Paucity of Sci-Fi

Adam Elkus takes on the sorry state of military sci-fi, positing that: "A focus on the technologies, strategies, and tactics involved tends to amplify some of the worst tendencies of science fiction in general: a fascination with the technical details of machines or the outlines of future worlds rather than the people who populate them." Fiction is the tale of people, and it is too easy for science fiction to miss the forest for the trees. "When in doubt, lean towards character."

But I'm not sure I buy that thesis, at least not wholesale. At the very least, I'd come at from the opposite end, saying that what makes the majority of most current science fiction so derivative is the excessive focus on characters, treating the worlds they live in as simple analogues to contemporary life, just with shinier toys, which ultimately teach us little about ourselves, forces us to confront uncomfortable possibilities, or leverages the possibilities of the genre. The possibility of science fiction isn't simply to conceive of a new technology and then populate a world and tell a story about people using that tech. By changing only the backdrop and then telling the same timeless tale of love, revenge or whatever, it sends the message that the setting was irrelevant to the point of the story and the technology is a MacGuffin. While the environment might be enjoyed for aesthetic reasons or admiring the craft of the author, it recreates a Waiting for Godot-scenario wherein people tune out the background and focus only on the characters.

And that leaves the potential of science fiction's potential untapped. This is the kind of fiction that gives birth to this (awesome) website. Incredibly rich stories of personalities are possible by addressing characters in far-flung and extreme scenarios. I'm certainly not saying that fiction of characters in analogous worlds with new toys is inferior or cheap. People are fascinating, wherever they are found. District 9 was a superbly well-written and directed movie, but it was a movie about apartheid, using extra-terrestrial props as stand-ins for humans. So, I'd simply call that fiction, with "science" functioning as a adjective signifying "mecha abound" than as a composite noun denoting equal admiration to the possibilities of science (though potentially hypothetical or theoretical science) and fiction. It needn't be true down to the last equation, but it asks us to question how science, and popularized technology in most commonly, alters our fundamental human interactions.

Science fiction is a unique genre with possibility beyond just imagining our next door neighbors in giant robots. At its core, science fiction are our modern works of popular philosophy. They challenge ourselves to become the brain-in-the-vat. They ask us to question the nature of the human soul by asking us to define when consciousness exists and how it can interact with ours in a virtual world, or by asking us to conceptualize an authentic artificial intelligence, as we needed to do to resolve the reveal of Blade Runner

Some, like Ghost in the Shell, do a fantastic job of creating a universe melding the imminently possible and the distant potential with characters made authentic by their adherence to the rules of their world. Doing so lets us explore questions like surpassing the mind-machine interface, and does so in a radically different way than The Matrix or Sleep Dealers. (By this typology, I would call the first Matrix as science fiction, and the second and third as fiction using science as props). Some, like Aurther C. Clark's Rendevous at Rama, asked us to confront our essential humanity by creating something truly alien, not simply "aliens" living in Johannesburg. One of my personal favorites, Carl Sagan's Contact combines the interface of religion, science, skepticism, and all through the immediate medium of science and the mechanics of extra-terrestrial communication.

Two of the classics of military science fiction, Starship Troopers and Ender's Game, straddles this divide. Starship Troopers is ostensibly a futuristic story of a fascist state that explores the questions of citizenship, governance, the role of the military, and the character of soldiers, but in reality, the "science" is totally irrelevant to the story and ultimately offers little upon which to enhance the above questions. Those are all fascinating questions, and Heinlein explores them in ways few have matched since, but ultimately, Starship Troopers treats the science and technology as props in which to situate broader exploration, not as characters in their own right.

Ender's Game, conversely, leverages both the Battle Room and the Command School as crucial devices in which to challenge our conceptions. Both the realization that "the gate is down" and the final reveal that Ender was actually fighting the buggers and not computer simulations forced the reader to question fundamental assumptions they had made regarding the motivations and capabilities of Ender and his jeesh. Using Graff as a Greek chorus framed the dichotomy even more starkly, as Graff explains that had Ender realized his commands were actual deployment orders, and his decision to commit xenocide, would have been impossible without "knowing" he was participating only in simulations. The technologies are integral to the conception and telling of the story.

To briefly return to Elkus and his critique of military science fiction, I'd argue that the issue isn't inherent to science fiction per se, but is instead reflective of technological fetishism, a phenomenon by no means isolated to science fiction. Tom Clancy actually perfectly reflects the obsession, as he both conceives of awesome scenarios and potential military conflicts, and then almost universally resolves them with some wazoo tech unveiled in the last 100 pages that solves everything and makes the previous 900 pages of conflict and inevitable doom seem silly enough to chastise people for worrying in the first place. Crichton is a little harder to pigeonhole, but that's partially because his bibliography is so hit-or-miss. Jurassic Park, asking about the limits of genetic exploring and cloning, good. Timeline just made my mind bleed, to say nothing of my sense of style.

So while I agree with Adam that obsessive fascination with the little details of the military operations undermines the narrative quality of the story, I tack that up more to bad writing than a flaw of the genre. Plus, I'd argue that for science fiction as I'm describing it to perform as advertised, it requires detailed understanding and explication of the involved technologies. Without this level of detail, Daemon would have been unable to make our peek around the corner at imminent technologies seem plausible (who appends a bibliography to a work of fiction anyways?). I don't want to drown in the details, but I need at least a few feet of water to stay afloat.


Parsing this finely between "science" fiction as props and science fiction as futurism may seem fairly silly, the insistence of the purist. But in our modern world a rapidly exploding technologies, we would be well served to have a genre of fiction that actively addresses that technology directly and honestly, forcing us to situate the narratives of our new technologies in our lives, and what they mean for who and what we are. Differentiating between fiction that employs science and technology to ask questions of the humanities, and science fiction as a medium in which to posit the future worlds our current actions and technological advances may create is therefore a highly practical differentiation. The humanities asks who we are, science fiction where we're going and who we're becoming.

Video Games as Civil-Military Estrangement

Jim Gourley's recent guest post on Rick's Best Defense raises some very thorny issues about the hyper-realism of modern first-person shooters. It's a trenchant summary of the state of modern wargame shooters and the potential effects they have on soldiers and the predispositions it creates for actions like the "Rogue Platoon".

But what really got me thinking was that this frames the experience of how the vast majority of the American population experiences the war. As Andrew Exum has noted before:

"This is the thing,” he told me. “Point 5 percent of this country actually fights in these conflicts.” Nearly 80,000 Americans are deployed in Afghanistan, Exum said, while 2.2 million played Modern Warfare 2 on Xbox Live during a single day last fall. “There’s something annoying that most of America experiences the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which are actually taking place, through a video game,” he said."

The problem is, I don't think America is actually experiencing the war. What they're experiencing is what they are told is the war. Both movies and video games are victim to this. Hurt Locker or the new Medal of Honor are both purported to be authentic depictions of war time experiences, yet they're not. When the discordant is labeled as genuine and it goes uncorrected, it gets used as a basis for forming opinions or framing the experiences of veterans. The Hurt Locker had factual errors and some ridiculous plotholes, yet managed to largely convey the personalities involved and their reactions to the world around them. But video games, even those based on real events, like Delta Force: Blackhawk Down or Medal of Honor, feature hours upon hours of unrelenting combat and little in the way of characters as people. Even when acknowledged to be the "for dramatic effect" changes necessary to make a game playable, it ends up leaving the impression that the common veteran's experience is wholesale slaughter.

So to return to Gourley, I end up wondering if, based on their "experiences" playing these games and watching these movies, these are the frames stateside uses to interact with soldiers. It makes me wonder if this is what underpins scenarios like this.

Technology in Fiction

An interesting thought piece on the role of modern communication technologies in fiction. Money graf:

The average fictional character is either so thoroughly disinterested in email, social media, and text messages he never thinks of it, or else hastily mentions electronic communications in the past tense. Sure, characters in fiction may own smart phones, but few have the urge to compulsively play with the device while waiting to meet a friend or catch a flight. This ever-present anachronism has made it so that almost all literary fiction is science fiction, a thought experiment as to what life might be like if we weren't so absorbed in our iPhones but instead watched and listened to the world around us at a moment's rest..

Even science fiction isn't immune to this curious disconnect. They'll pay lip service to having the props of future settings, but it's rare for a book to explore how communication technology (or technology in general) is radically restructuring our communication with each other. The closest I've seen recently was David Suarez's Daemon and it does a good job of capturing the dichotomies between the connected and the not, and the exploitable vulnerabilities of those who have wired in without really understanding the system to which they now belong.

Juxtaposition: Future War

Weirdly, I've lately acquired a number of books that seem as though they'd make some fascinating compare and contrasts. Some are books on the same subject from divergent views; others, books in the same subject separated by a hundred and fifty years or so. Rather than reviewing each independently, it seemed both expedient and illuminating to synchronize some of these books.

In this case, the question at hand is the evolution of modern war, as told by John Robb's Brave New War and Micheal Horowitz's The Diffusion of Military Power. Nominally, the two books are looking at the evolution of modern warfare, but from radically different paradigms. Whereas Robb is concerned with 4th or 5th generation warfare (4GW/5GW; depending on which theorist you're reading) and thus focuses his attention on non-state actors, Horowitz goes in almost the opposite direction, looking at the adoption of the most expensive and organizationally complex military innovations available.

Horowitz posits what he terms the "adaption-capacity model" to conceptualize how military innovations diffuse throughout the world and across the international power structure. He essentially grants the desire to acquire an innovation, be in aircraft carriers, tanks, or information technology and questions what governs why not everyone has everything. To that end, he posits that the likelihood of an innovation spread is a function of (a) the available financial capital and (b) the available organizational capital. The financial capital speaks for itself, while the organizational capital is considerably more nebulous. At it's most general, organizational capital represents the intangible capacity of a state to reorganize itself to use an innovation. Yet it can refer to the racial and ethnic cleavages of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire as a hindrance to Imperial adoption of levee en masse or to doctrinal rigidity within the Soviet Navy as as powerful obstacle to deploying aircraft carriers. While the fuzziness of the second criteria is at times frustrating, it provides a welcome counterpoint to the objective realist models that posit things like strategic necessity as a sole determinant of acquisition.

However, while Horowitz tries to use his model to explain how the acquisition of major weapons systems revamps the international balance of power, the smallest level of analysis he uses is state-versus-non-state, and from the perspective of the state. Three of the four case studies he uses are almost exclusively oriented towards state-on-state (battleship fleet doctrine, aircraft carriers, and the nuke). These three case studies all have their respective issues, but they all serve to highlight how the capacity of a state for change influences their global power. He chose each case study based on his typology (high financial/low organizational, etc), but what made these case studies interesting to me was how these particular innovations defined global power, perhaps erroneously.

The classic arms race is the adoption of dreadnoughts at the turn of the century. The points Horowitz makes about how British naval doctrine was shaped the rapid shifts in technology and capability are the most compelling arguments he makes for how diffusion of a technology shapes the international political situation. The development of the two-fleet doctrine, the tonnage comparisons, the races with Germany shaping the Entente-versus-Alliance system, largely as a function of the radical alterations to naval power posed by dreadnought-class ships. Yet, interestingly, their sole demonstration was the Battle of Toshima. Jutland was a waste, and the decisive naval weapons system ending up being the submarine. That paradox, between the calculation of military power based on the apparent largest ships afloat (or the most tanks or troops) and the actual capabilities of the states involved is one that permeates both the sections on the carriers and the nuke, and underscores the current schizophrenia between hailing America as the world's greatest military power and its struggles in low-intensity conflicts.

The carrier section captures that paradox exquisitely. An aircraft carrier represents power projection capabilities unrivaled by any other platform. Yet, as a naval instrument, it hasn't been used significantly since WWII. Instead, it has been used as a mobile airfield, and perhaps not even a necessary one. Carrier-based strike packages were flown in Vietnam, yet the majority of sorties were flown from Thailand and Rolling Thunder B-52s were based in Diego Garcia. I've written how carriers represent that global authority unrivaled by any other country, but even our Secretary of Defense wonders about their utility and whether risking a $20 billion carrier to missiles costing "mere" hundreds of thousands or less represents responsible strategic logic.

So carriers represent the dichotomy because even while the Soviet Union was incapable of procuring and deploying carrier fleets, the Soviet Union was hailed as the global rival to the US, it's peer competitor, despite it's "deficiency". Instead of multi-billion dollar, high tech equipment, the Soviet Union funded wars of national liberation, starting brushfires across the world. Horowitz is so focused on evaluating whether or not a state adopts innovations that he gives short shrift to alternative strategies if a state cannot adopt. Rather than adopting a technology of exceedingly high entry barriers, the Soviet Union changed the calculations of strategic calculus and sought to redefine the norms; likewise with the Chinese emphasis on area denial and anti-carrier ballistic missiles. Horowitz's model can help predict when or how a country will adopt an innovation, but it implicitly assumes the innovation is something worth acquiring and is thus deficient regarding alternatives to adoption.

This is where the fourth case study enters the picture. Moving away from innovations so expensive only a nation state could purchase them, Horowitz applies his model to suicide bombings. Instead of being prohibitively expensive for material that, in all likelihood will never be used, suicide bombing represents some of the most cost-effective tactics currently available. The cost of a single vest can be as little as $150, and a car perhaps $1,500 once modified. With an almost non-existent cost barrier, Horowitz asks why this isn't a universally adopted tactic. His answer is that the longer a group has been in exist, i.e. the longer a particular group's MO has had a chance to ossify, the less likely it is to adopt new tactics. Conversely, the groups identification as Islamic strongly increased it's propensity to adopt suicide bombings.

On face value, those seem like explanations that accords with common wisdom. However, it neglects important facets of insurgency theory, and doesn't adjust for group's training and social milieu. Horowitz uses the Tamil Tigers, Al Qaeda, and the Provisional Irish Republican Army as his focused examples, attempting to span both secular and religious adoption, and a notable group that refused to adopt the tactic. The Tigers perpetrated almost 50% of the suicide bombings globally between 1981 and 2003, but what makes their usage unique is it's intent focus on "hard" targets. These were targets of immediate military value and strongly defended. In contrast, the soft targets of Hamas or Hizbullah were population centers, people, markets. Brutal though the Tigers were to the population in general, their focus for suicide bombings were within the generally accepted boundaries of legitimate targets. Accordingly, on the spectrum of Maoist three-phase insurgency, the Tigers were heavily weighted towards the third conventional phase. This suggests adoption on largely military logics.

In contrast, the PIRA never adopted the tactic, despite using car bombs, assassinations, and other terrorist activities. Horowitz believes this to be because the PIRA had habituated MOs by the advent of suicide bombs, and because the PIRA consciously attempted to minimize civilian casualties. On the Maoist spectrum, the PIRA never really moved out of phase I. While both the Tigers and PIRA targeted hard targets, the PIRA never moved far enough along the spectrum to capitalize appropriately if they had used suicide bombs as a military tactic. Instead, they were operating as primarily political agents, sowing dissension and demonstrating the inefficacies of the government. With those goals in mind, suicide bombs couldn't accomplish anything regular bombs couldn't. Their adoption was unnecessary, given the environment in which they operated, their largely secular veneration of the heroic sacrifice (not glorious martyrdom), and their goals.

Meanwhile, Robb represents one of the modern intellectuals convinced in the obsolescence of the modern state, and the existential threats posed by non-state actors. In this vein, he is of the same cut as Kaplan's Coming Anarachy, though the difference of a decade and the data of the Iraqi sandbox provide additional granularity unavailable to Kaplan. Kaplan saw a world coming apart at the seems, as chaos in the periphery tore apart societies and countries. But a world apart at the seams still leaves broad swathes of cloth intact; the core might be balkanized, but it would still retain its essential edge and productivity.

For Robb, the coming anarchy is differentiation between how groups choose to challenge state sovereignty. Rather than assuming a monolithic entity in full command of all the resources traditionally accorded to a Westphalian state, Robb begins by noting the steady peripheral erosion of state authority. Globalization is eating away at a state's ability to provide services and goods at superior efficiencies than private actors; he cites WalMart serving as a distribution for fresh water after Katrina opposing FEMA's incompetence. He notes that groups like Hamas and Hizbullah have been providing services within their sectors of influence that makes them proto-states.

But most tellingly, globalization has democratized violence. Robb notes that for approximately $200,000, 9/11 produced economic damages and losses in excess of $80 billion. Example after example of oil sabotage notes that tactics costing mere hundreds or thousands of dollars produce loses in the millions to tens of millions. Specific nodes, what Robb calls systemspunkt, produce systemic ripples that topple electricity systems or ruin financial markets.

Just as the aircraft carrier is hailed as the pinnacle of modern conventional military might, suicide bombs are regarded as the undefeatable insurgent tactic, yet both miss the essential point that the metrics demonstrating their superiority are outdated. Both are absolutely deadly inventions, capable of producing targeted destruction of enormous effect, but assessing them against a military metric doesn't capture their true cost and benefits. Whereas Horowitz wanted to know why a group like the PIRA never adopted suicide bombing, we would be better served asking why the FARC or the Mexican cartels haven't adopted the tactic. Horowitz framed the question of why groups pass over tactics with demonstrated military utility. Robb suggests that it's because modern insurgencies have moved beyond military metrics.

The Mexican cartels aren't waging an insurgency, in the classic sense. The insurgencies Robb is talking about want to topple governments, but they have no desire to supplant the state. They're libertarian, and radically empowered to cause ruinous devastation. The ground rules Horowitz is using to predicate his model are changing. Massive financial barriers preclude states from acquiring carriers, and outdated insurgent groups aren't changing their paradigms fast enough to employ modern tactics. Yet when we're reaching the point where cells of five to nine men can shut down cities, or bleed economies dry, I'm not terribly concerned with whether China will field a blue water fleet in 25 years, let alone a credible great power threat. Superempowered individuals, target critical nodes, can produce damages modern states can only dream about.

Presidential automony

Insofar as Obama has a coherent foreign policy, it's been largely derided (/praised) as a continuation of Bush's policies. Drones strikes, increased footprint in Afghanistan (notwithstanding the purported disagreements Woodward cites), and drawdowns in Iraq are all continuation policies. This recent FP article about Obama's GA speech notes that:

"As powerful as the presidency is, it is still in the service of events. George W. Bush did not set out to be a wartime president until September 11th; Harry Truman did not assume office intending to be America's first Cold War president. The challenge a president faces is to read events and respond by seizing the initiative, to steer history's tides rather than merely be swept along."

The President of the United States is accorded respect as the leader of the most powerful nation of the world, yet they are subject to the whims of the Liliputians, trapped in the legacies of their predecessors and the sheer inertia of the world's largest bureaucracies. All of which makes me wonder: how free are Presidents to create, genuinely create, substantive change?

They polish policies developed by deputies. They provide guidance and direction, yet ultimately, those policies are created by others, credited to them as both a courtesy and acknowledgment that sufficient granularity is impossible. We say that Obama sets the time table for withdraw from Iraq or Afghanistan, yet those timetables are guided by objective constrains. The number of flights available, the personnel that need evacuation, the tonnage of equipment requiring transport. We say Obama delivered on his campaign promise of leaving Iraq, yet 50,000 troops remain, and enormous quantities of equipment remain in Iraq, relics of a by-gone era.

So my question is: absent an event like 9/11, absent a paradigm shift comparable to the initiation of the Cold War, how free are Presidents to shape the destinies of this country?

"Game Change" Review

I'd been meaning to read this book for a long time (hell, I got it from the library three months ago and... just never quite got around to it). And it's a fascinating read. I have no experience in a campaign from which to form a frame of reference, so it's hard to leverage the book as commentary on the strategy of a campaign or infer lessons, so the "lessons learned" is sadly underdeveloped. Still, it provides ample fodder for reference points in discussing a number of broader issues.

The first was simply comparing my own experiences observing the campaigns with the narratives of such intimately involved operators. At this time, I was reading the news for something like four hours a day, and consider the time my most well-informed period yet. I remember showing up in DC for my new job, within days promptly shipping down to Colonial Williamsburg for a product conference and being excited that I had a hotel room to myself where I could watch the YouTube debate in peace. I remember finding the most enjoyable part of using my apartment's fitness center to train up for the Army to be watching the primary results while I ran on the treadmill (it was February and around 20, even my hatred of treadmills wasn't enough to overcome those obstacles). I remember exactly where in the North Carolina woods I was on election night, and I remember exactly what other part of the woods I was in when Obama was sworn in (by exactly, I can give you an MGRS 8-digit grid to both).

Yet in reading through the book, I was continually reminded of how much had passed over my head unknown and unnoticed. The Drexel debate in Philadelphia had somehow passed completely past my radar. I remember vaguely the stories about Clinton's confused mess of a debate and how all the candidates had piled on her, but in terms of my personal relation to the candidates or preferences, that debate wouldn't have even been a footnote. At the time, I wrote about what undercut Clinton as an attractive candidate for me, and the twin events bookend the Drexel debate by a few months. Likewise with the Jefferson-Jackson Dinner held to be so pivotal in Iowa. Halperin and Heilemann hail the dinner as a crucial event in cementing Obama's potential as a candidate, yet I couldn't have even told you what party organized the dinner, let alone who attended or cared.

Even paying attention, I missed an enormous amount, and I considered myself an informed voter. Of course, missing the day-to-day tactical maneuverings is different than understanding a candidates position on issues and making informed choices, but it makes me wonder the gradient of the informed voter pyramid, and if it wasn't closer to a steeple.

Which brings up point two. Halperin and Heilemann make a point in not talking about the comparative issues in the campaigns as at all determinative. Instead, what shaped the narratives of influential events were the styles and tactics of the candidates. They make a point in noting that Obama campaign had been vapid, and contrasted that to Clinton's cool command of policy, yet the dominant factors weren't Clinton's ability to detail new plans, but her perception of being informed and experienced; people responded to her image, not her policies. Likewise, despite the deliberate choice by the Obama campaign to stay out of the minutia, people responded. Curiously, the two events described haiographically are Obama's speech on race, and his performance during the McCain stunt over the economic meltdown. In both cases, quotes are replete describing Obama's cool authority and command in periods of crisis.

Third observation: Obama's campaign was never overwhelmed by a third-party, like those that crippled his competition. Rudy and Edwards had their wives running their campaigns. Clinton had Clinton. McCain had Palin. Her cult of celebrity developed at such a pace that I remember it turning into a choice between Obama and Palin, and the topics of the chapters on closing days of the McCain candidacy are spent talking about Palin, not McCain. The McCain candidacy was so overwhelming that she swamped the campaign; she became to top of the ticket. Which is all the more ironic considering how incompetent she was exposed to be, and the disaster of crisis control the McCain candidacy exercised in her defense. The years since have only confirmed the sheer irresponsibility of letting her near power.

But it does provide a good counterpoint to the Clinton/Clinton campaign. That the first serious woman candidate should also be the spouse to a former President raises a huge host of questions. True enough, her tenure as First Lady gave her the name recognition that her Senate career or private career probably could never have granted her, to the extent I wonder if her candidacy would have been possible without her tenure as First Lady. It's purely speculative, but I'm curious how instrumental her marriage was to her candidacy, despite her independent qualifications. It gave her an In to the Democratic establishment and her husband's resources and connections were likely invaluable. Yet, that same tenure was also what made her negatives so stratospheric and confirmed her unsuitability as the Democratic candidate for many.

But her campaign was constantly under threat of being overwhelmed by Bill, and nearly got swamped multiple times. It was explicitly cited by Obama as a disqualification for a VP slot. Nevertheless, Bill's instincts and actions provided some of the most potent assets to the campaign. He brought enormous baggage, yet he remained a preternaturally gifted politician, and remained loved by a good sector of the Democratic vote. Voters seemed to respond to him in ways Hillary could only envy.

Ultimately, however, it never seemed like a fully comfortable narrative was developed to encompass Bill, both internally and externally. The Clinton campaign never seemed comfortable in how far forward they wanted to push Bill, if he should play the typical role of the candidate's spouse, if they should leverage his favorables among Democrats as a shadow candidate, if he should be a campaign architect, or if he should disappear for fear of overshadowing Hillary. Given his tendency to do his own thing, trying to pigeon hole him would likely have been unproductive, but without that frame, she never ran a truly solo campaign (although, given the love of Bill in the fourth estate, he wasn't allowed to leave stage right, even when he tried).

Which brings up the last observation, that of suppressed narratives. I remember how intimately issues of race and gender were tied into almost everything throughout the campaigns, yet both Obama and Clinton seemed to try to whitewash and neuter themselves, respectively. Insofar as I remember accusations and counter-accusations flying, I remember it was from their supporters. Halperin and Heilemann make the point of noting that both candidates actually suppressed proxies from raising those issues or trying to quiet fires others started on their behalf. Obama's speech on race and Wright aimed to be post-racial.

To be honest, I'm not really sure what that would look like. It's one thing to talk about an America which doesn't pay attention to race, that accepts someone simply as who they are and not from what group they hail. Given recent screeds like Dinesh D'Souza's inane "Kenyan 'anti-colonialism' ", longing for an era that transcends such simplistic explanations is fairly attractive.

Yet I can't help but feeling like a post-racial campaign is a campaign designed to be unthreatening to white voters. When a post-racial campaign looks and sounds suspiciously like a main-stream, old-money campaign, avoiding issues of race sounds more like smoothing one's self out than transcend complicated narratives.

Which was why I found his Wright speech so riveting. If I had to pick any particular influence for my vote, that was it. Once I left for Basic, I had almost no time to keep up on the vicissitudes of the campaigns or to research the issues, yet I felt confident in my vote almost single-handedly because of that speech.

So it serves as a good proxy to counterpoint my experiences of the campaign with Game Change. To Halperin and Heilemann, this speech was a just yet another moment as campaign drama, the resolution to the drama of Reverend Wright and the looming threat he posed. It was yet another moment of drama, an episodes that merited less page space than a discussion of Edward's trysts or Palin's... idiosyncracies.

Halperin and Heilemann aren't writing a treatise on the comparative merits of the candidates, nor do they pretend such at all. But the absence of commentary on substance ends up regulating observations about the competence of the candidates to the results of focus groups or the plaudits of the commentariat. So, while the book is a fascinating look into the private side of the candidates lives that wasn't shown for public consumption, it's disinclinations to involve higher order observations on the conduct of campaigns, relative strategies, or even just personal analysis ends up making the book feel more gossipy than substantial. High-end, quality gossip on power-brokers, to be sure, but gossip all the same. I'm armed for that proverbial beer. I'm just not sure I'm a more informed voter or campaign watcher.

The End of Combat Operations in----Eh

I've written on this meme before, but I just don't buy the meme that Iraq has defined this/my generation, indelibly imprinting lessons and cautions and scars upon millions of burgeoning Americans. This last week saw FP publish two articles directly addressing this topic, and both are fascinating conversations pieces, if ultimately wrong.

The first, and more interesting (especially the comments), is a quick hypothesis by Dan Drezner. Inspired by the combination of the NYT's 8,000 words on the lifestyles twentysomethings and The Icarus Syndrome, an analysis of three US foreign policy "blunders" as a function of the formative foreign policy experiences of the actors, Drezner posits that the formative policy views of millennials is a function of the events of the 2000s. I've asked the exact question of what has shaped the foreign policy views of my generation before, so this is a topic near and dear to my heart.

For Drezner, it's a function of a youth of prosperity, an adolescence during conflict and coming-of-age with an implosion of the economy. From these, he "...would have to conclude that this generation should be anti-interventionist to the point of isolationism". Really broadly speaking, the comments support that view. They speak to the hubris of American power, the need to embrace multilateralism and accepting the narrative that there are impossible tasks, insurmountable hatreds, and a need to tend to our own house first. They speak to the discredit of the Freedom Agenda and, despite the recent furor over TIME's cover, don't speak of human rights. It was responsibility and setting suns.

Picking up the thread was Elizabeth Dickensons's My Life, Under the Iraq War. She states unequivicably in her intro that: "Our generation has lived its entire adult life under the Iraq war. And everything -- from the way that we see global affairs, multilateral cooperation, conflict, and politics -- has been shaped by that conflict". She draws four lessons from this coming-of-age, and while I have particular issue with each point, my broader issue is with the basic skein that Iraq was a formative experience for the generation.

First, I simply doubt the thesis that concurrence begets formative experience. True enough, the defining foreign policy events that Drezner outlines are likely the most significant, yet how does the existence of those events translate into personal learning experience? Merely being alive when something significant happened doesn't make the even formative. When I asked this question in my earlier post, it was in the context of how Vietnam specifically had shaped the foreign policies of the 1990s NSC. Anthony Lake had personally served as an FSO in Saigon, and had resigned in protest. Even in dodging the draft, Bill Clinton was forced to confront the conflict and weave it into both his personal ambitions and his eventual political narrative. Those were events of personal impact.

Compare that to our current generation of political operatives. How many have served? If they were FSOs, were they in Iraq, or defending American policies in Riyadah or Beijing or Bogata? At what distance does the Iraq or Afghanistan transition from an issue of immediate concern to simply yet another American foreign policy, like support for carbon credits? This begs the question of what exactly qualifies as a formative experience, as spending a tour in Brussels amidst the NATO maneuvering is it's own brand of personal experience that could be as formative as being in a convey that comes under fire. But the basic point here is that, especially after this duration, Iraq and Afghanistan are just one of many competing priorities on the American agenda. A young CIA operative in Beijing is more concerned about a rival hegemon than about Beijing's policy towards radical Islamists.

Though I can't rigidly support the observation, it strikes me that the people most interested in this meme aren't necessarily the people proximately involved in either Iraq or Afghanistan. I was struck in reading through the comments to Drezner's post that almost none of them mentioned any kind of service, governmental or NGO, in either country. Instead, they were future wonks, academics and commentariats. Dickinson's biography fits that profile as well, as best I can tell. She's sharp and insightful, but not a player.

Which brings up the second caveat. This meme is discussed almost exclusively (in my experience) within the cloistered world of foreign policy and security studies nerds. In that world, asking this question is both perfectly natural and informative. Drezner is a professsor at Tufts; curiosity about the future generation makes sense, as does contextualizing it against his own experiences. So if asking the question about Iraq defining the current generation of foreign policy wonks, then yeah, it's a much more insightful question. But that it needs to be caveated that severely limits its descriptive power about my generation as a whole (think of Drezner's inspiration talking about the full twentysomething generation).

Between the general lack of political participation, declining readership of news publications across the board, and the increasing strain placed on the Army, I just can't connect the impact of Iraq to the entire generation, let alone even the internationally inclined. Even among the politically motivated at CU, that translated into planting little flags and yelling. Sure, broadly speaking, those are formative experiences (the flags presaging Dickinson's comment about sensitivity to civilian casualties), but those people moved on to other issues or kept their involvement limited to symbolic actions. My peers in the international affairs program weren't enraptured with Iraq. They wanted to study development or post-colonial studies or the International Criminal Court; all subjects worth extensive study and passion, and all subjects that weren't Iraq. Iraq is just one more niche area of study.

Maybe I'm just too cynical about my generation. But Dickinson's parting line, "But like the generation that grew up in Vietnam, we will be the Iraq generation", simply rings hollow to me. Vietnam is a catch phrase summing up the 1960s in general, a period of profound social change that upended the established order and touched almost everyone in America somehow. Vietnam was fought by draftees, Iraq by volunteers. Today, the most determinative factor that someone will join the military is if they have family who served; it's becoming a cloistered world. Even among the foreign policy saavy, Iraq is just one issue, and one whose impact is being learned more from primary documents than primary experiences.

Inalien Ego

So, apparently, we're WEIRD. That is to say, Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. In their own way, each how affected not simply what we think, but also how we think. As a consequence, the authors call to task the general discipline of behavioral sciences (ranging from psychology to economics to evolutionary biology) for it's almost myopic sampling of American undergraduates, and the preponderance of those from psychology programs. Each of those adjectives carries with it a significant descriptor and marked, significant deviation both other subpopulations within each category, and from humanity as a whole.

Westerners are markedly different than non-Westerners in whole categories of cognition, ranging from visiospatial processing to basic notions of justice as played out in simple games. Americans are themselves unique from other Westerners, being more likely to employ errors of fundamental attribution (versus situational or role explanations) more individualistic and more prone to functionalizing work while minimizing interpersonal complications. American undergraduates are more individualistic still, preferring justice rooted in autonomy versus an ethic of community or divinity. Essentially, "WEIRD populations may often be the worst subjects from which to make generalizations."

Of particular attention were the notations on the heritability of IQ and the expression of genetic phenotypes, noting that even the characteristics long held to be the most stable, the most basic expressions of an inalienable ego, are mutable, subject to contextual development and expression. Despite IQ being highly heritable, it's expression varies considerably when compared across socio-economic statuses. Which is to say, even the basic core of who you are, your cogito ergo sum, is a function of what you are before it's a function of who you are.

I've always found the tension between immutable egos and social order fascinating. Skinner's Walden II can't be said to have inspired a revolution, but it represents an ontology of maximizing human potential through deliberate, conscious sculpting. But it contradicts the central thesis of evolutionary biology, that variability, mutations, and deficiencies are the price paid for advancement. It's seductive to imagine that if only we could operationalize the booleans for perfect facets of human behavior, if we found the courage gene, the entrepreneurial behavioral code, the confidence cure, we could enter a post-human space, transcend the human condition.

That discussion is tangential to the above cautions about using American psychology undergraduates as stand-ins for the human race, but it is always interesting all the same to explore the interplay between how we conceive of ourselves and of our societies. The paper is a reminder that even our fundamental assumptions of ego, of perception, of intellect are narrower than we imagine, and as broad as we could wish, if only we push the boundaries.

Thoughts past the point of relevance

Adding my voice to the ship that has sailed of Runaway Generalgate, I came across some similarly late commentary. Saliently, they observe that Hastings' wasn't anti-McCrystal, but rather anti-war. (No idea as to the veracity of his feelings regarding McCrystal, as no one else has mentioned this, to my knowledge, but it opened the door to some interesting speculation, below.)

Framed thusly, Hastings' decision to include the quotes wasn't with the intention of counting coup on a four-star, but rather a clueless reporter writing about a subject he knew little about who thought those quotes sounded like how a badass soldier would sound. Compared to the quotes found elsewhere in the piece, such as those by line soldiers talking about RoEs and how they wanted to kill more people, McCrystal's comments sound "raw" and "authentic", especially to someone unfamiliar with military vernacular, i.e. the entire readership of the article. When you meet the military in the multiplex, you kinda expect them to sound like that.

Of course, that just changes Hastings' from a vindictive ambitious little scribbler to a writer assigned a topic he has no business writing about, given a loaded gun of quotes, and enabled by editors who should have known better. Hastings' general ignorance of both the theory and practice of COIN is made manifest throughout the article. He quotes the right buzzwords, but in weird places and in a rhythm that suggests he crammed for the exam the night before and is regurgitating something he doesn't quite understand, transliterating his jotted notepad notes into longform prose.

That Hastings' titled his piece "The Runaway General" suggests he knew the impact those quotes would have. All the same, I don't struggle very hard to imagine a Rolling Stones reporter (even one with an anti-war public record) with little to no experience with war zones or the military to be semi-awed by the environment and people. He thinks he's graduated from the kiddy table, and ready to sit with the adults. Eager to prove he belongs, he repeats this really funny off-color joke Uncle Tommy told him last week, and then gets confused when people get awkward and angry instead of laughing.

Napoleon once said "never attribute to malice what can be better explained by incompetence". Reading through the article, I'm left with the impression that Hastings' would be perfect writing about a rock star or a writer or even a pol. But warfare isn't something one should write about in ignorance, nor about warriors, even if you do like them.

The Army grows up

Gates is going to have a very interesting tenure. In the space of a week, he's taken some big swipes at the military-industrial complex, wasteful procurement, the Navy's force structure, the size of the civilian bureaucracy, and now the excessive number of flag officers. The latter called to mind two recent articles.

First, an article by Jenna Jordan, When Head's Roll. Her thesis is simply that assassination in counterproductive, based on case studies spanning nearly 70 years. It's tempting to say backlash, like the failed bombing in NYC this past week, is the price we pay for a winning strategy. We become our own collateral damage, to be avoided whenever possible yet understood as the cost of doing business on the path to victory. But Jordan makes the case that instead of decapitating a movement, assassination revitalizes violent, revolutionary groups, as the ossified old guard is replaced by younger, more dynamic leaders. With the change in leadership comes changes in tactics, technologies, and personal relationships. It also made me wonder where the inflexion point in an organization occurs before it becomes too old. That perhaps the people who should be in charge is senior middle management, not the boardroom.

Meanwhile, David Brooks wrote a fairly concise history of the development of the COIN doctrine. The piece is unsurprising to anyone familiar with the struggle, and a good enough synopsis for those tuning in. Some saw the summarization in "few hundred words facile", but what struck me most was Brooks' closing graf, wherein he identifies the tension between the old guard, trained "to use overwhelming force to kill bad guys" and the COINindistas who stepped outside the Army to relearn population-centric warfare. They went into academia, to private civilian schools, and they welcomed NGOs and tie-wearers into their deliberations. And, with very few (albeit very notable) exceptions, they were colonels and majors and captains. One of the most profound military theorists in recent memory, John Boyd, was an Air Force colonel.

In combination, the two articles make me wonder if the Army hasn't gotten too old, especially in an age such rapid technological change. Not knowing any generals personally, I can only speculate, and from what I've read of quite a few, they're a highly dynamic group. Still, my general impression is that the truly innovative wither and die just before flag rank, and only an extremely select few of an already highly restricted group are tapped. 1% of colonels make general (beat that Harvard). One of the few times the Army promotion system has broken into the mainstream was when (then) COL H.R. McMaster was passed over for flag rank in 2007, and it attracted a lot of vitriol from industry watchers; he has since been promoted. I'm not even going to guess on something that far above my paygrade. But reviewing my own auto-didactic library of RMA, COIN, and military innovation, I'm struck by the preponderance of (relatively) junior rank, both as authors and as citations.

A People's History of Vietnam

Although irritatingly polemical, reliant on superlatives, and full of facile analogies, Innes brings up a sorely overlooked aspect of most retrospective histories of the Vietnam War. Namely, little scholarship exists documenting the war from the Vietnamese perspective. For any perspective, governmental, Army of the Republic of Viet Nam, the Viet Cong, the North Vietnamese Army, there is simply deficient scholarship. But most of all, we lack a people's history of the war.

The mantra in counterinsurgency operations is that the people are the centers of gravity. Win their love, obedience, or minds, and win the war. The modern US Army has pioneered a number of initiatives designed enable better comprehension of the social battlefield in Iraq and Afghanistan thru biometric scanners, opinion polls, and Human Terrain Teams. (The latter has been condemned by academic and professional colleagues for aiding and abetting the military, not academea's finest hour.) So, a people's history of Vietnam would provide some very interesting insights into what the war looked like from the people how lived it for generations.

A couple of books have approached the topic, although since they're war memoirs, they're written for Americans by Americans. But books like The Village by Bing West offer a view into the lives of ordinary people living in a country torn by decades of war and the industrial might of global superpowers. If we want to win conflicts, it would certainly behoove us to understand that perspective, to understand what is like to live as an innocent bystander in a village subject to constant infiltration, low-level yet omnipresent violence, and the threat of massive artillery barrages. What will people endure, what will they ignore, what will they obey, what will they respect, and what will they never forgive?

A Floating City says Obey Me Now

A number of articles have popped up recently tackling China's military and speculating on it's import. Robert Kaplan has advocated for years a sort of neo-Mahanism, that naval power is what really counts in international power calculus and our preoccupation with COIN distracts us from the (ascendant) great power challenges facing the US. A constant refrain arguing for the F-22 was China's development of 3.5-5th generation fighters.

And now, especially in light of Gates' Saturday speech rumored to systemically challenge the carrier battle group model, a fascinating article crops up exploring China's incessant attempts to build an aircraft carrier as a function of social identity theory.

On face value, the Chinese attempts to build an aircraft carrier is anachronistic. First, any other, non-American design in the world is inferior to those currently afloat and would field inferior aircraft. Second, the lack of quantity would match the lack of quality; as Payne notes, changing the balance of power from 11-0 to 11-1 is... unlikely to affect matters materially. Third, with China investing so heavily in asymmetric capability, most relevantly anti-carrier cruise and ballistic missiles, that indicates a strategic foresight to transcend current American conventional military primacy, investing so heavily in such a conventional technology almost looks like a step backward.

Personally, I offer three explanations for China's motive. First, I agree with Larson and Shevchenko: Aircraft carriers are symbols. As much as China purports to pioneer an Asian (read: Chinese centric) metric for international importance in everything from human rights to environmental policy, they know what symbols the old system uses to judge countries. So, an aircraft carrier is a potent physical declaration saying: "I'm a great power and I have the toys to prove it". So Larson and Shevchenko argue a carrier is a fulfillment in China's need for self-esteem and prestige.

Second, judging Chinese power relative only to the US is a mistake. In addition to being a symbol of Great Power status, an aircraft carrier is a symbol of expeditionary force. Nothing says American hegemony like a carrier. A carrier says: "I can reach out and touch anyone, anywhere, anytime". The US might possess the most advanced fighter aircraft, the most sophisticated submarines, and the best-equipped Army in the world, but without it's network of forward deployed bases, pre-staging areas, and international agreements, all that military might would sit in warehouses in Iowa. That's why Russian and Kyrgyzstani politics are so salient for Afghanistan. It's why critics can dismiss Chinese military modernization. Even with modern fighters or a trained army, they couldn't project that power. A carrier would change that, especially relative to regional neighbors or perhaps as a big stick against recalcitrant Africans.

Third, a carrier introduces the possibility of winning the battle, yet losing the war. At the turn of the 20th century, British naval preeminence was unquestioned. The British fleet represented more combined tonnage than all their competitors combined. The fleet controlled the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, and the byways of South-East Asia, simultaneously. The French possessed a not insignificant fleet, but it was pretty much localized to the Med. Even the French, an active colonial power, were subject to British fleets controlling the lanes of communication. So when Germany, newly minted and eager to prove itself a global power, entered the Great Game, they could not tolerate British control of the seas. Germany was humiliated in the First Moroccan Crisis, and grew increasingly frustrated at it's overseas ambitions being subject to British sufferance. In the coin of the era, a Dreadnought was the symbol that Germany was a Great Power and could project power globally.

But what makes the comparison is not just a jejune analogy between two ascendant powers. Rather, it is the calculus employed by the German admiralty. Cognizant that Britain far outclassed them in tonnage, the Germans realized they didn't need to defeat the British in straight up combat. Instead, they decided to make their fleet strong enough that the British could not afford to defeat them. Because once the British defeated the German fleet, the French fleet, the Russian fleet, hell, maybe even the Japanese fleet, would all assert their authority in their respective spheres, and the British fleet would be too weak to fend them off. Additionally, Germany's proximity to Britain meant that while global British tonnage might outclass everyone else combined, their North fleet alone would have to be sufficient to defeat the Germans; the Germans were an existential threat. Consequently, as the German fleet grew, the British retracted their global commitments, until they finally, and amicably enough, seceded the Med to the French as part of their Triple Entente obligations so that they could concentrate their full might on defending the Home Isle.

Now, I'm straight up speculating if any of that influences the Chinese decision making process. There are certainly copious reasons why the analogy is imperfect or misleading. An aircraft carrier is a far more sophisticated vessel than a dreadnought, and the technological and developmental gap between the US and China is accordingly greater than it was between England and Germany. Secondly, there isn't a commensurate French fleet to affect balance of power calculations. Russia has a global fleet, sure, as does India, but neither is strong enough or motivated enough to play the same role. So whereas the British had to evaluate against the Germans, and the French, and the... the US really balances against China, with a few et als for spice. Third, China lacks the proximity or the means to poses the same existential threat Germany posed England. Certainly, a carrier could pose a threat to regional allies, but that's not quite the same thing.

Ultimately, my point is that whereas the British could not afford to lose the tonnage that made them vulnerable to the other Great Powers, the US cannot afford to lose even one carrier. As Gates' noted, a Ford-class carrier represents $15 to $20 billion in a single asset, to say nothing of the propaganda value. The Chinese don't need to have a carrier left afloat if they ever challenge us to Midway 2.0. They just need to sink ours.

Lost and Really Really Found

Backpacker Magazine has a fascinating article in their newest issue (May 2010), but sadly, the article itself isn't available online, only a video diary by the author.

The article, by Jim Thornton, is about being lost in the Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness in Idaho. As an experiment, he volunteered to be flown blindfolded into the middle of the 2.3 million acre national park to experience what it meant to be totally, completely, lost. Over the course of his experience, he makes what I consider to be unbelievable errors, like not stopping immediately when he locates an identifiable landmark or taking compass readings so infrequently he only knows he's headed north-by-not-southish. Even so, it sounds like a fascinating experiment, and one I would love to try on my own at some point.

But it got me thinking about when I've ever been lost in my life. I mean, there have been times where I didn't know where I was, or I was in a new environment with no map, but I could not think of a time where I've ever been legitimately lost. I mean lost like: "I have absolutely no idea where I am and I'm not sure I have the means to keep myself alive until I do". The closest I could think of was when I went to Thailand. I remember getting off the plane in China, and getting swindled by the taxi cab driver because I was so wet behind the ears, but I had at least enough rudimentary language skills to get from point A to B, buy train tickets or food. But in Thailand, if I wandered off the very specific path of hotel to airport, or a list of very specific destinations, there was a not insignificant chance I couldn't find my way back to my hotel. I couldn't even pronounce the name, and half the cabbies to whom I gave the hotel's business card to had no idea where it was either. But it was a city, and eventually I'd run into someone who spoke some English. I was never lost, just in a highly foreign environment.

Which is the second odd part of this experiment. At one point, Thornton quotes Daniel Boone as saying he had been lost for weeks at a time, but says it was all ok, because Boone knew how to live off the land. Which is true enough, I suppose, but it made me think two things. First, it was evidence of just how detached even a highly experienced backpacked was from the land in which he routinely walked. It gave me the impression that Thornton lacked even basic survival skills. But secondly, it also occurred to me that you always came from somewhere. In terms of normal human terms, the experience of finding yourself in a place without at least a basic idea of where you are or where you came from is pretty rare.

Survival in the ocean is one possibility, as is hiking some place and falling into a ravine or the like, a place where even though you know how you got in, you can't backtrack your way out. But for hikers, people on their feet, this sort of spontaneous manifestation is really pretty rare. And, as long as you keep your head, that memory of how you got in is exploitable, a key to going home.

In the article, Thornton talks about transporting squirrels to new, foreign habitats, and notes that, almost always, the squirrel dies because it knows nothing about it's new environment. We're creatures of accumulated knowledge, experiences of where is safe, where we can find food, and where predators come from. Disruptions to that environment make us nervous, but we can adjust. But changing everything all at once is debilitating, and very dangerous.

Media > Politics

The Clinton era marked a transition period in modern politics, marking the inflexion point between the printing press and the modern mass media-industrial complex. CNN was born under Reagen and had struggled to it's feet by Tiananmen in 1989 with enough vim to coin the term the CNN Effect. 24-hour infotainment and the internet has redefined journalism and news in ways we still don't quite get.

Douthat now suggests that now Fox News has actually contributed to the decline of the right. Riffing off a Jonah Goldberg quote that the popularity of Fox and talk shows is evidence of the right's strength, Douthat suggests that the right has mistook the forest for the trees, counterpointing conservative popularity against liberal policy. Douthat makes a strong case that the ever-increasing market share of conservative media outlets (I still snicker when I hear Fox News, the most popular cable news channel, deride the mainstream media) is not only a misplaced metric, but actually counterproductive to the conservative movement. Where once the journal of elite intellectualism guided the spirit of conservatism, today's reliance on popular media has degraded both the quality of the intellectual foundations for contemporary conservatism, and the quality of the interlocutors to parse the differences between liberalism and conservatism.

The Tea Parties make for an interesting case study of this struggle, as they've come to dominate the cutting edge of conservative thought. Lind reminds us that as much as establishment Republicans have attempted to co-opt the Tea Party movement, it was birthed as a mass movement. It lacked(s) ideologies, manifestos, or recognizable leaders. Glenn Beck gave it an enormous profile last summer, and it's as much the child of Fox as anything institutional or formal, hailed as a bellweather of both common American opinion and the future of Republican politics. The irony is that both are almost institutionally impaired from serving as intellectual pioneers.

Journalism is hardly the place to develop extended discourse. An editor or owner might produce a general perspective, filter a bias into the overall coverage, but a prolonged, rigorous development of philosophy and ideology just isn't possible in a media environment. The media can shape or guide or affect policy sure, but by journalism is about reporting, telling what happened. Obviously, plenty of journalists have been extremely influential in creating coherent ideology, but as authors, not journos, 1200 words at a time. Columnists at WSJ or WP or NYT comment. And bloggers are almost prisoners of echo chambers of their own devising.

Likewise, the Tea Parties are like hydras without heads. Vaguely libertarian, vaguely fiscally conservative, vaguely racist, wholly diffused. It isn't even cellular, with little mini-hierarchies that report to bigger hierarchies. It's as much a group of people defined by what they're not than by what they are, and that's not an environment conducive to producing manifestos. Even if regional organizations produce intellectual coherence, there's no reason their beliefs will translate to the next community or a reason it should. Vox populi, vox deus might eventually produce social changes, warp the fabric of American culture, but those changes take generations, centuries. Not the mechanism I'd trust to experiment with future policy.

Best of the Web 20APR10

On Why the USG Doesn’t “Get” AQ as a “Global Insurgency” - ZenPundit: Mark Sanfraski is always good for thought-provoking pieces. Here, he explores the widening gulf between "classical" (Maoist) insurgency, which forms a core of COIN theory, and post-Maoist insurgency, which typifies most insurgencies operating today. Interesting implications for state-centric foreign policy and theory.

Forgetting our American Tradition - David Brim via Sigma Forum: David takes a novel swing at the professionalization of American national security. Whereas most takes on contemporary civil-military relations focus on the "growing gulf" between the military and the civil worlds, David explores the difference between a preventative, elite professional approach versus a "resilient", civilian reserve. In doing so, he recasts our national security narrative from a focus on "fighting them over there so we don't fight them here" (incidentally, Zen questions this narrative above as well) towards a culture capable of rapid bounceback and "counter-attack".

When Heads Roll - Jenna Jordan: Analyzing the data for 298 leadership decapitations from 1945-2004, Jenna makes the provocative claim that: "The marginal utility of decapitation is negative for many groups, particularly for larger, older, religious, and separatist organizations." This surfaced as I was reading about the Army's leadership problems in Vietnam, and the impression strong component of American leadership was trapped in their experiences and modus operandis. For the groups Jordan reviewed, new leadership meant new direction and invigoration; new blood. Makes me wonder if the "optimal" age of authority isn't younger than we expect. The old guard becomes very good at perfecting how things used to be done as the present passes them by, while the Young Turks don't have the experience or seniority to pioneer real change. Senior middle management though...

hint.fm - Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg: Researchers in visualization, the pair has created some astounding projects. Web Seer is a fascinating little tool to cross-correlate Google search terms, while Many Eyes is a public forum for visualizations of, well, everything. History Flow, the project that gained the initial acclaim, captures the self-healing nature of Wikipedia by allowing anyone to track the history of changes. All-in-all, highly enjoyable.

Cities Under Siege - Geoff Manaugh: As the world turns urban, I'm interested in anything studying the direction of our coming urban spaces. Manaugh proposes that in addition to degradation towards a "feral city", our responses will be increasingly military and technological. Future cities will be islands of civilization and privilege surrounded by slums and lawlessness, isolated and controlled through physically balkanized districts, checkpoints, and surveillance. Call Baghdad the pilot program.

"The Army and Vietnam" Review

Fourteen years removed from the end of Vietnam, and predating Iraq by nearly twenty years, The Army and Vietnam by Andrew Krepinevich gives voice to what are now the prevailing tropes about America's conduct during the war. At a time when the rest of the Army was busying itself perfecting Air-Land Battle, developing the war machines that would define cutting edge military technology, and gazing across the Iron Curtain, Krepinevich looked back at Vietnam and said: "we got this really, really wrong". The contemporary explanations castigated the shackles of civilian leadership, presaging an almost dagger-in-the-back attitude. What introspection did occur affirmed the belief that that Army belonged atop tanks, going head-to-head with Soviet divisions.

Krepinevich summarizes this attitude with the two-fold Army Concept. First, the Army is properly employed in mid- to high-intensity conflicts (conventional state-on-state war and nuclear war, respectively). Second, wherever possible, firepower and technology is to be substituted for men; casualties are anathema. Both aspects are as potent today as ever. The debates between COINistas and COINtras, the use of artillery or drones, these are the same issues, and we're only slowly overcoming the handicaps imposed by the Concept.

Kennedy made the most concerted effort to challenge the Concept's precepts, but his study groups were staffed with conventionalists, albeit well-meaning conventionalists, and he died before doing a significant shakeup. McNamara was more interested in challenging the budgeting and acquisition process to question Army doctrine, and Taylor was too interested in protecting his career and political access to rock the boat. The actual COMUSMACVs grew up in WWII and Korea. They were children of massive, conventional conflict. It was what they knew. That doesn't excuse them for being unsuited for the nature of their job, but rather to note that dismissing them as closeminded or ignoramuses doesn't give full faith and credit to their attempts to do their job. They tried to do their job as best they could, but they lacked the experience to appropriately frame the conflict.

In a way, they were victims of their own success. Their experience, both personal and institutional, was based on winning WWII. It isn't hard to imagine a "if it ain't broke, why fix it?" attitude permeating decision making. Ia Drang proved to be a concrete example of that belief. If we could just fix the NVA, we'd cream 'em. The biggest obstacle to that was finding the NVA that melted away before our forces, so that means we needed to be more mobile. Ergo, the rapidity with which we could introduce airmobile troops at Ia Drang and employ fires validated a conventional doctrine and demonstrated that inconvenient changes to doctrine and training were unnecessary. The apocryphal conversation between COL Summer and COL Vu that the US never lost a battle yet lost the war underscores the seduction of illusionary victory.

Our modern Army (and population) is no more immune to that trope than our predecessors. Gulf War I was a smashing success for the US, yet as Fredrick Kagan points out in Finding the Target, we fought an enemy stupid enough to fight us on our own terms. 1990-era Iraq used Soviet weaponry, Soviet-style tactics and Soviet-style force structures, while the United States had spent the 1970s and 80s developing Air-Land Battle specifically to counter Soviet warfare and creating the weaponry necessary to do so; we fought the perfect fight. Ironically, we won so overwhelmingly, we all but spelled the obsolescence of that generation of warfare.

The narrative of American victory developed into an almost mythic story, which produced two-consequences. First, the US armed forces believed themselves omnipotent, and more importantly, so do the American people. Second, we became so powerful that all anyone had to do to win against us is not lose. That’s how 18 soldiers dying in Mogadishu became a political crisis, and why Task Force Hawk was never employed in Kosovo. The propaganda of even minor defeats or setbacks trumped the military gains we would exact in exchange.

Likewise, the mythic potency of the US military helps explain Rumsfeld’s agenda when he entered office and how the invasion of Iraq was planned. The stunning successes in Afghanistan sang a siren’s song that validated Rumsfeld’s vision of a lean 21^st century military, of commando teams backed by the world’s premier air force and offshore cruise missiles. The means were modern, but the thought process was decades old. If we could see it, we could kill it. If we killed it, we win. Victory through overwhelming firepower.

If the American Army was too wedded to employing third generation warfare, it is worth remembering that fourth generation warfare was still in its infancy. Mao articulated the now classic three phases of revolutionary war, but even his own revolution was a patchwork employment of that doctrine, hardly a model. A massive, diffused style of warfare capable of intense destruction by a handful of people was novel, untested. Both experience and schemata framed partisans as retroguard irritants. The experiences and history of warfare in the 21^st century thus far tended towards the concentration of military and political power, with lower-intensity conflict being a distraction, adjuncts to the central conflict.

At this point, it is worth parsing the differences between guerrillas, partisans, and insurgents. In general, the terms connote a spectrum of organization, concentration of objectives, and ability, ranging from the fragmented guerrilla bands to a professionally organized insurgency. All represent various forms of low-intensity conflict, but present enormous range across the spectrums that inhibits neat encapsulation.

“Guerrilla” was a term developed to describe the forces opposing Napoleon in Spain. They used raids and ambushes to strike at exposed French formations, but ultimately, their goal was disruption and distraction. Even more so than today, warfare was a series of giant, set battles, so their refusal to confront massed French troops eventually drove Napoleon to distraction. Yet they lacked a coherent strategy more profound than “strike the French when we can and don’t get caught”. Insofar as it could be called a strategy, it was a strategy of weakness, of frustration and inability to force decisive battle. Accordingly, it lacked the means to produce victory for the guerrillas, or even to deny victory for the invader. Instead, it just made life very irritating as the invaders moved their possessions into the palace (such as the British for the 150 years they occupied India). Lacking uniforms, uniform training, or standards of performance, a guerrilla can’t even be properly called a lay soldier, and fights more against something (someone, really), than for something. They may strike at political targets, with potentially enormous consequences (think of the assassination of Franz Ferdinand), or may engage in military activities, but its targets of opportunity or individual initiative. In this framing, a guerrilla war is a state military (typically a foreign invader) versus a popular, militia-style force.

In contrast, a partisan represented a unique formation of state-level armies. I personally use the terms partisan and irregular interchangeably, and both reflect that while the fighter is engaged in violent, military activities, they do so without uniform. Even if they act independently of their “host” military, they operate in support of its objectives and generally operate against military targets, not political. This is where we would find most OSS activities, from the Jedburgh teams in Europe to Detachment 101 in the Asia theater. While the partisan enjoys the material and financial support of a state, they are ancillary to the main force efforts. The actions of SF in northern Iraq in 2003 are perfect examples of how this force can be employed with devastating effect. But partisans alone don’t produce victory. That requires conventional forces and a more standard production of victory. Here, a partisan is a supplement to state-level conflict.

Lastly, an insurgent is, strictly, a force in armed opposition to the ruling government. This is a force organized along Mao’s guidelines, with differentiation between political cadre, auxiliaries performing assassination and sabotage, and armed fighters. Tactically, an insurgent will employ the same raids and ambushes as a guerrilla, but the presence of the political cadre and organization towards a strategy give an insurgency the capability of producing victory. While an insurgent may enjoy foreign support, it is a domestic force, capable of self-sustenance through kidnappings, intimidation, and coercion, or through popular support, although at degraded capability.

Vietnam, then, blends certain aspects of partisanship and insurgency that make describing US efforts, both actual and in the historical conditional, difficult. First, the boundaries that created Vietnam were arbitrary and recent, making South Vietnam both nascent and a political organization, rather than a nationalistic one. Even using French Indochina as a model better captures the impermeability of the national borders. Insisting on international standards of national sovereignty for governments that represented people spanning four countries is more an exercise in political convenience than material fact. The casual disregard of the North Vietnamese for national borders suggests this handicap was one-sided. For these reasons, using geographical constraints to define the scope of operations was flawed from the inception, and one exploited capably by the North Vietnamese who used both Laos and Cambodia to stage massive amounts of men and material, provide safe havens for troops in contact, and extend infiltration route across the breadth of the country.

Second, a “typical” insurgency would be defined by local actors and separation from neighbors, yet the division of Vietnam in the Geneva Agreements in 1954 represented reverse nationalism, cleaving a people, and blurring the distinctions between the VC as a popular insurgency and the VC as auxiliaries to the NVA. An insurgency is a fight over the affections, loyalties and obediences of the people. It is a violent referendum on the conduct of the government. Yet the VC received enormous support from “foreign” sources. Krepinevich convincingly makes the case that preoccupation with this external support inhibited the ability of American leadership to understand that the insurgency itself constituted a material threat, and that strategy and disposition suffered accordingly. However, it is worth remembering that the NVA fought in the war as well, and in this the VC operated as partisans in support of the phase three-style conventional forces. A counterinsurgency campaign alone would have been insufficient to match the threat posed by main force NVA units. So while current operations in Iraq and Afghanistan lack the threat of imminent invasion that frees them to craft a focused counterinsurgency campaign, Vietnam did not enjoy that luxury.

Third, the doctrine of a people’s war was itself revolutionary and embryonic. Guerrilla doctrine had literally in the process of being articulated. Mao’s On Guerrilla Warfare was written in 1937, while Che’s Guerrilla Warfare wasn’t written until 1961. Giap was inventing his own revolutionary style as he went along, modifying Mao’s models to suit Vietnamese circumstances. Meanwhile, such literature as existed on counterinsurgency could be more accurately defined as counter-guerrilla under the above typology. Calling it counter-guerrilla calls attention to the facts that previous insurgencies had lacked comprehensive organization, guidance, or support. A substantial portion of the grievances focused on foreign occupation (the French in Algeria during Galula’s composition of Counterinsurgency Warfare, which wasn’t written until 1964) and lacked unifying principles, either in ideology or organization. So while literature had been written describing revolutions, Vietnam precluded copy-and-paste style application of what nascent counterinsurgency theory existed.

Krepinevich rightly faults leadership, both civilian and military, for failing to take advantage of what experience it did have; failing to utilize one’s full range of capabilities is simply inexcusable. However, such experience as did exist in the US at the time was in unconventional war, i.e. partisans. Officers from Detachment 101 could have provided invaluable advice about South-East Asia and atraditional forms of warfare. But whereas Krepinevich cites the discrepancy between articulated policy, doxied up in the vocabulary of counterinsurgency, and practiced policy of conventional divisions performing search-and-clear missions as examples of how the Army’s commitment to its Concept overruled its willingness to explore alternatives, I find it more persuasive that the Army, even in its more experienced and erudite officers, was ignorant of a form of warfare still being created. They used language that indicates familiarity with both guerrilla and counterinsurgency theory, but the historical record was thin on material to persuasively argue that the people’s war would be qualitatively different than the guerrilla wars of colonial liberation, to say nothing of the quantitative differences enabled by modern infrastructure, weaponry, and foreign support.

Krepinevich argues persuasively that the leadership who lead us into was married to the Army Concept. He makes the case that we systematically ignored the Southern Vietnamese people as a center of gravity and wasted our time looking for massed tank divisions in the Central Highlands, positions with considerable merit. He acknowledges that the American bench was very weak in general in any type of atypical conflict, be it unconventional warfare or counterinsurgency. But there were plenty of officers with experience either in the OSS or who had misgivings about the course of the war available to change the strategy and planning process. Even so, I wish Krepinevich would have spent more time exploring the tension involved in crafting policy and doctrine in times of such profound change. Nuclear policy posed existential threats to the Army, and it had attempted to resolve that threat through supremacy in mid-intensity conflict. That dictated force structure, procurement and training, and changing those aspects was an ideational risk. It is worth exploring the question of crafting policy to address the immediate concern of Vietnam (or wars of national liberation in general) versus the greater Black Swan of facing down the Soviets in Germany.

"War in a Time of Peace" Review

Samantha Powers ruined the Clinton Administration for me. A Problem from Hell had no trouble castigating Bill Clinton for being almost criminally obtuse to the genocides of the 1990s. Between years of inaction on Bosnia, Blackhawk Down in Somalia, weeks of inaction and deliberate footdragging in Rwanda, and a lackluster policy for Kosovo, Powers had little trouble finding a soapbox. Still, her scope is American policy for the 20th century, and while Clinton is the best observed and documented, being the most recent and televised, he is treated more as a case study for the culmination of a century of failed policies than an independent exploration.

In contrast, although the narrative is structured around the same episodes, Halberstam's focus is Clinton's foreign policy and his relationship with the military; Rwanda is given junior billing to Haiti is their shared chapter (one of forty-three) and is covered in mere pages. Powers was galvanized by her reporting of Bosnia in the early 1990s to write on US fecklessness. Halberstam approaches his material as a curious but detached reporter, more concerned with the personalities of the principals than the events qua events. Accordingly, Halberstam's book doesn't provide much new about Clinton's ineffectual policies, but he sheds considerable light on a moment of transitioning values in American politics, caught in the lens of foreign policy. Standing at the cusp between two different generations of politics, each typified by a respective Bush, the Clinton Administration marked an era of transformation in American politics. Two separate, yet intertwined, changes created this alteration: the constituencies and thus character of the American two party system, and the personalities of the principals.

Whereas Reagan was savvy to modern media and reassuring to his constituents in his Manichean worldview, Bush Sr. was the last of the old guard of pols. As a President, Bush Sr. held foreign policy as the priority, not domestic politics; that was a legislative affair. As a politician, Bush Sr. felt that his accomplishments spoke for themselves and it would be gauche to promote his successes, despite helping Russia transition to a democracy and the stellar victories in the Gulf. In contrast, Bush W. ascended to the Presidency in a time when polling was sufficient to be determinative, and when one's influence was measured by their air time.

Betwixt these sharply opposed modes of politics stands the Clinton Administration. The product of the 1960s, the ghosts of civil rights and Vietnam stalked the halls of power. Civil rights drove conservative Democrats from the party, while Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority reshaped the character of the Republican Party, and both changes would drastically effect how Clinton shaped his policy. The Democratic Party became blacker (or more minority-er), more feminine, more urban, and more north-eastern, and Clinton needed to address their concerns, which were almost all domestic: jobs, education, affirmative action. As a rule, these were groups concerned more with problems at home than problems abroad, and Clinton needed to dance with them that brought him. Meanwhile, the Republican Party had become more convinced of it's righteousness, more partisan, and lead by leaders who played for keeps. It's hard to escape the impression the Republican leadership of the 1990s was more concerned with the fortunes of the Republican party than with the fortunes of America. As a result, Clinton's foreign policy was neglected in favor of domestic issues, and then sidelined to political survival. Halberstam frequently cites examples where Clinton suborned a foreign exigency to domestic concerns and where Clinton was moved to action only by compelling domestic pressure: Dole's decision to stress Bosnia in the 1996 elections, the grandstanding of Somalia and the creation of red tape to obstruct action in Rwanda, and the realization of NATO's imminent demise in the face of inaction in Kosovo.

But the uniqueness of Halberstam's book is his commentary on the personal changes in the principals, and their shifts across the Presidency. Clinton's original foreign policy staff, Lake, Christopher, Aspin, Powell, Lake, all came from a tradition that stressed staying in the shadows. As principals in the Washingtonian theater troupe, they all knew how to play the influence card, yet they respected the privacy of their positions, finding the spotlight to advocate the President's policies. Halberstam cites Lake explicitly as shunning the Sunday talk-show circuit, saying: "He believed others should speak for policy. He also held the old-fashioned view that the major decisions on foreign policy were private, and the more you were seen on television, the more you signaled you were out of the loop." This breed of Bush Sr.-style policy makers didn't even make it to the end of the Clinton administration.

By the second term, and the second NSC staff, self-promotion was understood, and policy was made by understanding what the public wanted then leading them to that. Albright had discovered the narcotic of a reporter's camera while UN Ambassador, and Holbrooke was unashamed in shilling his exploits in ways now common. While tempting to dismiss the changes as mere changes in the proclivities of the principals, Halberstam makes the case that the generation of middle and lower management saw cultivating public ties as a positive career move. It was understood that policy was made of public opinion; the public elected a Representative to the White House, not a trustee. Accordingly, foreign policy formulation in the Clinton White House became a matter of backburnering issues until the tea leaves told the powers that be further prevarication would incur political consequences domestically.

Meanwhile, Vietnam, and it's little cousin Somalia, were the concrete formative events of the Clinton NSC team. To say the Clinton team was adverse to force simply because they had been protesters would be facile, yet Vietnam was the military event when Democrats entered the system. Gulf War I might have expunged the ghosts of Vietnam for the country, but for the individuals of Clinton's administration, they had been out of power at the time, as they had for Grenada and Panama. Consequently, when Somalia blew up in Clinton's face, the immediate reaction was to link it to their last experience with force, Vietnam. Somalia would gain singular influence of the Clinton NSC team, but Vietnam shaped their preconceptions and made them cautious, hesitant, most concretely seen in the Powell-Weinberger Doctrine. Unshaken by the massive loss of life in the 1990s, the Powell-Wienberger Doctrine remains the authority determining appropriate American use of force. Even though the UN pledged "never again" after the catastrophe of Rwanda, it is worth remembering that Powell-Weinberger is unchallenged as the authoritative slide rule for US foreign policy, and that it was formulated in response to Vietnam, not genocide or global hegemony.

All of this begs the question: what are the formative events for today's generation of foreign policy experts? Sure, Rwanda and Kosovo are traumatic events, but for someone else, not us. What will be the lessons of 9/11, Iraq, and Afghanistan and what shapes the modern, ascendant foreign policy guru? It is tempting to cite the length of these conflicts as on par with Vietnam and thus suggest equal salience. We are quick to suggest "quagmire" and promote our current conflicts as equally influential as Vietnam, but I personally find it hard to believe either the general public or the policy corp views either conflict/war as emotionally as Vietnam was regarded in it's day. Today's corp of military personnel is all-volunteer, as is the diplomatic corp, and the brief furor over Baghdad stations two years ago notwithstanding, I don't see the equivalent of burning draft cards, or widespread public protests or teach-ins. Lake was distinguished by his decision to resign in protest over the invasion of Cambodia; who today can make similar claim?

If we accept there is a generation in power, and a generation waiting to ascend to power, then what events formed the opinions of today's principals? If we hypothesize a 20-year lag between an event and it's influencees ascending to power, then we're saying Obama's NSC team was created in the fires of Panama and Gulf War I, with hints of Somalia and Rwanda to guide them. Accepting a longer-term lens, we have to question the legacies of Rwanda and Kosovo as formative events because they eventually only affected a small portion of the FSO population, and only Somalia's influence appears determinative (and that's highly suspect).

So, is our current generation the product of the genocides of the 1990s? Or is it the products of the institutes of modern foreign policy, with homage paid to the case studies of Rwanda and Kosovo? Despite hundreds of millions in ethnic cleansings across continents, the lackluster response of US policy and US opinion suggests those events are not determinative. So what shapes the personalities of today's (and tomorrow's) foreign policy authorities? Schools or exigencies? Were they formed in the harried fires of crises or the calm contemplations of case studies? Are they guided by the necessities of preserving human life in the face of evil, or the abstracts of assessing America's position in the world as a function of relatively declining economic power and political legitimacy? Will we nominally note the "wars" while we continue to spend as usual? What ghosts will haunt the halls of future Presidents, and more importantly, the halls of State and the Pentagon? Halberstam suggests our future will be shaped by an omnipresent media, a political corp that craves public validation, and by wars disassociated from the American public (and even the majority of the FSO corp). He doesn't propose his own model, but all the same, his narrative is the story of how the legacy of Vietnam is applied to present contingencies. What future will we bequeath our next generation of foreign policy?