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I was involved in a discussion elsewhere regarding the excellent and thought provoking article at SWJ by General Huba Wass de Czege on operation art, design and thinking:

Operational Art is Not a Level of War

Strongly recommend you read the article first. My remarks follow, slightly revised:

I have only read a few pieces by General Wass de Czege, those published at SWJ but the caliber of the general’s self-reflective, professional, thinking is something we should strive to emulate.

Here is what seems to be the crtical point in his article, after which I have a comment:

 “We doctrine writers of the 1980’s inserted operational art as a mid-level of war between tactics and strategy – making it the art of translating the governing strategy into the implementing tactics of the “tactical echelons.” And thus, making operational art the province of “campaigning” generals. Because of the way I was conditioned to think then, that strategy was the business of the upper echelons and tactics the business of the lower ones, I miss-translated an idea borrowed from Soviet doctrine about the mediation between strategy and tactics. I was then a product of indoctrination in the US Army’s War and Command and Staff Colleges. These institutions, and the business schools of the time, taught based on the industrial age organizational model of the head (where strategic decisions are made) and the rest of the body (where tactical decisions implement the strategy). I now believe that, without violating the historical meaning of the terms strategy and tactics, this is a much more useful and natural way to think of the relationship between tactics, strategy and operational art.

In fact, this allows one to close the conceptual gap between our bifurcated way of thinking about warfare between nation states and that between states and armed movements of any kind. It also helps do the same for the two tactical operating modes that have recently surfaced in new Army concepts – “combined arms maneuver” and “wide area security.”

Campaigning, another word for operational art, can occur at any scale, and in any milieu, as a close look at what our best company, battalion, and brigade commanders have been doing in Iraq and Afghanistan. “

I think maybe this should be qualified – re; operational art is not a “level”. It is a level of war and it is not at the same time.
 
The difference between the two I think is *how* we are employing the term: “Operational art” as a historical, taxonomic, description of how a military-political command structure has behaved/behaves as a warfighting institutional culture vs. methodologically how they *could* and *should* think about warfare and in turn behave at any “level”.
 
It is not surprising to me, thinking in terms of history, that Wass de Czege, where he wrote that he was in error, was drawing from Soviet examples. If we think about “operational art” as a “level of war” we are led to military powers where powerful ideological constraints systemically interfered with the “natural” clausewitzian connection between Policy and Strategy.
 
The USSR’s Red Army, from the early days of Commissar-Commander relationships in battle, through the Stalinist era to the more modern and restrained (i.e. non-murderous) controls of the Army’s Political Department and vetting security checks for promotion carried out jointly by the military, State Security and Party organs, created an atmosphere where deferral of political implications caused a) a segregation of an officer’s intellectual initiative to organizational and technical military questions and b) constructing military strategy and operational campaigns to at least nominally reflect Marxist-Leninist dogma and the Party line as a matter of necessity, and for a period, in an effort to try and avoid being physically liquidated.
 
Most of the Soviet Union’s most gifted military strategists and tacticians were unsuccessful in this regard and perished (ex. Svechin, Tukhachevskii, Blyukher). Arguably that left an institutional legacy in it’s wake that narrowed the conceptual framework with which Soviet Marshals and generals approached planning for war, including nuclear war.
 
Germany is another example, with the policy-strategy split favoring a professional military focus on operational art emerging as early as 1870 in tensions between Bismarck and Moltke over the war with France, growing worse during the Great War until during the Third Reich, a state of enforced paralysis occurs after 1942 on the Eastern Front. In theory, Hitler, who was his own war minister and commander-in-chief of the Army in addition to being the Supreme Commander, Fuhrer and Reich Chancellor, could (like Stalin) have resolved any contradictions or discordance between Policy and Strategy. Hitler deliberately chose not to do so and his paranoia led him to eventually limit even his field commander’s tactical flexibility (some generals, like Rommel, resisted this more effectively than others).
 
The US military, in my view, suffers a similar fixation. The reasons are very different – proper constitutional deference to civil authority coupled with a limited or absent capacity of most civilian political authorities to think in a complementary strategic fashion that would allow them to best guide their military commanders in jointly constructing a seamless bridge between policy-strategy-operational campaign. Another reason, though I do not want to go into it here, is a cultural reaction to the experience of the Vietnam War that became embedded in the officer corps during the shift to the AVF starting with the Nixon administration.
 
Tom Ricks had a very interesting post at Best Defense while back on the Hew Strachan article in which Ricks argued against the existence of an operational level of war, but as we are not discussing platonic forms, militaries are at whatever “level” of war for which their culture institutionally encourages officers to think about and plan. So in that sense, Wass de Czege is absolutely correct – they can and should be thinking across the whole range and not in “slots”. However, if they don’t do what he suggests and if they do predominantly focus on one “level” as most of their thinking and planning, be it tactics, operations, strategy. Then that level “exists”, it leaves a bureaucratic “trail”, grows a structure to execute it and will be put into practice during a war – at least initially until events force a change of practice from below (the field) or above ( political leaders).

A brief point.

AFJ has a feature article by General Martin Dempsey on the need for the Army in it’s professional military education system to build future leaders who are critical thinkers:

Building Critical Thinkers

….The Army Leader Development Strategy identifies three critical leadership attributes for all Army leaders: character, presence and intellect. In addition to those three foundational attributes, we assert that strategic leaders must be inquisitive and open-minded. They must be able to think critically and be capable of developing creative solutions to complex problems. They must be historically minded; that is, they must be able to see and articulate issues in historical context. Possessed of a strong personal and professional ethic, strategic leaders must be able to navigate successfully in ethical “gray zones,” where absolutes may be elusive. Similarly, they must be comfortable with ambiguity and able to provide advice and make decisions with less, not more, information. While all leaders need these qualities, the complexity of problems will increase over the course of an officer’s career and require strategic leaders to develop greater sophistication of thought….

Read the rest here.

The nation is currently undergoing a debate about public education, of sorts. I say “of sorts” because the debate has largely been very dishonest on the part of proponents of certain kinds of “reforms” in which they hope to have a future financial interest, if radical changes can be legislatively imposed that will a) drastically lower labor costs and b) permit a “scalable” curriculum, to use the grammar of certain equity investor CEOs and lobbyists. The former does not concern this topic as much as the second, though the two will work in unison to create a profitable business model for a for-profit management company desiring to contract with local and state governments to run school systems.

“Scalability” builds upon Bush era NCLB legislation that emphasized standardized testing in basic math and reading skills, with punitive accountability measures for schools and districts failing to make “adequate yearly progress”. Due to the penalties and escalating standards, public schools have frequently narrowed their curriculums considerably, reducing instructional time for history, science, complex literature and the arts to put greater emphasis on basic skill drill instruction in just two subjects.

The net effect is that American public school students, roughly 88 % of all school children, spend a greater proportion of their day at concrete level cognitive activities than they did five or ten years ago and far less time on higher-level “critical thinking” like analysis or synthesis, making evaluative judgments, inquiry based learning or problem solving.

 “Scalability” means expanding on this dreary and unstimulating paradigm with digitally delivered, worksheet-like exercises to comprise the largest percentage of the instructional time for the largest number of children possible. It will be a low-cost, high-profit system of remedial education for would-be contractors, provided students are not able to “opt out”, except by leaving the public system entirely.

But only if their parents can afford it.

The US military relies upon the public schools to deliver the initial k-12 education of the overwhelming majority of their officer corps, to say nothing of the enlisted ranks. The soldiers, sailors, marines and airmen who went to Andover or similar private institutions before enlisting are very, very few. Today some public schools are excellent, some are failing and the rest are in-between. Most make an effort to challenge students of all ability levels, from those needing extra help to those in AP courses and gifted programs. There is systemic resiliency in a diversity of experiences.

What will be the effect on  the military leadership in the future if critical thought is methodically removed from public education by a nationally imposed, remedially oriented, uniform, “scalable” curriculum that is effectively free of science, history, literature and the arts? What kind of cognitive culture will we be creating primarily to financially benefit a small cadre of highly politically connected, billionaire-backed, would-be contractors?

Can inculcating critical thinking really be left entirely to universities and, in the case of the military, mid-career education?

What kind of thinkers will that system produce?

Better?

Or worse?

“What we think, we become” – Buddha

Great multidisciplinary talk by Dr. Denis Dutton on the possible evolutionary origins on culturally universal concepts of aesthetic beauty.

The New York Times, which I read on my iPad, particularly the non-political news sections of the paper where the obnoxious spin is reduced and the content quotient is higher, had an article that I think will ring a bell with ZP readers:

Sam Anderson –What I Really Want Is Someone Rolling Around in the Text’

One day in college I was trawling the library for a good book to read when I found a book called “How to Read a Book.” I tried to read it, but must have been doing something wrong, because it struck me as old-fashioned and dull, and I could get through only a tiny chunk of it. That chunk, however, contained a statement that changed my reading life forever. The author argued that you didn’t truly own a book (spiritually, intellectually) until you had marked it up.

….All of which means I’ve been feeling antsy over the last five years, as I’ve watched the inexorable rise of e-readers. I sympathize with the recent wave of public teeth-gnashing about the future of marginal notes. The digital book – scentless, pulp-free, antiseptic – seems like a poor home for the humid lushness of old-fashioned marginalia. You can’t even write by hand in an e-book – at least not comfortably, not yet. As John Dickerson recently put it on Slate, describing his attempt to annotate books on an iPad: “It’s like eating candy through a wrapper.” Although I’ve played with Kindles and iPads and Nooks, and I like them all in theory, I haven’t been able to commit to any of them. As readers, they disable the thing that, to me, defines reading itself. And yet I’ve continued to hope that, in some not-too-distant future, e-reading will learn to take marginalia seriously. And it looks as if that might be happening right now.

According to the marginalia scholar H. J. Jackson, the golden age of marginalia lasted from roughly 1700 to 1820. The practice, back then, was surprisingly social – people would mark up books for one another as gifts, or give pointedly annotated novels to potential lovers. Old-school marginalia was – to put it into contemporary cultural terms – a kind of slow-motion, long-form Twitter, or a statusless, meaning-soaked Facebook, or an analog, object-based G-chat. (Nevermind: it was social, is my point.) Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the undisputed all-time champion of marginalia, flourished at the tail end of this period, and his friends were always begging him to mark up their books. He eventually published some of his own marginalia, and in the process even popularized the word “marginalia” – a self-consciously pompous Latinism intended to mock the triviality of the form.

Incidentally, How to Read A Book is by Mortimer J. Adler. A classic 

Marginalia is of critical importance to biographers and historians studying controversial figures. We know far more about such disparate figures as John Adams and Joseph Stalin because they enthusiastically marked up their books and documents with sharp and brutally frank opinions, revealing the true feelings often masked to contemporaries. Stalin, who sometimes used a crayon, would mark certain passages with “ha ha!” which, far from being a sign of the dictator’s amusement indicated rage toward the author – sometimes with lethal consequences. Stalin’s rival and equally deadly disciple, Mao ZeDong scrawled erudite literary, scholarly, sometimes poetical, comments about philosophy and Chinese history that belied his taste for the maniacal ruin of a classical Confucian culture in which he was deeply versed.

Richard Nixon, who clinked toasts of maotais with Mao and Zhou ( mostly Zhou as Mao was seriously ill) during Nixon’s historic visit ran his semi-isolated presidency via marginalia he methodcally wrote on news clippings, memos and yellow legal pads all day long, which he sent to his “Lord High Executioner” H.R. Haldeman, who like Henry Kissinger, discreetly ignored Nixon’s angrier, stranger and more ill-considered notations while carrying out Nixon’s incisive or at least harmless instructions. Harry Truman, known for employing blistering profainity in private, was also capable of the searing marginal commentary favored by John Adams.

It isn’t just e-readers, iPads and PCs that have reduced marginalia. The culture of literacy is in a general decline in America and the “gotcha” nature of modern politics and the criminalization of policy differences have caused political figures to adopt a strategy of eschewing diaries, journals, letters and email on the advice of attorneys. Statesmen are following the old rule of Chicago alderman, “Don’t write it down when you can say it, don’t say it when you can nod, don’t nod when you can wink”. It’s a loss to history. We will know far more about Teddy Roosevelt’s true interior life or Richard Nixon’s than we will of Barack Obama’s. Very little that is recorded will not be, in part, artifice and marginalia is a poor strategy for artifice designed to craft an image or advance an argument.

As part of the diminishing cadre of marginalians, I like to mark up books with colored, ultra fine point, sharpies. Generally lighter hues so it won’t bleed heavily through the page. Occasionally, for especially important passages, maybe one or two a book, a highlighter is used so that in the future, I can lazily pull the book from the shelf and quickly flip to the paragraph in question. I tend to do a lot of underlining and bracketing; when I was younger, I “argued” more with the authors in the margins. Older now, I expand on their points whether I agree with them or not. The Kindle has the capacity to type in notes, but I have not used the function much because most of the books I have read on it are fiction.

What do you do with the margins of your books?

[by Charles Cameron ]

People want the man out of there — body and soul, it seems.

Sources: body and soul