Thomas E. Ricks's Blog, page 74

C.P. Snow (II): On ballistic missile defense and American exceptionalism

C.P. Snow makes some
comments in his book on science and government that seem to me to apply to
aspects of our lives today.

Be wary, Snow
writes, of "the euphoria of gadgets" combined with "the euphoria of
secrecy." He explains, "anyone who is drunk with gadgets is a menace. Any
choice he makes -- particularly if it involves comparison with other countries
-- is more likely to be wrong than right. The higher he climbs, the more he is
going to mislead his own country." This made me think of some of the goofier
programs in ballistic missile defense.

He also takes a pop
at American exceptionalism: "it often seems that Americans endanger
themselves most when they get possessed by a sense of their own uniqueness."

Some thoughts on the need for greater diversity in professional military education

By
Joan Johnson-Freese


Best
Defense guest columnist

Professional Military Education (PME) issues
increasingly have been a topic of discussion and debate for about 3 years now.
Diversity, however, has not been a conspicuous part of the online and print
discussion, likely to avoid further complicating already complicated PME
faculty qualification and military/civilian mix issues. But diversity was
raised as an issue at the NATO-sponsored PME conference at Wilton Park and at
the ITX3 conference at National Defense Uuniversity, both earlier this year.
The curtain is being pulled back, exposing the "sea of sameness" that prevails,
at least in senior PME institutions. Gender is only a part of the diversity issue,
but it's a place to start discussion.

A flag officer stood on the stage at the Naval
War College last year addressing the student body, regaling the students about
the intellectually charged program they were about to embark on, and the
magnificently diverse student body and faculty. To its credit, women currently
comprise 16 percent of active-duty Navy officers, including 36 flag officers.
Yet many people curiously looked around the room at a sea of sameness. My male
colleague sitting next to me whispered that we were about as diverse as the
Pyongyang Parliament.

During a recent routine government inspection
at the Naval War College, I was told, the investigators asked in advance what
civilian institution the Naval War College considered its peer for comparative
purposes. Yale was the answer. That provides an empirical basis for considering
my assertion that gender diversity is an issue with PME, or at least the Naval
War College as a sample. By just looking at faculty gender data offered on
websites, admittedly not perfect, a "gap" between military and civilian
academic institutions becomes obvious. Of the approximately 302 individuals
listed as faculty on the NWC website, 27 are women, or about 9 percent. Looking
at the History and Political Science Departments at Yale, the Harvard Kennedy
School, the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, and the U.S. Naval Academy,
the percentages are 40 percent, 42 percent, 28 percent, and 20 percent,
respectively. So the NWC employs less than half the women faculty as the Naval
Academy, and one-quarter the women of the school it considers its civilian
comparative peer.

Of the 27 faculty women at the NWC, less than
half actually hold teaching positions, or about 4 percent, making comparisons
even starker. Scientists at Rensselaer have found the tipping point for the
spread of ideas is at least 10 percent. Below that number of committed opinion
holders, there is no discernible progress in the spread of ideas. Though it can
be argued that departments like Joint Military Operations (JMO) skew the
numbers toward males with military backgrounds, even within the other
departments the numbers aren't even close to civilian "peer" schools.

These figures regarding gender don't even begin
to consider the even lesser numbers of minority faculty members if considered
by race and ethnicity.

What difference does diversity or lack thereof
make in education? Educators are supposed to challenge students, and that
includes challenging them from differing perspectives. A non-diverse body of
people, many if not most with similar career backgrounds, teaching the same
constituencies as themselves does little to broaden personal perspectives. In
fact, in some cases it simply reinforces what can be already very narrow
perspectives and the undermining of the independence of ideas becomes the norm.

Blindly building on non-diverse inputs has the
inherent risk of insularity. Homogeneity can be a huge hindrance in what is
today an increasingly dynamic, cross-cultural, cross-functional, joint military
environment. Demographics of military situations and issues in general are
making the military a more complex structure requiring a broadening of the
composition of those that work with and for the system. It is the breadth of
perspectives that comes from diversity that aid in the effective execution of
changing requirements for the curricula, creation of more informed counsel for
college governance and strategic oversight. Diverse environments allow for more
productive situations in which the challenging issues of today's military can
be confronted as well as open situations to opposing and non-like-me opinions.

Why are there so few women in PME? The
often-heard reason is "we can't find qualified women" -- though schools
suggested as NWC-comparable seem able to do so. Having served as a department chair
for eight years with responsibility for multiple faculty searches during that
period, the problem is actually twofold: hiring and retention. Many of the
highly-qualified women invited to interview would look around, see how few
women there were, and consider that as prima facie evidence women aren't really
wanted, with a consequently high potential for a hostile work environment. Some
women who came didn't stay, finding the work environment indeed "difficult."

Experiences vary. The professional opportunities
offered to PME faculty can be significant and the teaching very rewarding, and
women certainly recognize and appreciate that. But personally, some highly-qualified
women find the environment personally demoralizing. During my tenure as chair,
issues were raised to me (including from beyond my department) ranging from
offensive offhand statements and finding diverse input into discussions
unwelcomed, to sometimes outright bullying by both male students and
colleagues, and a case of simple assault. Though it is easy to say individuals
who take offense should "toughen up or leave," that approach defeats the
benefits of diversity, and ignores what should be considered the basic
expectations of professional courtesy.

Having also been privy to eight years of
student evaluations of faculty, it was not uncommon for teaching reviews of
female faculty to include comments about their demeanors, personalities, and
whether or not students "liked" them, comments far less common in reviews of
their male faculty counterparts. There are seminars that welcome diverse views
-- I have had the pleasure of teaching many of those -- but there are others
that do not. Unquestionably as well, behavior deemed "assertive" in a man is
seen as "bitchy" in a woman, as proven repeatedly in research on group
dynamics.

Lack of diversity within the faculty is
similarly reflected within the student body itself. Minorities in general make
up less than 10 percent of the student body. Female students face challenges
similar to female faculty.

Occasional meetings are held for administrators
to "pulse the feelings" of women faculty members and students. Unfortunately
they are often perceived as a perfunctory gesture of administrative concern.

The Naval War College is not unique, or likely
even the most egregious of the PME schools in terms of lack of diversity,
merely representational. Academia has already recognized the value of
diversity, and the private sector is increasingly following suit. Targets such
as 10 percent should be seen as a minimal threshold, not an end state.

Dealing with complex future issues requires
complex thinking, what Joseph Nye calls "contextual intelligence" in his 2013
book Presidential Leadership and the
Creation of the American Era. "Contextual intelligence" is gained through
exposure to multiple perspectives, information sources, and experiences. Increased,
sustained, and serious efforts toward faculty diversity in PME, and not just
gender related, are a necessary step toward providing PME students the
"contextual intelligence" requisite to deal with the future challenges they
will undoubtedly encounter.

Joan Johnson-Freese is a professor and former
department chair at the Naval War College. She is the author of  Educating America's Military   (Rutledge, 2013). The views expressed here are strictly her
own.

C.P. Snow (I) on radar, chaff and science in the years leading up to World War II

I finally got around
to C.P. Snow's Science and
Government, which despite its
sweeping title is really a look at how two British scientists, Henry Tizard and
Frederick Lindemann (also DBA Lord Cherwell) approached the questions of the
military use of radar and chaff in the years before World War II. The book had been
sitting in the pile for about a year and I needed something different to read
after finishing a collection of Churchill's speeches.

Honestly, I was
underwhelmed. I wanted more details and less speculative thinking.

That said, there are
some good thoughts in the book.

"Tizard actually persuaded
the [Royal] Air Force to base their defensive planning on the assumption that
radar would work long before the stations existed as practical systems. This
was an act of astonishing intellectual courage. Not only Tizard deserves the
highest credit for it, but also the officers of Fighter Command."




"The lesson to the
scientists was the prerequisite of sound military advice is that the giver must
convince himself that, if he were responsible for action, he would himself act
so."




In a closed system
not subject to public scrutiny (in this case, top secret deliberations),
"personalities and personal relations carry a weight of responsibility which is
out of proportion greater than any they carry in open politics."

A fascinating but difficult book of poems about war correspondent Paul Watson

Some of the
scariest people I've ever met are war photographers. They're the people who are
paid to pop up their heads for a good look when everyone else with sense is
diving for cover. Some of them have very cold eyes, of the sort that Special
Operators are depicted as having in the movies. These sometimes are people who
have grown too comfortable with looking violent death in the face, at some cost
to their souls.

I mention
this because I was alone over the weekend (my wife had to attend to a family
issue) and so the moment seemed right to pick up Dan O'Brien's War Reporter, a book of poems about the journalist Paul Watson, who is most famous
for his photograph of the body of an Army aviator being dragged through the
streets of Mogadishu in October 1993.

That moment
is the point of departure for the book. O'Brien writes, "When Paul took this
picture he heard the dead man speak to him: 'If you do this, I will own you forever.'" And it develops that the
dead man was correct.

You get the
picture. This is a book you read because you have to, not because you want.
Even as I settled down in the living room to read this, I began to find reasons
not to -- I disliked the cover, even more the blurbs. (I mean, invoking Wallace
Stevens?) By the time I got to the title page, I felt a little antsy and didn't
know why. I think I probably was a bit scared, unconsciously, of what I was
getting into. I have worked hard to leave all that behind and I now lead a
peaceful life. Even my dreams are pretty good nowadays.

Then I
began reading the poems. Soon I thought, this might be the best book ever
written about war photography.

When I pick
up a book, it is usually because I hope it will tell me things I didn't know.
This one was different, because it told me things I was hoping to forget, and
brought back people and days I would be happier not to think about. As I read,
I suddenly remembered, for the first time in years, a female photographer I met
in Baghdad. I thought of her as "The Photographer of Death." She just felt like
Death to me, with a capital D, when she walked into the room. I remember being
told that she would go out and work all day and then come back every night and
kill a bottle of inexpensive Scotch. With her sunken eyes I couldn't tell
whether she was 25 or 45. I thought of her especially when I read the line of
Watson thinking of a female journalist who was trying to seduce him: "I suspected she was already dead."

Attacked
and pummeled by a mob in Mosul one day, O'Brien has Watson thinking,

 . . .
Remember


what the ghost promised me: If you do this


I will own
you. I just have the this feeling


he's thinking, You watched my desecration,


now here
comes yours.

He has a
similar sickening thought about his own troubled mind when a Serb militiaman
threatens to kill him, a threat that he almost welcomes: "God's great aim. God's
executioner draining my poisoned skull."

Another
very strong line:

 . . .
The fog of war


as crematorium smoke.

I think that is a brilliant
combination, and a bit frightening, drawing a direct line from Clausewitz to
the Nazi death camps.

One caveat: Not all the poems are good,
or even are poetry. These lines to me, about how Canadian peacekeepers in
Somalia tortured a youth they captured, felt more like
a human rights report than a poem:

 . . . . Some soldiers


waterboarded him, then sodomized him


with a broomstick. Extinguished cigarettes


on his penis. Then beat him with meal packs


till he died.

Like I said, you read a book like this
because you have to, not because you want to.

Move over, Pentagon: Will Amazon one day field the world's largest drone force?

Quite possibly. Amazon chief and
potential king of the world Jeff Bezos says he wants to use drones to make same-hour deliveries of small
packages. Maybe the Air Force could subcontract its next war out to him.

Pakistanis living on the Afghan
frontier expressed mixed feelings about the retailing giant's new delivery
plan.

DIA chief Flynn says collaboration is the key to solving future intelligence problems

By Lacy Hebert


Best Defense office of analyzing intelligence analysis

One lesson that Lieutenant
General Mike Flynn, the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, says he
takes from his years of experience in the intelligence field is that challenges
can be overcome as long as U.S. intelligence agencies invest, prioritize, and
most importantly, collaborate. "If there's one thing that we know," he says,
"it's that we absolutely can't do any of this alone."

This does not just include
three-letter agencies collaborating and working together, however. Flynn,
speaking at the Brookings Institution recently, said that it is essential that
the United States partner with other countries, with foreign law enforcement,
and with non-governmental organizations to share knowledge and experience. By
contrast, he said, it is the failure to cooperate, the withholding of
knowledge, the going it alone, that results in gaps in our intelligence and
makes us vulnerable.

For example, said Flynn, a
former director of intelligence for U.S. Central Command, al
Qaeda in Syria is a serious problem for
not just the region, but for the international community as a whole. Foreign
elements fighting there will improve and develop
their skills and then are likely to bring those skills back to their home
countries or elsewhere. One side effect of the Syrian civil war is that the
international community has begun talking about this, he said.

What are the chances of joint Israeli-Saudi airstrikes against Iran in about a year?

I know it sounds bizarre, but we
are at a point where the Israelis
are more aligned with Saudi Arabia on
the crucial question of the day -- what to do about Iran -- than they are with
the government of the United States. "For the first time,
Saudi Arabian interests and Israel are almost parallel. It's incredible." That's a Saudi prince talking. So what is the logical consequence of that realignment?

Well, other Saudis are in Washington quietly but clearly saying they
would permit an Israeli overflight through their airspace. And that may be just
a first step. Where does it lead? I think, possibly, to the concept of Israeli and Saudi strikes launched from the bases in Saudi Arabia
where the U.S. Air Force used to operate. Stranger things have happened. The Saudi
and Israeli F-15s even have interchangeable parts. Flying out of Saudi would
make striking Iran far simpler than trying to stage it out of Israel and doing
a bunch of aerial refueling on the back and forth. Being that much closer, the
joint Israeli/Saudi force could hit many more targets -- i.e., we'll do the
nuclear sites, you do the air defense sites and then their missile launchers.
Then we'll do an air cap against retaliatory strikes. It would be interesting
to see if Israeli jets were tasked to intercept Iranian warplanes in Saudi
airspace. Maybe, along the lines of the old Russian move in various wars,
Israeli pilots would fly Saudi F-15s.

Of course, as a friend points out,
Iran would be likely to respond with a series of its own attacks, some of them
pretty hard to intercept. We'd see at least some retaliatory missile strikes
against Tel Aviv, Riyadh, and Jeddah. And likely some cyberhits on Saudi bank
accounts around the world.

And then we'd be off to the races.
What would the next step be? Closing the Persian Gulf?
Attacks on oil facilities? Hezbollah messing up Lebanon?
How would the Syrian civil war be affected?

And, of course, the effects on the
world economy would be interesting.

A few words in favor of the much-derided individual replacement system for soldiers

As MajRod knows, I
sometimes like to take a look at icons like readiness and ask, Do we really
need to do it that way? I especially like to do that on Fridays so we can talk
about it over the weekend. But I am doing it today because I don't plan to post
on Thanksgiving or the day after. 

So I was pleased to read an essay
on the individual replacement system by Robert S. Rush, the only retired
command sergeant major I know who has a Ph.D. from Ohio State, one of the best
military history departments in the country. Now, "everyone knows" that, just
as readiness is "good," so is unit rotation. Or at least that unit rotation is
better for cohesion, and so for military effectiveness, than the stinking
individual replacement system used in World War II and Vietnam.

Or so I thought. Then I read CSM
Rush's essay "The Individual Replacement System: Good, Bad or Indifferent?" (It
was presented at a conference about 10 years ago, but I don't believe it has
been published.) Among his surprising findings, based on an intense study of
the replacement system in the U.S. Army in Europe in late World War II:

"Units fail most often when not
maintained at strength, not because the soldiers lack long-term bonds with one
another."




"Units are more combat-efficient
when there are combat-wise veterans within the unit."

His bottom line is worth quoting
at length:

"Success results NOT from
rotating organizations in and out of combat but from sustaining those
organizations while in combat. Battalions fighting at near battalion strength can
accomplish missions that battalions fighting at company strength cannot, even
when it is a company of grizzled warriors. It is only when the veteran cadre is
sustained by a continual influx of new soldiers who in turn coalesce around
this battle-hardened core that a unit's combat power increases."

Taking Lincoln's name in vain: Why Admiral Mullen was wrong to write that all soldiers' deaths are meaningful

By Jim Gourley


Best Defense combat culture columnist

"That these dead
shall not have died in vain." So went the closing lines of Abraham Lincoln's
renowned Gettysburg Address and the opening of Admiral Mike Mullen's op-ed in the Washington
Post the other day arguing that no servicemember, either in time of war or
peace, ever dies in vain. "How could it be," he asks, "that in a
democracy -- a free society -- men and women may risk their lives to defend
that freedom and lose those lives in vain?" He never entertains any
theories, immediately denying his own proposition. "It cannot be so."

For a man who so presciently observed that America's debt posed its greatest national
security threat, this obtuse, absolutist argument signifies an egregiously
myopic perspective on the meaning of death in warfare to the leaders and the
led. Mullen uses the image of bereaved family members he's spoken with to prop
up his thesis that the fundamental nature of a soldier's service defines that
of their death. He even quotes Walt Whitman that a soldier "has yielded up
his young life at the very outset" in service to his nation.

In other words, a
meaningful and honorable death in uniform is assured as soon as you raise your
right hand, like some clause in your cell phone contract. He reinforces this
argument with platitudes about the tragic nature of all war and the non sequitur comparison to Civil War
soldiers dying from lack of modern medical care. Just because they expired of
simple infection doesn't mean their deaths were less purposeful, he says. In
this he is correct, but only because how a person dies has nothing to do with
why a person dies.

It would be
altogether convenient for any commander to lead with this mindset, and this is
why Mullen's argument does such disservice to military leadership. To say that
every servicemember dies "because they were fighting for freedom" is
a wholesale dismissal of a commander's obligation to the care and welfare of his
or her subordinates. Mullen glosses over the layers of faulty strategy, failed
systems, and poor decisions that highlight culpability at the highest levels of
military leadership in cases such as Wanat and veteran suicide. For him, it is
simpler to lump them together with all the other deaths and assess them in
aggregate and from a distance. "In war, as in any other facet of life,
there are losses more difficult to reconcile -- those caused by accident,
faulty judgment, treachery or carelessness. There are losses wholly
preventable, even as there are losses wholly necessary. Neither is to be
pitied. Neither lacks honor. There is no ‘good' death in war."

Again, half-truths
are Mullen's allies. No one would argue that an unpreventable death is better
than a preventable one. But Mullen's rhetorical sleight of hand here decouples
the sense of loss from the sense of duty. Just because a person died honorably
and we all feel sad doesn't remove the fact that they didn't have to die and
some of us are to blame. It was this philosophy that shielded General
McChrystal from accusations of falsifying
records in order to keep
Pat Tillman's name from being dragged through the mud. There are dozens more
such cases. This is why Mullen's ideas are anathema to leadership. The more
honorable a soldier's death, the more easily we can absolve commanders of
responsibility. The result is a leadership structure that regards the spilling
of blood about as well as it accounts the expenditure of the
country's treasure.

Mullen thus closes
by taking his rationale to its ultimate, strategic conclusion. "Let us
take comfort in the knowledge that, whatever the outcome in Iraq and
Afghanistan, the precious blood these young people shed for that future shall
not -- cannot -- have been shed in vain." This is nothing short of obscene. For years, congressmen, senators,
and generals have argued that "we must finish the job" in order to
ensure those servicemembers did not die in vain. Lincoln himself made the same
appeal to the crowd gathered at Gettysburg. But Mullen plows ahead in what
seems complete ignorance of Lincoln's intent. He hastens us to believe that,
regardless of the result, dying in vain was never possible. The Lord's truth is
marching on, even if Johnny never comes marching home. Glory, hallelujah.

Mullen proposes that
so long as the casus belli is draped
in the same red, white, and blue as the soldiers' coffins, then its valor is as
secure as their own. The last decade has proven the contrary. In either case,
looking underneath offers a mortifying encounter with the realities of war. The
hubris and poor strategic thinking of our military and political leaders in the
Iraqi invasion is well documented. The speed at which strategic commanders have
changed objectives and measures of success in Afghanistan is matched only by
how quickly we seem to fail to meet them. Soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines,
agents of our intelligence and law enforcement agencies, and even civilians
have died in our wars. Some of them have died by the enemy's hand, some by
their comrade's, some by their own, and others by that of fate.

But they have all
died in campaigns that, however virtuous, were mismanaged to the point of
failing to achieve their ultimate objectives. It is disturbing enough that the
highest ranks in contemporary military leadership have created an atmosphere
that allows commanders to write off billions of dollars wasted on weapons
systems and war efforts without fear of accountability. The emergence of a
culture that can avoid deep reflection of its culpability in spent lives based
on pretenses of virtue, and then go so far as to codify it as Mullen has done,
is truly horrifying.  

Jim Gourley is an author , journalist , and former military intelligence officer.

The eternal BS of higher headquarters: An example from German pilots in 1940

One of the eternals of combat is that
frontline fighters will always feel betrayed by the BS being peddled by top
leaders. I thought of this when I read that during the summer of 1940, the
German leaders kept saying that the Royal Air Force was on the verge of
collapse. It didn't feel that way to Luftwaffe pilots, who
supposedly would radio each other sarcastically as they crossed the British
coast, "Here they come again, the last fifty
British fighters."

The RAF did take a beating that summer,
of course. I was surprised to see that the majority of Australian pilots flying
for the RAF were killed -- that is, 14 of 22, according to Len Deighton's Battle of Britain. (Other sources offer
different numbers.) By contrast, Deighton's chart shows that 418 of the 2,543
British-born aircrew members were lost.