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. 

Your Daily Read

1. Google's Geospatial Ethnographic Data FAIL

2. The best thing you'll read about the challenges of being a soldier in Afghanistan you'll read this month (H/T Ghosts of Alexander)

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).

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. 

Random discovery of the day

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

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?

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.

Iraqi Food Update

How did I miss this? There's an Iraqi restaurant in NYC now. The Chowhound entry has mixed reviews, but it confirms that they serve tishreb laham. The NYTimes entry is relatively vague, but atmospherically appealing. A mandatory visit the next time I'm in NYC

The Question's No One's Asking

Over the past few days, there's been a tremendous amount of discussion about the prudential value of prosecuting torturers, and perhaps their legal advisers as well. The New York Times has even advocated that now-Judge Jay Bybee should be impeached for his role as lead drafter of the legal memos in question. 

In a variety of places, people have alluded to, or even stated explicitly, what one might call the Nuremberg Rule that following orders is no excuse for crimes, especially war crimes. I support that standard, and nothing that follows should be at all taken as an argument against that.

But we do need to recognize that there's a problem here: people whose very jobs are secret probably have trouble getting third-party legal advice. They're usually not lawyers, so they probably don't have the knowledge to see how one-sided and ineffectual the arguments presented are. I've read memos that led to lawyers being disbarred that were less dishonest in their presentation of relevant case law and argument.

When we put patriotic people in conditions where we tell them it's necessary, ordered, and legal, it's simply hard for anyone, regardless of character, not to trust in that legal claim. This is particularly true when the very act seems shocking to the conscience. Of course most of us would naturally believe that such an act would only be ordered, could only be ordered, if it was legal and utterly necessary to keep your country safe. 

So how do we make it possible for people who work in a secret world to get actual, proper legal advice? 

I'm not a lawyer, but my understanding is that the laws covering classification mean that they can't usually talk to outside counsel, even under the seal of attorney-client privilege. I also strongly suspect that the interrogators involved won't have the ability to sue the lawyers who gave that advice. The list of privileges that apply, such as state secrets, sovereign immunity, the fact that they weren't representing the interrogators, and, oh yeah, that one of them is a judge now, makes it pretty hard for the people who willingly followed that advice to gain redress. Overall, those rules make sense in the context of broader law. 

But these problems arose in a state of exception. If the facts are as they have been presented so far, we need a means for individuals in classified situations to get independent legal counsel. Even if you think that these interrogators should have been able to make this decision on their own, the fact is simply that it didn't happen enough. Having lawyers they could check with, that would not quash lingering doubts, but rather consider them genuinely and render an impartial opinion, would increase the likelihood that people would refuse illegal orders. Not being in that profession, I have no clue what such a legal capability would look like, but it sure seems necessary.*

If you believe that torture's wrong, don't just condemn it, or its advocates. Try to find a way to make it much harder in the future.

*As is broader oversight, greater focus on these issues in confirmation hearings, legal reforms, etc. 

Some Western camp (I know the Pict) or granite border keep

Via Andrew Exum, I see that the Department of Defense is considering creating 

[A]n experienced cadre of officers and senior enlisted soldiers, who would rotate between assignments in Afghanistan and at their home stations until the end of hostilities. 

By doing so, the Pentagon hopes to end a problem that has plagued the effort in Afghanistan—the lack of familiarity with local conditions by U.S. forces who rotate in and then depart after a year, just when they are beginning to understand the area or the mission where they are assigned. 

“These would be small groups who would deploy together for shorter periods, going back and forth to the same place and the same mission again and again, so they would know the culture and the terrain,” said a senior Pentagon official briefed on the plan, who said the teams could be asked to conduct training or other specialized counterinsurgency missions.

 

This is a good idea, overall. We don't have enough local knowledge built up, and having the same people return to the area later can certainly act as a form of proof that our promises to and relationships with locals last longer than a single tour. 

But I also wonder about the possible downsides as well. How can we make sure that units don't develop the "Not-Invented-Here" syndrome, either in terms of intelligence evaluations of their own battlespace or in terms of bringing over new techniques from other areas? Sometimes this will make sense; Korengal's is different from northern Afghanistan is different from Helmand, etc. Sometimes, the accretion of assumptions and practices will be problematic. (Don't get me wrong, the US Army and Marines have had to learn new tactics and operational techniques, been challenged by enemy adaptation, and responded with throwing it all away and learning it all again with aplomb. Not saying that local commands can't, or even largely won't, do that. Just that it's something to keep in mind.)

Additionally, God forbid this happens, but if it gets adapted as a general practice, in this or some future war we may have a lot of Afghan COIN experts in US ranks just as the same time as we get involved in another country where the insurgency has wildly different organization and tactics. (Yes, Dr. Gentile's critique of FM 3-24 as being too focused on beating Maoists probably has a point to it...) Remember, some British troops who fought in Malaya also fought in Kenya, with rather different results...

Similarly, what will ensure that our soldiers don't develop (unconscious and wholly human) bias towards the parochial concerns of locals that sticks with them in future higher-level commands in the same country? This is probably to some extent unavoidable, and not necessarily a bad thing, but how do we avoid people going too native?

On the more academic side, what's the smart training cycle for the returning cadre while they're stateside? Repeated visits means a higher ROI on additional, area-specific training. Do we push localized language and cultural education at them (or, heck, PRT-complementary training by sending them to learn about agriculture, road construction, whatever)?

Finally, this is going to be a brilliantly useful data set for comparative study, so long as someone keeps track of it. I really hope that RAND, Booz Allen, etc, as well as the pure academic sector, get in on the ground floor. A Minerva Project grant devoted to this would be a smart call.

(Crossposted as a comment on Abu Muqawama)

Talk Like A Shakespeare Day

Mayor Daley of Chicago has apparently declared this Thursday, April 23rd, to be "Talk Like Shakespeare Day," according to CNN. There's a website, even, for you to go to and establish whether or not a given word was coined by Shakespeare.

Of course, this is good news, particularly since I had previously expressed moral reservations about celebrating Talk Like A Pirate Day this year, and I'm always eagerly looking for new dialect-based holidays. 

But it could have been even better if it was Talk Like A Shakespeare Day, where everyone gets to choose to speak like their favorite Shakespearean author. Francis Bacon! Christopher Marlowe! Klingons! Doctor Who!

Anyone up for making this a thing?

Your Daily Read

1. The most remote place on Earth?

2. Michael Oren to be Israel's Ambassador to the US - power, faith, or fantasy?

Poulos and Torture

James Poulos is a very, very smart man. But I'm utterly dumbstruck at his latest post on the new Postmodern Conservative blog.

He offers up, in admittedly what he describes as a brief post deserving followup, that:

[S]ince I’m on record as saying that one dunk at the waterboard is not torture, whereas three dunks is, I judge 130+ dunks clearly to be torture, regardless of whether the issue is whether we ought to torture or not.

He further amplifies in the comments section of that post that:

My argument turns on two points, one more controversial, I guess, than the other. The more controversial claim is that nothing done once can be torture. I admit that waterboarding is ‘a procedure’ whereas, say, ripping out someone’s thumbnail once is not very intelligibly described as a procedure. But it seems to be that ‘proceduralizing’ things is of the essence of torture. Jumping out of nowhere, ONCE, screaming and pointing a gun: not torture. Building a process or an ordeal out of this event — and the distinction between one and three is that once is once and three is a pattern, while two is ambiguous — does lead us into probable torture territory. The less controversial claim is that we should resist the temptation to do the moral calculus that leads us to a precise decision about how many iterations we can perform before switching over into torture, because under the sway of this temptation our moral calculus turns quickly, if imperceptibly, into a legal calculus, which allows us to justify our conduct in legal terms so as to avoid having to do so in moral terms.

This argument, though tempting, is disturbingly compromising. Because the problem with torture isn't that we hurt the prisoner too many times, or too badly. It's that doing it even once can break a man.

Singular acts can alter the way we see someone - or the way we see ourselves - traumatically and persistently. I can't imagine that a person who's been struck once by their spouse ever can entirely reassert the same sort of unconscious familiarity and trust in him that they once had. While being waterboarded, even once, men are willing to do anything to make it stop. 

How will the man being tortured know, or credit, that he only gets one waterboarding, one day of being forced to stand in a stress position, one time of being slammed up against the wall so hard that whiplash can only be "minimized," not prevented?  

 He has to live with the knowledge that the men holding his used pain, and his body's own preservation instincts, to break him, just once. His jailers have done something that takes away not only his freedom of movement but his freedom to even say "NO." Why won't they do it again? 

So: He has to live with the constant, will-eroding fear of each dragging moment, never knowing whether footsteps in the hall are the torturer's approach or just the changing of the guard. He has been made to betray himself. He may be made to do it again. 

And that is unacceptable to a nation built upon the freedom of the mind of man. 

Conservatives Opposed to Torture

1. Conor Friedersdorf powerfully links opposition to torture to legal traditionalism.

2. Philip Zelikow tells of how he tried to argue against the torture memos in the Bush administration.

Your Daily Read

1. They Knew Then - how World War II Germany treated the Holocaust as an open secret.

2. Think Different - Uses of the iPod Touch at war

Footfall

(Via io9.com) Good news, everyone, a new model indicates that an ocean strike by a major asteroid won't produce world-spanning tsunamis. It'll only suck for a 1000-mile radius from the impact strike.

Being a science fiction fan can occasionally be very stressful, until you read results like these.

Pomocons Are Like the Terminator

They keep on coming back. And sometimes switch sides!

Also, there is a submarine.

(Look for this metaphor to be developed in annoying detail in future posts!)

Since Spencer Ackerman Asked...

Spencer Ackerman's looking for anti-torture conservatives that are willing to stand up to those who ruined my party's honor and good name.

So: I'm a conservative*, and I think that torture is immoral, illegal, and, oh yeah, entirely useless as a means of interrogation. Even if it worked perfectly, it wouldn't be justified. Ever. 

There is no outcome that can justify the government of the people endorsing waterboarding, or repeatedly locking someone in a dark room with their greatest fear. Torture doesn't preserve the health of the people; it makes them parties to monstrosity. 

I have a lot of way-more-brilliant conservative friends. Some of them are genuinely brilliant writers whose names you've heard of; I'm not going to out them, but in the days to come, I'll ask some of them to contribute their own thoughts on why torture's wrong.

*According to my friends, "no I'm not!" But I'm certain that I'm at least philosophically conservative, gosh darn it. 

Your Daily Read

1. A history of chess by mail and telegraph; the first known game of chess by mail was in 1116 between Henry I of England and Louis VI of France!

2. Another victory for incompatibilism; subatomic particles have free will - "if the experimenter can freely choose the directions in which to orient his apparatus in a certain measurement, then the particle’s response (to be pedantic—the universe’s response near the particle) is not determined by the entire previous history of the universe."  

Texas Is Like Voltron

If you've ever spent more than a few hours with me, you know of my love for Texas's statutory power to become five states, granted in 1845 as a condition of its admission to the Union. It was reasonable at the time, for most states were tiny ones on the East Coast. One of my friends just passed on the most comprehensive history of Texas politicians' efforts to divide themselves I've yet seen.

There's great stuff here, such as:

Failure to reapportion representation after the Thirteenth Census brought new agitation on the division question in 1914. The growth of the western part of the state made it necessary for more representation from that section, a need the legislature ignored. West Texans were also annoyed because few state institutions were established in their region. The result was the proposal in the Texas Senate for the state of Jefferson, to be composed of the Twenty-fifth, Twenty-sixth, Twenty-eighth, and Twenty-ninth senatorial districts. No more than six senators supported the measure, and other proposals to the Thirty-fourth Legislature were equally fruitless. In 1921 the veto of a bill calling for the location of an agricultural and mechanical college in West Texas revived the whole question. Mass meetings were held in West Texas, but the agitation died down quickly.

And:

In the 1930s John Nance Garner proposed a division that called for the maximum number of states permitted under the law, East Texas, West Texas, North Texas, South Texas, and Central Texas.

The conclusion is obvious:

A Thought

Talk Like A Pirate Day this year is going to be far more morally and culturally complex.

Temper Paratus

Gizmodo has produced the ultimate time travel cheat sheet. Develop an anachronistic firearms capability and save the Roman Empire! Institute public hygiene and save London from the Black Plague!

I cannot describe how much happier - and safer - having this in my laptop bag makes me.

Edit: It is now a shirt!

Pirate/Zombie/Ninja is the 21st Century's Rock/Paper/Scissors

Lev Grossman has declared that zombies are the new vampires.

This may be true in its own way, but it ignores a more pressing concern: What mythological forces can defeat each other? And can they be assembled into some sort of rock/paper/scissors system? The answer, after laborious research, is definitive.

Pirates can defeat zombies, as is well known. 

Equally, zombies can defeat ninjas; barring a few a few spurious oral histories , there is no reason to believe that ninjas can successfully defeat zombies. Zombies cannot be fooled by illusions or smoke bombs, and their limbs and nerves cannot respond to the powerful secret arts of the ninja. Though the ninjas may fight valiantly, they will be ultimately overrun. 

This leaves us, of course, with the crux of the debate: pirates versus ninjas. While some accounts indicate that pirates would be superior, think carefully about any potential engagement. The pirates would be drunk with grog, while the ninjas possess clothes as black as the sea, swords as sharp as a northern breeze, and blows as powerful as a hurricane's gale. At land, the pirates lack ship-based firepower, and Lone Wolf and Cub establishes that ninjas are equally at comfortable at sea as at land. While pirates use their cannon to win a decisive advantage over the slow-moving and easily-friable zombie, those advantages fall away when faced with stealthy and swift ninja operatives. Any serious contemplation of the issue leads one to believe that the ninjas would destroy the pirates.

There one has it: the pirate/zombie/ninja circle. Pirates beat zombies, zombies beat ninjas, ninjas beat pirates. Tell your friends.

Awesome!

Lost in the discussion about F-22 appropriations is the question of just how awesome they can be. Danger Room, however, has the answer, with this official USAF photo.*

It isn't even flying! Just by sitting there, awesome things are happening! 

I soon predict that we will appropriate some large number of dollars to purchase awesome prop-driven aircraft to fly behind F-22s with smoke trails and explosions. And it will be worth it.

*I love Danger Room. 

Revisionist Malaise

Do you have an unhealthy obsession with oratory? Do you know someone who has an unhealthy fascination with oratory's effects on politics? If so, tell them to read this interesting revisionist account of Carter's "malaise speech," which argues that it wasn't the speech itself but rather his follow-on moves to fire his Cabinet that sunk him.

The Need for Inspectors General

If there's something you should be angry about, it's this (from Newsweek): 

A military team sent to evaluate electrical problems at U.S. facilities in Iraq determined there was a high risk that flawed wiring could cause further "catastrophic results" — namely, the electrocutions of U.S. soldiers.

The team said the use of a required device, commonly found in American houses to prevent electrical shocks, was "patchy at best" near showers and latrines in U.S. military facilities. There also was widespread use of uncertified electrical devices and "incomplete application" of U.S. electrical codes in buildings throughout the war-torn country, the team found.

At least three U.S. service members have been electrocuted in Iraq while taking showers in the six years since the U.S.-led invasion of the country.

This story has been slowly trickling out for a while, and it should make you as furious as it makes me. There's simply no excuse.

But there's also no excuse for how little oversight DoD and Congress have exerted over procurement in Iraq and Afghanistan. SIGIR, the Special Inspectorate General for Iraq Reconstruction, is overwhelmed. SIGAR, the Afghanistan equivalent, wasn't established until 2007 and didn't release its first, very basic* reporting until late 2008. DoD's Inspectorate General office hasn't increased its number of staff inspectors even as its budget has doubled. 

Meanwhile, Secretary Gates has said that some of his proposed cuts were driven not just by lack of need for certain weapons, but because the acquisitions process itself is in severe trouble.  One proposal for Secretary Gates: push for a statutory maximum number of dollars per inspector general staff. Want to increase the defense budget? Increase the number of IG staff.**

*I like SIGAR overall, despite the roadblocks they've faced. Their first report was cannily designed to set up baseline budget and expenditures analyses for future investigation. That makes sense; it just should have been done years ago. 

** Uberwonkish aside: even if it can be gotten around, like the Nunn-McCurdy amendment, its mere presence will affect how bureaucrats and private firms deal with these issues. Which would be quite helpful.

Canon Fire

If you are a pomocon who wasn't in love with Spencer Ackerman already (somehow), this post will change your mind. Al Qaeda, Foucault, and you, all in one post.

Above All

While there's some excellent criticism out there about the new defense budget, there's also some profoundly troubling commentary by people who should just know better. The following is an argument that Thomas Donnelly and Gary Schmitt made yesterday in the WSJ against the Gates/Obama changes in the defense budget:

 The termination of the F-22 Raptor program at just 187 aircraft inevitably will call U.S. air supremacy -- the salient feature, since World War II, of the American way of war -- into question.

The need for these sophisticated, stealthy, radar-evading planes is already apparent. During Russia's invasion of Georgia, U.S. commanders wanted to fly unmanned surveillance aircraft over the region, and requested that F-22s sanitize the skies so that the slow-moving drones would be protected from Russian fighters or air defenses. When the F-22s were not made available, likely for fear of provoking Moscow, the reconnaissance flights were cancelled.

Yes, that's right. Only in the strange world of F-22 acquisitions does it make sense to buy a $130 million dollar airplane to protect $5 million dollar low-observability unmanned drones, by suppressing the air defenses of a nation you're not even at war with. Because if we buy more F-22s, the political and strategic factors preventing using them will JUST GO AWAY.

Right.

(I'm slightly exaggerating the ridiculousness of the editorial. It has some useful points, including noting that the Gates budget says virtually nothing about submarine acquisitions.)

And Which Is More

I'm only halfway through reading Craig Mullaney's new book, The Unforgiving Minute, and I feel justified already in saying that it's every bit as good as you've heard (the crowd at COIN Prom last night clustered around him was too thick to fight through, which is a stunning review in and of itself).

I also want to say something really inscrutable, that will no doubt befuddle both of my readers who weren't classmates of mine at Yale: The rhapsodic, wonderful chapters describing Oxford are probably the single best description of our Yale experience you could hope to read.  Don't worry about the strange pretension of that comment, just buy the book, and you'll know what I mean.

One particularly beautiful passage is when Craig Mullaney finally tracks down his thesis supervisor:

"Hullo. You must be Mullaney."

"Yes, sir."

"Quite." He cleared his throat and adjusted his bifocals. "Interested in the Congo, are you?" I had emailed my intention to examine American involvement in a secessionist insurgency there in the 1960s."

"Yes, sir."

"Why don't you write something up before next term, and we'll have another chat in February."

"In February?" It was three months away.

"Seems about right."

"What should I write about? How long should it be? Where do I start?"

"Let me think." He rattled off a dozen books from memory, and I quickly wrote them in my notebook. He must have picked up my distress signals. "It's easy, really."

"It is?"

"Yes. Just find a question and then answer it." This sounded like a bad college application essay. "Read and think." He paused and swirled his tea. "Simultaneously if possible."

Quantity Does Not Have A Quality of its Own...

...but it sure can be helpful.  Last night, at CNAS's talk and reception for David Kilcullen's new book (hereafter to be referred to as "COIN Prom"), I had a fascinating conversation with a foreign officer who said something to the effect that Americans never do anything small* because we have the ability to go big, which can make us impatient; by contrast, smaller European, ISAF, etc forces have to be deliberate and think everything through painfully, since they lack that sort of cushion. 

(After hashing this thought over with a naval officer also involved in the conversation, we amended to "unless it's really, really expensive. Then, the smaller, the better." Whoever said that sarcasm was dead?)

 

And though certainly we don't have enough forces in the Army, or the civilian agencies, to tackle our commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan as quickly or as effectively as we'd like, it's still nonetheless true that we do have a lot more flexibility than many of our allies. 

I think that's true, but that also got me to thinking about how in some sense, there's a genius to using large forces more effectively than small forces alone. Military leaders often get a bad rap in historical accounts for being too attrition-focused; this is frankly probably a historiographic legacy of World War I, and then Vietnam two generations of scholars later. Outside of Napoleon's use of brigades, people rarely talk about the organizational genius that it takes to effectively employ large forces and direct them effectively in battle.

Put it another way, there's an unexamined genius involved in using America's military might to result in increasing returns to scale, rather than constant or decreasing returns.  

After all, coordinating that many forces can be well-nigh paralyzing; you might argue that McClellan faced exactly such a problem during the Civil War, while Grant used his massive manpower advantage to seek battle more frequently, even if at first he met with mixed results. 

Similar results obtain in more modern wars; after all, the obvious call in the invasion of Baghdad in 2003 was to surround the city and then slowly work in, using overwhelming firepower, not the genius finesse move of sprinting a force deep inside the city to capture Baghdad's airport, and backing it up with air power, etc, in a pincer move. Or Schwartzpkof's great wheel in the desert, etc, etc, you can insert your own examples here. 

But what does this mean for COIN? After all, we talk about flooding the zone, and minimum required troop ratios of 20 troops per thousand inhabitants, but what are the radical variations on that not only require, but take fullest advantage of having a lot of troops and materiel? (The "Surge" is not an acceptable answer, since it was a response to having too few people; the Baghdad "Anaconda"** strategy might be heading in that direction.)

This is the sort of idea that I'm going to poke at for a while.

*On behalf of all military history fans everywhere, may I beg for a moratorium on using "Anaconda" as the name of military strategies for at least a few years? We get it, it's good and evocative. But it's been used twice since 2001 alone! 

King Abdullah's Dog Dies in Israel

If you want a microcosm of all Israel-Jordan relations in one article, read this one:

Jordanian royal family's dog was secretly rushed to Israel or treatment in the midst of Operation Cast Lead in Gaza, Yedioth Ahronoth reported Sunday.

 

Relations between the royal palace in Amman and the Beit Dagan veterinary hospital have been good for many years now.

 

The Israeli medical team's expertise has served Jordan a number of times, almost always under a heavy veil of secrecy, as per the royal court's request.

 

During the fighting in the Gaza Strip, the Jordanians once again called on the Israeli veterinarians for help. King Abdullah and Queen Rania's beloved dog had fallen ill.

 

In a secret operation, the pet was transferred to the hospital in Israel in very poor condition.

Time Enough For ?

Via Tom Ricks, the Navy is establishing a program for career intermissions for both their enlisted and officer ranks, allowing people to take time off with full medical benefits and 1/15th their normal pay, and then to return to the force where they left off.

 I always thought this sort of thing made sense; after all, one of the huge strengths of the officer corps has been educating the force, not only through service academies and staff colleges, but think tank fellowships, Fulbright/Marshall/Rhodes grants, etc. And, well, one of the themes that I've always seen as a civilian about the armed forces is the extent to which it helps people get their lives in order and help them figure out what to do in life; letting them explore some sort of educative experience, or spend time at home with their newborn kid, seems like a great way to not only build the human capital necessary to having a superior force, but also to keep those people around and let them live well-integrated lives. 

If this experiment works well, I bet that in 50 years it'll be commonplace. If it goes badly, well, then expect us to have more trouble with filling the career service ranks. 

Your Daily Read

1. A carrying capacity model for vampire-human predation

2. John McHugh reports on problems with the ANA 

Your Daily Read

1.  Why Afghanistan isn't the "graveyard of empires" - or at least, not all of them.

2. "Mature wisdom often resembles being too tired" - how Jimmy Carter made one of his best decisions about Chinese relations when awoken in the middle of the night.

Your Daily Read

1. Attn "pomocons": The rise of an unending issues-based partisanship is the death of intellectualism. But maybe that's a good thing? Ambiguous conclusion. 

2. What happens when prepublication copies of controversial papers get spread online; academic criticism's response loop gets sped up, both for good and for ill. 

Your Daily Read

1. A very Agrarian-Studies-esque argument that Norman Borlaug's Green Revolution developed crops that were ideal for the type of farming conducted by confiscatory landlords, but that small farmers don't get nearly the same yields. Calling all Jim Scott fans....

2. Andrew Exum on how CT and COIN policies can be usefully combined. Builds effectively on what CNAS has already written to say some new and interesting things. 

The Intifada Problem

Andrew Exum writes in a recent post that 

Now why do I mention this? Because I'm sticking to my guns -- how you behave tactically has strategic effects on the modern battlefield. My central thesis, I believe, is correct -- whether you're talking about the U.S. military, the IDF, or any other Western military:

Relatively recently, a consensus has emerged stateside that well-drafted rules of engagement are A Good Thing, and protecting the population is A Better Thing. Those are broad, broad statements that have to be applied differently to different circumstances. But the central issue at play here is this: How do we assess those circumstances? How do we predict when populations will rise up in response to any particular deadly incident*? 

This is THE central hard problem political scientists and military strategists don't have an answer to. The First Intifada was triggered (not caused, but triggered) in part by a traffic accident. Both the PLO and Hamas were caught utterly flat-footed by the uprising, as was the IDF equally. The IDF thought it had the population pretty well in hand; West Bank Palestinians were at that point employed in fairly large numbers in Israeli cities,** they had decently-managed checkpoints, the PLO was in exile. 

Yet a series of small incidents triggered a massive amount of violence, and then escalation in response by the IDF. No particular change in ROE would have prevented it, and no particular predictor could have told you when violence was going to flare up. 

We know generalities about how violence versus respect matters once civil wars orinsurgencies are underway and there is a high pace of operations; telling US soldiers in Iraq to "First, do no harm" was a good call. But the majority of IDF interactions with Palestinians are at checkpoints, raids on houses, clashes at settlements, NOT high-intensity warfare. And I'm really skeptical that we have any clear idea about what the right tactics are to produce the strategic outcomes we desire in low-intensity operations and peacekeeping. 

(Crossposted to the Abu Muqawama comment thread)

*Phrase made intentionally broad not to just cover killings that violate the laws of war, but lawful warfare, accident, etc, etc, etc. 

**General disclaimer from now until eternity: If you look hard enough in this part of the world, you'll find a way to turn territorial terminology here into a statement of some political craziness. I almost certainly don't believe whatever you'd read the tea leaves to ascribe to me.

Your Daily Read

1. Taliban parasitism of NSP funds in Afghanistan

2. Center for American Progress weighs in on Afghanistan

3. Lyall and Wilson argue that mechanized armies lack the COIN knowledge acquired by foraging

Your Daily Read

1. John Rawls and Religion

2. The econ major as the "just right" signaling mechanism

The Biggest Missed Opportunity of the BSG Finale

No spoilers here; the biggest missed opportunity had nothing to do with any of the strange messages sent by the epilogue; rather it was that there were no Terminator: Salvation commercials.

I mean, come on. There is this large, dedicated fan base of people who love post-apocalyptic stories of humans and good robots fighting against bad robots with machine guns and computer hacking. They have NOTHING LEFT IN THEIR LIVES. You have a movie offering them precisely that coming out in under two months. The advertising plan practically writes itself.

Your Daily Read

1. Advanced document reconstruction technology aids human rights prosecutions in Guatemala

2. Game theory for troops in Afghanistan 

Your Next Ethnic Food Craze

Via Abu Muqawama (Be less derivative! - Ed I'm trying!), a great piece by Anthony Shadid on a Baghdadi shawarma stand. 

To anyone who's ever had the pleasure of eating in Iraqi restaurants (of which there are many in countries neighboring Iraq), this story makes the stomach rumble with longing for the warm spices and bold flavors of good Iraqi cuisine. Not just the shawarma, but rich za'atar-drenched kabobs and tishreb - stacks of bread drenched in soup with meat so soft it falls off the bone. 

And there's not a single Iraqi restaurant anywhere in America, so far as I can tell.

If there was, it would outshine the on-the-go muchability of Lebanese and the rich spiciness of Indian food, and have a narrative that would (sad-to-say) make it more than trendy. 

Though I love Adams Morgan, its shawarma options are palest in comparison. Shawarma King's chicken shawarma lacks any of the fat or dark meat that makes Jordanian shawarma so addictive.  Old City Cafe's beef shawarma is quite good but the pita it comes in isn't so great. Shawarma Spot is supposed to be decent, but I haven't gotten there yet. And though Busboys and Poets is owned by an Iraqi-American, there are only a few Iraqi and Moroccan dishes on its menu. 

One can only hope that Iraqi food eventually makes it to the United States, though given our current visa policy, the prospects are not only slim, but demonstrate the failings of our policy. It could possibly arrive via the (as yet saddeningly far too small) resettlement programs for Iraqis who aided MNF-Iraq, but since we let relatively few refugees in, and almost no Iraqis via the normal immigration process, this seems less than likely. (And anyone who claimed this as a silver lining of the Iraq War should seriously take a long look in the mirror) 

Yet maybe one day the peace foreshadowed by one neighborhood shawarma cart will be in all of Iraq, and maybe one day we can all break bread together. Until then, I'll just have to dream.

Your Daily Read

1. FM 3-24.2, "Tactics in Counterinsurgency."

2. Why "carrots and sticks" is a metaphor that harms public diplomacy

Standing Athwart His Stories Yelling Stop

For the life of me, I really have no clue what the point of this clip dump on Ross Douthat's college column is. 

The overall theme appears to be "LOOK! Here are boring things he wrote that he later explicitly or implicitly disavowed with more interesting comments! Tell your leftist friends who haven't read his stuff before so they can prejudge him!"

Some writers maintain a consistent voice from college into their professional lives, such as David Brooks, or my friend Jamie Kirchick. Others really, really don't. The man has written two books, a ton of articles, and blogged for years.  

Look, there's nothing wrong with mining the archives. But responsible journalism seeks to put these things in context.

Confidential to Jim Cramer

Do Not Pick A Fight With Jon Stewart.

See this video here? 

This is him ENDING one of the most popular political shows on television in 14 minutes and 13 seconds. He took down a show anchored by Tucker Carlson, Bob Novak, James Carville, and Paul Begala. These people collectively caused Congressional investigations and defeated presidents, and he still stole their pants on national television. You are a guy who throws rubber chickens and suggests that people buy Bear Stearns. 

Seriously, leave your spittle-stained pride on the floor, and back off. This just won't end well otherwise. 

"Whatever you do, don't blink!"

Yves Smith writes a dynamite post about  the problem with relying too heavily on either heuristics or quantitative models (read the whole thing):

[I]f our mental construct of how the world works is off in some fundamental respects, it also calls into question our ability to make good decisions. And apart from Taleb, there are reasons to question our abilities here. It has been pretty well documented in brain research that humans can only hold so many variables in their consciousness at once. Our decision-making capabilities are more limited than we'd like to believe. And confronting every situation as if it were new would be simply exhausting, That is why we rely heavily on rules of thumb (more fancily called heuristics). Now we also have certain types of analytic processes, what I like to think of as pattern recognition, that can serve us well (this was the topic of Malcolm Gladwell's Blink). The problem is that this quick pattern recognition can work very well, or be absolutely wrong, and we have no easy way of telling which.

My College Years, In Acoustic

"I Will Never Lie to You," said bin Laden

Spencer Ackerman, whose work I love and cite, makes in passing a frequent argument that I've always found slightly problematic:

al-Qaeda has never believed it could actually defeat the United States at so much as a ping-pong match. What it looks to do instead is lure the United States into strategically untenable situations in which the U.S. arouses widespread Muslim anger and experiences too much military pain at too high an economic price to justify a continued presence on the Arabian peninsula. We know this because, like, Osama bin Laden says it. It’s worked to some degree — a couple of years ago this country, like a less-self-aware Nicholas Cage in Leaving Las Vegas, went out of its mind and invaded and occupied Iraq — but nowhere near sufficiently, as the United State will undoubtedly retain an on-shore presence in the Peninsula, and much of the Arab world won’t really care so much. Could the economic crisis be an opportunity for al-Qaeda?

Well, yes, bin Laden says it. I don't know about you, but if I were a terrorist, I'd make a business out of saying anything that psyched out my opponent as much as possible. In other words, I think bin Laden wanted to humiliate the US with a short, victorious war, and only adopted the rhetoric of long-run quagmire afterwards. Since the two are somewhat similar, and the US presence has turned out to be long-lasting, it's easy to assume he always intended the latter rather than the former. 

Now, the following is slightly risky to write about, since I could embarrass myself. So perceive the following as a request for evidence regarding bin Laden's strategy, where I'm willing very much to be proven wrong.

The quote Spencer links comes from a 2004 bin Laden tape. As far as I'm aware*, there is no pre-9/11 quotes where bin Laden says that he wanted to draw the US into a long-term, Russia-style quagmire (look, e.g., at this official, unclassified compilation of quotes by bin Laden, where the only references to quagmire come in 2002, and 2004, i.e. months after US invasions). He does refer to the US as a paper tiger, however.

He does say that he expects that the US won't last long in any post-attack invasion, just as it did not last long in Somalia, just as it didn't do anything major after the Embassy bombings. But the strategic goal there is essentially defensive - to outlast - rather than offensive - to wear down American forces and win in the field. America is metaphorically and theologically similar to Russia, but he seemed to think we wouldn't last as long in the field.

This rhetorical shift isn't without precedent; bin Laden only begins mentioning Israel-Palestine relatively late in al Qaeda's evolution for example.

Admittedly, the data are thin, but they seem to shade my way.  First, it's too damned convenient for bin Laden, and lacks any sort of easy rebuttal. Second, the timing of his statements seems to fit that; he wanted to bloody the US, but in a relatively short time frame. Third, the September 10th, 2001 assassination of Massoud, a major Northern warlord, by AQ operatives seems to be a shaping operation for defensive purposes. Killing the local enemy with whom the US might ally, who might stick around after the Americans leave, seems to fit this narrative. 

Could he have been willing to accept the possibility of a prolonged, Russia-style war? Sure. But I don't think that's what his main bet was on. 

*Please correct me if I'm wrong; I've looked through compilations of bin Laden quotes in the past for this, but the number of expansive and/or dubious quotation compilations produced in recent years makes it hard to be certain about this. If I am wrong, I'd be glad to admit it. 

Ta-Nehisi Coates reminds us what forceful argument, the kind that takes every word, clause, connector, and punctuation mark, and turns it into a weapon, looks like.

This is the best paragraph, but read the whole thing:

The point is that you have to be able to distinguish your deeply held beliefs, from the electorates. I think much of the GOP's trouble stems from the inability to discern the difference. That whole "Real America," "Real Virginia," small-town snobbery bit, isn't an act--they actually believe it. I've never understood the whole "Center-right country" meme, because it's ultimately self-serving--and then self-defeating. It blinds you to the hard work of arguing, cajoling and fighting with the electorate, until they see your point. It's interesting that so many of their most dominant voices of the GOP (Steele, Gingrich, Limbaugh) have either never won an election, or haven't won one in a decade. 

I Went to the A'n'P to Make You An OMLT but I ETT it...

...Tom Ricks has discovered the joys of LOLghanistan:

Do you have to break eggs ...to make an OMLT ("Operational Mentoring and Liasion Team")? Do they come with American cheese? This is my favorite new military acronym.

(ETT=Embedded Training Team, the best such blog about which is Afghanistan Shrugged)

Why Yale Didn't Implement Gender-Neutral Housing

Yesterday, Yale announced it would not implement gender-neutral housing for upperclassmen. That decision flew in the face of both years of lobbying by the LGBT Co-op's activists, as well as a recommendation by the Council of Masters, which is usually the final step before the formal adoption of a policy.

Already, Yale students are forming facebook groups and writing op-eds in protest.  They'll claim it's discriminatory against transgender students (which, given that Yale is unwilling to even carve out individualized accommodations for such students, it is), and that it distorts the housing market for upperclassmen (which it does). 

They'll note that other universities get away with it, and that co-ed living arrangements exist de facto in some significant fraction of rooms already, due to the existence of, y'know, heterosexual relationships.

All of this is true. None of this is relevant. President Levin's staring at a hole in his budget the size of a small African nation's GDP (no, really, look it up, Yale's endowment lost more money last year than Mauritania makes in a year) and is forced to make hard choices.

It's no secret that many really, really old alums still find the idea of women at Yale a little od; gender-neutral housing is definitely a Rubicon too far. Yale is desperate for money now, so my strong hunch is that this decision was motivated by a desire to avoid damaging any Hail-Mary fundraising attempts this year.  To a certain extent, financial considerations made it logical to screw the transgender lobby. 

Is this morally the right call? I hate to say it, but there's some point at which Yale faces a bad enough financial crisis where it seems like it might be (say, 300 more jobs lost versus waiting another few years to implement the rule change).

I guarantee, however, that at no point in what is certain to be a very angry and frustrating public debate will this rationale be brought up.  The activists don't want to weigh rights claims against pragmatism, and the University doesn't want to imply that its donors are prejudiced against transgendered people. Just remember that when this bar fight reaches the national news.

Terrifying Darwinian Lesson du Jour

You have body hairs whose sole purpose is to create belly button lint.

Backwards-Compatible Atheism

Via BoingBoing, a call for backwards-compatible atheism:

With religion, I think atheists have the same dissonance going on. If they really think the world would be better off without religion, they shouldn't hate religion and call believers fools. Any successful new belief system must appreciate the beauty of what it's replacing and strive for backwards-compatibility. If Matthew 1:1-16 hadn't explained how Jesus' lineage fulfills the prophecy in Isaiah 1:1-5, it wouldn't have gotten where it is today.

So I put it to declared atheists-- the ones who fly the flag about it, not the ones who are quiet or closeted: Do you think that most of humanity is A) hopeless and doomed to kill each other because of their stupid religious beliefs, or B) capable of coming to and benefiting from your views?

I think closeted atheists who participate in other religious activities are the future of atheism. They know that prayer feels good without a needing brain scientist to tell them, and they know you don't need God to want to feed the hungry, heal the sick, and provide homes for the orphaned. What if they simply stopped reciting the words that they didn't agree with during religious services, without calling attention to it? In many places I don't think they would be kicked out or turned upon and beaten just for that.

This actually gets at something I was trying to address in my last post: absences only are meaningful in the context of presences. Christianity attempts to fulfill what it sees as the legacy of Judaism, but it explicitly doesn't require the following of most Jewish laws. The more interesting argument here would be to claim that atheism should fulfill the point of religion without requiring religion. I don't see that coming out of pure science or the triumph of the Anglo-American analytical philosophers.  But "quiet atheism" only makes sense if you belong to a community where faith isn't the point of religion, where the community, and its practices, are the point. 

If the distinction I'm trying to draw between Judaism and Christianity seems to abstract, think of it this way; we think of Buddhism, Confucianism, Hinduism, etc, as being religions just like monotheistic religions, even though worship, festival, and law aren't really linked to promise of an afterlife per se, though they have transcendent implications. Many subtypes of Judaism are a hybrid between a focus on practice, and a focus on belief. Atheism has a healthy place in the first sort of religion, but I'm not convinced it can in the second.