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RESTREPO 

As I mentioned yesterday, I had the good fortune to receive a courtesy invite to a screening of RESTREPO, a documentary of the experience of the second platoon of Battle Company in the Korengal valley of Afghanistan. The film takes its title from a fallen member of the platoon, a medic Pvt. Juan “Doc” Restrepo, in whose honor the platoon’s new outpost in that ferociously disputed valley is named. The film, largely compiled from footage shot by Tim Hetherington, is the companion to the book WAR by Sebastian Junger on the same subject. There are some substantial differences between the movie experience and reading the book ( which I reviewed here).

First, RESTREPO makes more explicit the harsh terrain in which the war is taking place for the young men of second platoon. If you have ever driven through the mountains of Tennessee or West Virginia, imagine those states as semi-arid, with steeper elevations and go back in time to circa 1900 so that the deeply impoverished residents are struggling to scratch a living out of sand and rocks with little or no comforts of modernity. The valley appears to always be dusty, sunny and very hot. Except up in the hills where it snows – then it looks cloudy and cold. That’s what Korengal looks like.

The Korengalis, it must be said, look like that too. Virtually every Korengali man in the film is hawk-faced gaunt and weathered, fierce faces deeply lined by sun and privation. Korengali elders have the look of determined survivors who built the fortified compounds that cling precariously to the rock wall of the hills, ascending, jerry-built. The village reminded me of what Cabrini-Green might have looked like had it been erected in the 9th century. The warmth of their elders’ feelings toward Americans can be described as “grudging”, well-demonstrated at the shura where the elders asked the Captain for the return of “Yusuf Mohammed” who had been arrested. As it turned out, young “fucking Yusuf Mohammed” had beheaded someone on a jihadi videotape and the clearly disgusted C.O. told the elders that Yusuf would not be coming back.

A second striking difference was that unlike WAR, which is narrated through Sebastian Junger’s perspective, the soldiers are speaking directly themselves, either in candid comments on patrol and in RESTREPO or in de-brief interviews. Junger accurately reflected the views of the soldiers he interviewed but where WAR has one voice, Junger’s, RESTREPO has a multitude of voices with their individual insights, irreverance, agonies, tedium, bitching, regrets and pride. Reading WAR depressed me, but watching RESTREPO, despite scenes of graphic suffering, definitely did not. If you see these young soldiers and do not come away impressed with their mettle and resilience of character, then you have a heart of stone and a head of straw.

A thought that kept coming back to me, which I think was stirred by the imagery of the valley seen in the film in a way the book did not, was that there was nothing of strategic value there whatsoever. Even the Taliban was not particularly welcome and tread very lightly among the Korengalis who are ruled by their elders to a degree that has eroded elsewhere in Afghanistan. It seemed with American operations in the Korengal we were replicating in miniature a Khe Sanh or Dien Bien Phu where the conventional army could draw out the insurgents and that the COIN elements were window dressing, Big Army humoring the party line at CENTCOM while playing a joke on the soldiers ordered to go through the motions of counterinsurgency on the ground. Junger, in his talk after the film hinted as much in saying that 150 men of Battle Company could hold their own there but could not do the COIN objectives in Korengal by themselves that required a full battalion.

After the film was over, Sebastian Junger took questions from the theater audience, which had a strong representation of veterans, including two who had served at RESTREPO and family members who lost sons in Afghanistan. He was a straight shooter in all of his answers, even the difficult moral questions and did not pretend he had all the answers or better answers and tried to testify primarily to what he personally witnessed. A performance that would make me comfortable in relying on Junger’s reporting in the future.

A moving and thought-provoking documentary, RESTREPO opens at Piper’s Alley in Chicago this Friday on July 2nd

I am not even sure what Iron Sky is supposed to be, but I saw it on Blog Them Out of the Stone Age.

But I still hate Illinois Nazis…..

Top Billing! BBC – ‘Artificial life’ breakthrough announced by scientists

Scientists in the US have succeeded in developing the first living cell to be controlled entirely by synthetic DNA. The researchers constructed a bacterium’s “genetic software” and transplanted it into a host cell. The resulting microbe then looked and behaved like the species “dictated” by the synthetic DNA. The advance, published in Science, has been hailed as a scientific landmark, but critics say there are dangers posed by synthetic organisms.

This is a seminal scientific breakthrough with staggering downstream implications. John Robb commented on a few of them:

Now that we have a self-replicating biological platform (yeast — likely one of many different platforms that will be floated over the next couple of years) that can accommodate a completely synthetic genome, the race in on:   towards an abundance in nearly every material or process that can be enabled via biological means.

Nagl vs. Galbraith at The Economist….. 

Coming Anarchy (Curzon) – Education will not save us, Part 2

….To all of this, I can only repeat my Robert D. Kaplan-esque conclusion from my previous post-education will not save us. The long-term battle against Islamist terror is actually fueled by the promotion of education. Whether it be 19th century France, 20th century Russia and China, or 21st century Islamic World, education is not the cure for political extremism but often the catalyst to violence. Pursuing the mass education of the poor as policy to counter the spread of extremism, is misguided.

SWJ Blog – On the DNI

An excellent media round-up on the resignation of Admiral Dennis C. Blair  as DNI

Eide Neurolearning Blog – The Creative Advantage: How Vivid Memories of the Past Help Predictions for the Future

When researchers looked at the brain regions involved in looking at the past, they found many of the same regions activated in response to prompts to imagine events in the future.

….But because personal memory is so closely linked to future prediction pathways, shouldn’t we think about the implications for education? There’s a lot concern these days about American students not being prepared for the new millennial global workplace. Perhaps we spend too little time cultivating rich personal experiences, the development of spatial intelligence, and future thinking.

The Atlantic (Marc Ambinder) – The Secret Pentagon Spy Ring

The CIA doesn’t think STRATCOM should play in this lane. But neither does Robert Gates, the Defense Secretary, or the State Department, or the National Security Staff. Information Operations involves five fields: deception, psychological operations, computer network operations, electronic warfare and operations security. When you hear these terms, you think military, war, penetration of secret bunkers and the like. The State Department and the others want to make sure that Information Operations don’t conflict with what they call Strategic Communications — getting the message out that the US isn’t fighting against Islam, that the Afghan military is a credible institution. State sees IO from the perspective of an ad agency: what does the customer need? STRATCOM sees IO from the perspective of a military targeter: what’s the target, and how to we use all resources to manipulate it.

The problem is that the main thrust of the current administration’s strategy for combating terrorism involves strategic communication, State Department-style. There is room for both approaches, of course, but there isn’t room for an entity like STRATCOM to make unilateral decisions about how to influence the adversary. 

Schmedlap – Why do Good Citizens Suddenly Become Terrorists?

I am not proposing a cause for their shift in behavior. But I am asserting that nobody should be shocked or befuddled. Affluence, integration, and apparent moderate viewpoints do not provide any kind of moral or spiritual guidance. They are not a foundation upon which happiness is built. They are only indicators of past performance, not indicators of future performance. The real head-scratcher is that anyone would measure someone’s success in life by these worldly, materialistic standards.

The League of Ordinary Gentlemen (Rufus F.) – Plato, “Crito”, and should we obey bad laws?

There was Socrates and then there was Plato’s Socrates.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING:

Authors @Google – Dr. David Kilcullen ( Hat tip NYRKinDC)

I found this interesting. It is science and technology journalist Micheal Specter at TED where he is blasting “science denial”:

I may be wrong, but I suspect that Specter’s political and perhaps, economic, views, are to the left of my own. That’s ok – he has a scientific-empirical-rational epistemology, which means there’s an intellectual common ground where debates can actually be resolved or final conclusions arrived at that can be recognized as sensible, even if disagreement based on value choices remained.

More and more, I run across people on the Left and Right using magical, tribalistic, emotionally atavistic or other variations of irrational thinking to justify their positions. Worse, this intellectual equivalent of grunting tends to be coupled with a churlishly defiant refusal to honestly consider the costs (monetary or opportunity) involved or the logical, and still less, the unintended, consequences. Am I just getting old, or is this social phenomena getting rapidly worse?

Ignorance is nothing to be ashamed of because we are all, in varying degrees, ignorant about many things. The important choice as individuals and as a society is adopting an epistemology of rational-scientific-empiricism that, if steadily applied, allows us to chip away at our ignorance and become aware of our errors and solve problems.  On the other hand, adopting a posture of belligerent, stubborn, defense of our own ignorance by evading facts, logic and the conclusions drawn from the evidence of experience is the road to certain disaster.

Our epistemic worldview matters.

Top Billing! It’s the Tribes, Stupid! – Downrange: An Informal Report on a trip to Afghanistan with Marine Gen. James N. Mattis Part I., Part II., Part III., Part IV.

Steve Pressfield was invited to accompany General Mattis, USMC Commander of JFCOM, on the latter’s fact-finding mission in Afghanistan and blogged a colorful four part series that mixes policy observations with travelogue:

[Part Four of Four]

COIN doctrine, counter-insurgency theory, says “protect the people” comes before “kill the enemy.” In meeting after meeting we heard all the right things from officers and civilian leaders who were earnest, brave, well-intentioned, smart, sincere, hard-working and absolutely decent and ethical.  We heard about construction projects and rules of engagement and mitigating civilian casualties, about liaising with tribal elders and managing escalation of force and irrigation and extracting resources and using local people, defeating the corruption of the Karzai regime, delivering good governance, etc.  But I didn’t see any Afghans in the rooms.  I didn’t see any in the PRT sessions (the meetings with the Provincial Reconstruction Teams.)

….Maybe Vietnam is the culprit-the U.S.’s last unhappy experience with a conscripted army. Maybe blame can be localized to whatever forces or events turned the U.S. electorate off to the idea that every citizen owes service to his country-and decreed that 100% of the burden for defending our nation be borne by 5% of its citizenry.  The all-volunteer military is probably the most highly functioning sector in American society and the only one in which the public still places full faith. But our troops are out here alone in space. They can hack it. In their own way they relish it.  But that’s a lot of weight on their shoulders-and lot on Gen. McChrystal’s. “Today in America,” says Navy Capt. Kevin Sweeney, Gen. Mattis’ executive assistant, “if you don’t have a son or husband or a neighbor who’s in the military, you don’t even know there’s a war on. You see film on the news but the fight seems a million miles away, and you don’t want to hear about it anyway. It’s someone else’s problem. I don’t blame people. Who wants to ruin their dinner, hearing about civilian casualties and suicide bombers? But it’s happening. We’re here and this is a real fight and somebody ought to know about it.”

Foreign Policy (Robert Haddick) –This Week at War: Is This the Week Mexico Lost the Drug War?

Hmmm….to use the Iraq War analogy, it might be approaching 2006 in Mexico. Hat tip SWJ Blog.

American Diplomacy (Dr. David Robinson) – Chinese Expansion and Western Influence in 21st Century Africa

Despite advanced case of clientitis, the article has some useful information on emerging Sino-African relationships.

Lawyers, Guns & Money (Dr. Charli Carpenter) – How to Run a Maritime Militia

Dr. Charli reduces piracy to a business model.

Project White Horse (Dr. Chet Richards) – Crisis Management: Operating Inside Their OODA Loops

PPT presentation by Dr. Richards

The Glittering Eye – The Elephant and Using Education As a Model for Healthcare

Dave Schuler’s common sense take on Health Care.

Metamodern – Is ???? doing science? (aka BGI)

Science Daily – TV Ads May Be More Effective If We Pay Less Attention

….The sting in the tail is that by paying less attention, we are less able to counter-argue what the ad is communicating. In effect we let our guard down and leave ourselves more open to the advertiser’s message.

“This has serious implications for certain categories of ads, particularly ads for products that can be harmful to our health, and products aimed at children.

“The findings suggest that if you don’t want an ad to affect you in this way, you should watch it more closely.”

RECOMMENDED VIEWING:

John Seely Brown on “Teaching 2.0 – Doing More with Less”