Thomas E. Ricks's Blog, page 58

Rebecca's War Dog of the Week: NYPD gets its first MWD

By Rebecca
Frankel        


Best Defense Chief Canine Correspondent

The New York Police Department (NYPD) recently welcomed
three-tour veteran and recently retired Military Working Dog Caesar to its
ranks. The seasoned Army dog is the first war dog to work for the Big Apple's
police department as a member of its "NYPD Transit Bureau's Canine
Unit"; he's also part of a new working relationship between the military
and the NYPD.

Through friendly channels the NYPD's K-9 Unit training
supervisor, Sgt. Randy Brenner, has worked
out an arrangement with "a Pentagon official ... to allow the NYPD to
use military dogs for police work once they've finished serving their
country." The arrangement reportedly
"saves the police force the $6,000 to $8,000 cost of training an
inexperienced dog."

According to Brenner, Caesar's war-dog life prepared him
well for the streets of New York. After three combat deployments, the
four-year-old German Shepherd had no trouble with the gauntlet of environmental
tests Brenner put him through at a nearby haunted house -- he doesn't
"spook" easily.

Brenner seems to be the right person to bridge the short
divide between military service and law enforcement; he understands all the
good an MWD can do once he's retired from service with more working years still
ahead:

"I look at it as, I'm giving a
veteran a job," said [Brenner]. "Their sole purpose is working. Every day to
them is a great day as long as they're working. They're excited to work."

An added bonus for Caesar, his new handler, Officer Juan Rodriguez, is
also an Army veteran who did "two overseas tours" during his military
service.

Hat Tip: TR and DJR.

One good way to respond to Putin: Take the unexpected cushion shot in Syria

By
Lt. James Schmitt, USAF


Best
Defense guest columnist

If there's one lesson to be learned in the
Russian invasion of Crimea, it is that hard power acts faster than soft power.
The international outrage against Russia for its actions traveled at a fraction
of the pace of the Russian troops moving out of their bases in the region.
Consequences for the action will follow "in days, not weeks," according
to unnamed U.S. officials, but the entire Russian takeover of the peninsula took
less than a day. The slow reaction of the international community in Ukraine
follows an ineffectual reaction from the international community in a much more
deadly Syrian conflict. International inaction was likely part of Vladimir Putin's decision-making
calculus when he was planning, allegedly for weeks, Russia's advance.

In fact, for Russia, the conflicts in Syria and
Ukraine bear striking similarities. In both cases, Russia is acting to protect
a strategically-important warm water port, at Tartous in Syria and at
Sevastopol in Ukraine. In both cases, the standing governments were supportive
of Russian interests, even if not perfectly so, but faced popular uprisings
with the open backing of Western powers. Finally, in both cases, the catalyst
for action was exactly what Russia is determined to avoid within its own
borders: mass uprisings by groups that feel politically underrepresented. These
three similarities touch on central interests of the Russian state: power
projection, international alliances, and domestic stability. In this light, the
benefits of previously unthinkable Russian intervention in Ukraine become more
clear.

Meanwhile, the United States and its allies
seek opposite goals on all three fronts in order to protect -- or produce -- security
in Europe, peace in the Levant, and human rights within Russian borders.
Ukraine, however, is no place to make a stand against an aggressive Russian
advance.

The reason lies in the differences that are
plainly obvious to Western powers. First and most importantly, the humanitarian
crisis that Syria represents dwarfs the violence in Ukraine. While there have
been close to
100
deaths in Ukraine, the number in Syria now likely
exceeds 140,000.
On the most basic humanitarian level, there is more to be gained with an end to
the Bashar al-Assad government in Syria than to be gained with Ukrainian
control over Crimea. More cynically, the United States benefits more from a new
ally in the Middle East than from supporting an old and only sometimes-friendly
nation in Eastern Europe. Removing Assad would deprive Iran of a key ally and
transit point for arms to Hezbollah, would help stabilize a rapidly
deteriorating situation in neighboring Iraq, and would calm Israel's nerves at
the start of a new
push for peace talks.
In Eastern Europe, on the other hand, the United States and NATO may have
already overextended themselves with their standing commitments. Taking on more
responsibility in the region could destabilize regions that rely on NATO's
finite attention, such as Afghanistan. Finally, there are more means for the
United States to help the Syrian opposition than to help in Ukraine; financial
assistance for the Ukrainian government and punitive sanctions against Russia
are unlikely to significantly rebalance the conflict. In Syria, large increases
in weapons shipments to the Free Syrian Army, looser restrictions on the
recipients of aid, and cruise missile strikes designed to encourage the
government to accelerate suspiciously slow chemical weapons deliveries all have
the potential to make major differences in the opposition's favor.

The benefit of a Syrian response to Russia's
Ukrainian aggression is that it uses both parties' assumptions. The Russians,
who perceive the conflicts to be similar, will likely (and correctly) take the
increased intervention as a countermove. In future cost-benefit analyses, they
will now have to consider not just theater ramifications, but immediate
international ramifications. This return to a mindset more similar to the Cold
War, when conflicts in Cuba could be partially resolved by drawbacks in Turkey,
may lead to a more stable and conservative Russia in the future, which would be
a benefit to uneasy neighbors such as Georgia.

For the West, the low point of Russian
legitimacy in the international arena provides a unique opportunity to seize
the initiative in Syria for the first time since the Russian-crafted chemical
weapons deal that left John Kerry agreeing to what he once considered an
offhand joke. More importantly, an ebb in Russian soft power could allow the
United States to help solve a humanitarian crisis that continues to claim the
lives of hundreds each week.

The takeway: The United States does not face a
dichotomy between doing nothing and an impossible military reaction against
Russia; instead, it can seize a major opportunity to save thousands of lives.

James Schmitt is a pilot in the U.S. Air
Force and a graduate of American University. The views expressed here are his
own.

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs's fine assessment of risk being taken in budget

General
Dempsey's assessment of the amount and kinds of risk
the United States is taking by cutting its defense budget is an
extremely good statement of the conventional
wisdom. And I mean that in a good way -- I don't see a lot to with which to disagree
in it.

The key quote: "My greatest concern is that we will
not innovate quickly enough or deeply enough to be prepared for the future, for
the world we will face 2 decades from now." That should be tattooed on the
foreheads of our four-star generals. Maybe in reverse, so they ponder it every
morning as they shave.

The world of JAGs continues to go to hell in a hand basket: BG Sinclair edition

The
lead prosecutor in the Army's case
against Brig. Gen. Sinclair was removed after he
became persuaded that the government's chief witness was lying about certain
evidence. He felt strongly about it, saying to a superior, "She lied to me. She lied to me.
She [expletive] lied to me. Why would she lie to me?"

Said
superior officer visited him in a Washington-area hotel and decided that the
prosecutor was going nuts. "I've
never seen a human being so stripped of logic and rationality," related Brig.
Gen. Paul Wilson, the prosecutor's commander.

(My
side question: Why were two Army lawyers meeting at the Ritz Carlton? If they are on the
taxpayers' tab, I think Days Inn might be better.)

Meanwhile,
the Bozo Prize for flat-out stupidity goes to BG Sinclair for having 9,100 pornographic
images
on his computer. To further confuse things, he is pleading guilty to some of the charges,
but not to the most serious ones. I do not understand what that really means.

In
other senior officer criminal news, an Air Guard colonel based in Pittsburgh
has been charged with 100 counts of theft, conspiracy, and wire fraud.

Sharp on defense budget: We're taking risks with ground forces, so it would be prudent to plan for ways to rebuild them

One of the best people I know on
analyzing the defense budget is Travis Sharp, and he delivers as usual in his new brief. He
concludes that the United States is taking some risks by cutting its ground
forces, and so should study different ways to regenerate ground forces quickly.
Given this situation, Sharp, who lives up to his surname, writes:

DOD could add more substance to the
debate by studying transformative models for generating ground forces,
including a progressive- or tiered-readiness system. Tiered readiness has a bad
reputation because it is often blamed for past U.S. military failures. However,
critics often overlook the fact that these failures had many causes, including
significant strategic errors by civilian political leaders.

Future of War (14): It is gonna be pretty much like it was for the last 4,000 years

By
Capt. Michael Junge, U.S. Navy


Best
Defense future of war entrant

On January 22nd, Tom
opened up his "future of war contest." Two days later, he posted about
Churchill, the tank, and the airplane. The short yet thought-provoking post
included this gem: "As a general I know says: all warfare is a lethal
version of Rock-Paper-Scissors."

The juxtaposition of the two stuck in my brain
and I did what Mark Twain advised -- when I feel like writing I lie down until
the feeling goes away. While I am no longer lying down, the feeling did not go
away. How can someone ask on Wednesday for
thoughts on the future of warfare and on Friday put forward such a simplistic idea as
"all warfare is a lethal version of Rock-Paper-Scissors"? Aren't the two ideas
in conflict?

Actually, they aren't. Well, that's not true. If
you are a real RMA-believing, innovation-pushing tech warrior, then the idea
that war is synonymous with Rock-Paper-Scissors (RPS) is anathema. But,
when you pull back a bit, that simple child's game tells us so much about the future
of warfare.

For common understanding, as well as for the one
or two who have never heard of the game, RPS is a game played by two people who
simultaneously make one of three shapes with their hands, a closed fist (rock),
a downward facing palm (paper), or the index and middle finger extended
(scissors). The hierarchy of victory is circular. Rock smashes scissors,
scissors cuts paper, paper covers rock.

This is where the RBIPTW says "with a sharp
enough pair of scissors I can cut that rock." Sure, and doing so violates the
rules of the game. Rules? War doesn't have any rules! Well, yes, it does. And
not the Law of Armed Conflict kind, but real, no kidding rules that have
existed since the beginning of warfare and will continue into the future.

1. The rules exist. They can be modified, but
not thrown away.


2. Whoever has more bullets than enemy soldiers
wins.


3. Victory isn't about killing the enemy. It's
about fixing the problem that led to the war.


4. The key to winning is in recognizing and
exploiting non-random behavior.

The rules
exist.

This rule is like that wonderful witticism of
"Rule No. 1: The captain is always right. Rule No. 2: If the captain is wrong,
see Rule No. 1." There are basics of rules. Operational art and its reliance on
the factors of time, space, and force show how the interplay of variables has
existed since the beginning of warfare. No matter how many times someone says
"it's all different now," it really isn't.

Whoever
has more bullets than enemy soldiers wins.

All war remains based on attrition. Each side
seeks to attrite the other's soldiers, resources, or will to fight. That hasn't
changed. It won't change.

Victory
isn't about killing the enemy. It's about fixing the problem that led to the
war.

War can be about all sorts of things. While many
cold warriors think that winning is about killing the other guy (getting the
other poor dumb bastard to die for his country), the reality is that warfare is
political and the only way to resolve the conflict -- to win the war -- is to
address the underlying condition that led to the war. Drones, nukes, k-bars,
limpets, Molotov cocktails, IEDs don't address the underlying condition of the
conflict. People address the underlying condition.

The key to
winning is in recognizing and exploiting non-random behavior.

This is where we come back to RPS. Unlike coin
tosses, RPS has an element of randomness to it. In general, opponents devolve
to non-random actions. The person who favors rock over the other two options
will return to rock often enough that his opponent can eventually counter with
paper. Numerous computer programming contests
have shown that computers can be programmed to defeat human players -- unless
that human player is playing completely randomly. How rare is that? While
political science is replete with the concept of rational actors, how common is
the irrational actor? When one remembers that rationality is bounded and learns
to look at the opponent's actions in relation to what the opponent seeks to
achieve (like lying about WMD to stay in power) we can predict what will happen
next. Having the resolve to act, well, that's another issue altogether.

So, what does the future of warfare look like? Pretty
much like the last four millenia. One group will insist that the nature of
warfare hasn't changed while another insists that everything is different. And
like all things, the truth is somewhere in the middle.

Capt. Michael Junge
(USN)
is a military professor at the Naval War College. The opinions expressed here
are his own and not necessarily those of the college, the Navy, the Navy
Department, the Defense Department, or the U.S. government.

Tom note: Got
your own views of the future of war?  Consider submitting an essay . The contest remains open for at least another few weeks.
Try to keep it short -- no more than 750 words, if possible. And please, no
footnotes or recycled war college papers.

A new literary and arts magazine by vets

It is called the Pass in Review, and it is worth
reading. Check it
out. Lovely photography, too. And it isn't all written
by embittered junior officers. (We were debating over
dinner the other night in Austin about whether that last phrase is a redundant
term.) 

FoW (13): You think innovation means better drones? Faster jets? Wrong. We've been out-innovated for the last 13 years.

By Paul Lewandowski


Best
Defense future of war entrant

To
the American military, innovation means technology. Innovating on the
battlefield is synonymous with more electronics, bigger robots, and better
fighter jets. To non-state actors, insurgents and terrorists, innovation has
taken on a fundamentally different meaning. Their tactics are moving away from
technological solutions and into realms where technology does not play a role.

In
the realm of military technology, the U.S. Defense Department and its host of
contractors are the ultimate trump card. America's military budget is greater
than the next 10 largest state actors' military spending combined. Any force attempting
to develop technology superior to American forces will eventually be crushed
under the weight of billions of dollars of DARPA contracts, DOD research
grants, and rapid fielding initiatives.

The
Iraq and Afghan insurgencies have struggled valiantly to out-innovate American
tactical forces. From 2001 until recently, these insurgencies believed they
could turn to technological solutions to outpace coalition counter-IED efforts.
The first IEDs were simple -- a detonator, some copper wire, and an old
artillery shell. It didn't take long for U.S. forces to answer. Humvees became
armored, gunners' turrets grew taller and more protected. Soon, the insurgency
evolved. They turned to pressure plates and infrared sensors triggered by an
engine's heat. Again, U.S. technological savvy answered. Cell phone and radio
IED detonators were countered as well. The insurgents' reliance on technology
quickly became a hindrance rather than an advantage. US forces could hunt them
down on their cell numbers, via their purchases, texts, and emails.

And
so the terrorists began to innovate in the other direction. Insurgent
techniques became simpler, low-tech. Military-grade munitions gave way to homemade
explosives. Cell phone detonators regressed back to command wire. Suicide
bombers and insurgents disguised as Afghan army or police proved more efficient
than complex, electronic IEDs or expensive VBIEDs. After nearly 13 years of
war, the terrorists have learned that the best counter to a techno-savvy force
is simplicity.

The
gospel of the simple insurgent hasn't just stayed in Afghanistan. In Kenya's
Westgate Mall, insurgents lightly armed with assault rifles, grenades, and an
active Twitter account were able to make the marginalized al-Shabab a global
name in terror. They were able to instill fear in the citizens of Kenya and
humiliate the Kenyan government as it bungled the response. The whole operation
probably cost less than a used car.

Despite
what defense contractors want to believe, the next war isn't going to be fought
or won with drones, biometric readers, or robot suits. It will be won with
smart, adaptive, culturally aware ground
forces. Non-state actors and peripheral militaries have learned not to fall
into the technological arms-race trap again. The 21st century insurgent won't
have a cell phone to tap. He will have a few trusted associates and a courier.
Emails, texts, and phone calls will give way to written plans, handshakes, and
hard currency.

The
next-generation terror network will look more like a drug cartel: deeply embedded
in the local culture, regional in focus, and urban in operation. The new
insurgent will be so low tech he will be virtually untraceable. Another face in
a sea of faces. No biometric data, no name on a government registry, they will
be known to their associates as just a nickname. A ghost in plain view. They
won't be identified as terrorists until they decide to make their moves. Their
tactics will be crude but lethal, more befitting of medieval warfare than
modern combat: stabbing a policeman in the throat, a bucket of chemicals in the
reservoir, a soldier who suddenly turns on the unit. They'll carry weapons that
are innovative yet simple: The counterinsurgent could see them walking to their
target, weapon in hand, and never register him as a threat. It could be a
bucket of chemicals, a farmer with a sickle, or even a rancher with his disease-infected
cattle. These low-tech, low-cost innovations are the insurgent answer to a
modern, technologically-heavy force.

The
21st-century insurgent will be adaptive. He will seize opportunities as they
break. A power transformer left unguarded, a truck full of food, even a herd of
livestock are all opportunities for him to seize. His reaction time is minutes,
not days. The counterinsurgent will struggle to fight him. Governments, by
their very nature, are bureaucratic institutions. They demand supervision,
approval, review. The counterinsurgent can't tap into the local, informal
network the way the insurgent can. No one talks to the uniformed government
official, but everyone talks to their neighbor. It's why the Autodefensa in Mexico can damage a
cartel more in a week than the Mexican army can in a year. They react at the
speed of the cartel and they glean intelligence straight from the source. They
don't just have their finger on the pulse of the community -- they are swimming
in its bloodstream.

The
only way to fight and win as a state actor in the 21st century is to become as
smart and as culturally sensitive as the insurgent. Forces will have to look at
the herd of cattle and see the same target the insurgent does. The
counterinsurgent will have to understand the culture of the streets the same
way his enemy does. No military can afford to outsource analytical,
in-the-moment thinking. The future counterinsurgent must know the culture and
the enemy so well that he can think one step ahead of him. The future of war
demands predictive abilities that only a living, breathing, thinking soldier
can bring to the fight.

A
drone overhead would have done exactly nothing during the Westgate Mall
attacks. Biometric scanners are useless after a food supply has been poisoned.
An F-35 can't put a bomb on a green-on-blue attack. These tactics cannot be
countered by military technology. Believing that technology will answer our
problems, and that money spent developing robots is better spent than on
developing smarter warriors is a dangerous fallacy. It serves only to play into
the hands of America's enemies.

Paul Lewandowski is a former Army officer
and Operation Enduring Freedom veteran. The views expressed here are his own.

Want to reform military education? An easy 1st step would be banning PowerPoint

By Richard L. Russell


Best Defense guest columnist

The winds of curriculum reform are blowing mightily on the campus of the
National Defense University, the pinnacle of Professional Military Education
(PME) in the United States. The changes appear aimed, in part, at infusing the
curriculum with lessons learned from the last decade of war. 

One reform measure -- which no doubt is not in the docket
-- would be easy to propose, extremely beneficial to PME's quality, and of
lasting intellectual benefit to graduates as future military leaders: banning PowerPoint
on campus. PowerPoint has become so acculturated and institutionalized in the
military writ large that it retards the quality of research, analysis,
planning, operations, strategy, and decision making at all levels of command. The
banning of PowerPoint in PME for use by students, faculty, administrators, and
guest speakers, however, would be horrifically difficult to implement given its
powerful hold over the minds and practices of today's military.

Numerous serious strategists, practitioners, and
soldier-scholars over the years have bemoaned and warned of the dangers of the
military's PowerPoint obsession. These warnings from the lips and pens of
serious strategic thinkers should squash any belittling dismissals that
PowerPoint's use is not an issue for serious curriculum reform. Marine General
James Mattis, former combatant commander of Central Command and no one to mess
with on the battlefield, publicly commented, "PowerPoint makes us stupid." Accomplished
conventional and unconventional warfighter, best-selling author, and soon-to-be
three-star general H. R. McMaster observed, "It's dangerous because it can
create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control."

PowerPoint
masquerades as serious research and analysis, but it is anything but. It should
be used as a tool to provide audiences with the highlights or conclusions from
extensive bodies of research and analysis. In other words, PowerPoint should be
just the tip of the intellectual iceberg. In the daily reality practiced high
and low in today's military, however, there are little to no substantive
research papers and analyses behind the endless torrent of PowerPoint
briefings. The briefing slides themselves are the beginning, middle, and end of
thought and study. 

The
routine use of PowerPoint bullets relieves officers from the intellectual
burden of actually writing full sentences and complete paragraphs and stringing
them together to create actual substantive research and analyses. T. X. Hammes,
a retired Marine colonel with a doctorate in history from Oxford University,
recalls that before PowerPoint, "staffs prepared succinct two- or three-page
summaries of key issues. The decision-maker would read a paper, have time to
think it over and then convene a meeting with either the full staff or just the
experts involved to discuss the key points of the paper.... In contrast, today, a
decision-maker sits through a 20-minute PowerPoint presentation followed by
five minutes of discussion and then is expected to make a decision."

The
military's infatuation with PowerPoint, moreover, does not endear senior
officers to their senior-most civilian counterparts. Former Secretary of
Defense Robert Gates -- a practitioner-scholar exemplar -- wrote in his superb
memoir, Duty, that
"PowerPoint slides were the bane of my existence in Pentagon meetings; it was
as though no one could talk without them. As CIA director, I had been able to
ban slides from briefings except for maps or charts; as secretary, I was an
abject failure at even reducing the number of slides in a briefing."

The
military's use of PowerPoint befuddles civilian and foreign counterparts, with
whom the military needs strong working relationships for effective intra-agency
processes and multinational operations. The military "masters" of PowerPoint
cut against these goals by their refusal to use pithy sentences to highlight
important issues. Instead, they insist on stuffing as much information on to
each and every slide, in the smallest font, as humanly possible. The practice
leads cynical observers to suspect that the military tries to cram the
equivalent of an encyclopedia volume on to each and every slide as part and
parcel of a "shock and awe" strategy to overwhelm the audience with so many
factoids that no one is able to articulate a single insightful or critical
question. The audience faced with information overload is compelled to assume
that all is well because "the military must have thought of everything," when
the reality might well be that it has thought of nothing of strategic import.

And our
foreign security partners are mimicking our military's bad habits, fooled into
believing that effective modern militaries are built on PowerPoint. Former
Secretary of Defense Gates saw this first-hand in Iraq: "And right there in the
middle of a war zone, in the equivalent of Fort Apache, Baghdad, I got a
PowerPoint briefing by Iraqi officers. PowerPoint! My God, what are we doing
to these people? I thought."

PowerPoint
stifles substantial discussions, debates, and arguments essential for the
formulation and implementation of strategy. To take just one stunning example
we got from Tom Ricks, the commander of the invasion force for the 2003 Iraq
war, Lieutenant General David McKiernan, could not even get the combatant
commander of Central Command, General Tommy Franks, to issue explicit, clearly
written orders on how to conduct the invasion. The best Franks would do for him
was to pass along PowerPoint briefing slides which he had shown Secretary of
Defense Rumsfeld. McKiernan was exasperated and reflected that "It's quite
frustrating the way this works, but the way we do things nowadays is combatant
commanders brief their products in PowerPoint up in Washington to OSD [Office
of the Secretary of Defense] and Secretary of Defense.... In lieu of an order, or
a frag [fragmentary] order, or plan, you get a set of PowerPoint slides.... [T]hat
is frustrating, because nobody wants to plan against PowerPoint slides."

The
inability of a combatant commander today to issue clear, crisp, and direct
campaign orders is a far cry from American military commanders in the past. One
shining example is General Ulysses Grant, who wrote beautifully. His orders
written in the midst of Civil War battles, sometimes on horseback, remain today
as models of concise clarity. According to late military historian John Keegan,
one of Grant's command contemporaries admiringly commented that "there is one
striking feature of Grant's orders; no matter how hurriedly he may write them
on the field, no one ever has the slightest doubt as to their meaning, or even
has to read them over a second time to understand them." Not bad for a guy who
didn't academically distinguish himself in his class at West Point.

General
officers today have allowed PowerPoint and staffs to atrophy any writing
abilities they might have had. I often joked with a former boss and former
commander of our forces in Afghanistan, retired Army Lieutenant General David
Barno, after he published several excellent journal articles. I told Barno that
he was insulting me by proving wrong my thesis that general officers cannot
write. On one occasion, Barno smiled and replied, "Of course, they can't. They
have staffs to write for them." 

But as
the art of writing papers among senior American military leaders is lost, so
too is the discipline writing imposes on one's mind -- a discipline that often
illuminates weaknesses in thinking that go undetected in the process of
endlessly manufacturing bullet points for PowerPoint slides. Lest readers think
this is only a concern  for an academic
"pinhead," one should note that NASA found out about this PowerPoint pitfall
the hard way. The NASA Columbia Accident Investigation Board argued that NASA
had become too reliant on putting complex information on PowerPoint instead of
technical reports, and as a consequence, "It is easy to understand how a senior
manager might read this PowerPoint slide and not realize that it addresses a
life-threatening situation."

As the
National Defense University, as well as other PME institutions such as the
service war colleges and the Naval Postgraduate School, ponders curriculum
reform, the issue of PowerPoint ought to be on the agenda. A workshop on the
institutional and cultural role of PowerPoint in today's military and the
embedded pitfalls of overreliance on the software would be an intellectual cold
shower for incoming graduate students. Many of these field grade officers would
be aghast at what they would see as an alarming attack on one of their core
staff and command practices by "fifty pound brain" academics. They would liken
PowerPoint pitfall charges to heresy because it is so ingrained in the
military's daily routines of morning intelligence briefings, afternoon staff
briefings, and nightly "hot washes." A welcome-to-campus workshop on PowerPoint
pitfalls would set the stage for the outright banning of the use of PowerPoint
-- whether by faculty, administrators, staff, and guest speakers and lecturers
-- for the entire academic year of residence for masters' degrees.

Although
the easily proposed banning of PowerPoint would be a nothing short of a call
for revolt in the ears of many in the PME leaderships and ranks, if implemented
it could become as routine, customary, and as practical and beneficial as
Chatham House rules, or non-attribution practices, under which much of PME
constructively operates. Such a curriculum reform would be an invaluable Socratic
teaching tool to make students decidedly uncomfortable, force them to maneuver
outside their intellectual comfort zones, and open new vistas for developing
intellectual skills for debating, analyzing, and thinking about policy and
strategy in the real world, not the virtual, mind-numbing world of PowerPoint.

Richard L. Russell teaches for the Security Studies
Ph.D.Program in the Department of Political Science at the University of
Central Florida.

Things I didn’t know: Chevy Chase's grandfather was a hero of Midway

I learned the other day that Miles Browning, one of
the heroes of the battle of Midway, is the grandfather of the comedian Chevy
Chase. However, I already knew that in his youth Chase played drums in a band
with the guys who became Steely Dan.