I was wrong about SecDef Gates - here is a more accurate view of him

I apologize to those of you who read yesterday’s post about Secretary of Defense Gates.  I read his recent speeches with my mind closed.  Fortunately Tom Engelhardt sees what the rest of us overlook.  Consider Gates’ 4 April speech at West Point.

Last year I read Partners in Command, a book by Mark Perry. It is an account of the unique relationship between Eisenhower and General George Marshall … one of the things I found compelling is how they were both influenced by another senior Army officer who is not nearly as well-known and in fact, as a reader of history, I had never heard of.

His name is Fox Conner, a tutor and mentor to both Eisenhower and Marshall. … From Conner, Marshall and Eisenhower learned much about leadership and the conduct of war. Conner had three principles of war for a democracy that he imparted to Eisenhower and Marshall. They were:

• Never fight unless you have to;
• Never fight alone;
• And never fight for long.

All things being equal, these principles are pretty straightforward and strategically sound. We’ve heard variants of them in the decades since, perhaps most recently in the Powell doctrine.

But of course, all things are not equal, particularly when you think about the range and complexity of the threats facing America today, from the wars we are in to the conflicts we are most likely to fight. So tonight I’d like to discuss with you how you should think about applying Fox Conner’s three axioms to the security challenges of the 21st century, the challenges where you will be on the front lines.

Gates then explains that we will no longer follow these principles — and will do the opposite.  This is the build-up to the heart of the speech (bold emphasis added):

Secretary Gates would be a hero - if speeches could reform DoD

Secretary of Defense Gates has received praise from some worthy analysts. It would be deserved, if speeches alone could reform DoD.  It would be heroic, if we had any signs that Gates was even trying.

The Zenpundit (25 April 2008):

On a related matter I’m very, very happy with Robert Gates. I think he just gave a ’shape up or ship out’ warning to the senior brass. What he said the other day to the cadets regarding John Boyd was akin to a Soviet General-Secretary giving a speech to the Supreme Soviet on the virtues of Milton Friedman. Or Pope Benedict praising Martin Luther.

Fred Kaplan: “Gates Celebrates Dissent“, Slate (23 April 2008) — Opening:

A neverending story: DoD’s attempts to stop cooking the books

“The Pentagon’s $1 Trillion Problem“, Scot Paltrow, Portfolio.com (May 2008) — An excellent article, well worth reading in full.  However, note the reporter’s implied assumption that DoD’s leaders want accurate accounting, but somehow new systems never seem to work.

Excerpt:

The size of nearly 28 football fields, with a facade of alternating red stucco and white cement tiles, the three-story operations center (in Indianapolis} is the federal government’s third-largest office building, after the Pentagon and the Ronald Reagan Building, and the place where a big chunk of the Iraq war’s soaring price is paid. The center doles out more than $104 billion annually, making it Defense’s largest disburser.

… To enter the Indianapolis center is to pass through a time warp, to a place where the most critical software programs date from the dawn of the computer age. They run on old-style I.B.M. mainframes and rely on Cobol, the ancient Sumerian of computer languages. “This was a bunch of systems patched together,” says Greg Bitz, a former director of the center. “I never went home at night without worrying about one of them crashing.” Bitz predicts a crisis as older programmers retire. “Try to find somebody today who knows Cobol,” he says.

… Preoccupied with protecting their turf, the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines continue to maintain separate, increasingly outdated systems that can’t talk to each other, trace disbursements, or detect overbilling by contractors. At the Indianapolis facility, as at the Defense Department’s four other main U.S. centers for financial operations, accounting programs under the same roof can’t share information without extensive jury-rigging, as though contracts, payments, and accounting had nothing to do with one another.

… Since the scandal in 1985, which revealed that the Navy paid Lockheed $640 each for airplane toilet seats, Congress, military leaders, and regulators have agreed that the Defense Department’s internal accounting system is in shambles. What’s startling is the scope of the problem and the government’s seeming inability to fix it. Over the past two decades, the Pentagon has repeatedly tried to design new computer systems to replace the antiquated ones. Even today, new incompatible financial systems continue to proliferate within the services, contrary to directives from the secretary of Defense’s office.

Only our amnesia makes reading the newspapers bearable

Tom Englehardt’s TomDispatch always goes to the top of my reading pile.  Tom publishes long, complex articles which compare to the average blog post like the Lincoln-Douglas debates to our Presidential pretend-jousts.  Today he pens another classic:   ”Petraeus, Falling Upwards — The Petraeus Story“.  Excerpt:

You simply can’t pile up enough adjectives when it comes to the general, who, at a relatively young age, was already a runner-up for Time Magazine’s Person of the Year in 2007. His record is stellar. His tactical sense extraordinary. His strategic ability, when it comes to mounting a campaign, beyond compare.

I’m speaking, of course, of General David Petraeus, the President’s surge commander in Iraq and, as of last week, the newly nominated head of U.S. Central Command (Centcom) for all of the Middle East and beyond… And the campaign I have in mind has been his years’ long wooing and winning of the American media, in the process of which he sold himself as a true American hero, a Caesar of celebrity.

… This, after all, is the man who, in the summer of 2004, as a mere three-star general being sent back to Baghdad to train the Iraqi army, made Newsweek’s cover under the caption, “Can This Man Save Iraq?” (The article’s subtitle — with the “yes” practically etched into it — read: “Mission Impossible? David Petraeus Is Tasked with Rebuilding Iraq’s Security Forces. An Up-close Look at the Only Real Exit Plan the United States Has — the Man Himself”).

It gets better, and is worth reading in full.  The over the top gushing about General Petraeus mocks the journalism profession’s ideals – especially in light of increasing evidence of the mainstream media’s cooperation with our government’s information operations against the American people.  (some links appear below).  Note:  this post discusses the media, not the General.

Roads in Afghanistan, a new weapon to win 4GW’s?

A new article by Dr. David Kilcullen: “Political Maneuver in Counterinsurgency“, posted at the Small Wars Council (24 April 2008) — “Road-Building in Afghanistan, Part 1 of a Series on Political Maneuver in Counterinsurgency”

Over the past eight years Kilcullen has laid a profound theoretical foundation for COIN on which he has written many articles rich with operational insights and recommendations. Here is a full archive of his work: The Essential 4GW reading list: David Kilcullen.

One fascinating aspect of Kilcullen’s work is the relative absence of critical review. Such attention is usually an indicator of significance, and his work is powerful in both an intellectual and operational sense. Why so little analytical attention? Even Newton and Einstein had their critics.

I posted this question (and a link to my archive of Kilcullen’s work) in the comments at both the Small Wars Journal and at Zenpundit. The SWJ Editor(s) deleted both (too disturbing to the troops, perhaps). At the Zenpundit there were two replies. First, from the Zenpundit himself:

The media discover info ops, with outrage!

The media have discovered that our military has mastered the key 4GW skill of running information operations.  Thoroughly researched and well-written, the following is probably one of the most important news stories of the year.   I strongly recommend reading it.

“Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon’s Hidden Hand“, New York Times, 20 April 2008 — “A Pentagon Campaign:  Retired officers have been used to shape terrorism coverage from inside the TV and radio networks. “

This should not be news.  In November 2007 I described good news:  our military had learned how to run successful information operations.  Unfortunately, they were running them against us.  Mine was not the first such article. 

One of the best to date examined the propaganda of the pre-war and early war phases.  Boehlert’s account of Bush’s Imperial press conference on 6 March 2003 is worth the price of his book, recounting the moment in which “please stand for the President of the United States” in effect gave way to to “bow before the President of the United States.”

“Lapdogs“, Eric Boehlert, Salon (4 May 2006) — “Cowardly and clueless, the U.S. media abandoned its post as Bush led the country into a disastrous war. A look inside one of the great journalistic collapses of our time. This is an excerpt from former Salon senior writer Eric Boehlert’s new book Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush.”

Many do not see any problem with this, like this post at Winds of Change.  Almost nobody discusses the real problem with government propaganda:  it undermines people’s trust of and identification with the State.  That is bad even for tyrannies like the USSR; it is a potentially terminal problem for a republic. 

Whatever the short-term benefits of info ops — in this case, building public support for a long war — it undermines the foundation of our political regime.  That should be an unacceptable price in the Decline of the State era, in which strengthening people’s relationship with the government must be a paramount strategic goal.

Update:  A comment about this story by W. Patrick Lang (Colonel, US Army, retired), posted at Sic Semper Tyrannis (19 April 2008):

I was invited to one briefing at the Pentagon. At the meeting, many of those mentioned in this article were present. The purpose of the meeting was to give Rumsfeld the chance to explain the Abu Ghraib mess. I asked some awkward questions and was not invited again.

Update:  A comment by Matt Armstrong at MountainRunner (23 April 2008) that concurs with my conclusion (mentioned above).  The full post is worth reading!  Excerpt:

In the end, I don’t see this as an issue of legality, but one of credibility and trust. The Rumsfeldian Defense Department clearly failed to understand the importance of these two elements in Information Age conflict and counterinsurgency, which has been ably documented elsewhere.

( click for more about how our military has mastered this key 21st century military skill)

Update to the “Navy Death Spiral”

This is an update to DoD Death Spiral — the US Navy version.

“Two ships deemed ‘unfit’ for combat“, Navy Times (21 April 2008) — The full article is worth reading, as usual for the Navy Times.  It is not yet clear if this is the first sign of a serious problem, or just random bad performance that occurs in even the best organizations.  Here is a brief excerpt:

Most of the missiles couldn’t be fired, and neither could any of the big guns. The Aegis radars key to the ships’ fighting abilities didn’t work right. The flight decks were inoperable. Most of the lifesaving gear failed inspection. Corrosion was rampant, and lube oil leaked all over. The verdict: “unfit for sustained combat operations.”

Another volley in the battle of the anthropologists

A volley of shots in the battle of the antropologists:

1. “A Gun in One Hand, A Pen in the Other“, Newsweek (12 April 2008) — “The Army is spending millions to hire ‘experts’ to analyze Iraqi society. If only they could find some.”
2. Dr. Montgomery McFate replies in “HTS and Newsweek”, posted at the Small Wars Journal (17 April 2008).  Abu Muqawama calls this a ”smackdown”; Kings of War says she “swatted down” Newseek.

{Note the update at the end of this post}  Dr. McFate has some substantial and legitimate objections to Newsweek’s article, but imo her major objections are lost amidst the trivial ones, giving an overall impression of “ankle-biting.”  One example:

(#6) Social scientists earn “$300,000″ a year - Overstated. This is true only if hazard pay, overtime, and danger pay are included. The base salary is a low six figures.

This is weak. This is not a significant correction.  Also, people earning six figures seldom get overtime pay. This would have been more serious if phrased as ”their salary is low six figures, but of course they get extra pay for as appropriate for dangers and hazards.”

For a full account of this battle about the role of social scientists in war, see Anthropologists go to war AND Revolt of the Anthropologists, with links to the major articles on both sides.

Update:  I owe Newsweek an apology

I re-read both articles.  Of Dr. McFate’s 13 “factual errors”, I count…

• three corrections of biographical details (#3 - 5, which I presume are correct),
• six corrections on trivial points (e.g., Newsweek said “special forces” instead of “special ops”) — nbrs 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, and 13;
• two points which seems disputable (#1, as the HTS has been described in various ways by officials in participants; #12 which depends on period one considers);
• two corrections in which Dr. McFate misunderstands what Newsweek said — nbrs. 2 and 6.

The misunderstandings seem willful for a person of Dr. McFate’s education.  In #2, Newsweek was clearly referring to the social scientists on the team.  #6 is discussed above.  

Please share your comments by posting below (brief and relevant, please) or email me at fabmaximus at hotmail dot com (note the spam-protected spelling).

America needs a Foreign Legion

Michael O’Hanlon advocates recruiting foreigners into the US military in this Bookings Institute video:  “The Future of the Military“.  He wrote two articles with Max Boot advocating this. 

• “Create a U.S. foreign legion“, Armed Forces Journal (March 2007).
• “A Military Path to Citizenship“, Washington Post (19 October 2006).

These articles have attracted much consideration, even mockery, but the idea is sound.  Recruiting a Foreign Legion as a secondary force is neither a crazy nor unproven idea. France and Britain have used them for centuries, without apparent ill effects. Like everything else in life, recruiting foreigners for one’s armed forces has dangers and can be used to excess.

I presented such a proposal in “Lessons Learned from the American Expedition to Iraq” (29 December 2005).

Excerpt:  A Foreign legion for America

Weekend Reading Recommendations - about our wars

Table of Contents

1. Two (now three) more articles in the debate about the surge, recent events in Iraq, and the US Army’s new focus on COIN.
2. We need a longer unit than Friedman Units to measure the Iraq War — 6 months is not long enough.
3. “Petraeus and Crocker, less convincing this time“, W Patrick Lang (Colonel, US Army, retired), Sic Semper Tyrannis (9 April 2008) — A brilliant summary of the selling of a war.
4. A provocative new analysis — if not quite a forecast — by Strator.
5. Follow-up to the Iraq Study Group: Iraq After the Surge: Options and Questions, US Institute of Peace (April 2008) .
6. The staff of the Long War Journal have put together an Order of Battle for the Iraq and Afghanistan security forces.
7. This week’s statement of what should by now be blindingly obvious.

4GW: A solution of the first kind - Robots!

Just as visionaries earn more than analysts, so do solutions of the first kind (hardware) receive more funding than solutions of the second (ideas) or the third kind (ways to attract, retain, and train people).  This is life in modern America.  This is why we continue to lose at 4GW.

The big money is in building things.  Sometimes they work, like the F-16.  Sometimes they do not, like the nuclear aircraft engine.  Sometimes they work but are too expensive to produce, like the XM2001 Crusader.  Sometimes they are too expensive to produce, but we do so anyway — like the F-22.  Now it appears that robots are the future of defense procurement, as seen in these articles.

4GW: A solution of the third kind

Solutions of the first kind… new things (i.e., robots, autonomous flying vehicles,
software to help us understand and manipulate foreign societies).

Solutions of the second kind… new ideas about tactics and strategy.

Solutions of the third kind… new ways to shape our institutions
– aka politics — usually by altering how they recruit, train, and promote people. 

Don Vandergriff (Major, US Army, retired) is one of the very few actually implementing 4GW solutions of the third kind, with his work for the Army on new methods of training leaders.  He now has a blog here, writing as an expert on leader development, personnel management and fourth generation warfare.

I strongly recommend visiting his blog for a look at the cutting edge of 4GW (at least, work on our side about 4GW).  For links to his online articles and list of his books, see The Essential 4GW reading list: Chapter Two, Donald Vandergriff.

Please share your comments by posting below (brief and relevant, please) — especially with suggestions about links worth adding — or email me at fabmaximus at hotmail dot com (note the spam-protected spelling).

Previous posts in this series

1. Arrows in the Eagle’s claw — solutions to 4GW, chapter I
2. Arrows in the Eagle’s claw — Chapter II, about 4GW analysts
3. A solution to 4GW — the introduction
4. How to get the study of 4GW in gear
5. 4GW: A solution of the second kind – Shawn Brimley has provided an example of a solution of the second kind with “A Grand Strategy of Sustainment”.  It is good, but solutions of the second kind do us little good.
6. 4GW: A solution of the third kind – Don Vandergriff is one of the very few today implementing solutions of the third kind.

Dark origins of the new COIN manual, FM 3-24

Summary:  A follow-up to this post about the use of social science language and concepts in FM 3-24.  They provide useful terminology, but at the cost of either weakening the beliefs of our troops or giving them a “grey net of abstraction to cover the world in order to simplify and explain it in a way that is pleasing to us.”  The former would be disastrous in 4GW, the latter probably useless exercise.  Or worse than useless, creating the illusion of understanding foreign cultures which eliminates the bafflement that leads to study, thought, and partial understanding.  While it is easy to dismiss these fears, the social sciences themselves note the powerful effect of language on thought and behavior.

One of the interesting aspects of the new COIN manual, FM 3-24, is its use of technical sociological terminology ripped from the intellectual framework of its creators (e.g. Max Weber) — a framework both dark and alien to American culture.  In it “We hold these truths to be self-evident” reflects the naive thinking of a lost age, and can be believed only by “a few big babies in university chairs or in editorial offices”  (from  Weber’s “Science as a Vocation“).  In it our core beliefs  — liberty, freedom of religion, equality of races and genders, democracy and free enterprise — are just choices, like those of any other culture.  As such we have no basis on which to advocate any of practices to other cultures (other than Mao’s adage that “power grows out of the barrel of a gun”).

To illustrate this, here are some excepts from Allan Bloom’s great work Closing of the American Mind in which he describes the origins of these concepts.

On the dark roots of this framework

It is amazing to me that the irrational source of all conscious life in Freud, and the relativity of all values in Weber, did not pose a problem for them and their optimism about science.  … {Weber’s} science was formulated as a doubtful dare against the chaos of things, and values certainly lay beyond its limits.  That is what the very precarious, not to say imaginary, distinction between facts and values meant.

News: “U.S. Army Isn’t Broken After All, Military Experts Say”

Important news, if accurate:  “U.S. Army Isn’t Broken After All, Military Experts Say“, Fox News (19 March 2008).   Of special note are the data they show in these nine charts.

Opening of the Fox News story

One year ago, as President Bush decided to send more troops to Iraq, the conventional wisdom in Washington among opponents of the war was that the U.S. Army was on the verge of breaking.  In December 2006 former Secretary of State and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell warned, “The active Army is about broken.”

Ret. Gen. Barry McCaffrey, in a much-cited memo to West Point colleagues, wrote: “My bottom line is that the Army is unraveling, and if we don’t expend significant national energy to reverse that trend, sometime in the next two years we will break the Army just like we did during Vietnam.”  Army Maj. Gen. Bob Scales, the former head of the Army War College, agreed. He wrote in an editorial in the Washington Times on March 30:

“If you haven’t heard the news, I’m afraid your Army is broken, a victim of too many missions for too few soldiers for too long. … Today, anecdotal evidence of collapse is all around.”

But now, one year later, Scales has done an about-face. He says that he was wrong. Despite all the predictions of imminent collapse, the U.S. Army and the combat brigades have proven to be surprisingly resilient.

Please share your comments by posting below (brief and relevant, please), or email me at fabmaximus at hotmail dot com (note the spam-protected spelling).

For more on this, including several Army studies, see An Army near the Breaking Point — an archive of links.

A key to the power of FM 3-24, the new COIN manual

(later additions to the text are in red)   FM 3-24 provides a basis for DoD’s people to describe a society. This is sketched out under “Describe the Effects of the Operational Environment” (3-16 through 3-65+) using standard social science definitions. This is valuable, as we cannot describe that for which we lack the words, and clear language promotes clear thinking.  Ths post discusses the problematic nature of the Army using language and concepts from the social sciences, following yesterday’s post discussing the limited operational utility of social science theories.

General Semantics teaches us that language is a process of abstraction, and can sometimes give just the illusion of knowledge. The map is not the territory. The name is not the thing itself. The deeper we go in this section of FM 3-24, the deeper gets the waters. To take a small example: as Americans we can talk about clans, races, and other groups … but understanding their hold on people’s minds and feelings is far more difficult. As we climb the ladder to more abstract concepts, their meaning becomes more difficult to grasp.

3-44. A value is an enduring belief that a specific mode of conduct or end state of existence is preferable to an opposite or converse mode of conduct or end state of existence.

Values are the bedrock on which many people build their lives. Americans are taught in most colleges that facts and values are different things, a concept with roots in western philosophy going back to Hume. Believing that values are not facts puts one in a different cultural universe from that of many other peoples, who believe that their values are not personally chosen but instead rooted in reality … derived from God. The Army can teach the words, but the music is more difficult to learn.

An implied message of western social sciences can be that “we” are superior to “them”. After all, Max Weber taught “us” that values are just beliefs, while “they” do not know this — foolishly regarding their values as permanent and enduring facts about the universe. Armed with these insights, it must be difficult not to patronize the locals (especially in the ancient societies of the Middle East, which had a high civilization when the people of Britain painted themselves blue and worshiped trees). Even worse, these insights might encourage officers to believe they actually understand these foreign societies (much of the language in FM 3-24 encourages this). Worst of all would be belief that the Anthropology 101 concepts allow us to successfully manipulate foreign societies (see yesterday’s post for more about this last point. Much of the professional training in these fields is to overcome these tendencies.

As an example, consider one simple and clear typology from FM 3-24 (from the work of Max Weber):