AFG 02: Invitation to Afghanistan

The February 2011 Education Week at SOCOM covered many topics, and one of them was press relations. The organizing committee had invited a panel of reporters, three of whom were CNN, NPR, and Army Times. The tension was palpable as there is a natural tension if not antipathy between Special Operations Forces (SOF) and the press as they work at natural cross purposes. SOF by necessity must maintain security for multiple reasons. Its tactics, techniques and procedures – that is, how it does its job – must be kept hidden because intimate knowledge about them allows other to counter what SOF does and predict where SOF will be. Operationally, the press must not know what operations are planned nor their timing and location because, once again, such knowledge can place US military personnel in danger. The press, in contrast, has a very different set of incentives. Reporters want information to be free and open, and they get paid for telling a good story that people want to read or hear. SOF and the warrior culture is inherently interesting to many because their job is active, visual, and kinetic. Moreover, SOF generates a pretty much endless stream of interesting stories. The intersection between SOF and the press gets placed into sharp relief when considering that military budgets are not guaranteed in the 21st century, and taxpayers need to know something about SOF if they are going to appreciate the work they do and continue to fund their activities. Helping young SOF soldiers to understand the incentives of the press will help them tell reporters what they need to know without jeopardizing operational security. It’s also important to know which reporters to trust, which is something that only comes only through repeated positive interaction.

On the second day of the program, a Special Forces (SF) Colonel named Fred wanted to have lunch with and meet me. Fred as it turns out was the guy who in fact issued the official invitation for me to attend Education Week. So Bob, my quantitative analysis buddy, and I had lunch with Fred in the Officer’s Club, a building from an earlier, simpler era just a short walk across some patchy grass away from the meeting hall. He was younger, quieter, smaller, and more thoughtful than I thought a SF colonel would be, not that I had met that many, but doubtless he had done something considerable to achieve his rank. Fred said that he ran an analysis group in Afghanistan and that he had heard about some advanced analytic techniques that might be useful there. I knew he was talking about some system dynamics-based, complex social systems analysis work that I had done for DARPA a few years ago. The program that funded that work finished with mixed results, but it was nice that some remembered the work I had done. Then Fred came right out and asked me, “Would you be interested in coming to Afghanistan to work for our analysis group? I think your contributions could be very helpful.” I was taken aback. Bob had of course talked about this, but I didn’t know that the invitation to Education Week was really kind of a tryout or evaluation for a much longer engagement. Also, listening to Bob hypothesize about going to Afghanistan was a heck of a lot different than having a full-bird, flesh and blood SF colonel issue a semi-official invitation. I replied that I was certainly interested, but I had a lot of questions. Where would Bob and I sleep? Fred said the Army provided all that. Would we need special equipment? The Army would provide it. Would we need special training? The Army would provide it. How long would we be there? Fred was thinking around six months. I left that lunch feeling disoriented and confused yet vaguely flattered and excited.

That night there was a meet-up at a local Tampa bar for drinks, and all the conference attendees were invited. Of course, the conference organizers reminded everyone that drinking and driving was strictly prohibited and that anybody caught would be in a world of hurt, including loss of security clearance and the career limitations associated with that. I understood that the same consequences applied to me, but I had to go to see who was there and what information I could dig up. I was also driving Bob’s rental, and crashing it drunk would have been, in a word, “bad.” The first thing I learned is that the journalists are natural raconteurs and interviewers. They were the easiest to talk to, they were interested in what you had to say, or at least appeared interested, and their stories were endless and normally pretty good. I talked a good long while with the reporter from NPR, who told a few stories about meeting Lara Logan of CBS, who I always thought was in front of the camera primarily because of her looks rather than reportorial acumen, but I was informed that she was brave, intelligent, and a friend of SOF. I also met a guy from the Army Times, who was literally swaying in front of the bar and asked me if I wanted a drink. I had made a promise to myself to just nurse one beer for the evening, but I have to admit that I was tempted. I wondered how he’d get home.

The SOF in attendance were much tougher nuts to crack. They were pretty easy to identify because they’re physically fit and stick with their team. The SEALs were the rock stars of the event because they are comparatively rare compared to SF. Also, they are “pure shooters,” which means they primarily perform the types of “kinetic,” shooting missions that SOF like, which involves taking out the bad guys. SF, in contrast, performs the foreign internal defense or FID mission, which involves training local indigenous forces to protect their own country. As a political economist and quantitative analyst, I think SF are very cool because not only are they very capable militarily—operating in small, 12-man, Operational Detachments Alpha (ODAs)—but they also know how to interact with and motivate local populations. As cool as I think they are though, I came across a group of some of America’s most elite SF warriors complaining because they didn’t get the same respect and rock-star status as SEALs. I wanted to give them a pep talk, but in retrospect opted to keep my mouth shut because they had no idea who I was and I probably didn’t know what I was talking about anyway. It was nice to be there, but I was not in that SOF world.

The rest of the week passed without incident, but I was becoming increasingly nervous at the prospect of actually going to Afghanistan. I had just started a new job, and how would my management react to my going? Also how was I going to tell my wife that I was considering this? Did I really want to spend that long away from my family and my home? Bob was driving me to the airport, and he was really pressuring me to go, but at this point, I was getting a little fed up because I knew it was Bob’s dream to go, but it was mine? Did I really want to go, or was I just caught up in the excitement? Finally Bob, getting a little bit frustrated with me, asked me what it would take for me to say yes. I said that I would need to be able to come back for Christmas if it happened, which I wasn’t sure it would. He then let me off at the curb and I went into the airport, glad that the conversation was over because, after thinking about it, I didn’t really want to go to Afghanistan – at all.

AFG 01: Invitation to Tampa

I met my buddy Bob at a conference in Quantico, VA in the summer of 2010. Seeing Bob was memorable because as soon as he saw me, he said, “Hey, do you want to go to Afghanistan with me?” I’ve made it a point in life to always answer totally outrageous questions like that with a hearty, “Oh yeah! Sure!” because there was no way this could actually be possible in real life, right? We hung out for a few days, including a spectacular evening at the new Marine Corps Museum watching the Silent Drill Team, and that was that. I basically forgot about the question and my flippant reply because people say stuff all the time, and how frequently does it work out? In my experience, such proposals work out not very frequently at all.

But about six months later I got another call from Bob, and he had been a busy guy. There was an Education Week being given at USSOCOM in Tampa for Special Operations Forces (SOF) heading over to Afghanistan, and he wanted to know if I would attend as an instructor. I told him I didn’t know anything about Afghanistan, so I didn’t want to over promise my background or experience. Bob said that I had been to a few too many graduate schools and that was good enough for Fred, the guy who was inviting me. I said sure, it sounded like fun and at least good for a few stories, so I made my arrangements to fly down and attend.

I arrived in Tampa a few weeks later in February 2011. Monday was scheduled as a day simply to get oriented with the facility, the staff, and the program content with the actual program starting on Tuesday. I found myself in a control room suspended above an audience of hundreds of US Army Special Forces (SF) and a few sundry US Navy SEALs who were inbound for Afghanistan. Now I confess, much of the reason I was there was because I was the world of SOF fascinating. When I was studying international relations in graduate school, whenever I needed an intellectual break, I’d read a book on SOF with possibly the most influential or eye-opening being Douglas Waller’s Commandos, especially the first chapter on how  each type of SOF is trained and selected. Now, looking down on this audience—all of then young, strong, and potentially lethal—I wondered I all of them would be alive in a year’s time. There was no way to know, but my guess was that some of them would no longer be with us.

There were many speeches given by multiple people. Each education week has its own character, and this one was more academic and intellectual than usual, hence my invitation. Three particular presentations stood out. First Thomas Barfield, a Boston University professor, gave a talk based on his book, Afghanistan: A cultural and political history. Not only did Prof. Barfield exhibit an admirable expertise, but his book was in the right place at the right time, making his research indispensable to this SOF audience. Barfield’s expertise might also have made a significant impression on me due to my comparative lack of it: for example, I was spelling the acronym for the Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, GIRoA, with a “J” in my notes, which indicates just how uninformed I was about that particular region of the world.

Second Jeff Weiss, a financier who also taught part-time at West Point, presented his work on “Extreme Negotiations,” that captured the hard-won lessons-learned from previous generations of soldiers who had spent time in Afghanistan. His basic insight is that soldiers who are far from home and in danger, have a tendency to try and placate and mollify the locals, which usually makes the situation worse. Instead, Weiss and his co-authors recommend the following five extreme negotiations strategies for soldiers: (1) Get the Big Picture: Start by soliciting the other person’s or group’s point of view. Use what you learn to shape the objectives of the negotiation and to determine how you’ll achieve them; (2) Uncover and Collaborate: Learn the other party’s motivations and concerns. Propose multiple solutions and invite your counterparts to improve on them; (3) Elicit Genuine Buy-In: Use facts and the principles of fairness, rather than brute force, to persuade others. Arm them with ways to defend their decisions to their critics, and create useful precedents for future negotiations; (4) Build Trust First: Deal with relationship issues head-on. Make incremental commitments to encourage trust and cooperation; and (5) Focus on Process: Consciously change the game by not reacting to the other side. Take steps to shape the negotiation process as well as the outcome. The great thing about these tips for operating and negotiating is that they’re battle tested by SOF, so they can be trusted.

But the best talk, the one I’ll always remember, was from GEN Stanley McCrystal who had just been forcibly retired by Obama due to a take-down piece by Michael Hastings in Rolling Stone. So GEN McCrystal gets up in front of those several hundred SOF, dressed in a suit rather than his uniform, and I could literally feel the sympathy, admiration, and affection well up from the crowd. He seemed impossibly thin and began, “When I was your age, I wanted to retire and be one of those cranky, bitter old guys. I wanted to sit around the house, smoking unfiltered Marlboros and complaining about the old days of how I was rooked over by the system.” He paused for effect, and there was a definite tension in the room as I know I for one was wondering, where is the General going with this? “But I want you to know that’s not the way I feel now. I feel very lucky that I served in the US Army and got to do what I did. But mostly I’m thankful and enthusiastic because I got to serve with people – like you. With memories like that, I could never be bitter or angry. When I think of the skills you have, and the sacrifices you’re willing to make for your country, I’m incredible proud to have served with people like you and filled with optimism for our future.” From somebody outside the Army, McCrystal did the most unexpected thing possible, especially given the recent Rolling Stone incident: he took the focus off himself and put it on the guys in the room and the mission they were about to undertake. The SOF in the audience rose up as one and gave him thunderous applause for what seemed like minutes. I felt like I was in the presence of something special, true leadership, and that I too would be willing to go to Afghanistan to do my part if I were asked.  

Engineering and the Fact-Value Distinction

"Contemporary events differ from history in that we do not know the results they will produce." -- Friedrich Hayek

The fact-value distinction is fundamental to philosophy, and perhaps counter-intuitively, to engineering as well. I explicitly attended a graduate program where I could learn from a University of Chicago-trained Straussian, where emphasis is placed on “facts.” The key here is realizing the "fact" part is realistic, complex, and the way things "are," while the "value" part is convincing, simple, and the way things "should be." Straussians explicitly embrace complexity and "facts," while society in general embraces simplicity and "values," effectively arguing that facts are messy things that can be ignored if inconvenient.  

Here the situation becomes somewhat confused, but let me try to establish an analytic baseline and then draw some final conclusions. Straussians, who are followers of Leo Strauss, are essentially traditionalists and are often described as “close-reading,” meaning that they read closely to determine original meaning and intent. This tends not to be the philosophical stance at MIT, home to Noam Chomsky, Paul Krugman, and Jonathan Gruber, which is more “progressive” and value-oriented and less concerned about tradition and fact-oriented. Why might this be the case? There are two arguments to be made here. The first concerns technological optimism of the kind that was on display at the Chicago World’s Fair from 1933 to 1934, “A Century of Progress,” that featured the motto, “Science Finds, Industry Applies, Man Conforms.” And it appears that MIT continues with this technological optimism in that they seek to improve society through technology.

This is a fine sentiment or “value,” as far as it goes, but “facts,” reality, and life are all more complicated. Tom Wolfe in his 1987 piece, “The Great Relearning,” develop several vignettes with the common theme of progressive policies undertaken with the best of intentions that, unfortunately, bear bitter fruit, chief among them the sexual revolution. The problem is, such radical changes – and by “radical” and mean fast, significant, and fundamental – almost always turn out poorly because their advocates don’t understand the systems being radically changed and they certainly don’t understand the consequences. Here is where engineering has something significant to say about complex systems generally and social systems specifically. When I was programming and I made changes to my code base, I basically had no idea what was going to happen, so I was very careful with my changes and was always able to back out the changes I made. The interesting thing is that nobody knew more about that code than I did, and I was constantly surprised by the way consequences lined up, and my experience is not unusual. The problem is, politicians, policy makers, and philosophers are constantly advocating fundamental changes to society without knowing half as much about the systems they seek to change as I knew about my code. So is it any wonder that the history of social change is strewn with such debacles?

Of course these observations, while semi-well known, are immensely unpopular. It would be simple enough to run through the books and citations, but the video “Beware the Boom and Bust” provides an quick window with Keynes proposing popular but problematic policies and Hayek more unpopular but effective ones. Hayek of course wrote the well-known The Road to Serfdom, which is almost universally reviled by those on the value side of the fact-value distinction, which indicates, to my way of thinking, its inherent value and worth. But it is worth also considering for a moment the progressive response to Hayek, The Road to Reaction by Herman Finer. Hayek’s description of the Fabian Finer is worth recounting: "a specimen of abuse and invective which is probably unique in contemporary academic discussion." As factual arguments come into conflict with progressive values, reactions such as Finer’s are becoming all too common.

The key philosophic dichotomy in the 21st century therefore seem to have progressed from the fact-value distinction to one that is more grounded in complexity, with a natural tension emerging from the fact that nature is complex, but human success is furthered by being convincing, and simple arguments are more successful than complex ones, especially in a media age. So when I see the topics addressed by the Apple University – that is, making the complex simple – I think making products easy to use is great consumer design, but I wonder, does this also mean that they’re simplifying the world? Does this mean that Apple thinks that the rich complexity of reality can be simplified into notions of “social justice” that seldom turn out as initially envisioned?