Years ago, I came across Carl Builder's The Masks of War, which sought to explain how the different services viewed the world, each other, and their relative places within the world, i.e. their strategic culture. I've found the idea fascinating, and found it meaningful even at my level to ask how the unique culture of an organization shapes its actions. In my little corner, individuals wield enough influence to equal or exceed institutional inertia to shape an organizational culture. This has left me sensitive to seeking explanations centered around the characteristics of the people who wield the power, rather than the power itself or the circumstances in which it is wielded.
Toward a New Maritime Strategy: American Naval Thinking in the Post-Cold War World adopts a similar focus, and attempts to answer the question of how unique individuals shaped, or often failed to shape, the direction of the Navy. Even though he explicitly faults the institution of the Navy, rather than any given set of individuals, for failing to develop a new post-Cold War strategy, his analytic lens is firmly humanistic. Unlike other large organizations, where personnel rotate between senior VPs of different companies and their golden parachute lands them at a competing firm, the military home-grows all its senior leaders. Broadening experiences like civilian education are informative and shaping, yet the professional focus on the service and years spent in it's echo-chamber shape the personalities of commanders. This makes the military a unique population to examine how organization breeds its own future.
To be honest, the central question of what is or was not the Navy's strategy was the least interesting part of the book for me. Within pages, CAPT Haynes asserts that the business of the Navy is the maintenance of the global commons to perpetuate American dominance in the globalized economy, and thereafter uses the congruence of published Navy strategic documents with this idea as his metric to gauge sound reasoning. I wish CAPT Haynes had spent more time developing why a "maritime" strategy, as opposed to a merely "naval" strategy, was the correct focus of the Navy, but CAPT Haynes finds this as self-evident to the globalized economy and only elaborates on the growth of globalization. It was surprising to hear how resistant the naval community was to the implications of globalization. I would have liked to read more differentiation between maritime and naval strategy to give greater insight into the mindset of the Navy and its intellectual hobbyhorses.
More than anything, this is a book about how people. Individuals are products of their times and their cultures, and this book explores their chance to reciprocate that influence. Each time CAPT Haynes introduced a new character, he gave a brief professional CV, and always mentioned in which community (surface warfare, aviation, or submariner) the individual had grown up. Each community had developed its own cultures and strategic assumptions (such as the zero-defect culture of nuclear engineers), and these shaped where each new Chief of Naval Operations stood. Additionally, the technocratic engineering backgrounds that had forced career specialized and had guided naval PME profoundly shaped the worldviews of naval officers. It focused them on solving the "how" of problems, rather than the "why". CAPT Haynes calls out a number of CNOs for abdicating their role in strategic decision making to civilian leadership. Yet the CNO has at least three civilians to whom he directly reports in the Pentagon alone, and the Navy is but one national asset, so to fault the Navy for a lack of strategic planning seems fairly parochial. That there was no strategy that situated the Navy within the broader national security apparatus is certainly concerning and merits urgent redress, yet situating responsibility for developing the why and how for an asset by the asset seems to empower the asset to refuse being used in a way it dislikes, rather than making it conform into an agent of the national authorities. This tension was found in the absence of Iraq and Afghanistan as influences, and how the longest wars in American history either validated or questioned his strategic emphasis is never explored.
Equally interesting was contrasting the strategic culture of the Navy with that of its sister services. The Marines are the most developed here due to their shared status within the Department of the Navy, which only highlights the often radical difference between the two services. In contrast to the Navy's technocentric approach where the capabilities of material dictated their application, the Marines sought "constant innovation". Especially in light of how much the current woes of the F-35 stem from the Marine's insistence on VTOL capability, I'd be very curious to read a more detailed exploration of why the two services are so far apart on strategic and operational considerations. Builder regretted not investigating the Marines as a fourth service. Because the Marines incorporate aspects of all three services, contrasting the Marines' culture with that of a given service, or especially with the intersection of two other services, would provide fertile grounds to highlight woes of jointness and strategic myopia.
Lastly, it was very interesting to note the impressions of an O-6 in the Navy and the lessons learned from both Desert Storm and OEF. It's illuminating that he treats these victories axiomatically as simple validations of strike craft. This nests the tactical effects of the Navy firmly within the strategic bombing framework so favored by the Air Force, while also minimizing the effects of ground power. Given how much the strategic bombing predicates using carriers or Tomahawks, I wish CAPT Haynes had better explored the ways in which the Navy differed from the Air Force in how it influenced strategic effects, especially non-kinetically. This would have been a great way to contrast how maritime strategy effects global commerce to provide categorically different national benefits beyond the ability to smash things. Additionally, this would have been a chance to delineate between maritime and naval strategy as a way of contrasting how the use (versus merely the presence or threat) of military power vouchsafes commerce. As I read it, if the function of a maritime strategy is to ensure access to the global commons, then force would be used when that access is jeopardized, and I would have enjoyed an exploration of what such scenarios might be. Iran may have missile batteries that give them primacy over the Straits of Hormuz, yet if the oil tankers continue to run, who cares? China may assert dominion of the South China Sea, yet if container ships filled with TVs still make it to Tokyo or LA, is that of concern to the US? Or does the US suspect China may attempt to impose tariffs on goods moving through those waters? How does the Navy shape itself when the most likely reason goods no longer flow from Guangzhou is because of political boycotts, rather than sunken ships?
In the end, Towards a New Maritime Strategy was a great read, and a fascinating look at who shaped naval policy over the last 25 years. Even individuals without a strategic bent created the organizational flexibilities than enabled them to respond well to emerging threats and to make the necessary changes. Its a welcome humanistic approach to studying strategy, and how policy is a function of the people who make it.
Thursday, August 6, 2015
Tuesday, May 10, 2011
Thursday, March 24, 2011
Who are we?
On the one hand, it's gratifying to hear that the US is handing off command and that we are only involved in 2.5 wars. It ostensibly limits our involvement, our financial obligations, and in theory precludes putting troops on the ground. The ambiguity of the end state still allows for the potential that things will change and that nothing goes according to plan. We're still on the hook for the conduct of both our allies and our ostensible supportees. Nevertheless, it's an intriguing decision.
But it puts the US in a weird position. While Libya does possess oil, it's hardly a significant amount, especially when compared to the rest of the Arab world. Basically, the is unambiguously a humanitarian intervention. No one can really identify a compelling national interest for any of the countries involved. If anything, the more consistent explanation seems to be the domestic politics of the assembled countries. So, absent the crass motivations that mire discussion of Iraq or Afghanistan, Libya seems to be a case of clear humanitarian motivations. It's about as close as the international community gets to "doing the right thing".
And yet the US is sitting this one out. Our image has been badly tarnished after Iraq, and the predominant narrative seems to be that the US only goes to war if our national interests, which is to say oil conglomerates, are involved. Even though we've launched air strikes and Tomahawks, we're passing control, and credit to other countries. There's some practical sense to this, yet that sense is going untaughted. So, we're getting involved in a moral cause, for good reasons, let letting others take the credit and allowing our reputation as opportunistic, oil-hungry oil mongers to go challenged. For that, we might as well have just let the Europeans handle it and saved our missiles for our own ends.
But there's also the Obama history of being much better at doing things than at selling their ability to do things. From health care to DADT, the administration has had a surprising record of quietly focusing on their goals. As their projects have all been long-term investments that will take years to develop, the results don't even speak for themselves. Coupled with weird issues staying on message, I'm curious to hear how this will play out come election year. I'm still not sure if this represents the triumph of policy over posturing, or just simple confusion about what the message is to begin with, but all in all, it makes for an odd Presidency, one that seems to avoid the spotlight.
But it puts the US in a weird position. While Libya does possess oil, it's hardly a significant amount, especially when compared to the rest of the Arab world. Basically, the is unambiguously a humanitarian intervention. No one can really identify a compelling national interest for any of the countries involved. If anything, the more consistent explanation seems to be the domestic politics of the assembled countries. So, absent the crass motivations that mire discussion of Iraq or Afghanistan, Libya seems to be a case of clear humanitarian motivations. It's about as close as the international community gets to "doing the right thing".
And yet the US is sitting this one out. Our image has been badly tarnished after Iraq, and the predominant narrative seems to be that the US only goes to war if our national interests, which is to say oil conglomerates, are involved. Even though we've launched air strikes and Tomahawks, we're passing control, and credit to other countries. There's some practical sense to this, yet that sense is going untaughted. So, we're getting involved in a moral cause, for good reasons, let letting others take the credit and allowing our reputation as opportunistic, oil-hungry oil mongers to go challenged. For that, we might as well have just let the Europeans handle it and saved our missiles for our own ends.
But there's also the Obama history of being much better at doing things than at selling their ability to do things. From health care to DADT, the administration has had a surprising record of quietly focusing on their goals. As their projects have all been long-term investments that will take years to develop, the results don't even speak for themselves. Coupled with weird issues staying on message, I'm curious to hear how this will play out come election year. I'm still not sure if this represents the triumph of policy over posturing, or just simple confusion about what the message is to begin with, but all in all, it makes for an odd Presidency, one that seems to avoid the spotlight.
Thursday, March 17, 2011
The myth of NGO neutrality
In a counterinsurgency, there is no such thing as a neutral party. There may be unaffiliated parties, parties who refuse to endorse either the government or the rebels. But when the center of gravity are the loyalties of the population, the conditions of their lives contextualizes how they interact with either belligerent force. A poor village, desperate for a market for their milk, finds fast friends in an insurgent who needs food. A village in the midst of a water dispute with a neighboring town sides with those willing to arbitrate the case. A young man, whose family is fed by international aid, can join the local police instead of working the field. Aid isn't neutral. It makes a village strong enough to resist insurgent incursions. An insurgency isn't fought between armies, with tragic casualties of innocent bystanders, non-belligerents. It's fought by the people, for the people, and of the people. There is no neutral space, only unaffiliated, whether through choice or weariness or cagey caution. When making people's lives better, showing them their lives will be better off under the government, aid isn't neutral.
Likewise, when aid is given in areas controlled by insurgents, it aids their cause. It lets them gain medical training, like the ICRC training given to Taliban medics last year. Foodstuffs are diverted for insurgent use, while development projects are co-opted to steal credit and show that life is better under insurgent care. But ultimately, humanitarian aid, provided without consideration of political affiliation, lets the insurgent run the political show and eases the strains of the community, strengthening their political rule. Because the sustainment of the community is exogenous, the insurgents gets both credit for supervising an area with a decent quality of life and control through permitting or denying the aid. So while the aid worker may be supplying the basic humanitarian supplies to a badly impoverished, war-stricken village, they're functionally supporting a side.
Lastly, in the cases of an insurgency like the Taliban, whose first attempt to governance involved lighting people on fire in public arenas, ignoring the character of the sides involved may end producing more harm and dependency for the very people an agency is trying to help. While an insurgency is never clean on either side; there is not a moral equivalency. Differences can be discerned, even between shades of gray. International aid neutrality may have been appropriate in an era when wars were fought between states, with clearly demarcated rules and codes of conduct and ways to discriminate between the combatants and the civilian. But that era has passed, and the international aid community needs to adjust to reflect that.
Likewise, when aid is given in areas controlled by insurgents, it aids their cause. It lets them gain medical training, like the ICRC training given to Taliban medics last year. Foodstuffs are diverted for insurgent use, while development projects are co-opted to steal credit and show that life is better under insurgent care. But ultimately, humanitarian aid, provided without consideration of political affiliation, lets the insurgent run the political show and eases the strains of the community, strengthening their political rule. Because the sustainment of the community is exogenous, the insurgents gets both credit for supervising an area with a decent quality of life and control through permitting or denying the aid. So while the aid worker may be supplying the basic humanitarian supplies to a badly impoverished, war-stricken village, they're functionally supporting a side.
Lastly, in the cases of an insurgency like the Taliban, whose first attempt to governance involved lighting people on fire in public arenas, ignoring the character of the sides involved may end producing more harm and dependency for the very people an agency is trying to help. While an insurgency is never clean on either side; there is not a moral equivalency. Differences can be discerned, even between shades of gray. International aid neutrality may have been appropriate in an era when wars were fought between states, with clearly demarcated rules and codes of conduct and ways to discriminate between the combatants and the civilian. But that era has passed, and the international aid community needs to adjust to reflect that.
Tuesday, March 8, 2011
Take Vienna
Seeing as an incredibly strong motivator for why I joined the Army in the first place was because of the (in)actions of the Clinton administration in the face of genocidal tyrants, the situation in Libya makes for an interesting case study in how my perspectives have evolved. Bottom line up front: I think intervention is the wrong move. Mostly because what I've heard proposed are half-measures, attempts to feel good without committing to anything.
The above descriptor notwithstanding, I don't think genocide is occurring. Not to minimize the likely thousands already dead, but violent repression is vastly different than unleashing janjaweed militia, importing machetes, or the systematic annihilation of a minority. As I'll discuss below, there are still parallels to be drawn from the policies of the 1990s, but calling what's happening in Libya genocide is ignorant of both the meaning and history of genocide.
That said, I have serious doubts about the efficacy of a no-fly zone, both as a historical rule and in relation to Libya specifically. A no-fly zone would begin with "acts of war" to suppress Libyan air defenses. Pretending we aren't committed at that point would be an act of willful blindness. Even worse, aside from a generalized outrage, a consistent rationale for why the US would get involved hasn't been articulated. Would we be fighting for democracy, even though we don't actually know if that's a rebel goal? Are we fighting to depose a "delegitimzed" Qaddafi, in which case why stop at cratering airfields? Are we supporting the rebels? Does that mean coordinated tactical strikes to aid operations? Or just striking at anything shooting at the rebels, like planes and helicopters? What about tanks or troops? Or is this a symbolic gesture? If so, is an act of war really the appropriate medium to say "yep, I've still got my mojo", especially if we then fail to follow through?
But this strategic ambiguity also means no one else knows what we're doing either. If we're actively supporting rebel elements against dictators, what message to we send to allies like Saudi Arabia? How do we avoid looking hypocritical when China suppresses it's own activists, or justify our support for Malaki or Karzai, given their lack of popular support, without looking crassly self-interested? Likewise, what happens if we support the rebels and they prove too unorganized or underequipped to finish the fight on their own steam? Do we start another 12-year no-fly zone and tolerate the continuation of the regime, or do we move in ground forces of our own?
If our goal is unambiguously to depose Qaddafi, I think it might be possible to thread the Pottery Barn needle, even if that involves ground troops, be it the 101st or special operations forces. But if we're unclear as to our purpose, end state, or willingness to complete the job, we're better off steering clear. A no-fly zone, multilateral or not, isn't capable producing results. It'll look showy, and it'll feel good in DC, but it carries risk and investments out of proportion to our articulated principles, desired end states, or willpower.
The above descriptor notwithstanding, I don't think genocide is occurring. Not to minimize the likely thousands already dead, but violent repression is vastly different than unleashing janjaweed militia, importing machetes, or the systematic annihilation of a minority. As I'll discuss below, there are still parallels to be drawn from the policies of the 1990s, but calling what's happening in Libya genocide is ignorant of both the meaning and history of genocide.
That said, I have serious doubts about the efficacy of a no-fly zone, both as a historical rule and in relation to Libya specifically. A no-fly zone would begin with "acts of war" to suppress Libyan air defenses. Pretending we aren't committed at that point would be an act of willful blindness. Even worse, aside from a generalized outrage, a consistent rationale for why the US would get involved hasn't been articulated. Would we be fighting for democracy, even though we don't actually know if that's a rebel goal? Are we fighting to depose a "delegitimzed" Qaddafi, in which case why stop at cratering airfields? Are we supporting the rebels? Does that mean coordinated tactical strikes to aid operations? Or just striking at anything shooting at the rebels, like planes and helicopters? What about tanks or troops? Or is this a symbolic gesture? If so, is an act of war really the appropriate medium to say "yep, I've still got my mojo", especially if we then fail to follow through?
But this strategic ambiguity also means no one else knows what we're doing either. If we're actively supporting rebel elements against dictators, what message to we send to allies like Saudi Arabia? How do we avoid looking hypocritical when China suppresses it's own activists, or justify our support for Malaki or Karzai, given their lack of popular support, without looking crassly self-interested? Likewise, what happens if we support the rebels and they prove too unorganized or underequipped to finish the fight on their own steam? Do we start another 12-year no-fly zone and tolerate the continuation of the regime, or do we move in ground forces of our own?
If our goal is unambiguously to depose Qaddafi, I think it might be possible to thread the Pottery Barn needle, even if that involves ground troops, be it the 101st or special operations forces. But if we're unclear as to our purpose, end state, or willingness to complete the job, we're better off steering clear. A no-fly zone, multilateral or not, isn't capable producing results. It'll look showy, and it'll feel good in DC, but it carries risk and investments out of proportion to our articulated principles, desired end states, or willpower.
Tuesday, October 19, 2010
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.
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.
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