Monday, May 25, 2009

Attackerman Guestblogging

Dear all,

I'll be guestblogging this week, along with a cast of other smarter people, over at Spencer Ackerman's Attackerman blog this week. 

My first post is on whether or not the new literature of counterinsurgency is becoming too practicioner-focused, and asks more questions than it answers. I think you'll like it. 

Friday, May 1, 2009

The Great Bird of the Galaxy

Over at Attackerman, Spencer's lamenting the failure of X-Men 3 to properly take advantage of the Dark Phoenix Saga source material:

If comic books are megalomaniacal escapism, we should all want to be Jean Grey. Wolverine is better at slicing people to pieces. Jean destroys entire star systems; destabilizes intergalactic empires; compels acoyltes of mystical tyrants to clone her; makes men leave their wives for her (especially when they marry her clones); dies and comes back to life endlessly; jumps out of Jamaica Bay with her hair totally dry. All hypothetical battle plans for defeating the X-Men require gaming out how to neutralize Jean. 

Men: you should want to be Jean Grey. And as I was just saying to Dave Weigel, what a crying shame that X-Men 3 booted a chance to tell the Phoenix/Dark Phoenix saga.


I think part of the problem here is that the whole Phoenix/Dark Phoenix Saga falls apart when subjected to the sort of near-future realism that all superhero movies seem to have adopted nowadays. After all, when the synopsis of the plot (SPOILER WARNING) essentially is: "ONE DAY IN SPACE, bad things happen and the X-Men need to fly back to Earth quickly. Jean Grey out of nowhere learns how to pilot a space shuttle, and so volunteers to fly everyone else home and get zapped with cosmic rays, which contrary to previous Fantastic Four continuity realistically and quickly just straight up KILL her. 
Then she becomes a SPACE BIRD.

Said Space Bird is in fact a primeval force of nature to these aliens with perpendicular mohawks - by the way, Cyclops' dad shows up FROM THE DEAD, but this is passed over in about ten seconds - and they need the Space Bird to fix the M'Guffin Krystal. They fix it and all is well, and return to earth, where things are boring for a while. Then Jean goes to the Yale Club of New York and gets mesmerized by Jack Sparrow, Wolverine jumps out of the sewer and into the plot of Die Hard, and Jean turns evil again.
Then the Space Bird EATS A SUN. Then Jean gets better, and buys a mask and a go-go skirt. Time passes. The perpendicular mohawk aliens flip out and put Jean on trial. Luckily, Charles Xavier, space lawyer, finds a way to turn it into a trial by combat, in which the fate of the universe will be decided by an unauthorized X-Men vs. JLA crossover event. Distraught by the thought of the JLA winning, Jean Grey suicides instead of becoming the Evil Space Bird again. THE END."

(And then it gets worse.) I mean, the story swerves back and forth over the realism line like ten times a second; it's an amazing story, but it doesn't fit into a world of black leather biker jackets. It's much more high science fiction than anything else, and it would completely break the budget. Unlike Watchmen, it doesn't even pretend at realism. It is beautiful escapism, but importantly, that's not what superhero movies are about nowadays. As a response to 9/11, superhero movies changed tone dramatically. Instead of elevating us, they drag our modern mythology down to street level. This, by the way, is part of why only Batman and Spiderman movies really work at all, and why the low-science-fiction installments (The Dark Knight and Spiderman 1 and 2) are far more popular than the heavy-SF installments (Batman Begins and Spiderman 3).

Wednesday, April 29, 2009

For God, For Country, and For....?

As you probably know by now, Tom Ricks of CNAS has kicked off a major discussion about the value of the service academies versus others means of commissioning students who attend public or private colleges, such as ROTC or OCS.

In some ways, this discussion is not only logical, but long overdue. The rise of COIN theory out of academic obscurity to political and strategic prominence has reminded people of how important intellectual firepower is, and how important flexibility in warfare is. At the same time, COIN warfare rewards giving commanders freedom to make smart local decisions, while democratizing the diffusion of expertise and knowledge amongst officers, regardless of commissioning source. Meanwhile, many universities, including most Ivies, don't allow ROTC on campus, and there's a huge desire to bring that back. 

However, I think Mr. Ricks isn't considering a bunch of objections to his argument that revolve around the fact that both the military, and academia, are complex social institutions. These objections fall into two major categories: "This is what happens to any academic institution"  and "Centralization has a purpose." 

Anyone who spends even a few hours listening to faculty members complain about their colleagues and departmental politics knows how important money is, and how likely it is that money is being spent unwisely. And there are easy academic routes to take at West Point? So too there are at other universities, and we all know people who BS their way through. And there are professors that don't care about educating their students exist in the Ivies as well, and prefer to focus on their side projects. Apples and apples, here. 

Similarly on the funding question, departments continue to grow to the limits of the funds provided. At the alma mater that I share with Mr. Ricks, the 4-year tuition, room and board cost is north of $160K, but that's only the external cost charged to the students and their families. The endowment kicks in far several times as much money per pupil, both to cover day-to-day operating costs and to improve facilities. So we end up with a total internal cost number in the same range as the very broad numbers being thrown about to discuss the service academies, without Yale having to pay the costs of deploying them as temporary third lieutenants, expending ammunition, providing facility security, etc, etc, etc.

In other words, yes, it costs more than other commissioning routes, but to do an academy at all requires this amount of funds. What reason, then, is there for the service academies? Why centralize the education of a significant portion of officers in these hulking campuses on crags or swamps? It may surprise you to know that scientific opinion now informs us that the appendix, rather than being purely useless, also acts as a reservoir of important immune system information. Schools are much the same way.

First, having academies produces a powerful incentive to keep around active-duty officers who think long and hard about the same problems for a long time, to a degree not possible in the military in general. Even if you assume that Ricks' preferred alternative results in a greater number of better-educated officers, there's no certainty that those officers will keep their intellectual skillsets fresh to the same degree as officers who get to be in the classroom. This is particularly true, I suspect, given that classrooms face these thinkers every day with the questions of cadets. This unparalleled opportunity for confrontation in a hierarchical military may force officer-teachers to rethink first principles in a way they otherwise would not. 

Think of it this way: General Petraeus pulled much of his staff directly out of the West Point Social Science faculty, as Ricks acknowledges. There are other Ph.Ds in the Army, and lots of graduates of the war colleges, and lots of former Army think-tankers, too. Why did he pick the people he did?  How much is a well-executed Surge worth to the American taxpayer, in terms of West Point operating budget-years?

I also wonder if the prestige effect of service academies may paradoxically allow for more change than would otherwise occur. If teaching of army values was more diffuse, then army culture could easily become beholden to no one and difficult to alter systematically, spread as it would be across ROTC, OCS, PLC; a large number of sites and a variety of training programs. By contrast, the prestige of the academies allows for values  and ideas to be quickly inculcated in a large batch of future officers, for good, or as Mr. Ricks rightly points out, for ill. 

Similarly, I wonder if it might allow for more dissent, both by academy graduates and their instructors. The seal of approval that an academy offers its graduates means that it's harder to accuse a reformer or dissenter of being unmilitary in their values or beliefs; at the same time, the responsibility for teaching cadets well allows for instructors to make broader and more pressing claims about what is being taught, and how, than might occur otherwise. This can cut both ways - consider how effective Gian Gentile has been at arguing for his position, in part because of his status as a leading and respected member of the West Point academic community.

Second, I'm highly skeptical of the claim that the promotion system, or evaluations by superiors alone, can capture all of the relevant data as to whether service academies produce better officers. For example, I would love to see an analysis of the effectiveness of service academy graduates at training Iraqi and Afghan security forces on land, and at conducting joint exercises and knowledge transfer in the air and sea realms. It seems plausible to me that cadets who trained in a highly-hierarchical environment where they had to teach their juniors military discipline, skills, etc, might well be particularly good as officers at training missions by comparison to others who did not have to do so for the same length or to the same degree in OCS (ROTC I don't know enough about to meaningfully say - Yale lacks it). It's a commonly repeated (albeit unproven) complaint that success in those fields does not correlate with promotions or positive evaluations; if that's the case, then Mr. Ricks' reports from the field wouldn't capture that highly-vital factor, or other similar and relevant data.

Finally, suppose that Ricks' conclusion gets backed up by a series of major studies, and it really does cost more to run service academies, and it really doesn't produce better individual soldiers.  That doesn't mean that DoD, as a system, does not benefit tremendously from having service academy graduates. It may well be that there is a tremendous value to the personnel system of knowing that a standardized product of roughly X officers per year, who are guaranteed to know A, B, and C within the following long-established statistical bounds, will be commissioned on a date certain. I imagine this is much more difficult to do with ROTC and OCS, where so much relies upon local recruitment and organization.

Does any one of these reasons suffice to justify a service academy? Not necessarily. But the data is as yet really shaky, and these factors aren't being considered, which should fill anyone expressing strong opinions on the topic with great caution. 


Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Random discovery of the day

Mac OS X's built-in dictionary function knows the words "shtick" and "mensch."

Monday, April 27, 2009

The Pomocon Manifest

Would you like to read a manifesto that combines the obsessive referentiality of philosophy with the inscrutable organizational scheme of the tax code? IF SO, the pomocons have just the manifesto for you.

This frustrates me, because the basic idea behind the pomocons is much easier to say, and farmore interesting: They're people who want to believe in tradition and doctrine, and let those ideas have powerful force in their lives, even though - or especially because -  they know that these beliefs are constructed and not quite true. But the traditions that they want to maintain often deny the possibility of change or revision. Pomocons are trying to square that circle, usually from a (pseudo-) Christian perspective that doesn't have enough flexibility in the directions they need. 

See, wasn't that easy?


Sunday, April 26, 2009

No Reservations

Jon Stewart had an absolutely hilarious clip on Thursday about Congressmen freaking out about the possibility of the US signing treaties that it's never ever going to sign with impossible threatened consequences, like the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child making it illegal for you to take your child to church, or fictional treaties creating a one world currency:



One thing worth noting about the US refusal to sign certain treaties is actually more honest than many countries' practices. Ever wonder how North Korea, Iran, or Turkmenistan are signatories to certain treaties, like maybe conventions on human rights? Well, countries can sign treaties with "reservations," which basically are a list of caveats to the binding power (such as it is) of the treaty. Saudi Arabia usually reserves "except as conflicts with sharia," and other nations pick their own reservations for philosophical or parochial reasons. The United States reserves "except as affects national security or the Constitution" all the time, even on treaties intended to prevent genocide.

Even if a crazy treaty did get signed by the US, it'd almost certainly include such reservations. But Congressmen don't mention this, and the news media doesn't call them on it. Oy.