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.