In praise of our Armed Forces

I have written several times about the self-serving nature of Washington bureaucracies and political life, and I have not been especially flattering. But I want to make a distinction here between the other federal bureaucracies and the American Armed Forces.

Certainly the American Armed Forces are federal bureaucracies, and vast ones at that. And certainly they contain their fair share of incompetents, time-servers, martinets and bullies, and dirty office politics, just like any large organization. But there is something different here as well that I have sensed over the years from all the active and retired military people I have been privileged to work with. There is a prevailing sense of mission, a sense that there are causes beyond oneself that are worth fighting and even dying for, a sense of taking care of one’s people, a can-do spirit in the face of difficulties.

When there is a problem, the first instinct of the politician seems to be to find someone to blame, preferably from the other party. The first instinct of the bureaucrat is to be sure they can’t be blamed. But over and over again I have seen military leaders say explicitly. “It doesn’t matter how we got into this mess. Just tell me how we are going to recover.”

Perhaps if politicians and bureaucrats had to work on military pay scales, and risk their lives every now and then, they too would learn this spirit.

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Einstein and drugs

Einstein is supposed to have once said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. I thought of this last night as I was reading something about the “drug war” in America. We have been interdicting drug smugglers and prosecuting drug vendors and users for decades now, filling our prisons with drug-related offenders. Consider:

• “Overall, the United States incarcerated 2,320,359 persons at year end 2005….At year end 2005, one in every 136 U.S. residents was incarcerated in a State or Federal prison or a local jail.” Source: Harrison, Paige M. & Beck, Allen J., Ph.D., US Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, Prisoners in 2005 (Washington DC: US Department of Justice, Nov. 2006), pp. 1-2.

• "More than 9.25 million people are held in penal institutions throughout the world, mostly as pre-trial detainees (remand prisoners) or as sentenced prisoners. Almost half of these are in the United States (2.19m), China (1.55m plus pretrial detainees and prisoners in 'administrative detention') or Russia (0.87m)." Source: Walmsley, Roy, "World Prison Population List (Seventh Edition)" (London, England: International Centre for Prison Studies, 2007), p. 1

• "In 1995, 23% of state prisoners were incarcerated for drug offenses in contrast to 9% of drug offenders in state prisons in 1986. In fact, the proportion of drug offenders in the state prison population nearly tripled by 1990, when it reached 21%, and has remained at close to that level since then. The proportion of federal prisoners held for drug violations doubled during the past 10 years. In 1985, 34% of federal prisoners were incarcerated for drug violations. By 1995, the proportion had risen to 60%." Source: Craig Haney, Ph.D., and Philip Zimbardo, Ph.D., "The Past and Future of U.S. Prison Policy: Twenty-five Years After the Stanford Prison Experiment," American Psychologist, Vol. 53, No. 7 (July 1998), p. 715.

• States spent $42.89 billion on Corrections in 2005 alone. To compare, states only spent $24.69 billion on public assistance. Source: National Association of State Budget Officers (NASBO), 2005 State Expenditure Report (Washington, DC: NASBO, Fall 2006), p. 35, Table 18, and p. 58, Table 32.

• Since the enactment of mandatory minimum sentencing for drug users, the Federal Bureau of Prisons budget has increased by 1,954%. Its budget jumped from $220 million in 1986 to more than $4.3 billion in 2001. Sources: US Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics 1996 (Washington DC: US Department of Justice, 1997), p. 20; Executive Office of the President, Budget of the United States Government, FY 2002 (Washington DC: US Government Printing Office, 2001), p. 134.

• According to ONDCP, federal spending to incarcerate drug offenders totals nearly $3 Billion a year -- $2.525 Billion by the Bureau of Prisons, and $429.4 Million by Federal Prisoner Detention. Source: Office of National Drug Control Policy, "National Drug Control Strategy: FY 2003 Budget Summary" (Washington, DC: Office of the President, February 2002), Table 3, pp. 7-9.

You would think we might have learned something from prohibition, which didn’t significantly impede the supply of alcohol, but did spawn a highly profitable smuggling trade run by organized crime, since it effectively produced a monopoly and drove the price of alcohol higher, even though the production costs stayed very low.

Our largely ineffectual attempts at constraining the supply of drugs to the US has had essentially the same effect – it has produced a highly profitable monopoly. Plants (cannabis and poppies) which grow like roadside weeds produce a product that can be sold for astronomical prices on American streets. This has produced an international narcotics business estimated to earn drug traffickers $300-400 billion per year, enough that they essentially own states like Afghanistan and Columbia.

I don’t know what the answer is – drugs are addictive and it is hard to wean people from addictions. But Einstein had a point – whatever we are doing now certainly isn’t working, and to continue just to do more of the same and expect anything to improve is the definition of insanity. It’s too bad that it seems to be political suicide to suggest we try a different approach, because that effectively constrains us to keep doing the same ineffectual things and wasting billions of dollars a year of approaches that don’t work.

I suspect if we spent even a fraction of those billions on treatments and education – trying to reduce the demand instead of focusing on the supply – we would have much better results.

Religion and culture

In any discussion about religion, one must account for the fact that a religion and the culture within which it evolves are inextricably intertwined. Each shapes and is shaped by the other. So it is almost impossible to understand or discuss one without understanding and discussing the other.

More than that, it is almost impossible to fully “convert” to a religion one didn’t grow up in. One can certainly learn the theology and the rituals, but it is almost impossible to learn all the subtle cultural aspects, the unspoken attitudes and assumptions, and the many unspoken things no one even thinks to teach a newcomer because they are simply obviously “the way things are”. Converts certainly have a valid religion, but it isn’t quite the same religion as practiced and experienced by those who were raised from childhood in that religion.

What draws many people to their religion is only partly the dogmas and beliefs of that religion. The rest of the pull is to the familiar and comforting cultural aspects. It is perfectly possible to find comfort in the rituals and music and group support of a religion, and yet question or outright disbelieve that religion’s dogmas. Indeed, I suspect many people who are religiously observant are not wholly in agreement with all the beliefs they profess.

This is one of the reasons it is difficult to change cultures, or religions. It’s not possible to change the one without changing the other.

Who wants war?

In popular fiction, it is frequently generals who are advocating war, and there is some tendency in the American public to assume that the military must always be looking for an opportunity to try out its new weapons. In fact, I think that is a myth.

My reading of both recent and distant history suggests that it is usually the politicians – those who have never studied military history and know little or nothing about the real complexities of managing and supplying a battlefield army - who are most eager to find military solutions to difficult political problems. It is the generals, who have studied military history and understand the enormous uncertainties of wars and the terrible costs, who are most reticent to rush into war.

The brilliant Confederate general Robert E. Lee understood full well that the Confederacy was taking a terrible gamble to fight the northern states with their much greater manufacturing capabilities, while the Confederate political leaders were eager for a military confrontation. The equally brilliant WWII Japanese admiral Isoroko Yamamoto (who by the way attended Harvard and Annapolis, and understood Americans) was against a war with the US, and told the Japanese political leaders that with a surprise attack on the US Pacific fleet he could run wild in the Pacific for perhaps six months at the most, after which the enormous productive force of the US would make things increasingly difficult for the Japanese, but his political masters didn’t believe him. And in recent history the Bush administration launched a war in Iraq against the advice of some of the senior military staff, and with far fewer troops than the experienced generals wanted, leading us to the debacle we now face.

Is it stupidity or is it arrogance that deludes politicians, most of them lawyers, into thinking they know more about warfare than the professional military people who have studied the field throughout their entire careers?

What a good manager does

My father spent his career establishing and running large research laboratories, and he taught me early on that a manager’s job is not to “manage” her/his people. A good manager’s job is to hire the best people he/she can find, and then protect them from outside interference so that they can get on with the job at hand.

Too many people reach management with the idea that a manager’s job is to sit in a big office and give orders. They use management as a way to gratify their need for power or status. I once worked in an organization (which shall remain nameless) in which everyone from the president down ate together in the same cafeteria and had offices about the same size. Some years later significant changes appeared: managers began to get bigger offices with fancier furniture, reserved parking places appeared for them, upper managers got permission to travel first class, they built a separate dining room for the managers so that they wouldn’t have to eat in the cafeteria with the rest of the staff. It is probably no surprise that within a few years the company was in deep trouble.

My principle has always been that a manager’s primary job is to run interference for his/her staff, and to do whatever tasks need to be done, no matter how “menial”, to help her/his staff get on with their jobs unimpeded. There are some other important tasks for managers – mentoring young staff is one, helping to provide a guiding vision is another, encouraging staff to improve their skills and keep up with their field is another. But the single most important task is to face outward and protect one’s staff from the inevitable inanities of the corporate bureaucracy that always exists.

Counterinsurgency strategies

Insurgencies – unofficial underground military and terrorist groups who use unconventional means of waging war, like car bombs and suicide bombers – are going to be with us for the foreseeable future. It is one of the consequences of developing an overwhelmingly powerful military force; insurgency is the only effective avenue we have left opposition groups.

The November/December 2007 issue of Foreign Affairs contains a review essay by Colin Kahl on the new US Army/Marine Counterinsurgency Field Manual, which was issued in its new revised form last December after considerable debate within the military establishment and its think tanks. I recommend this essay.

Looking at the history of insurgencies from the time of the Romans to the present day, only two effective counterinsurgency methods have emerged: (1) the old Roman method of brutally crushing all opposition and ruling the territory with an iron hand, and (2) the very slow process of winning the hearts and minds of the populace so that they themselves turn against the insurgency and deprive it of the indigenous support and cover that makes it possible. In general, America has tried to follow a middle path between these two, combining the worst elements of both. Not surprisingly, this has usually been not only ineffective, but actually counterproductive. In Iraq, for example, we don’t really offer the populace enough stability and safety to win them to our side, and our occasional ham-handed military sweep-and-clear operations produce enough civilian casualties and bad media exposure to help the insurgency recruit more members, yet not enough enemy casualties to really tip the balance.

The thing to remember is that insurgencies don’t have to win to succeed. They only have to produce enough pain for long enough to wear down the resolve and patience of their opponent and make them abandon the field of battle. Moreover, the modern world works in favor of insurgencies. On the one hand democracies are notoriously unable to keep a long term perspective or maintain a patient long-term policy. Voters will tolerate casualties for only so long, especially if there is no visible progress. On the other hand the worldwide media is easy to enlist and manipulate, and the emergence of the internet has simplified the propaganda, communications and organizational tasks of any insurgency.

The new US Army/Marine Counterinsurgency Field Manual tries to address these issues, but however enlightened it is, the military approach will always be hobbled by the constraints and inconstancy and limited time horizons of democratic governments and their constituents, we the voters of America.

It seems to me the only solution here is to improve our skills at winning the hearts and minds of foreign populations, which is not a military task and will not be accomplished by military means, though security forces can certainly help maintain stability at times.

Spending billions producing yet more high-tech weapons systems is not likely to solve the current insurgency problem. Spending a fraction of that money on staffing our intelligence and diplomatic and aid agencies with people who really understand other countries and their languages and their cultures would pay far better dividends.

Unless, of course, the administration in power, in its arrogance, decides once again to ignore their input, as they did with Iraq.