more nuance to be gleaned. As I told one of my sparring partners in the debate, we are all type A personalities passionately doing and advocating what we believe in. Perceptions differ and clash in this arena. What I need to add to this is that, being type A's and true believers of various sorts, we all work at the intersection of self and service. We all want to be very successful, but we all want to do it in a way that supports the beliefs we hold and causes we advance.

So, Yingling is grandstanding a bit, not only to advance his cause, but also to advance himself. As another Tweep said, it is an important message and little Tweeps cannot advance it like Paul Yingling can. And Paul Yingling can advance it because he has made a name for himself. No one listens to the anonymous masses. You have to continuously build a platform to get your message out. I'm sure some think me to be a shameless whiner and self promoter. Yes, there is an element of self promotion, because I want to be successful personally and because I want to have a platform to advance my views. Others are less outspoken, but nonetheless they pursue their personal success along the lines of their beliefs in the defense industry. I cringe at the spending some of these actions provokes, but nonetheless, the people working to promote their wares are doing what they believe is right.

In the end, we need all of these things, grandstanding critics, officers that stay in and quietly serve, and defense execs that promote their wares and the strategic worldview that calls for them. We need to find a balance between them, but without both types, we would be much worse off. I do think, though, that the military needs to do much better to keep the best of its officers in service and in positions of influence, while casting others off to positions on the outside where their mediocrity will make them less able to tug at the institution's puppet strings.

Growing Up

2011-12-01T17:33:00.000-08:00

This is also posted at the Marine Corps Gazette blog. Please visit the site and comment there.

A friend of mine who is dead set at getting out of the Marine Corps at just a bit over the ten-year mark is wondering what his boss will say once he drops his papers. In his "mind movie" of the encounter, my friend would tell his incredulous boss that he's ready to move on, "And frankly, sir, it is time to grow up." Indeed it is, and this is a large part of the reason why he is getting out. He wants to grow up, but the institution does not value that.

Now, my friend has made his share of sacrifices and has held positions of grave responsibility in combat. He has filled very grown up roles. Yet, the institution is not providing him or a great number of other high performers with the opportunity to operate in a grown up world. This is not so trivial as my common gripes about safety stand-downs or HARP forms. My friend and many others like him are disheartened by the lack of seriousness, the lack of opportunities, and the lack of grown-up respect that our institution affords them.

The Corps does give us brilliant opportunities that really have no parallel in the civilian world. Where else are you responsible for every aspect of the lives of dozens or hundreds of people or millions of dollars worth of assets at such a young age? Where else do daily decisions often have life or death repercussions? Despite a decade of experiencing such immense responsibility, our junior and mid-grade Marine leaders are still not allowed to grow up. We live in a locker room culture that doesn't age with us, in which far too many of us still try to make our bones on blocking and tackling, while eschewing the sorts of professional dedication and study that is required to leave the pads behind and truly excel as position coaches, offensive and defensive coordinators, managers, and owners. Unlike even NFL players, we look at wearing a suit as shameful, even as we grow older. We still want to be the boys on the field, in the trenches.

I speak in metaphor here. We do have great instructors and mentors, but as I have written here, we often fail in management and leadership in the more administrative realms, with real and deleterious impacts on our ability to conduct our tactical missions. This downward focus, with each leader seeking to show his blocking and tackling prowess, leads to the micromanagement we all bemoan. What is more, our insecurity with growing older and getting farther away from the field leads to a sophomoric attitude on the part of some of our leaders who can't age gracefully. For them, rank is like the class year on the sleeve of a letter jacket. Instead of treating their subordinates as valued colleagues, they treat them as ignorant, beneath them, and not to be trusted.

A friend of mine worked in a role under Marine staff officers, but along side civilian counterparts. He noted how senior Marine officers treated the civilians as intellectual equals. While these civilians were no older or more educated, and in fact less experienced than a senior captain foreign area officer, the Marine officer did not receive nearly the same degree of collegial respect as the suits. Our working class, locker room ethos requires a misplaced, pseudo-humility that goes past self-deprecation to outright hee-haw childishness. I have by now lost count how many times a Marine officer has stood in front of an audience, once including a sitting U.S. ambassador and assembled foreign dignitaries, to say "Well, shucks, the Marine Corps sent me to graduate school but I'm not a very smart man," or some variant thereof.

I have likely turned many of you off at this point. I am not, however, arguing for an effete or elitist culture. I am arguing only for a professional, adult culture. If you expect to be a career officer and fill important staff or command roles, you should be expected to do more than just punch the clock, read beyond the Commandant's list (and beyond Runner's World or Field & Stream, for that matter), and have some intellectual curiosity about the matters that impact your trade. This includes business and management literature, as well as reading on politics, economics, history, and current events. You should not feel ashamed if you read extensively, write well, or have an advanced degree. You should have a well fitting suit, so that you don't look like an idiot when you have to dress in civilian clothes. How much did you pay for your uniforms, after all? And do you wear those off the rack?

In all, Marine leaders must grow up. My friend who made the comment about growing up noted a quote about a man in a book he was reading: "All of the bearing of a Marine, but none of the bluster." As we grow up, we learn to be more confident, more subdued, and more poised. We lose our bluster and settle into the role of sage, mentor, and esteemed leader. We learn that we can treat colleagues with respect and nurture them without feeling insecure. We know that no bluster is required to show who is in charge.

The thing is, though, people grow up at different rates. Some are quite grown up at 25, others at 35 or 45. Still others will never be able to play the role of sage, mentor, or esteemed leader. Some have the capacity to lead and manage large organizations and complex issues, others do not. Our high performing young stars quickly grow tired of the locker room world when they know they can outperform the lieutenant colonel or colonel who treats them as an unworthy sophomore, while bumbling through the day with a hee-haw act that fails at its attempt to act as a cover for incompetence and insecurity. Too often, competent people are led, and stifled, by incompetent people. This is because our promotion system is a lock-step mediocracy, instead of the meritocracy we pretend it to be. Just like in the locker room, we can never forget who are the seniors and who are the freshmen. This works for four years. Much more after that, many high performers begin to chafe and look for the exit.

I'm drawing to the close of what will undoubtedly be labeled by some as another "whiney diatribe." I have little to offer in the way of actionable suggestions. I could suggest a complete revamp of our promotion system, but that is not going to happen. I could plead for just a few more promotions from the below zone, but that probably won't happen either. So, I'm left with imploring our officers to grow up, become professionals, and quit the hee-haw act. There are quite a few examples around you to follow, but there are many more that need to get the message. If you think of those leaders that you most respect, and there are many to be respected, you'll probably agree that these are the self-confident, poised, and mature ones that have made the transition from locker room to front office, but in a way that still understands what goes on in the trenches and relates to it daily.

UPDATE: I don't think I'm alone on this. Read Col Paul Yingling's essay on why he's walking away from the military two years before he is eligible for a full colonel's retirement. See more on my thoughts about Yingling's public move here.

Irrational Exuberance Leaves a Mark

2011-12-01T03:02:00.000-08:00

European PMIs all in the red, from @markiteconomics. Pls follow.

Stock markets rallied in the 3 to 4 percent range yesterday on news of coordinated central bank action to increase liquidity. These western banks announced a plan to cut the rate on short-term dollar denominated loans, increasing liquidity in the U.S. and Euro markets. At the same time, the Chinese in a surprise week-day move announced that they were lowering the reserve requirement ratio for their banks, meaning they too were upping liquidity in the face of slowing growth. While the Chinese move was not likely coordinated with the rest, the coordinated western move buoyed markets.

The stock bounce, though, was unwarranted. The move is only a safety net, a stop-gap, whatever you want to term it. It buys the Euro Zone (EZ) a little more time to stave off a freeze up, but not much. If anything, this move only acknowledges the fears, nearly panic, at the prospect of another, perhaps far deeper credit crisis. Despite the stock bounce, markets have shown in the past week that they are scared. A German bond auction failed, or at least did not meet its target. Greek bank withdrawals have trebled over the same, already high period last year. Yields on bonds, UK gilts, etc show that markets are beginning to price the risk of a EZ break-up.

Add to this today news that purchasing managers' indices around the world have dropped sharply. The PMI is a measure of manufacturing growth or contraction, with any mark below 50 meaning contraction. China's PMI dropped to 47.5, a very sharp fall-off. PMIs across the EU are below 50 as well. The image above from @markiteconomics (please follow) shows EU PMIs are mostly in the 47 range, even bold German, with southern Europe in the 43s and 44s. These are terrible numbers.

More bad news will be forthcoming. The EU's political leadership does not have the mandate for bold action. While some have said that a German bail-out of the EU will cost them 7% of GDP, but a break-up will cost 20%, don't expect them to rush into a scenario that costs them 7% of GDP, meaning that they may end up left looking at a 20% slump, and a global catastrophe. A quote from Hayek a friend posted on an earlier post is salient here: "Who imagines that there exist any common ideals of distributive justice such as will make the Norwegian fisherman consent to forego the prospect of economic improvement in order to help his Portuguese fellow, or the Dutch worker to pay more for his bicycle to help the Coventry mechanic, or the French peasant to pay more taxes to assist the industrialization of Italy." It was true then, and it is true today, even in the great United States of America. The states of Europe are not united. And divided they may fall.

Fetters of Paper

2011-11-29T06:28:00.000-08:00

NYT today reports the tightening of credit markets, a story already well known to those in the business world. Across the globe, money is everywhere but not a drop to drink. The original crash of the credit markets in 2008, with the drying up of bank and interbank lending, was a key factor in the explosion of government debts. The commercial debt market overexpanded and crashed, leaving governments to clean up the mess, while consumers and corporations deleveraged, pulling more money out of circulation. Now governments are trying to return to a sustainable position through austerity programs, meaning they are no longer pumping money into the system.

At the same time, in a bid to prevent future overextensions of credit, they have increased banks' required credit ratios. This means that banks have less capacity to lend to businesses and individuals, and are being forced to sell assets in some cases to increase their liquidity. From the perspective of avoiding further government bailouts of financial institutions, this is a prudent measure. When you consider the choking effect on the credit markets needed to reignite economic growth, however, these moves are more sinister. These come on top of spooked markets, questionable consumer confidence, and a general lack of trust in the institutions and politics that underpin our markets. In all, this means that governments, individuals, and banks are all withdrawing capital from the system, which will almost certainly lead to another recession, unless dramatic measures are taken. The Euro Zone crisis plays no small part in this, as does the continuing uncertainty in the U.S. budgetary drama. Wolfgang Munchau, in yesterday's FT, went so far as to boldly state that the "Eurozone has only days to avoid collapse." Today, Gavyn Davies writes that London law firms are "allocating large amounts of time to examining the validity, following a break-up, of cross-border contracts written in Euros," while asset managers are likewise struggling to understand what could happen. Gideon Rachman asks the question if things could go "really bad - Great Depression bad, world war bad?" He notes the "sense of foreboding in Europe at the moment," citing the Polish foreign minister's warning that Europe is "on the precipice." If that is even remotely the case, the fetters of paper that bind our system together will transmit the effects across the world.

For more reading on the effects of such a catastrophe, read my previous posts here and here.

Your Tired, Your Poor, Your Huddled Masses

2011-11-21T06:11:00.000-08:00

Ellis Island's registration hall

I am in New York City for the week. I have been here twice before for only a few hours each time. Once to drop my brother off in Brooklyn for college and once on an afternoon trip down from Stewart Air Base in January 2002 to see Ground Zero. This is my first extended stay in the City and I love it so far.

Sunday, we visited the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. We got off the ferry then at Battery Park, sitting in the fall bliss of a beautiful afternoon amid the leaves before making our way up Broadway, through a street fair toward the World Trade Center site. I had not looked up the exact location of Zucotti Park, Groud Zero of the Occupy movement, but as we passed Trinity Church (whose iron fences were covered with missing persons notices and makeshift memorials when I was last there), I figured that the noise from the park up the way was from the infamous park.

The mood there was subdued. The park had a small crowd with some drums playing. The police around the cordon told me that they had been pretty quiet and presented no issues since a Monday night raid ran out the squatters. Tents were no longer allowed in. We went down the hill toward the WTC site, where military, fire, and police members can get in without making internet reservations ahead of time. It is an impressive memorial. Two gaping, weeping, seemingly bottomless holes in the earth.

In all, though, I was struck by the contrast between the promise of Ellis Island, where we once processed in over 10,000 immigrants a day (although conditions were often harsh and less than welcoming) and the aimless, sit-down protest of the OWS movement. OWS is a symbol of the debate that surrounds our welfare state. Immigration is a prominent part of this debate. The job question has always been a bit of a strawman in this debate. Are most Americans really competing with immigrants, especially illegal immigrants, for jobs? No, but welfare benefits (writ large, meaning all the benefits of the welfare state) are an issue. People do not want to pay more for a smaller slice of the welfare state pie. When 10,000 people a day were flowing through Ellis Island, there were little if any welfare state entitlements. People came, without any safety net, for the promise of opportunity, and a life of chance and risk. Today, their descendants have demanded more and more safety nets and government protections and are loathe to give a slice of their pie to others. As Bobby Baccalieri related in the final season of The Sopranos, many of us are proud of our immigrant roots, sometimes even illegal. Bobby's grandfather came in illegally through Canada because he had been mixed up in "some shenanigans" in the old country. We draw a line, though, between now and then. That line has a great deal to do with the welfare state, and the lack of a frontier. Sitting on the shore of his lakefront cabin, Bobby says, "They should build a wall now, though. I'm tellin' ya."

New York City is still quite a vibrant place, filled with people of every language and creed. Were it people only with Bobby Baccalieri's and OWS protestors, it would lose most all of its dynamism.

Please Visit the Marine Corps Gazette Blog

2011-11-15T11:28:00.000-08:00

This post was my first contribution at the Marine Corps Gazette's fairly new blog. Please go to the post at the MCG blog and share that URL with your Marine friends. If you are a Marine, or one interested in the Marine Corps' future, please comment there.

Marines, we live at what may be looked back upon as a critical junction of history. While we have collectively spent the last decade locked in combat in two theaters, our experiences may not seem quite as historic as those epic battles we have read and heard about since the first day we thought about becoming a Marine. But not all history is made on the battlefield. In fact, what happens on the battlefield is only a product of much deeper historical trends. Often, we go to battle because political and institutional structures have been unable to keep pace with the forces of social, economic, technological, and ideational change. We fight because the system has failed.

While our world system has not failed, it is surely undergoing momentous change. The United States faces significant fiscal challenges, while our European allies face a much deeper crisis of their welfare state. Meanwhile, developing nations are on the rise, some with ambitions to regional and even global power. In short, we can expect this to be a transformative period on many fronts. A Marine Corps facing such a time of change, while facing the budget axe and the drift that can be expected at the end of a period of extended conflict, must be agile. As the Nation’s Force in Readiness, we must be most ready when others are least prepared. In acting as our Nation’s second land army during a decade of conflict ashore, we have picked up great experience and many bad habits. The worst of these is the rigidity, centralization, and unimaginative thought processes of a large bureaucracy. This cannot stand. In this era, organizations that are not agile enough to move with the tide will be swept away. In this era, organizations that are not agile enough to move with the tide will be swept away. Institutional agility is built on professional dialogue.

Institutional innovation has been a point of Marine pride. From the successful creation of small wars doctrine, to the pioneering amphibious vision of Earl H. “Pete” Ellis, to the bold use of helicopter, short takeoff/vertical landing, and tiltrotor aircraft, the Marine Corps has quite a history of innovation. All along, the institution has relied on the power of informal channels in such creative processes, nurturing them and integrating them into formal structures when appropriate. As Keith Bickel pointed out in “Mars Learning,” informal doctrine, those ideas individuals capture and propagate via journal articles, personal letters, and ad hoc training and operational solutions, help to fill the gap while the institution catches up to new realities. Informal doctrine adapts more quickly than institutional doctrine. It is critically important, however, for the institution to capture and make official the best practices and hard-won lessons of informal doctrine. This is the mission of organizations like the Marine Corps Center for Lessons Learned (MCCLL). MCCLL, however, is not a forum for debate on doctrine, institutional structure, or institutional vision. This falls to the Gazette and our emails.

In an institution that is larger and more bound by hierarchical bureaucracy than it has been in previous periods of innovation, this is not enough. Our emails are too often informal gripe sessions between peers. The Gazette, perhaps, is less influential than it was in the days when articles prompted lengthy back-and-forth discussions in print from the likes of Pete Ellis and his peers. While the Gazette has sparked some dialogue between the institutional leadership and the middle management, it is too often a one-way forum. Juniors publish gripes and good ideas. Seniors and commands publish indigestible policy statements that few read. Gone too, or so it seems, are the days of the Little Men’s Chowder and Marching Society, the legendary band that we all read about in Brute Krulak’s “First to Fight.” Even the name suggests the quaintness of days gone by, but this little group of bureaucratic insurgents are credited with being a major force in protecting the Corps during the postwar budgetary battles that threatened to end our Service.

We do have, however, the formidable powers of the information age at our disposal. This blog is the perfect forum for a renewed Marine professional dialogue. It is no replacement for the hallowed pages of the Gazette. We must keep alive our professional journal, started by none other than General John A. Lejeune. The blog, however, could do for the Gazette and the Corps what the Gazette did for the Service nearly a century ago. Discussions started here can grow into articles, well refined by collegial criticism, that make a timeless impact from the pages of the Gazette. Debate over Gazette articles, too, can be carried from the print pages to this forum. Without dialogue, the Gazette as it was intended is dead. And without dialogue, our Service will never have the agility to maintain its place of pride as the Force in Readiness. The times are changing. We must be ready to change with them. This can only come from agile minds honed by professional dialogue that challenges our beliefs and preconceptions, crystallizing them into much finer and harder stuff, much as fire tempers the steel of our swords.

Contagion: A Case Study

2011-11-14T16:55:00.000-08:00

"Apocalyptic Landscape" by Ludwig Meidner - 1913 - LACMA

Catherine Rampell at the NY Times Economix blog is one of many to try to explain the potential spin-off effects of a Euro Zone crisis on the U.S. As we consider what could come of a worsening EZ crisis, it is instructive to look back at the Great Depression and how contagion and political crisis spread then. The following is an excerpt from the first draft of my book, War, Welfare & Democracy: Rethinking America's Quest for the End of History, forthcoming from Potomac Books in 2012.

Writing at the height of the Second World War, political economist Karl Polanyi chronicled the “great transformation” that took place between the two world wars of the twentieth century: “While at the end of the Great War nineteenth century ideals were paramount, and their influence dominated the following decade, by 1940 every vestige of the international system had disappeared and, apart from a few enclaves, the nations were living in an entirely new international setting.”[1] The events of the inter-war years dramatically reshaped the world, outlining the terms of the struggle that would reach beyond 1945, even beyond 1989, and into the new millennium. The leaders that emerged from the First World War believed that the status quo could be maintained indefinitely, as many leaders believe of the status quo today. Their inflexibility only made the changes more explosive when they came. In 1918, the nineteenth century system was staggered, but still standing. In the 1930s, the collapse came. By the end of that decade, the rubble had hit the ground sending a huge cloud of war into the sky.

The collapse of the global economy was the centerpiece of this tragedy. The gold standard, wartime debt and capital destruction, and the harsh indemnity payments of the peace combined to precipitate a crisis. As global financial leaders, the British hurried to restore the gold standard, restating the pound’s value with regard to gold at war’s end to the prewar parity. The war fundamentally changed the international economy, inflicting high inflation, depleting capital stocks on the main combatants, and ushering the U.S., Japan, and Latin American manufacturers to new positions of prominence. European states were unable to generate the capital to pay their indemnities and war debts, prompting the U.S. to become the chief creditor in a Ponzi scheme. American banks loaned money to the defeated powers that paid it in indemnities to France and Britain, who then returned it to the U.S. in the form of war debt repayments. The imposition of the gold standard at prewar parity on this system imparted rigidity to an extremely volatile and unbalanced system. The reestablished gold fetter constricted the supply of money, pushing up domestic interest rates, stemming the flow of U.S. lending, and necessitating European deflation.[2] British economist John Maynard Keynes warned of the dire social and economic consequences of the “Carthaginian Peace” in 1919. Once the “limit of human endurance is reached,” he wrote, “counsels of despair and madness [would] stir the sufferers from the lethargy which precedes the crisis. Then man shakes himself, and the bonds of custom are loosed. The power of ideas is sovereign, and he listens to whatever instruction of hope, illusion, or revenge is carried to him on the air.”[3]

Some states witnessed a boom in the twenties nonetheless. Leisure and apparent prosperity grew, funded by a boom in installment credit. Wages, however, did not keep pace as industrialists pocketed immense profits and set the stage for their own demise. Mass production required mass consumption. When neither wages nor consumption could keep pace with the new methods, the boom turned bust.[4]

A lesson learned, but perhaps forgotten during the interwar years was that mass production industrialism required consumption supported by “high and expanding levels of income and a high degree of confidence about the future.”[5] Democracy, too, is facilitated by prosperity as it fosters a “basic consensus among most citizens about the acceptability of their state and social system.” Without this consensus, democracy falls apart.[6] Hope in a better future is the lubricant of collective action and the delayed gratification inherent in long-term projects and policies. Conversely, times of crisis severely damage societal support for political and economic liberalism. The prospect of growing returns keeps investors in political or economic projects sanguine about maintaining their position. If future prospects are dim, those same folks want to cash out, eschewing cooperation in losing projects by cutting their losses and protecting their slice of the pie now. This was especially true in light of the interwar period’s new environment of mass politics, industrial capitalism, and social protectionism. Society shaken by a cataclysmic war and the threat of economic ruin was making itself heard in ways the established systems and paradigms were not prepared to accommodate. This was where the history of the twentieth century really began. Polanyi described the dysfunction:

Labor entrenched itself in parliament where its numbers gave it weight, capitalists built industry into a fortress from which to lord the country. Popular bodies answered by ruthlessly intervening in business, disregarding the needs of the given form of industry. The captains of industry were subverting the population from allegiance to their own freely elected rulers, while democratic bodies carried on warfare against the industrial system on which everybody’s livelihood depended. Eventually, the moment would come when both the economic and the political systems were threatened by complete paralysis. Fear would grip the people and leadership would be thrust upon those who offered an easy way out at whatever ultimate price. The time was ripe for the fascist solution.[7]

Unions and political organization gave workers the tools to resist the deflationary pressures transmitted by the gold standard. Minimum wages and social welfare outlays justified by wartime sacrifices made the system more inflexible. Wages and prices ratcheted upward under these demands while war debts and reparations cast an ever-greater shadow over governmental finances. Imbalances in exchange rates added stress to the system, as did America’s bold, inexperienced, and unpredictable involvement in the sovereign debt market.[8]

The collapse loomed, but few recognized it at the time. E.H. Carr looked back at the attitude ruefully, writing at the dawn of the Second World War. “The mirage of the nineteen-twenties was, as we now know, the belated reflection of a century past beyond recall – the golden age of continuously expanding territories and markets, of a world policed by the self-assured and not too onerous British hegemony, of a coherent ‘Western’ civilization whose conflicts could be harmonized by a progressive extension of the area of common development and exploitation, of the easy assumptions that what was good for one was good for all and that what was economically right could not be morally wrong.”[9] After the war, the old world was on life support, a new order loomed beneath the surface, and pressure built until an earthquake cleared the way.

The wheel stopped spinning with the 1929 crash of the American stock market and the chain of loans and repayments quickly transmitted the effects of the American crisis to Europe. The gold standard made currency devaluation impractical at face value, leaving states with no options to deal with economic crisis. The essence of the Great Depression’s world-changing quality was that it came at a time when the world’s power structure was under fundamental change. When the system began to wobble, the British were no longer able to provide international economic leadership and lending, doing the unthinkable and forsaking the gold standard in September 1930. America was able, but not yet willing to take up the role of global leader and lender of last resort, turning inward and erecting the Smoot-Hawley Tariff wall instead. The whole world soon followed in quarantining themselves from the international economy.[10]

In his influential postmortem of the Great Depression, economist Charles Kindelberger explained the critical role of the hegemonic leader. In times of crisis, “the international economic and monetary system needs leadership,” he wrote, “a country that is prepared, consciously or unconsciously, under some system of rules that it has internalized, to set standards of conduct for other countries and to seek to get others to follow them, to take on an undue share of the burdens of the system, and in particular to take on its support in adversity by accepting its redundant commodities, maintaining a flow of investment capital, and discounting its paper.”[11] The decline, both relative and absolute, of Britain played a central role in the cascade of catastrophes that led up to the Second World War. Britain’s relative decline led her to throw her lot in with the Triple Entente, ending her role as offshore balancer and setting out the sides of the First World War. Her role as global financier and facilitator of trade, too, was undercut by economic decline in the interwar years. Thus, the international political and economic solar system lost its center star and the individual planets careened off into the chaos of space, precipitating a world war.

The international economy was rudderless for nearly seven years as states turned inward, building the walls that led to the Second World War. The result was a “beggar thy neighbor” deflationary spiral that swept the foundation from under stock and commodity prices, while the actual value of debt ballooned. The chain reaction of market crashes was epic. Bookended by two world wars, the crash transmitted the effects of one into the world re-making calamity of the other. States went off the gold standard, turning toward isolationism or virulent nationalism. As Polanyi wrote, “The snapping of the golden thread was the signal for world revolution.”[12]

The Depression tore apart societies, who in turn demanded that governments protect them from the vagaries of the economy. Voters universally rejected the fiscal and political orthodoxy, austerity and adherence to the gold standard that prevailed for the first two to three years of the Depression, voting the sitting administrations out of office. In America, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a Democrat, replaced Herbert Hoover and the Republican Party. In Germany, the National Socialist Party expanded from twelve to 230 seats over the course of two years. In Britain and France, too, politics took unforeseen turns. In nearly every state, marches and riots protested governments’ reactions to the economic calamity, forcing a turn away from the old order.[13]

Governments set a new course. While welfare policies existed well prior to the Depression,[14] the idea that the government was responsible for protecting and providing for the welfare of its citizens was cemented during this era. It was in the 1930s that the liberal laissez faire state died and was replaced by the national welfare state: a state that based its legitimacy on providing for the welfare, social security, and full employment of a population of citizens defined by nationality within a given territory. E.H. Carr identified this change as revolutionary. Governments abandoned “economic advantage as the test of policy,” valuing instead issues of social stability, employment, and equality. This change meant that states could no longer follow the logic that had spurred the developmental path Tilly described over the past millennium. Instead of the state being a protection racket that skimmed rents from the merchants it protected, it became a vessel for the distribution and redistribution of income to society. Social stability, rather than maximum profit, became the test of policy.^[15]

Voters rejected the old order orthodoxy of President Herbert Hoover and the Republicans, who clung to the international gold standard while seeking to protect domestic industry by tariff walls such as the Smoot-Hawley bill, yielding deflation and stagnation. The New Deal turned this policy on its head, freeing finance from the international gold fetters in 1933, while lowering tariff and other barriers in order to foster international trade and reignite economic expansion both domestically and internationally. These policies allowed the Democrats to manage the currency in order to protect domestic society and revive employment, while at the same time trying to revive international trade to provide the stimulus of increased demand from the outside world.[16] America’s experience in the Depression would be the basis of the playbook when American advisors helped to shape the postwar world.

The New Deal fundamentally changed the tenor of government’s relationship with society and economy. The government decisively entered the socio-economic arena on the side of society, making clear its willingness to protect social interests, stability, and the “liberty of the community” over the individual advancement of the wealthy minority, a proposition every bit as divisive then as it is now.[18] Sweeping reforms were predicated on government intervention and control in order to expedite recovery, improve efficiency, and provide social benefit to the people of America. This government intervention in business had its roots in the War Industries Board that introduced planning in support of mobilization for the First World War and would only be strengthened in the mobilization for the Second. New Deal legislation strengthened labor’s position, affirming the right of organization and collective bargaining, as well as abolishing child labor and setting maximum hours and minimum wages for workers involved in interstate commerce. The Social Security Act established a national pension system for the elderly and infirm, while also creating an unemployment insurance system, all based on subscription payments from citizens. In a bid to stimulate the economy with public spending, works projects significantly altered Americans’ lives for the better through the 1930s providing, for example, electricity and new roads that eased commerce and spurred spending on new consumer goods.[19] Like in Alabama’s “Song of the South,” farmers were foreclosed and moved to town, but they got jobs with the TVA and ended up buying washing machines and Chevrolets.

The transformation was undeniable, underscoring the fact that the United States, contrary to some opinions, is most decidedly a welfare state. It accomplished this through a much different tack than European states and did so with much less redistributive policies, but in many ways, the United States is not only a welfare state, it was the driver of the new welfare paradigm in the Depression and postwar years. In the words of New Deal historian William Leuchtenburg, “Roosevelt’s program rested on the assumption that a just society could be secured by imposing a welfare state on a capitalist foundation.”[21] Contemporaries recognized the striking departure of the New Deal. Winston Churchill, for one, remarked, “Roosevelt is an explorer who has embarked on a voyage as uncertain as that of Columbus, and upon a quest which might conceivably be as important as the discovery of the New World.”[22]

If Roosevelt discovered a new world, it would not be until the close of the Second World War that others began to migrate there. For while even amidst the throes of the Depression, America’s position as the world’s economic powerhouse grew, it would be some time before she chose to take on a commensurate leadership role. Nor was Europe ready to follow. Europe lacked the expanding economy, banks flush with capital, and world-leading capital-intensive corporations that drove change in the US.

As debtor nations, Europe’s prostrate titans faced authoritarian politics and campaigns of economic autarky under ultraright and ultranationalist banners. These states lacked internationally competitive industries or powerful global financiers to drive liberal politics. Instead, right-wing movements drew their support from small businessmen, professional public servants, and small farmers, because these groups were most dislocated and had the least voice in the interwar era. These groups’ anti-socialist credentials and attacks on labor politics made them uneasy allies with some landowners and capitalists. This was the boon of the National Socialists in Germany, whose philosophy was laid out by Hermann Goring: “In the center of the economy stand the people and the nation, not the individual and his profit; work and economy are exclusively only there for the whole people.”[25] This was quite a different tack than the New Deal, but like almost all answers to the Depression, National Socialism rejected the old laissez faire liberalism as a failed creed.

The Nazis cut wages and subsidized hiring in order to defeat unemployment. Conscription, public works projects, and the like were used to stimulate employment. The government established labor commissions to arbitrate between workers and management, a practice also followed in Italy.[26] Above all, the Germans, through the maniacal fascist program of Nazism, forged nationalism and social cohesion in a harsh fire. The other European nations found themselves lost in the wilderness of economic despair. France, in particular, found left and right pulling the country apart, each putting their interests ahead of the common good.[27] While Germans hewed together, the rest of the world tragically floundered in social discord.

While the causes of the coming war were relatively straightforward, the underlying theme was a struggle over how best to deal with the catastrophe: liberalism, fascism, or socialism.[28] ...

Totalitarian, mercantilist states based on planned economies replaced the liberal states of the previous era and fused state, society, and economy into an incredibly powerful machine that made incredibly powerful war.[30] It takes more than ideology and powerful states to make war, though. States either need to believe that the chance of triumph in a war provides them with gain worth the risk, or that nothing but war can save them from a fate worse than death. In either case, the situation is usually marked by the fluid inequality created by multiple poles of unequal power. The period between the wars was one of significant and chaotic inequality: the kind that makes states think they can run the gauntlet and win the prize. Called “unbalanced multipolarity” by international relations theorists, this power structure is an opportunist state’s playground and the catalyst of war.[31] Fascist governments recognized the need to expand in order to deliver on their promises to the nation. They feared the backlash if their recovery stalled and in their neighbors’ discord, they saw an opportunity. Germany and Japan, taking small but rapidly emboldened steps, launching the Second World War as they attempted to rob territory and economic gems from their weakened neighbors. Once again, the entire world careened into the abyss.

[1] Polanyi, The Great Transformation, 23.

[2] Georg Schild, Bretton Woods and Dumbarton Oaks: American Economic and Political Postwar Planning in the Summer of 1944, (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), 76-77, 93-94. Barry Eichengreen and Peter Temin, “The Gold Standard and the Great Depression,” Contemporary European History 9, no. 2 (2000): 183-184, 191, 194. Barry Eichengreen and Peter Temin, “Fetters of Paper and Gold,” NBER Working Paper 16202, (Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research, July 2010), 5-6. Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, (New York: Penguin 2005), 98. Barry Eichengreen, Exorbitant Privilege: The Rise and Fall of the Dollar and the Future of the International Monetary System, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 26-28.

[3] John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2004 [1919]), 259-260.

[4] Charles P. Kindleberger, The World in Depression: 1929-1939 (Revised and Enlarged Edition), (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986), 44-45. Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes, 100-101.

[5] W.W. Rostow quoted in Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes, 101.

[6] Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes, 136.

[7] Polanyi, The Great Transformation, 235-236.

[8] Kindleberger, World in Depression, 14-15.

[9] Carr, Twenty Years’ Crisis, 207.

[10] Eichengreen and Temin, “The Gold Standard and the Great Depression,”183-184, 191. Also Eichengreen and Temin, “Fetters of Paper and Gold,” 4-6, 11. Jeffry R. Frieden, Global Capitalism: Its Rise and Fall in the Twentieth Century, (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006), 131. Kindleberger, World in Depression, 126, 140-141, 156-159, 197-198. Eichengreen, Exorbitant Privilege, 33ff.

[11] Kindleberger, World in Depression, 12, 289. See also Carr, Twenty Years’ Crisis, 213-214.

[12] Polanyi, The Great Transformation, 27, 29.

[13] Eichengreen and Temin, “The Gold Standard and the Great Depression,” 204-205. Kindleberger, World in Depression, 173-174, 247-248. Eichengreen and Temin, “Fetters of Paper,” 15-16.

[14] John Joseph Wallis, Price Fishback, Shawn Kantor, “Politics, Relief, and Reform: The Transformation of America’s Social Welfare During the New Deal,” NBER Working Paper 11080, (Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economics Research, 2005): 1. Fred Block and Margaret Somers, “In the Shadow of Speenhamland: Social Policy and the Old Poor Law,” Politics & Society 31, no. 2, (June 2003): 283-290, 302-303. Polanyi, The Great Transformation, 78-80.

[15] Quote from Carr, Twenty Years’ Crisis, 218-219. See also Judt, Postwar, 69, Philip Bobbitt, The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace, and the Course of History, (New York: Anchor Books, 2002), xxvi, and Polanyi, The Great Transformation, 244.

[16] Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. The Age of Roosevelt Volume II, 1933-1935: The Coming of the New Deal, (New York: Mariner Books, 1958), 185, 201, 260.

[17] Thomas Ferguson, “From Normalcy to New Deal: Industrial Structure, Party Competition, and American Public Policy in the Great Depression,” International Organization 38, no. 1 (Winter 1984): 46-47, 55-56ff, 63-66, 83-84. Michel J. Hogan, The Marshall Plan: America, Britain, and the Reconstruction of Western Europe, 1947-1952, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 10-12. Frieden, Global Capitalism, 169, 245-246.

[18] Schlesinger, New Deal, 343. Franklin Delano Roosevelt quoted quoted therein, 238, 201-202.

[19] Schlesinger, New Deal, 41ff, 55, 87-88, 94-95, 98-99. Hugh Johnson quoted therein, 88, 136 ff, 174-175. William E. Leuchtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal: 1932-1940, (New York: Harper Perennial, 1963), 41-62, 107, 132, 145, 150-151, 157-158, 240, 262.

[20] See Kindleberger, World in Depression, 198-199. Schlesinger, New Deal, 201, 471-488, 495. Leuchtenburg, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the New Deal, 131.

[21] Leuchtenburg, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the New Deal, 165.

[22] Winston Churchill quoted in Schlesinger, New Deal, 23.

[23] Schlesinger, New Deal, 259.

[24] Ferguson, “From Normalcy to New Deal,” 52-56.

[25] Frieden, Global Capitalism, 171, 177, 196, 210-211. Goring quoted therein, 205.

[26] Frieden, Global Capitalism, 203. Kindleberger, World in Depression, 236-239.

[27] Kindleberger, World in Depression, 252-255.

[28] This is as Fernand Braudel terms the categories, A History of Civilizations, translated by Richard Mayne, (New York: Penguin, 1993 (1987)), 331. Others label the competitors communism, fascisim, and parliamentarism, Bobbitt, The Shield of Achilles, xxvi. See also Polanyi, The Great Transformation, 244, who refers to the competing forms as communism, fascism, and the New Deal and Judt, Postwar, 274: Nazism, communism, and “Americanism.”

[29] Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire, 102-104. Carr, Twenty Years’ Crisis, 50.

[30] Polanyi, The Great Transformation, 28, 233-234, 244. See also Eichengreen and Temin, “Fetters of Paper,” on the adherence to the gold standard mentalité.

[31] See John J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, (New York: W.W. Norton, 2001), 44-45.

Trains and Trust

2011-11-11T06:00:00.000-08:00

The other day, I bounced over a section of the old coastal rail line in Lebanon. One of the other passengers noted drily that if they could get a passenger line up and running again, it would do wonders for the traffic we had spent the last hour fighting. Traffic in Beirut is epic, a close second to the chaos that is Cairo. He went on, explaining that he does not see that happening any time soon, as it would be impossible to get all of the stakeholders to agree on any plan. With a rail line running through so many different fiefdoms, gaining consensus would be nearly impossible. This sort of sad truth explains why many such projects languish, but yet we still continue to ignore these failed examples in our quest to “fix” things.

Lebanon’s railway once ran the length of the entire coast, connecting Palestine and Turkey, with a spur running off to Damascus. That network slowly shrank due to the death of the Ottoman Empire and the growth of nettlesome political borders astride the tracks. The railway remained active in Lebanon until the civil war within the country’s borders killed it too. Railways are an apt metaphor for the cooperation and consensus required to support commerce and the illogic that political disagreement often produces. Take for example the question of gauge. Like the world’s electricity supplies, trains run on a number of different gauges. There are no pocket-sized power converters to make train travel across borders easier, though. For a time, Europe and much of the world ran their trains on different gauges. Each time a cargo came to a border of one of these lines, sometimes a country border, sometimes even a provincial or company border, the cargo had to be unloaded from a train on one line and reloaded onto a train on the next line to be taken onward to its destination. This operation, plus the customs and other fees tacked on at borders, was a major drain on the profitability of cross-border trade. The problem predates the advent of rail, though. The episodic success of empire and the flowering of commerce and culture over the wide areas of their dominion owes to the power of empire in reducing or erasing these cross-border transaction costs. Among the many standards imposed by the Roman Empire, the one most relevant to the rail example was the standard width of a chariot’s axle. This simple convention helped ease transit on Roman roads, keeping rutting to a standard track passable by all.

Perhaps more important than these physical examples, though are the legal and conceptual infrastructure that standardizes and enforces things such as contracts, property rights, languages, and weights and measures. Empires, through their vast power, were able to enforce adherence to such standards. As they expanded their dominion, they were able to effect economies of scale in their military power and administrative efforts. They were likewise able to extract tribute, or taxes, as well as the acquiescence of powerful merchants and elites, because they reduced transaction costs and losses from cross-border inefficiencies, theft in ungoverned areas, poor infrastructure, and the like. By gaining a monopoly of force, they likewise became the only protection racket in town, alleviating the need to pay off officials, brigands, et cetera in every hamlet along main arteries of trade. In short, empires enforced cooperation, at a price.

While overt empires have disappeared from the face of the earth, this tendency toward creating the conditions for economies of scale and easy cross-border trade has continued. In Europe, the trend has been for smaller entities to be aggregated into larger ones. While many think of France, Germany, Italy, and Spain to be the natural territorial domains of a single, timeless national group, nothing could be farther from the truth. Each of those states was cobbled together over time by the process of war-making and state-making, as dominant rulers enlarged their protection racket to gobble up the territories of smaller ones. As this contest grew more fierce, rulers expended great energy to count, control, tax, educate, and employ their populations to provide the maximum tribute to the power structures that enabled continued and expanding rule. This tendency culminated in the cataclysmic wars of the twentieth century, after which, it seems so far, Europe and the rest of the world had little appetite for inviting Armageddon.

So, empire building took on a different flavor in the latter twentieth century. The facilitation of cross-border trade was accomplished not through imperial dominion, but through the effects of Gramscian hegemony and multinational and international agreements such as the European Common Market/European Union/Euro Zone and the Bretton Woods system.

The premise behind all of these postwar systems is that economic interdependency is the linchpin to continued, peaceful cooperation. This premise is coming up on some hard times as we see that interdependency is dual-edged. It spreads the benefits of times of expansion, but it also spreads the contagion during contractionary periods. Cooperation is easy in good times, but cooperation often falls apart in the absence of compulsion when times get tough.

Coming back to our railroad, it extended from Europe, through Asia, to Africa when the Ottoman Empire ruled the land and stayed on course as dominion passed to the European powers. Once the local hegemony of the European powers began to wane, the railroad was effectively cut off at contentious new borders. So the trains puttered on inside national borders, until the government lost its grip over the country’s various centrifugal forces, and the whole thing fell apart.

The natural answer in many minds is the same answer that we have seen applied time and again in the past decade. “Build it and they/it will come.” If we throw some dollars and technology at the situation, we can rebuild the infrastructure (railroad, wells, pipelines, electrical systems, dams, laws, armies, elections) and, poof, commerce and cooperation will reappear. The problem is that our understanding of causality is flawed. We mistake symptoms for problems that, if fixed, can create success. Instead, we must trace symptoms back to root causes and, while we may think we can fix these root causes too, we must be humble about our real power.

Looking at the railway, we might think that the broken down railway is a root cause of traffic congestion and stalled commerce. Yes, there may be some causality there, so let’s try to rebuild a railway. We can throw millions of dollars (hypothetically, but we can’t even do that anymore) at the problem and we will quickly see that money disappear as, perhaps, contracts are awarded and money changes hands, but stakeholders squabble over details of the project, over who benefits, and who sacrifices. Maybe a few sections are restored, but others remain dormant. The bottom line is that there is little to show for a massive investment and the acrimonious debate over the project has actually set cooperation and commerce back, rather than advancing it.

When we realize that the investment has been frittered away, we begin to point the finger: poor oversight, faulty accounting, corruption, mismanagement, bad contract-writing, or the lack of “rule of law.” So, we put more money against projects to address each of these problems. In the end, we have little to show for it but more investigations to find missing money or to explain why we have virtually zero return on investment. Back to the drawing board we go, imagining that maybe we could try harder. If only we’d trained our trainers and overseers better, and on and on.

What are we missing? We are missing the chicken and the egg. In order to create consensus and cooperation, there must be consensus and cooperation. It cannot be created by elections, railroads, trade agreements, the rule of law, or any other such infrastructure. Infrastructure must be built on a foundation and that foundation, the chicken and the egg, is consensus. Without consensus, people will not bet on hoary concepts of laws, norms, or morals. They will bet on family and other markers of identity and on the power of violence. To do anything else is a fool’s bet, and even ignorant people are not fools when it comes to survival.

So, if we need the chicken and the egg, if we need consensus to build consensus, how do we proceed. I suggest humbly and with low expectations. We certainly do not proceed by wasting capital in building infrastructure on sandy shoals. The rush to build a democracy in Iraq nearly destroyed that country. We saw there and are beginning to see elsewhere that democracy without consensus fractures the vote, giving advantage to existing elites, whether remaining from the old system or emerging from the underground opposition. In Tunisia, as in Iraq, as much as a third of the vote in their proportional representation systems has gone unrepresented, squandered on a plethora of local candidates and parties that do not meet the threshold for a seat. Meanwhile, parties with an organizational advantage reap the benefits. This does little to enamor people to the principles of compromise and consensus. The system in Egypt is shaping up to be much the same, while acrimony grows over the new bosses of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, who look to many to be same as the old boss. Calls for boycott of the election are growing, which will only further empower the old elites and those elements that are able to enforce discipline on their voters and turn them out en masse.

Ideally, consensus is built upon consensus. Leaders must be encouraged to cooperate in areas where consensus is relatively clear, leaving the other issues for later. Through an iterative process of interaction, trust is built and the “shadow of the future” is cast, encouraging current cooperation in order to build capital for future cooperation. In this iterative process, players are less likely to “defect,” or renege on their agreements, meaning other players are less likely to receive the “sucker’s payoff.” With each turn of the game, trust is built. When players are pushed into scenarios where their defection is all but assured, however, this capital is rapidly spent and even fields where consensus recently reigned become contentious once again.

Some societies can limp along like this for some time, gradually growing healthier until the old fault lines are almost invisible and they begin to organize along new and more flexible lines of interest. Often, though, consensus on key issues cannot be found quickly enough, and no amount of money or assistance can overcome this fact. In this, people will fall back to tried and true definitions of interest and identity and the only way the most reliable method that man has ever known for enforcing cooperation (as incredibly imperfect as it is): violence.

As I drove around Lebanon, even having read extensively on the civil war that raged here, I was astounded by the still-remaining scars of war. While there are many new buildings, the older ones around Beirut are almost universally pock-marked. I can only imagine the hell that was rained down on a freeway underpass where I saw evidence of an RPG blast on a wall. In another area, between the train tracks and the nearby sea, my eyes were drawn to one cluster of craters on an apartment building peppered with gunfire. The rounds on a balcony wall clearly were the lower half of a shot group aimed through a door just behind it. I imagined the fighters engaged in a gun battle across an open field with a militant holed away in the building. It was clear that people had died where I was standing.

Lebanon continues to work at building consensus, but the constant interference of outsiders and outside issues pulls mightily at the strained fabric there. Hopefully, they can continue to sit down over and over again, building consensus. Maybe one day, they will find the consensus to get the train running again, all along the country’s beautiful coast. I hope that when they do, I can come back to take it from north to south and east to west, gazing out the window at the natural wealth the country has been blessed with.

Swamped

2011-11-06T16:51:00.000-08:00

I apologize for the lack of posts lately, but I have been swamped with work as I prepared for an upcoming trip. Also, the last thing I was going to do this weekend before going away was sit here and put together a blog post.

In addition to the work stuff, I am trying to distill the essence of the book into an essay for submission to a top tier journal. I think the argument merits attention and the work of distilling it may help in the revisions after my editor gets through it.

I probably won't be able to be online much in the coming week or so, but when I am, I will try to keep pushing relevant articles and news on Twitter. If you are not following me there, I recommend you do so as I retweet links to most of the interesting things I read. If you are interested in world events and are not on Twitter, you are missing out.

As for the management/leadership debate, I am still trying to get back to that. I did some reading of some Harvard Business Review articles and just finished a book that I plan on rolling up into an article either for the Marine Corps Gazette or Armed Forces Journal. That may not happen until December or January, though. I'll probably have a post together for it sooner though.

Update

2011-11-03T16:47:00.000-07:00

Between work and trying to get together an article to submit (basically a summation of the book's thesis), I haven't been able to get together a decent blog post. I'll be doing some travel soon, so hopefully will get some good material out of that.

In the interim, I may try to get something together based on a few interesting articles in the last two days' Financial Times. The gist of what I got out of reading them was that the functioning of the global economy requires deficit countries to continue consuming, while surplus countries must both produce for export and underwrite the deficit countries' consumption with loans. In the creditor countries, producers encourage lenders to keep up the flow until it becomes clear that the debts are bad, at which point the burden is shifted to the government. At that point, governments are left trying to figure out how to keep the cycle of lending to debtors to subsidize consumption of goods from creditors. This system is not sustainable, but I do not see how it can be corrected without a snapping of the linkages. We want to avoid this snap, but the longer we sustain the status quo, the larger the snap will be. So, as we watch the Euro Zone crisis, we have to wonder if any successful "solution" is only delaying and worsening the inevitable.

Monday Reading

2011-10-31T03:06:00.000-07:00

Eurozone unemployment reportedly hits record 10.2%. Italian unemployment expected at 7.9, actual 8.3%.

The National (UAE) - Their take on US plans to boost military presence in the Gulf

The National - On continued protests in Bahrain

Al-Arabiya - Ahmedinijad Planning Coup in Iran?

Daily Beast - Moshe Dayan's Widow: Zionist Dream has Run Its Course

SF Chronicle - Iraqi Security Sweep Nets 615 ex-Baathists

Reidar Visser - Welcome to Malikistan

FT - Norman Davies - How Historians Will Look Back on Euroland's Demise

Independent (UK) - HSBC Accused of Helping Egypt Generals Stifle Dissent

Line of Departure - Prine - Today's Bonus Marcher

Brookings Doha - Shadi Hamid and Courtney Freer - How Stable is Jordan?

CFR - Assessing Middle East Transitions

Carnegie Endowment for Intl Peace - Youth in the Middle East and the Job Market

Neller Responds

2011-10-28T18:10:00.000-07:00

If you have followed my back and forth with LtGen Neller in the Marine Corps Gazette, you must read his article in this month's edition. There is no blueprint for action, but he admits that the institutional leadership must listen to the "young turks," adapt where required, and explain their stance where they cannot adapt. I don't think things will get better any time soon. There are a whole host of toxic and incapable "leaders" that need to face the hatchet, or the firing squad, but won't. And the politics and posturing only get more intense as the budget fights loom.

Security Cooperation: Understanding Our Partners

2011-10-27T17:25:00.000-07:00

"Don't point this at me."

I work in the realm of security cooperation these days, which is much in vogue as we talk about drawing down our combat adventures. In security cooperation, we seek to both prevent conflict by helping to build capable and responsible militaries, while also building partners' capacity to take up the fight with us or for us if needed. This is all well and good if we maintain attainable expectations, but when we imagine that we can take our partners places they won't go, this leads to frustrations on both sides and vast misspent resources on our side. Some of the background in the following post is taken from my forthcoming book, War, Welfare & Democracy: Rethinking America's Quest for the End of History, due out from Potomac Books in 2012.

Security cooperation and security force assistance are important aspects of our quest to transition Iraq and Afghanistan, and to set the world up to combat its demons more broadly. One of the buzzwords is "building partner capacity," which many take to mean building forces that look and act like ours and can take care of business on our behalf, or in our absence. We realize that few forces will match the capacity of the US military, but we want to march them in that direction. In some cases, this is a worthy effort. In others, it is a hopeless task. This is not to say that some cultures are incapable of soldiering, but that we must realize what factors impact forces and soldiers and that some of these forces passively or actively block the route we want them to take.

In the military's perennial 1-3 year turnover, each cadre thinks they are starting the campaign to do task X anew. In this environment, it is easy to forget that there are few truly new militaries out there. When we imagine that we are going to "crawl-walk-run" or take a "building block approach" that will greatly change things in the course of a 5-year plan, we forget that people have been making similar plans in many cases for years or decades and the walk and run phase has not yet been attained. "Well, we have to try," comes the retort to any jaded naysayer. No, we really don't. We don't have to try to do the building block approach and build unattainable plans for everyone. We need to approach the problem by first understanding the problem, what is attainable, and what we can get out of it. We do this for us, after all.

It is important to understand what drives the performance of military forces. While there is often a group that conforms to some notion of a stereotype in most cultures, we cannot ascribe military performance to culture alone. Generally, when there is an imperative to perform, people find a way to perform. A lack of performance may point to a missing imperative, or to a logic that does not meet our preconceptions, but is nonetheless compelling. Misunderstanding leads to tragedy, especially when our aims reach beyond destroying an enemy to recreating societies in our image. Neil Sheehan, journalist and author of the landmark Vietnam War book, A Bright and Shining Lie, wrote, “Only the Americans knew neither the Vietnamese they were depending on to work their will, nor the Vietnamese enemy they faced.” The military’s attempts to understand its enemies are often confounded by preconceptions, oversimplification, reductionist approaches, and the poisonous effect of ideology. In the nation-building exercises we have drawn ourselves into, however, we remain largely ignorant about our partners and the society we seek to reshape. This lack of understanding was not unique to Vietnam. The senior intelligence officer in Afghanistan, Major General Michael Flynn, admitted in 2010 that “our intelligence apparatus still finds itself unable to answer fundamental questions about the environment in which we operate and the people we are trying to protect and persuade,” while Marine Captain Brad Fultz argued that ten years into the conflict, units have failed to “bring the voice of the Afghans to the staff decision-making process.” It would seem that these shortcomings would have been resolved sometime earlier in the conflict.

The reality is that many in the military have been trying, but it is incredibly challenging to break the bounds of the black and white mental world we build and understand alternate viewpoints. By projecting our rationality onto others, we invite failures from the tactical level to the strategic. Sheehan offers an illustrative example from Vietnam. Advisors were frustrated with the seeming cowardice of officers of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN), a feebleness that was sometimes dismissed as part of the “Oriental mind.” The calculus was far more rational, Sheehan explained. “The Americans saw the ARVN as an army with which to defend South Vietnam. The Ngo Dinhs, on the other hand, saw the ARVN primarily as a force-in-being to safe guard their regime. The first priority of the Ngo Dinhs was the survival of their rule.” Risking this force in operations against the Viet Cong risked their downfall.
This example illustrates more than a casual misunderstanding of another culture. The societies that we have aimed to remake in our image over the past half-century operate on an entirely different political, social, and economic calculus than we do today in the west. Yet, if we think back to Charles Tilly’s description of state making as organized crime and consider the history of war and nation-state creation in Europe, we should recognize that western rulers followed a very similar logic not so long ago. Furthermore, the exploitation that elites like those in Vietnam lived on was honed by if not learned from the legacy of colonialism and mercantilism imported by the west. We forget our own recent past while assuming that our present mores and institutions can be quickly imposed on blank slates in the developing world. Inexplicably, however, we express dismay and disgust when we realize that our erstwhile partners are more interested in their own sources of rent and the protection of their position than in the birth or rebirth of their nation. We are boggled by levels of corruption in countries like Afghanistan and Iraq that are little worse than that found in some parts of America less than a century ago.

These points resound in security cooperation, too. Many militaries are designed as several concentric rings. The inner rings are for regime protection and internal policing. The outer rings are jobs programs. None of the rings are really concerned with defense against external enemies. Why would they be? That is what the U.S. and the heavy hand of international norms is for. So, the regimes build up their inner rings, but have an active interest in making sure that the outer rings are not nearly as capable. Why invite a coup? Even in regimes less concerned with their own protection, the outer ring as a jobs program still holds true. While these regimes may not actively work to keep these outer rings incapable of mounting an insurrection, the tyranny of scarce resources does the trick anyway. They only have enough money to make a small, capable force while spreading the rest around to soldiers who show up for a paycheck, but little else. It is an alternative to welfare. In countries facing these sorts of challenges, security cooperation with the outer rings is not going to be very productive.

What is more, while we may be concerned with capabilities such as amphibious assault and expeditionary warfare, almost no one else in the world is. Thus, when we look for like partner forces, the Marines especially find poor analogs. This is fine, as long as we are happy to work with these forces as they are, and not to make them into something they need not and cannot be. If we are not going to make them significantly better, then why bother? A similar line of reasoning underlies the "train-the-trainer" concept (we train trainers, that can spread the wealth to the rest of their force). We want to make them better and to make that capability self-sustaining. This is well and good with some forces, but others have little interest. As a friend said, each unit wants to get the American "thumbprint": it is a badge of credibility to have been trained by the U.S. If this is what they want, we should give it to them. These forces are more concerned with the interface with Americans than real capability, so we should be honest with ourselves and give them the face time they want, but with economy of force and with the clear guidance to the engagement teams that they are there to spread a positive image of America to as many troops as possible, not to make an elite fighting force. To imagine that we can do something else only wastes resources and leads to mutual frustration.

Professional Military Education Question

2011-10-26T04:40:00.000-07:00

A question for military officers reading the blog which I hope to feed into an article and future blog posts on the management topic. Have you participated in or do you know of any PME programs that include courses, classes, or lessons on general management principles? In this, I'm looking for general PME such as intermediate or top level school. Captains' career courses would be applicable too. Please exclude comments about special graduate programs such as those for contracting or procurement or the new MBA program at Naval Postgraduate School. I am looking for info on management education for the general population of officers. Is it out there? I would greatly appreciate answers from each service in the comments section. If you can point me to syllabi, POCs, etc, that would be greatly helpful.

Wednesday Reading

2011-10-26T02:58:00.000-07:00

As always, I may update.

NYT - New Poll Finds Deep Distrust of Govt - 89% don't trust gov to do the right thing. 74% say country on wrong track. 84% disapprove of Congress.

CBO - Trends in the Distribution of Household Income Between 1979 and 2007 - Income distribution became more skewed, i.e. more unequal. This is in line with the themes of growing inequality discussed in my book and found elsewhere in the blog.

NYT - Archives Reveal Hussein's Mindset

Today's Zaman - What kind of Islamism is boosted by Arab Spring? - Briefly touches on trends in Egypt, Tunisia, and Syria

CFR - Kupchan on the EU's Make or Break Moment

SWJ - Don't Break the Bank with COIN

Brookings - Douglas Elliott - Testimony on Eurozone Crisis and Implications for US

NYT- More Arrests in Massive Iranian Bank Fraud Case

The World According to Winnie the Pooh

2011-10-25T18:27:00.000-07:00

I just watched the Winnie the Pooh movie with my wife and daughter. Here's what I got out of it. Unlearned people defer to leader figures who pretend to know more than they do, but really don't. The leader figures, straining to understand things they cannot, tend to overblow evidence and create monsters, which reinforces their leadership role. They blunder about in the woods for some time and in the end, end up doing more harm to themselves than anyone else does. I think I need to take an extended vacation.

A Palate Cleanser and a Bucket

2011-10-24T13:29:00.000-07:00

With "victory" in Libya and the close of the U.S. mission in Iraq, it is amazing how quickly wonks are seeking to learn new lessons. Like a palate cleanser at a scotch tasting, Libya suggests a new "smarter" way ahead. But palate cleanser or not, when you don't know when to stop, you're going to end up making a mess, most of which ends up on you.

The potential "Obama doctrine" was heralded in today's Financial Times in an article by Anna Fifield and Geoff Dyer. They summarize it as "a new form of high-tech, low-budget and politically astute intervention, one that maximizes US influence while minimizing costs for a cash-strapped government. It could represent a template for future interventions that meshes the moral and political impulses of US policy with straitened economic times." They cite the cost of the Libya intervention, which was $1 billion compared to the over $1 trillion spent on Iraq. And there was no loss of life on the US side. FT usually offers interesting and intelligent articles, but this one really goes off the rails.

They quote Vice President Joe Biden as saying "This is more of the prescription for how to deal with the world as we go forward." Former NSC adviser Zbignew Brzezinski gushes, in their quote, of "discriminating engagement." A Clinton-era official labels it an "orthoscopic (British publication) surgical approach" to the Bush era "open-heart surgery of shock-and-awe." They even get Brian Katulis and Rory Stewart into the act. Yet, while all these wonks gush on about how much smarter this intervention was, no one mentions the most glaring facts. That it was a totally different opportunity than that of Iraq or Afghanistan. That previous "surgical" attempts at using airpower alone failed miserably. That the Libyans themselves started the whole thing, which cannot always be counted on if one wants to create a model for interventionism. That we have not yet even begun to see where this thing is going.

None of these caveats is meant as a criticism of the policies that, to this point, seem very successful. However, to generalize these as a doctrine is quite short-sighted. The success here owes more to the unique circumstances than it does to the application of different policies. Arthroscopic surgery may work when the whole body is working against that which you are working to excise. It does not when that which you are working to excise has complete control of all functions of the body. I quote the much maligned Clausewitz to this end. "Kind-hearted people might of course think there was some ingenious way to disarm or defeat the enemy without too much bloodshed, and might imagine this is the true goal of the art of war. Pleasant as it sounds, it is a fallacy that must be exposed: war is such a dangerous business that the mistakes which come from kindness are the very worst." Instead of seeking new ways to be interventionist, we should instead be learning that there are very few circumstances in which interventionism works out well and that, despite the as yet unfinished work in Libya, one needs to be prepared for undetermined, often uncontrollable, high costs in order to exert one's will on the world. Magic solutions, whether they be open heart shock and awe or arthroscopic airstrikes, rarely materialize. Perhaps the wonks will be less glib when we see just how damaged the body is after the months of bitter fighting in Libya. And remember, a palate cleanser may only lead to another unhealthy binge.

Monday Reading

2011-10-24T02:58:00.000-07:00

Washington Institute - Sultan's Death Tests Saudi Succession Mechanisms

Reuters - Christopher Hill (former US Amb to Iraq) - Why the US Couldn't Stay in Iraq

Multiple agencies on Twitter report that Amb Robert Ford is leaving Syria due to security concerns. AJ Arabic breaking news attributes this to Reuters. AJE reports that AMEMB Damascus says this is not true, saying he is traveling to the US and will be back by November.

Fox - McCain says US may consider military options to protect civilians in Syria

AJE - Kenyans use air strikes in attack on Shabab stronghold in Somalia

NYT - Panetta Charts Course without Blank Check

FT - Crown Prince Sultan's death - Marked by stability and won't precipitate jump to the younger crowd of princes. New CP likely to be Naif, a conservative, maybe a "hard liner," maybe pragmatically so. Definitely old.

SF Chronicle - EU leaders rule out tapping ECB for funds to shore up EZ. Rule out forced restructuring of Greek debt.

Federal Reserve Board - Fed releases Beige Book - Overall modest/slight expansion. Commercial and residential real estate remains weak. Consumer spending up, led by tourism and car purchases. Business capital spending and hiring remained weak, indicating a cautious to pessimistic outlook. Lending was down except for mortgage refinancing. "Wage pressures remained subdued" but a few sectors reported difficulties in finding qualified workers.

Telegraph (UK) - Karzai - Afghanistan would back Pakistan in war with US

AP - Early Signs of Strong Islamist Vote in Tunisia Elections

CNN - Kenya night club grenade attack injures 12 coming after US Embassy warning

WaPo - State Dept Police Training Program Lacks Planning, Report Says

Today's Zaman - Turkey Quake Toll to 269, 1000 Injured

Cognitive Dissonance Much?

2011-10-21T18:20:00.000-07:00

I've been pretty quiet this week. Before I get down to my brief thought tonight, I'll submit a few excuses (whiney, probably, at least according to one commenter who described my management essay as a whiney diatribe) for my lack of posts this week. I've been eyeball deep in exciting staff work. Rewriting an order has been the most interesting of the work. At least I've been learning something in that and I feel a sense of accomplishment in getting through chunks of it. Next down the list is writing info papers. I did a few of those this week. They really do not provide much info. The stricture is to keep them to one page. Understandable, given the demands on executive's time. Yet, once you take that page and break it into the obligatory title and date lines, purpose, background, and discussion, with an empty line between each paragraph, there is not much information really on the page. There's an obligatory recommendation paragraph that must be included, even if to say "None, for information only" (hence an information paper for background) plus the signature block. So, in the end, your information paper, which in the minds of some is a great intellectual step up from the powerpoint slide, once you format and create actual sentences, often has less information than I can fit on a powerpoint slide. I'm not arguing for powerpoints, but neither the information paper nor the powerpoint really has any intellectual heft behind it.

This brings us to my least favorite part of the week, which was working with the "supporting establishment" to make an event happen. In trying to schedule an event a little over a month away, I made the mistake of trying to "socialize" the plan with the end units to be visited first, instead of launching a message to the faceless stratosphere of higher headquarters flunkies with zero understanding of what the units could best support. Unfortunately, I got a flunkie at a lower headquarters, a DoD civilian, retired officer of course, who refused to talk to me until tasked, even when I was infoing the higher headquarters on the conversation. To make a long story short, I counted at least six layers of civilian and contractor hierarchy that I was launched through on email like a pinball, none of whom would actually do anything but pontificate on process and who might be the command and point of contact that should be responsible for making the magic happen. In the end, I ended up sending message traffic like I said I planned to do in the first place, only instead of having a supportable schedule, I have one that I made up in a vacuum and will be cussed when the message comes down. Well, by most. A Gunnery Sergeant and a retired enlisted infantry Marine at two of the functions got back to me with their pieces. The retired officers, guardians of process, will get what I dreamed up.

Preamble complete, I give you the brief thought behind the title. Remember, I said brief. The military, especially the Marine officer and SNCO corps, is one of the most politically conservative organizations in America. I am subjected to FoxNews daily, through a government provided plasma TV in my shared office. I don't think the Army is much different when it comes to political orientation. Despite this extreme conservatism, we are denizens and proud supporters of what must be the most successful socialist socio-economic entity in the world. And we defend it rabidly. At the same time we, the braintrust of the military, have been rabid supporters of centralized government reconstruction and government planned economic programs in two nations, while also advocating the idea that democratic elections held almost immediately after the removal of the previous, wildly dysfunctional regimes, would make for a utopia. Back home, we (collectively) have Ayn Rand in our back pockets, often bought in the subsidized post exchange. Over there, we invoke the Marshall Plan, a program that borrowed much from the New Deal. Over here, we compare Obama to Roosevelt and his New Deal with all but a Mediterranean spit on the floor. We watch Fox and chime in about no new taxes, but lament the end of the mission in Iraq and march off to the tax-subsidized lunch at the commissary, griping about the surcharges. We're gloomy. We'll probably get our retirements, but the younger guys may not. The problem for us, though, is that the lucrative contract jobs paid for by endless OCO funds that we treat like funny money are going to dry up. Because we've spent it all. And the American public is tired of it. And they don't want to pay taxes. Neither do we. But we don't understand our own role in pissing away America's wealth. Cognitive dissonance much?

Hard Choices - Pay the Bills or Ignore Gravity

2011-10-18T16:26:00.000-07:00

Sometimes, you have to settle.

CNAS released its report on the impending knock of reality on the door of the American defense establishment last week. The lead author was LTG David Barno, former commander of Combined Forces Command - Afghanistan from 2003 to 2005 (during my 2004 stint in sunny Tarin Kowt). Entitled "Hard Choices: Responsible Defense in an Age of Austerity," it created a minor stir for its recommendation to cut ground forces. The surprise came, in part, because CNAS has been the champion of the ground-force intensive population-centric counter-insurgency tactigy (I won't call it a strategy, but it isn't really a tactic either). That makes their call a bit of an about face, but it makes sense given the realities that they are addressing. This won't be a detailed analysis of their report or of the way ahead in general. Rather, I'll comment on a few of the report's statements and suggestions that I found interesting.

While the report offers a portfolio of choices, there is not really a lot of meat to the implications they elucidate for chosing any of their four options. This is not so much of a criticism as an observation. As an initial report that they hope some people would actually read, it makes sense that it should not be an undigestible book length research report. However, some of their suggestions and assumptions are missing critical caveats that should, but may not, accompany any adoption of their suggestions. More on that in a few paragraphs.

First, the report speaks to the fiscally constrained environment we are looking at. Strangely, though, they offer this statement as a sort of apology: "We acknowledge that these constraints are driving strategy, not the other way around, but accept this as an unavoidable reality in today's political environment." Perhaps I am missing something, but I think that there are two flaws in this statement, well, three. The first is just the quibble I added at the end of the last sentence: they are not really offering a strategy, but a way to cut forces while still retaining global capabilities. Second, and more importantly, I do not think that resource constraints are necessarily driving strategy, but like constraints in any plan, they must inform the plan and be captured in it in order to come up with a supportable concept. This is why it seems strange to me that Congressional legislation prohibits QDR from addressing budget constraints, as the report points out. Perhaps this is an effort to keep the military out of the civilian political realm, or to make sure that the military is giving its honest assessement in order to allow civilian decision-makers to full evaluate their risk. Perhaps not. But this leads to the third and most critical point.

It is not improper that resource constraints constrain a strategic plan. How could it be any other way? NASA would love to put a person on some planet at the far reaches of the universe, but we literally cannot get to there from here. I'd love to have a palatial house in La Jolla overlooking the Pacific and not have to work. Also cannot be done. Every person and corporation in the world that plans quickly moves beyond pie in the sky brainstorming to figure out the limits of their capabilities and resources, then sets attainable goals. So, I don't think that constraints driving strategy are an "unacceptable reality in today's political environment." I think that constraints are a reality, period, that must be accounted for. When you don't, you invite disaster. I realize that the authors are not suggesting that they'd concoct a plan to take over the world in the absence of constraints, but our strategic braintrust absolutely must account for constraints and realize that in our current fiscal and socio-economic environment, to spend without consideration of its effects is to hasten our strategic demise. Our grand strategy must seek to husband, and when possible set the conditions for recreation, of our national and state power. Thus, cuts of the sort that CNAS proposes are not only hard choices, they are required choices. (Read this great op-ed from FT's Gideon Rachman on decline and choices).

Here, we come back to the heart of the report's recommendations and the critical caveats that are missing. The first of three core recommendations that CNAS recommends is predicated upon the assumption that "naval and air forces will grow increasingly important in the future strategic environment." CNAS recommends cutting ground forces because this "may incur less risk than canceling naval and air modernization programs because the US military can build up additional ground forces more quickly than it can acquire additional naval and air forces once production lines have closed." I think their assumption is based more on the reality of a distributed Indo-Pacific theater characterized by area denial capabilities than it is on a technology-driven belief in the growing power of air and sea weapons. This is a point that must be elucidated if these choices are to be considered for action.

What is more, the statement about building up ground forces versus air and sea platforms is also true, but incomplete. This may work for a distant, brewing war against a growing near peer power, but what happens if a country with weapons of mass destruction melts down and the Nation decides that we must once again return to stability or counter-insurgency operations? We can say, "Never again," but once we head in to search for needles in haystacks, it will be difficult to manage the scope of the operation and a large number of ground forces may be needed. The hedge against this is transferring more combat power to the reserve force. Again, this is a plausible course of action, but the illusion of reserve parity with active forces that has been pushed in some corners of late is just that: an illusion.

All of this suggests that, for the report's suggestions to make strategic sense, we must fundamentally change the way we approach conflicts. This all works if we keep a very high bar for entry into conflicts and are willing to request significant support and sacrifices on the part of the Nation if the situation demands military intervention. As we have seen, though, our national security decision-making process does not follow such logic. We are much more likely to allow ourselves to believe that nifty air and sea weaponry, along with fancy strategery, can win us a war on the cheap, only this time there will be a far smaller ground force to play clean up.

With regard to these air and naval platforms, CNAS has some more words of wisdom. "The US military is over-invested in expensive and often redundant capabilities that discourage interdependence among the services." This sentence is largely, but not solely aimed at Uncle Sam's Misguided Children. I agree with their assertion and have briefly stated so in the Marine Corps Gazette. Not only should the military reduce the redundancies in its air forces, medical corps, and I'd suggest its BANDS and sports teams, but it should be more pragmatic in the high end toys it buys. "The US military should generate requirements for new weapons systems based on realistic assessments of likely threats, not on the pursuit of maximalist capabilities." Like Gunny would tell the PFC, "Boy, I know you can get the loan, but I'm telling you, you're just gonna get it tore up driving to work every day and end up getting that Corvette repo'd."

Like the PFC, we're flying the wings off our top end, incredibly expensive daily drivers today as they fly circles in keypads over Afghanistan. We could be doing the same missions and many of those likely to arise in the future with a fleet of less expensive and more flexible utility aircraft, while maintaining a smaller fleet of more capable aircraft for other contingencies. We seek transformational platforms, but due to the rapid pace of innovation, the slow bureaucratic process of testing, risk decision-making, and subsequent approval, our transformational platforms often come out late, over-budget, nearly obsolete, and often without the bells and whistle add-ons that we have decided are critical to operations in the interim. As a result, "The Pentagon's plans consistently outpace available resources." Citing "systematic cost growth," the CBO estimates that DoD will need $48 billion per year to FY21 in order to execute its programs over and above natural rate of inflation growth of the level of funding in FY11 budget. The illogic in our procurement system and military-industrial complex is killing our ability to innovate and acquire capabilities in a timely and affordable manner. Some of this can be traced to the desire of senior leadership to leave their mark, and doing so by creating acquisition poison pills and faits accomplis. Their intent is to ensure that programs can't be killed, but the result is that bad programs cannot be dropped and extended acquisitions timelines create mega-problems in sustaining legacy programs. On the outside, military contractors enjoy asymmetric advantages in the political and bureaucratic realm that allows them to claim huge rents in various ways (see Mancur Olson on this more generally).

The report does not cover the two elephants in the room. One, they admit to. Their scenarios do not address the massively growing personnel costs associated with retirement, healthcare, and other compensations. The other, they do not. Nothing is said about the rampant mismanagement of personnel, the bloating of staffs, or the fact that there is a "tasker coordination cell" in at least one J-section in a joint staff that I know of consisting of contractors monitoring contractors and GSs and officers who have tasked contractors and GSs and officers with... well you get the point. Nothing is said about cutting the chaff, reducing the number of bandsmen, cutting down on flag messes and other perks, reducing the plasma screens and cable contracts for every office, and so on, that hemorrhage our wealth and potential capabilities. This is what a decade of unconstrained resources has done for us. To change this might take some management.

More on Leadership - You Have to Be a Leader Too

2011-10-17T03:16:00.000-07:00

See my latest on the subject at this post.

While my post about leadership and management was generally well received and got record views, my rhetorical flourish put some people off while also supporting my thesis in a way. Critics have characterized managers as meek block checkers and the sorts that ensure the TPS reports are duly filed and go on "making the ham sandwich" for higher headquarters, no matter how ridiculous the demand for the ham sandwich is. Another comment was that managers manage things while leaders lead people. These criticisms underline that we in the military know so little about management and are so put off by it due to bad management, that it is tantamount to being a dirty word. Furthermore, I downplayed leadership in the post for several reasons. One, military officers are steeped in rhetoric and education on leadership. If you don't already "get it" to some degree by the time you're a mid-level company grade, you're probably a hopeless case. Two, I'm an anonymous typist on here for most of you, so my focus on management may make me sound like a meek bean counter wannabe manager-as-leader. I take leadership very seriously and I'm the last guy, in my mind anyway, to keep my head down and do the TPS reports. In my billets, I did try to manage our metrics well and keep the blocks green, but I also stood up to stupidity to the limits of propriety (and sometimes maybe a little beyond). Most importantly, I tried to make sure that we created the reality of the intent behind the green blocks and that this reality took priority over good numbers. I think I'm a better leader than manager, and if I can't be equally good at both, I'd rather be better at leadership. Third, in the blog post I focused on management and dissed leadership-as-a-parlor-trick to make a rhetorical point. When you add all these together, I'm not saying that military officers should be managers first. I'm saying that we collectively have a big leadership claw and a tiny little management claw. What is more, we are not making an effort as an institution to develop the management claw. The situation is so bad that management is seen pejoratively among many officers.

To counter one of the distinctions made in a comment at SWJ, you can manage people, not just things. You can manage their efforts, their assignments (not just in the big institutional HR way, but within a unit), you can manage their development within your unit, you can manage the tasks you give them, and for goodness sake, manage the meetings you make them sit through and the other exchanges of information in your unit. But all of this has to be coupled with leadership. Thus, many definitions of management include leadership.

Management does not replace leadership, but poor management creates problems leadership, usually at lower levels, needs to solve, including poor morale, misspent time and effort, and what the hell are we doing questions.

Leadership takes on far more importance in combat operations, especially at the small unit level. This is one reason why people are often more content with the deployed environment.

So, I'd ask you to try to see management in a new light. Think of good management and what it would mean to you. Banish the images of bean counters and those a-holes up at echelons above reality from your picture of management. Think of how management, coupled with leadership, can improve how we utilize, and thus make worth of, our people. Pick up a Harvard Business Review sometime and skim the articles. Read a few lines of a management book at Barnes and Noble on a weekend. Try to glean some wisdom from people who take management seriously, not as a epithet, and consider whether we'd be a better organization if we coupled management with leadership, rather than focusing on leadership alone. And think of some of the bad examples of leadership and the problems that mismanagement has made for you as a leader to realize that leadership can be a dirty word too. It isn't the word, it is the addition of the word and reality poor in front of it that makes leadership or management a bad thing.

For further reading, continue to this post.

Monday Reading

2011-10-17T03:14:00.000-07:00

SWJ - Realism vs. Liberalism in Development of CT Strategy

National Journal - Iraq's al-Maliki as the Region's New Strongman

al-Arabiya English - Oman's Elections

NYT- Tensions Flare - Firing from Pakistan into Afghanistan

Today's Zaman (Turkey) - Syrian National Council electing leadership in Istanbul - Front page headline shows that Turkey is allowing opposition to organize on its soil

Today's Zaman - Arab League Gives Deadline for Syria Cease Fire

WaPo - Dubai and the unsustainability of subsidized gas

WaPo Checkpoint Washington Blog - Congress Losing Patience with Iran Policy

Jerusalem Post - Jordan's New Government

USIP - Iran's Massive Banking Scandal - Dwarfs all previous corruption scandals. Impairs Ahmedinijad's attempt to paint himself as battling corruption. May bring impeachement of economic minister. Inflames charges of corruption in government's privatization campaign.

WSJ - Of Blind Men and Elephants - On the Chinese economy

Federal Reserve - Industrial Production Data - Industrial production grew very slightly in September, remaining well below its 2007 level (around 94 percent). Capacity utilization stands at around 77 percent, 3 points below its long-term average of 80 percent.
More later if I see anything or have time to post.