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?

 

Democracy as Foreign Policy

I just finished writing a chapter on a foreign policy model that reviews the American experience in Afghanistan that attempts to extract lessons learned and apply them to policies designed to address the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). International interventions were undertaken by the United States (US) President Bush in both Afghanistan and Iraq with the goal in implementing democracy in both countries according to the theories of Natan Sharansky’s influential volume, The Case for Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror. I disagree with Sharansky, but I’m not exactly sure why I disagree with him, so this purpose of this quick essay is to think through why I disagree with his thesis and see what comes out on the other side.

The first item for examination is the traditional fact-value distinction. Sharansky is firmly on the “value” side with the argument that democracy must be implemented to increase freedom and decrease tyranny and terror. Anybody who disagrees with him must be against freedom and for tyranny and terror, right? But the problem I have is with the workability and effectiveness of democracy in foreign policy. Does it really work as well as Sharansky said it would? Did holding elections in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the Arab spring countries improve them? I would argue that it hasn’t, but that’s not where the critique ends. I’m not sure that Sharansky’s argument was designed to improve foreign policy as much as it was to improve the career prospects of Sharansky. This isn’t meant to be overly critical because there are many people making arguments and trying to get ahead, but at some point there has to be a clear distinction made between the attractiveness of an argument and its workability, and this line is actually getting less well defined in our media age.

One way this analytic tension manifests itself is as a debate between “curiosity” and “problem solving,” with the idealists putting forth lots of idea and realists questioning wither they could ever work. However, America’s constitution is based on the failures of the too-democratic Articles of Confederation, and it was the Federalists who organized the country and increased centralization to create a more workable and effective government organization. It can be argued that the modern media age has upset this traditional balance between centralization and democracy, implemented a more extreme democracy, and returned to the nation to an unworkable political system. However, as Tocqueville points out, democracy in America can be so all encompassing and pervasive that it is impossible to understand any alternative to democracy. It is this mindset that helps to explain why democracy is seldom questioned and when it is, why the reaction can be so emotional and negative.

Returning to Afghanistan and Iraq, elections were held in both places and resulted in Karzai and Maliki respectively. How did they do? Karzai ruled over years of epic corruption with Kabul Bank, Dawood Hospital, and the Afghan Air Force that was used to run drugs are only the beginning of the long and sordid tale. After over 10 years of American intervention effort, Afghanistan is fourth in corruption behind Somalia, North Korea, and Sudan, which is rare company. Iraq’s leader Nouri al Malaki, a close friend of George Bush’s, used Iraq’s army to attack Sunnis rather than share power with them, which helped to create ISIS. Clearly just having elections is insufficient for establishing effective and long-lasting governance in countries, but it remains to be seen how to implement security, governance, and development policies that leave a country in a stable and sustainable state.

The current policy of merely holding elections puts policy makers in an interesting double bind however because, once chosen, policy makers are no longer able to leverage them because they have been “selected” by the people. The people who usually have little experience with democracy conversely see their leaders as selected by Americans more than elected by them and believe that they are implementing American policy. The larger problem is that an overreliance on or premature implementation of elections leaves American policy makers unable to hold a nation’s leaders accountable. That is, if they are excessively corrupt, then they cannot be removed, which is a problem. Reviewing the argument up until now, I find myself arguing for Americans taking a more active hand in running countries in which we are heavily involved. In some ways this makes sense: that is, if America is funding the government, and if American military personnel are dying to protect that government, then shouldn’t the American government have some say about how that government is run? In other words, if we’re effectively in charge, shouldn’t we act like we’re in charge? While this may not square with American politics, it certainly squares with politics in many parts of the world in which the US has security interests. This is doubtless a controversial conclusion, but it’s worth considering as the US continues to confront international security challenges in the 21st century.

Security World Tour

With Michael Flynn having just retired from the Army, going on the talk shows, and criticizing Barack Obama, the policy community is worried that a person fresh from wearing the uniform is speaking out. However, as head of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), Flynn is well informed about the threats facing the United States and the American world order. America, as the world center, tends to focus inwards with an inordinate preoccupation with domestic politics. However, there is a whole world of international politics out there that normally escapes the attention of many Americans. The question then becomes, how to organize a systematic study of the wide world of international politics?

Following Flynn’s lead, I choose to organize it around the key security threats to America. First is the Islamic State, which goes by three names: (1) the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria or ash-Sham (ISIS); (2) Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL); or (3) the loose Arabic acronym for ISIL, al-Dawla al-Islamiya al-Iraq al-Sham, Daesh. Already the language lawyers say that ISIS and ISIL are “offensive” because it implies that the organization is Islamic when most Muslims find it abhorrent, but other analysts make a pretty convincing argument that ISIS/L is very Islamic. However, the Daesh phenomenon is not geographically limited to only Iraq and Syria but extends its relationships throughout the Middle East through its funding relationships, which include Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Also, there is a relationship between Daesh and Al Qaeda that leads to additional systemic complexity and geographic relationships that extend across North Africa.

The second major security threat concerns the newly aggressive Russia. Now there may be some who are a little bit not “up to speed” on the current situations and who make think that while the old Soviet Union was a problem, but the new Russia is not. However, that is not the case. First, there is an undeclared war going on in the Ukraine with Russian “little green men” separatists fighting against a western leaning Ukraine government. Second, this is not the only example of such a war with previous examples including the Crimea, Georgia, and Chechnya. Third, unbeknownst to most Americans, there is a significant information operations campaign being waged within Russia against the US and NATO. On Twitter, just search on #nato and #hato for minutes of fun, and then search Youtube for “RT,” which stands for “Russia Today,” and you can find some first-rate propaganda that explores whether WWIII has already begun.

The third major security threat concerns America’s strategic economic partner China, or more accurately the People’s Republic of China (PRC), what some have called an “existential threat,” meaning it threatens the very existence of the United States. There are multiple intriguing aspects to the PRC including security threats in the Pacific, ongoing trade imbalances with the United States, cyberwarfare, and development practices throughout the world, including Africa. All of these relationships are fraught with tension, so China will continue to be a source of security concern for the foreseeable future.

Finally, there is the southern border with Mexico, which is a source of Democrat votes, cheap Republican labor, drugs, and ongoing security issues. Recently a US helicopter was shot down near the border, which probably caused no end of consternation on the part of the Obama administration. Why this is a cause of consternation is a matter to be considered at another time. However, these four international actors – Daesh, Russia, China, and Mexico – provide a starting point for an ongoing series of international analyses.

AL Productions

I received my recent issue of Vanity Fair (VF), and accompanying it was an additional, smaller magazine filled exclusively with Ralph Lauren (RL) advertising. Now I confess to a certain weakness for all things RL and wish my closet was filled with more of his... products. However, as an inveterate observer of all things RL, I noticed that Andrew Lauren, RL's son, is prominently featured, something I hadn't noticed before. So this got me to thinking, "What films has he produced?" I mean, I wrote a book but does that make me an author? And perhaps more importantly, "Are his films any good?" So I fired up IMDB and saw that Andrew's company, AL Productions, has created three films: (1) G (2002); (2) The Squid and the Whale (S&W, 2005); and (3) The Spectacular Now (TSN, 2013). But then I wondered, are these movies any good? As it turns out, S&W received a 93% on Rotten Tomatoes and TSN also received a 93%, which is in my humble opinion is more than a little impressive. I look forward to watching TSN at some point and will write a review when I do. I also need to finagle a trip to New York to review the Polo Bar. I know, the world of RL is a weakness.

CIA Reorganization

On March 7th, the NYTimes features an article on Director John Brennan's reorganization of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in Langley, Virginia. There are those who argue both sides of the reorganization, with those from the Agency who remember and like it the way it was arguing that the changes are intended to create a "legacy" for those currently in charge. However, there are a couple of cross currents that inform and argue for the change. First, the threats currently faced by the Agency are much different than those that agued for its creation in 1947 at the outset of the Cold War. America's primary competition at that time was the Soviet Union -- what is present-day Russia -- which was primarily a regular or symmetric conflict in which one superpower was in a state of conflict with a second. The primary threats now are irregular or asymmetric in which a "regular" state finds itself in conflict with a less organized -- that is, "irregular" -- organizations, movements, or populations with an emphasis on radial Islam. It is instructive to review Steve Coll's description of the 1979 US embassy burning in Islamabad, Pakistan in Ghost Wars. To the point, US leadership was doubtless so focused on the familiar née comfortable foreign policy analytic posture of the Cold War that this attack, which occurred mere days after the Iran embassy takeover, caught them by surprise. Martin van Crevald's Transformation of War (1990) helps to provide insight into this dynamic, but institutionally the US Federal Government is still searching for the best ways to understand and address these more demographic and less state-based challenges.

Second, since 9/11 when radical Islam made its presence known on American shores, the Agency has been focused on targeting individuals. This targeting process was popularized by the character Maya in the movie Zero Dark Thirty, and is examined in much more detail by the HBO documentary Manhunt. However the premise is pretty simple: find people such as Al Qaeda's key leaders and take them off the battlefield. However, taking insurgents off the battlefield can cause unintended consequences as pointed out by Stanley McCrystal's Insurgent Math, which asks how you can have 100 insurgents, take away 10, and end up with 110? The answer is that the civilian casualties associated with such insurgent removal operations can radicalize populations. Once you realize this, then the question becomes, how can you understand, account for, and minimize these unintended consequences.

Third, when thinking about unintended consequences, the natural way to proceed is thinking about ways to understand complex social systems. That is, human societies are made up of lots of interconnected components and features that operate on both short and long timescales. With regard to Insurgent Math, removing insurgents from the battlefield may make sense from a short-term perspective, but if it creates problems in the long term, then have you done more harm than good. Also, the multiple interconnected system features can be considered from the perspective of counterinsurgency theory, which considers governance, development, and local populations in addition to the usual security concerns of the military. The Defense Intelligence Agency's Michael Flynn and his co-authors wrote in Fixing Intel that analysis had been too concentrated on details and that insufficient detail had been given to the intelligence supporting military operations. Flynn specifically said that intelligence had become too functional -- that is, focused on narrow technical areas. He recommended that, in contrast, intelligence analysis should become more regional -- that is, focused on all the relevant factors with a specific area of interest or operations.

The Agency has historically been organized around a significant cleavage between the Directorate of Intelligence (DI) that performs analysis and Directorate of Operations (DO) that does the things we all see on movies. During the targeting operations since 9/11, these two activities have grown closer together. It seems to me that if the proposed reorganization is correctly executed (and that's a big if), then the changes proposed for the Agency could help improve both analysis as well as operations.  

On American Sniper and Policy

I haven’t seen American Sniper (AS) yet, but that is due not to lack of interest but of time. That said, I can’t help but notice the controversy the film has generated. Rather go down the path of identifying critics and calling them out, I thought it would be more productive and instructive instead to step back and think about what’s driving this stilted and heated “conversation” between the fans of AS and its critics.

Let me first reflect on the reasons why I named this blog, “on policy, etc.” Policy always concerns the policy problématique: how to interpret events in the past to inform decisions in the present to improve the future. It’s easy to describe, but nothing is harder due to the complexity of the social systems policies are intended to influence, like the Iraq War. The implementation of policy seldom goes according to plan, which results in policy resistance. Complex social systems exhibit behaviors that confound straightforward logic and tend to yield results that are surprising, unexpected, or counterintuitive. For example, US military forces entered Iraq in 2003 expecting to oust Saddam Hussein and set up a workable democracy. Deposing Saddam went mostly according to plan, but the insurgency disrupted the UW policymakers’ plans for an early exit and eventually resulted in the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).

Chris Kyle spent four tours in the Iraq, and it is important to remember that he was sent there by American politicians to implement US foreign policy, and by all accounts he did his best to do just that. However, I maintain that US policy in Iraq was ill-conceived, which greatly increased the difficulty of Kyle’s mission. One of the great phrases in the military is that a mission plan or policy “briefs well.” In other words, it tells a good, simple, and convincing story, but left implicit is the small problem is that the plan probably won’t work. So people like Kyle then face the intractable difficulties of inflated expectations, simplistic solutions, and unrealistic timelines that inevitably become more limited possibilities, complex considerations, and extended timelines – that is, what results when people try to achieve something hard in the real world. What’s particularly tragic is when people are criticized for taking on these difficult tasks and coming up short despite their best efforts, especially when they are undertaken in the national interest.

AS is compelling because it highlights the emotional toll such extended efforts exact, but there’s another point to be made here: shouldn’t senior policy makers be held accountable for the decision they make, the policies they craft, and the unworkable situations into which they put people like Chris Kyle? If it’s the job of senior decision makers to craft policy, should they be punished for doing it badly? It’s a story as old of time, but such policies, like invading Iraq and setting up a democracy, are too often implemented without sufficient attention given to the complexities, details, and likely consequences of such actions. Policies are too often implemented based on a feel-good, overly optimistic narrative that “briefs well.” It seems that undertaking something as serious as war with its attendant costs in terms of time, treasure, and lives, merits more serious consideration and analysis than is currently the case. Certainly seeing the pain associated with Chris Kyle’s life—both in the US and Iraq—should provide us with the incentive to consider the way policy is crafted as well as holding senior government decision makers to standards of truth, courage, and excellence as high as those demonstrated by Chris Kyle.