On Work Dynamics

The last four years have allowed me to watch the dynamic at work shift substantially.  My class transitioned during what can only be termed a low period and it was every bit a year and multiple fired colonels before improvements were seen.  This resulted in a bond between those who experienced the dereliction of leadership that we young lieutenants and captains walked into.

As in all things, times changed.  The powers that be realized the dysfunction in the organization and took corrective action.  The leadership that came in immediately sought to improve things, no matter how slight.  While major problems exist to this day, things progressed and people responded.  Partly because the old guard of embittered souls rotated elsewhere and partly because enough of us became believers in the process, morale rose.  I would go so far to say that morale was overexuberant.

Here is the primary takeaway I have from the experience;  people are much less influenced by the magnitude of a change then by the direction. Between talking to leadership during this time and seeing what they tried to accomplish, and having known some of the fundamental problems in our career; the situation remained badly broken when leadership changed.  This is not meant to take away from their accomplishments.  Between Air Force bureaucracy, deeply entrenched resentment and humanity’s resistance to change; that a positive direction was achieved is monumental.  All the same the gains were fragile.   The forward momentum needed to be maintained.

I guess it would help to lay out some of the underlying issues.  First, the majority of young officers did not choose the career field and definitely did not choose the location.  This starts any situation out with a relatively unwilling work force, no matter how much people point to the voluntary nature of our service.  This argument always seemed insulting. Just because we signed up we lost all right to an opinion on what came after, but I digress.  Second is the disconnect between what we hear and what we experience.  We are called a top priority and yet everything is old, broken and not getting fixed.  We are responsible for everything, get blamed at least partly for everything, and yet we aren’t treated like adults, much less officers.  Our input is ignored by those higher up and removed from our job.  The thinking is since they did it once and are now more experienced officers their opinion is automatically more valid.  The problem is the skill set to do our job has deteriorated, and without actually having to implement things in our environment, solutions work in theory but not in practice.  The tendency for leadership to push solutions because ‘that’s how pilots or another wing’ does it also infuriates.  If the only justification is that someone else does something that way with no reason for why it’s better, the idea should be scrapped. The last thing I’ll mention is the emphasis on perfection.  That explanation will probably run as long as this one.

That should give a basic outline of the problems inherent to the job.  Most of them were unresolved by the former leadership but a few were addressed.  More attention was paid to broken equipment.  Our organization won more fights as to how we should operate, but not all.  We were not categorically blamed for everything that happened.  These changes were important, but what was more important was the environment that surrounded them.  Leadership seemed open to criticism and new ideas. They did not thunder with judgment and recrimination when things went wrong.  They looked for the good, the path to improvement, the positive with most things.  This is not to say that standards were not upheld or that lapses were ignored, it’s that people working in good faith were allowed to make mistakes and improve from them, as opposed to hiding them.  On top of this was constant communication of what was happening.  Leadership shared their successes, failures and current battles to improve aspects of our job on top of our performance.

When leadership changed over, subtle differences were noticed by those of us who had experienced the full swing of morale.  No one wanted to say the old days had returned, but the feeling was shared amongst more than a few. Little things enhanced this perception.  Not enough to elicit a response, but enough to put people on edge.  Into this enters our particular morality play.

One of the issues that had been resolved by the previous leadership was the issue of crews washing vehicles when they returned from alert.  This seems inconsequential. After a 24+ hour shift, where sleep may or may not have been adequate, an extra twenty minutes to clean a vehicle tends to fray tempers.  Add on having very junior enlisted ordering lieutenants and captains,standing watching them do the job, and you have an unacceptable situation.  The regulation read a certain way backs up the enlisted members; the problem is the spirit and intent.  First, vehicles shouldn’t be washed every day.  Second and more importantly the regulation is written for casual operators of the vehicles; people who check a car out once a month or so to pick distinguished visitors up at the airport.  Crews use vehicles daily.  Lastly, the officer-enlisted dynamic is trampled by the situation, with airmen supervising the job that officers do.

This problem reemerged recently because a young lieutenant decided by god things were going to change in his shop.  The previous agreement had not been codified and in the Air Force of today that means it never happened.  This has gone on for weeks and it seems to have exploded yesterday.  Leadership was informed well prior to now, so it begs the question of what they are doing.  While they may have been giving lower levels the opportunity to resolve the problem, I believe at this point inaction would result in consequences beyond what they imagine for such a trivial item.

The reason the car washing is important is the visibility to crews.  It immediately impacts crews trying to get home when they are at their worst.  It demonstrates to every crew member whether leadership has an interest in making life a little better for them.  It helped highlight the fact that we are operators doing a critical mission.  With the rumblings that had occurred, reversing course on a policy so easily identified with the previous leadership would have an impact beyond that to be expected for having to wash vehicles.  It would be a concrete indicator that the direction of the organization had changed , and not in a way that crew members would approve.  While the change in and of itself is small, as I mentioned before, it’s the direction not the magnitude that matters.

Channeling My Inner Montaigne

I do not think there are any links between the different thoughts I am about to explore, but I had similar opinions about most of the essays I wrote for school and as often as not things came full circle, so we’ll see.  The first thought is from Steven Pressfield On Habit: http://www.stevenpressfield.com/2011/11/habit/.

I have long known two things about myself.  The first is that I am a creature of habit, good bad or otherwise.  I quickly fall into an embarrassing level of sloth if I get away from the habits and rituals that I use to define my life.  The second is that I need goals, at least for the initial period of constructing habits.  It is why the writing has never stuck, I have yet to find the appropriate goal to inculcate the habit.  I think trying for http://www.nanowrimo.org/ is the wrong approach.  It would be like running a half marathon when up til then I’d only sprinkled a few runs over the last year or so.  A friend of mine did this; he finished, but not well.  So I think a novel in a month is a great goal, but not in the month of November.  It is a great goal for next year, should I have developed a habit of mostly daily writing.  I understand the pain of staring at a computer screen for hours and days and having nothing, nothing at all come to mind.  The struggle might be the point for me.  I am stealing the thought from Montaigne, but I do not value what I do too easily.  I know I am a good student.  I know I can do my job with minimal effort.  These two areas don’t define me so I have had to look outside for things that will, and it is in the struggle that I better define who I am.  For some reason I always come back to the Delphic “Know Thyself” tinged with what I will only describe as an engineering upbringing, where to know something is to know where it fails.

This sounds unduly pessimistic.  I disagree with that assessment.

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us.’ We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There’s nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we’re liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.     -Marianne Williamson

I strive to embrace failure.  Without failure, I cannot grow.  My great fear is not failure.  I have failed more times than I care to remember.  One of the few eternal truths I accept is that I am a flawed individual, prone to all the foibles of humanity, and I can point to ample proof to back this up.  The above quote encapsulates my greatest fear.  I fear not becoming great beyond measure.  Not that I can nor that I will but the potential is there.  I may be a vessel flawed to the point where striving for such success leads to shattering myself, but I would rather try to be great and suffer irreparably then settle into obscure mediocrity.

This is not to say that I strive for fame or fortune or power beyond measure.  It is trite to say I want to be the best me I can be, but that is the basic idea.  It is why I am leaving my job and all I have known for almost a decade.  It is why I can imagine leaving everyone I know and love and going off into some vast unknown.  I do not think this is likely, but the idea doesn’t terrify me.  I guess I want adventures.   Not necessarily paddling through the Congo adventures, but adventures nonetheless.

On that note comes another link, again from Mr. Pressfield: http://www.stevenpressfield.com/2011/11/out-of-my-comfort-zone/. The thought he mentions that most resonates is that of creative panic.  The quickest way I’d explain it to someone is the ability to get things done at the last minute when a paper or presentation is due the next day.  That feeling is creative panic.  I think people have developed ways to manage it which are unique to their experiences, but naming it can allow the ability to use it in unfamiliar territory.  Students tend to descend into panic on timed tests.  I tend to crush timed tests.  This is partly an ability to quickly absorb information and more so a set of guidelines I’ve mostly tacitly developed to deal with situations where I may not be prepared or have adequate time.  It applies elsewhere, with a similar example to his travel issues and where I tend to get lost.  As a teenager this completely wrecked me.   I was incapable of dealing with it.  Now I tend to stay calm, avoid panic and approach the problem as just that, a problem to be addressed.  I tend to get un-lost quicker and definitely much less stressed.  Having identified this, I think it would be helpful to apply to other life areas that stress me out.

Creative panic comes into play because I think the absence of it is a very apt indicator that I am plodding to mediocrity.  I don’t really have anything to add to this thought and my last bit I think I will save for the next post.  It ties in, so to some extent it will be a continuation.

Rebirth, Resurgence, or Just a Sad Echo of What I Want to Be

I have the urge to write something.  Well, several somethings.  I have a few ideas that are bouncing around or which others expressed that I felt the need to articulate.  I think that might be the point of writing this for me, a hole that is missing.  At times I talk to people to work through my thought processes, to have a sounding board for whatever. The problem is firstly that few people fulfill this role,  partly because I am not good at finding more people for it, partly because my thinking at its best is a bit idiosyncratic I think.

My brother was good at operating on the same wavelength, but that ship has sailed.  My father is great, but we talk infrequently, and I like to have things polished before I talk to him, or at least not entirely rough.  My mother will listen but does not always comprehend.  My sister is great for making sure I understand things because if I can get her to understand then I have a firm grasp, but I can’t abuse the relationship with too much of that sort of discussion since that would be rather selfish.  Of friends, my former roommate was great on most levels, but he has a wife and kids and is a long ways away, in other words rather inaccessible.  One is good if it’s something that interests him, but his availability is spotty.  There is no one else that comes to mind, other family members are too remote, other friends are either disinterested or well, not really that close of friends.

So here we are.  I might not have an audience (I had a following of I think two people, but they surely have left for greener pastures).  At least here I have to articulate what I am thinking, I can’t leave it in the formless mess it occupies while floating in my mind.  We’ll see if I can develop appropriate habits to make this work.  Consistent writing has never been my forte, but then again I never ran much, or did homework, or most anything else, so I can change habits should I wish.  Funnily enough a few of those topics will be the very next post, which was supposed to be this post but I got sidetracked with the personal thoughts.  Lastly, the writing may not occur here.  A fair chunk will, but I also am wanting to write thank you letters to different people who have impacted me whether they know it or not.  In addition, in spite of my second failure at National Novel Writing Month, I think I would like to continue writing.  I may not be cut out for fiction, but I’m not ready to give up yet.

Ineffable

One of these days I will learn to keep proclamations to myself. Then again they are great motivators to accomplish otherwise unachievable goals; hurray for finishing a marathon continually running without dropping dead. At the very least I should check my schedule and realize that attempting to start up anything when the next two weeks will be swamped is a bad idea. Inertia supplied the subsequent week or so of ennui and no posts.

I did however have a thought that had started to percolate before my last post that has at least not entirely run away on me. I’m afraid I might have lost the essence of it along the lines of Coleridge with Xanadu (one of the few poems whose explanation by the teacher made sense to me at the time) but I will give it a whirl. Even more hopeful is that more posts have suggested themselves so I should avoid staring blankly at the screen hoping for divine inspiration.

I have several dilemmas with writing besides laziness and outside interests sapping my time. The first is a matter of ego; I have never considered myself more than a competent writer at best. When I say competent I mean that most of my ideas come across as I intend the majority of the time and my writing only occasionally gets in the way of what I have to say. This gets me to the level of all but the worst Star Wars novelists; they however do it for an entire novel. This is a step above where I used to be. Confidence was entirely missing through most of school. It took going to an engineering school full of very bright people who could not write to make me realize while not a Melville or Conrad, I can write.

Being able to write is not enough to convince me that this is worthwhile. The more I dig through the classics and other literature the more I realize that I will most likely not write anything new or innovative or possibly even remotely interesting. Very few ideas have not been recycled enough times to be worn bare. Two ideas jump out and make this thought something worth overcoming. The first is seeing those worn ideas presented in interesting ways with different incarnations be it a creation myth, a romance doomed to tragedy or a Faustian bargain for your soul. When done well they bring out varied emotions and thoughts on humanity and the self. It’s the thought that art helps illuminate the human condition that makes it worth striving even if I know I lack a pittance of the talent necessary to leave my mark on the world.

The other driving force is that even the great authors of the past have struggled with their inability to make the language express what they wish to say. In Heart of Darkness Conrad continually draws upon the ineffable to illuminate his novel. The object of interest, Kurtz is built up to demigod status, and yet the most glaring weakness of the book to me is how paper-thin he comes across when finally introduced. I think Conrad knew this so he postponed the meeting as long as possible and killed him off shortly thereafter. It’s hard to write a character that has discovered great truths, if diabolic truths unless you also possess them.

Conrad isn’t the only author that has these issues. Nabokov also seems to have similar problems. Non fiction writers are also not exempt; futurologists all draw on the past to explain the future. Either we’ll get more of the same to a greater extreme or we’ll find a way to do a 180 drawing on the doomed ideas of a distant age. It is also cross cultural; the French je ne sais quoi, on par with our having it. Myth in general is struggling to give context to that which is at present indefinable. On the other side, quantum physicists resort to ancient Eastern philosophy to try to put into intelligible form what they have discovered about the universe. They then proceed to say this is entirely inaccurate and bad form, but it is done all the same.

I could go on in this vein for quite a while. Douglas Adams had much to say on the subject. Plato and the shadows on the wall in the cave encapsulates it. I guess drawing attention to the idea is what I need to start writing. I think knowing there are limits to what the English language can do and seeing how I deal with those limits is intriguing in and of itself. On that note I’ll leave you with Bruce Campbell describing It.

Reboot

I have up to this point been dismal about posting with any regularity.  I may not ever post frequently, but I think a few things have prevented me from doing this.  Up until now I restricted what I wrote about.  I mostly limited myself to a military bent, or at least to things pertaining at least peripherally to my job.  I am going to try to lift this particular restriction.   I also have done a bad job of at least starting ideas that are only half-formed.  Other times I don’t keep track of ideas that are fully formed.  Lastly, I haven’t carved out a chunk of time in my life in which to write.  We’ll see how successful I am.  Worst comes to worst I fail again–I tend to go through four or five failures before I am successful anyways.  Later today will be the start with an article on the ineffable.

Team of Rivals

I was hoping to write this a week or so ago and never got around to it.  I’m afraid the original idea has faded a bit, but we’ll see what the result is.

I finished Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin and had a thought that really stuck with me.  The book itself was quite interesting.  It highlights President Lincoln and his Cabinet and how they operated.  It is a comprehensive view of the political side of the Civil War, and the era directly preceding it, at least as seen by Lincoln and his rivals in the Republican Party.

Lincoln’s idea to surround himself with his chief rivals was a brilliant decision.  He was capable of harnessing them to his purpose, and they had already demonstrated their competence by being his rivals.  They all were viewed as more likely candidates right up until the last moment for the Republican nomination.

The book was not just a biography of Lincoln but also a biography of his major cabinet members, it gave a very human look at the immediate players in Washington throughout the War, after having given the reader a perspective on what shaped these people.  Lincoln always is very high in the Pantheon of great presidents, but this book manages to shape his story as well as that of the other players to make them seem human.  They are fallible, petty, ambitious.  And yet all are accomplished men who are striving for the salvation of the nation.

I could go on at length about the different personalities.  Chase, Seward and Bates all were interesting people, but they weren’t the parts that intrigued me most.  The first was Lincoln himself.  It’s amazing just how good a politician he was.  He knew that he could only get things done if he rode public sentiment, yet he was no crass populist.  He had definite thoughts on what he wanted to accomplish and he knew how to prepare the way in order for those things to be done.  Yet throughout his life he did not compromise himself.  He did not make hasty decisions, but when he made them he stuck to them.  I could say so much more on this, and many people already have, but I better understand why he is upheld as an exemplar of all things good and right.

The next person that intrigued me was Mary Todd Lincoln.  Before this all I knew was that she was Lincoln’s Crazy Wife.  That was about as incomplete a picture as I could have formed.  She was ambitious and insecure.  She was temperamental.  She threw fits at inappropriate times and spent money she didn’t have to fit into the Washington circuit.  Yet she also spent a lot of time in Army hospitals caring for troops while going out of her way to not let the newspapers know.  She was a loving wife and a caring mother.  In other words she was an individual, with her own quirks, foibles and flaws.

The last person to briefly touch on is General McClellan.  The funniest bit of the book to me was that my initial impression of McClellan was accurate.  He was an arrogant, egotistical man who was an inferior military leader with the sole redeeming quality that he could train troops well.  He could not accept blame for anything. he belittled everyone above him and criticized them for his own mistakes.  His sole redeeming quality was his love for his troops.

The Nuclear Posture Review

I read through the Nuclear Posture Review a few days ago.  Outside of a few grating grammatical errors and the fact that Pentagon writers copy and pasted major portions of the document (seriously, it’s like 25 pages of fresh material in a 70 page document, and even that 25 at least sounds like things I’ve read other places.  I get it, we want our nukes to be safe, secure and reliable)  it wasn’t a bad document.  I would say in terms of rhetoric it points in the right direction.  It limits who the US would attack with nukes and takes other stabilizing steps such as demrving ICBMs.

At the same time there are issues that could be brought up.  First, since some conservatives are using this to attack Obama for weakening our national security I’d like to address that topic.  John Stewart addresses it in a more entertaining fashion than I do.

http://www.thedailyshow.com/full-episodes/thu-april-8-2010-david-remnick

Even dropping down to 1500 or so strategic warheads with the Russians we have 90% of the nukes in the world. (not sure how the treaty counts things, the bit I saw points to this being more complicated than one would think, such as a B-52 counting as one warhead and one launcher, which may or may not make sense.  It’s outside my area of expertise)  This points to Russia being the only place that could pose an existential threat.  To that, the whole point of START treaties and every other nuclear treaty really is for both us and the Russians to draw down in a way that keeps us from thinking the other is engaging in any funny business.  The Cold War is not coming back, no matter how much some people might long for those simpler days.

Any other supposed security risk is a chimera created to inspire fear in people who don’t know better.  In spite of the current conflicts of the US it still possesses the conventional ability to thwack anyone that does something phenomenally stupid, no nukes necessary.  Whether this is a conventional, chemical or biological attack, that ability will not go away.  Furthermore, the logistics of chemical and biological attacks preclude them from being weapons of mass destruction.  On the same page are either dirty bombs or a stolen detonated nuke.  The former would be a local or regional disaster due to contamination.  The latter would wipe a city off the face of the earth.  While this would most probably spell doom for whatever political party was in power, the world has seen cities wiped out.  The US would carry on without New York or Chicago.  More nukes would not change this calculus. If anything they make it a more likely eventuality.

On the other side is the contention that our nuclear posture still has bombs on ‘hair trigger alert.’  This phrase skews the reality by making it seem that a launch could happen at any moment.  The safeguards make this particular trigger very hard to pull without all the appropriate pieces in place.

I only have three real comments on the NPR myself.  The first is that the document is a promise that the US can go back on at any time.  It is why Russia is still a global concern; they possess the ability to wipe a nation off the face of the earth.  We possess this same potential which others must keep in mind.

The next is that the article does not address Israel, Pakistan or India at all.  While the US views these nations differently than Iran and North Korea, they also are not signatories to the Non Proliferation Act.   The failure to mention them makes me think that the writers did not want to address those particular issues at all.

Lastly is what this document could do to the mindset of North Korea and Iran.  Since these two nations were singled out as definitely being potential targets it could drive them to pursue a greater nuclear potential in order to keep the US from intervening in their affairs. (I mostly mean invade them)  I point this out since the single best way to keep us out is to have the ability to inflict a significant amount of damage on us. (IE North Korea’s ability to invade South Korea followed by their ability to nuke somewhere in East Asia versus Iraq)

On a mostly unrelated note, people who keep proclaiming that nuclear proliferation is right around the corner need to calm down.  One to two nuclear powers have been added every decade, which is not a rapid accumulation especially considering the number of nations that could possess nukes if they were so inclined.  Also necessary to note is the nations that gave up successful programs (South Africa) or programs in progress (Libya).

A have a notion of a thought of an idea…

I’m mostly finished with Osinga’s book on Boyd’s theories, Science, Strategy and War: The Strategic Theory of John Boyd.  It’s been interesting, nothing new, but a further illumination of Boyd’s ideas.  The one thing that keeps coming to mind is the connection between Boyd’s thoughts which revolve primarily around uncertainty and how to deal with it, and Taleb’s ideas encapsulated in The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable.  I’m not sure what it is, or how to link the two.  I think they both are dealing with the same conceptual issue, and I think they both are approaching it from two different directions, but I’m not sure if they’re coming from slightly different angles or if they’re diametrically opposed.

They both focus on the idea that it’s impossible to know everything, and that unknowable portion is the important part.  Boyd focuses on either decreasing the unknowable by continuing to reorient to it, to be open to it in order to change, and that ignoring it leads to death or failure.  Taleb instead looks at the impact of what we cannot know, and proposes that indeed what you don’t know is very important.  He uses the term black swan for those improbable events with huge impacts.

I look at his ideas and Boyd’s, and I get the feeling that what is being described is simply two sides of the same coin.  Taleb is focused on the environment, he explains what is out there–or more accurately, he explains what we don’t know that’s out there that is going to impact us.  He highlights that there are monsters in the closet, there are risks that can undo everything, even if they have not been seen.  Absence of evidence does not equal evidence of absence, to use a cliche.  Boyd on the other hand is looking at decision-making, so people and organizations.  He addresses the issue from the context of making decisions based on an ever changing and unpredictable environment. His focus is on dealing with uncertainty, learning to deal with it, learning to use it, learning to cause it for those you want to destroy.

It seems to me that the dire circumstances that Taleb highlights, the black swans that exist that can not be planned for or avoided, are things that Boyd’s theories are tailor-made to address.  It’s not a matter of having contingencies in place for everything, though that’s not necessarily a bad idea, it’s a matter of having the flexibility to adapt to unforeseen circumstances, no matter how extreme.  Even more so, it’s important to have the ability to spot these circumstances in order to allow that flexibility to function.

How you set this up I’m not sure, but I think Lean Production is one thought.  Decentralized control, allowing those closest to the proverbial fire make decisions is another thought.  Then again, that’s not the point.  At some point I’ll have to dig further into both Boyd and Taleb and see if I can draw more mental bridges.

If We Can Keep It

Almost done with Chet Richards newish book on national security and grand strategy, among other things.  It’s interesting and thought provoking, but I want to focus on a few topics.  The first of these is the concept of shi.  Like most all Chinese words, this has layers of meaning, of which Richards focuses on one.  “The third aspect of shi is about developing a favorable situation with great potential to achieve the political objectives.”  It’s not nearly as much about reaching out to change things, though this can and should be done, but about building oneself up, increasing one’s “strategic solvency.”  A more tangible example would be instead of adventures in Iraq, repairing the United States’ infrastructure, repairing Social Security and Medicaid.  There are good steps, but are more physical than what I think the idea is.  It’s about Boyd’s idea of grand strategy; increasing our resolve, decreasing our opponents.  strengthening our allies, drawing in the undecided.  It is very hard to damage the enemy, while strengthening ourselves is a much easier task to approach (we know the subject much better at least) and then we can wait for our enemies to screw up and take advantage of that weakness.  This also ties into the issue of being the aggressor or the aggressee.  Attacking immediately casts a pall over everything, even if done with the best of intentions.  Responding to an attack draws sympathy and support from even supposed enemies and provides a lot of room to make more friends than enemies, to reverse the adage about Germany.

The second point is the concept of formlessness which I had conceptualized in The Dancing Wu Li Masters.  It takes quantum physics and shows that our best guess as to the ‘workings of a clock we cannot see the insides of’ is that objects at their smallest level are not objects, but instead are relationships, possibilities and interactions.  What happens to one will potentially influence the actions of another, and possibly something quite removed from the object being observed.  (I’m still hazy on it, Bell’s Theory I think, going to need to dig further)

Another part is that there is only form and structure when the objects are being observed, until then it’s all only potentials, which leads to a number of different conclusions.  I’m not sure how this links to what follows, but I feel on some level (Fingerspitzengefuehl) that this is connected to the idea of creation and destruction, of swarms and of formlessness being the epitome of strength.  Boyd’s destruction and creation is all about building an idea or model, synthesizing it out of differing parts, testing it, using it, then destroying it and building anew in order to better adapt to a changing and chaotic world.  (oversimplification I think, but not a bad explanation)  Forms are seen, and used, but they are not things to be cherished, simply the latest iteration that is hopefully most effective.  They will be discarded as soon as we’ve come up with a better way.  This sounds great in theory, unfortunately people become attached to ideas which were good but are past their time which helped take the person to where they are, even if not adapting leads to obsolescence.  It’s fighting the last war and building a Maginot line, instead of figuring out how to concur more with less (blitzkrieg).

This all ties into swarms, as represented by insurgencies, specifically in this instance in Iraq and Afghanistan.  The US military is tied to one form, overwhelming, conventional force.  The insurgents know they will lose against this force in any direct confrontation, so they take on a new form with IEDs and suicide bombers.  The US military adapts with roadblocks, checkpoints and better humvees, the insurgents get better bombs, more remote detonations, non military targets.  This is only one prism of the conflict (and not the best since it’s solely the military side, but it’s on the mind), but the insurgents are better suited to adapting.  They have a swarm approach, an individual is no threat when examined, but together they learn and adapt and overcome a stronger opponent by being as formless as possible, testing solutions and quickly spreading what works until it doesn’t, then testing some more.  It also ties into the Darwinian Ratchet where only the smart and capable survive.  The military on the other hand is tied to tradition and hierarchy and top down leadership.  It is very committed to one form, and changing is a matter of years. No matter the pressure, nothing short of catastrophe on an immense scale could get the military to adapt at the same speed as an insurgency, there’s too much institutional inertia to allow this, too many pieces and players against allowing control to slide to the lower levels.

This all raises several questions; How to become that flexible, (short of a crisis, if possible)  How to avoid being in such a position, and lastly how to not let this advantage defeat us? The first two are simple though difficult, major surgery on the DoD and our grand strategy.  The third option is a bird of a different feather; though the idea to fight the insurgency instead of the insurgents is not a bad start.  (Chet Richards touches on this in the book, and I think I’ll try explore the idea tomorrow)

Legacy of Ashes

I’m not very good at writing new posts.  Having no one else looking at it does not help the motivation. Then again having people reading my writing used to be the quickest way to get me to not write, so this may be untenable no matter how I look at it.

Anyways, I’ve been reading rather prolifically lately.  I just finished Legacy of Ashes about the CIA, and it was quite interesting.  It’s amazing that an organization with almost no major successes for the first decade of its existence kept receiving high levels of funding and support.  It also highlighted that problems tend to revolve around people, not money or technology or ideas even (though ideas can be powerful in and of themselves).  First in trying to establish contacts and build a network of intelligence and espionage agents in unfriendly places of the world (which was hit or miss, but then again the KGB was working directly against the CIA, which had just started, so somewhat understandable).  Even worse though was after the organization had had the time and funding to build a viable program, they lacked the ability to acquire and train enough quality people to be able to accomplish anything really.  It comes down to the basic question of how to motivate someone to go spend the prime of their lives mucking about with no creature comforts, no recognition, in a hostile country where screwing up would end up bad for the person and embarrassing for the country.  So instead of these sorts of people who would give the CIA a fighting chance, it ended up (mostly) with bureaucrats, which has only gotten worse with the privatization of the intelligence community.

Then there’s the antagonism between the espionage side and the intelligence side, which to me is odd since the only way to have a hope of espionage being successful (let alone having any understanding at all even of the immediate consequences, successful or not) is if a certain level of knowledge has already been obtained on the area of interest.  Without that, it’s like shooting in the dark, success might come about with enough money and brute force, but it’s not going to stay hidden, and the consequences are going to be worse than the rewards even in a successful operation.

There are other thoughts, but the last is on the antagonism shown by the military throughout the history of the CIA.  First in keeping its intelligence from the CIA (which was originally created to oversee the nation’s efforts) to then trying to subvert and destroy the CIA, (taking over the NRO, having generals and admirals run the CIA, and finally succeeding in it being relegated to second tier status with the CIA director losing his seat on the NSC).  competition is good, but this level of infighting (sometimes seen between services also) can only be counterproductive.

There’s more, but my thoughts aren’t entirely organized.  How to get good intelligence, how to not let individuals ignore analysis and stamp their opinions on reports, how to keep the president from ignoring advice or swaying the organization away from unbiased reporting, all are lessons to be drawn from the book.  I don’t know what the answer is on any of them other than finding the right people for the job, or possibly starting from scratch, which seems a waste.  Though then you have to balance the pains of learning the wheel anew and losing half a century of expertise, and the struggles of overturning the culture, history, habits and prejudices of an organization as secretive and tribal as the CIA.  There might be a third option, but I’m not sure what it is.