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Dr. Tony Corn opens fire at the SWJ with a 33 page broadside against ….well….many targets… of the Defense Department/ military academia/civilian political status quo. I can’t say that I agree with every point in this brutal, turbocharged jeremiad, but some of Corn’s targets deserve the abuse he heaps on them, and he nails a few of my pet peeves, including the chronic neglect of strategy and grand strategy by the American elite (civilian appointees even more than flag officers, in my view).

You will agree and disagree with Corn as he has a high density of concepts and references here, often expressed in polemical terms. He also throws in a gratuitous dose of anti-Clausewitzianism to add salt to the wounds of some readers, if the political angle is not providing sufficient friction 🙂 :

From War Managers to Soldier Diplomats: The Coming Revolution in Civil Military Relations

….There was of course a price to be paid for the failure to distinguish between political partisanship and political literacy. The risk was to end up with an officer corps focused exclusively on tactical and operational matters, and so lacking in political literacy as to be unable to relate military means to political ends, i.e. to think strategically. It did not seem to matter much at the time for two reasons. In the nuclear age, strategic thinking was seen as being too important to be left to the military, and was therefore quickly taken over by civilians. In addition, those same civilians (including Huntington) tacitly shared the conviction famously expressed by Bernard Brodie in 1946: “Thus far the chief purpose of our military establishment has been to win wars. From now on its chief purpose must be to avert them. It can have no other useful purpose.” And indeed, if the main raison d’etre of the military is not to win, but to avert, war, why take the risk of having officers develop an “unhealthy” interest in politics by emphasizing the strategic level of war?

Read the whole thing here.

ADDENDUM:

My take, four years ago, on the emerging class of “soldier-statesmen” (I try to be so far ahead of each curve that it brings me no recognition whatsoever. LOL!)

Jeff Stein of Spy Talk had a fascinating interview with Dr. David Charney, a CIA psychiatrist specializing in treating professional spooks. The whole article is interesting but the following caught my eye:

….But for case officers at the tip of the CIA’s spear, he said, the problem tends to be A.D.D., Adult Attention Deficit Disorder. 
“They seem to be highly functional A.D.D.’s,” Charney said. “You might think a person with ADD can’t tie their shoelaces, but quite the opposite.” To them, “boredom equals death,” Charney says, not really joking. 

“They’re energetic, restless, people who have to physically keep moving. Lock them to a desk, and they can’t deal with it. They can’t stand to be bored…” 

But A.D.D. can be an asset, too.  “They have the ability to absorb things from 360 degrees,” Charney marvels. 

“Contrast that with people who are linear, like your book-keeper or accountant, who chug along in a channel and get things done by going from one thing to another. But A.D.D. minds tend to be very synthetic. They reach out and pull things out of the air, or through other persons who are not linked in any way. They see patterns that other people don’t see. They can gather together unusual elements and bring them together into a whole that is a brilliant synthesis of things that would be lost on other people.  

“They have a sensitivity to ambient thoughts going on that a good case officer needs to pick up, little nuances, little hues, little things said that let you know if the agent you’ve recruited is telling the truth, or which is partly the truth … which buttons to push to manage the person, how to absorb material and put it into a whole. And the good ones have that ability.”

This is classic horizontal thinking with an emphasis on connections, patterns and synthesis driven by an internal “restlessness” – the kind of persona seen in such disparate occupations as fighter pilots, inventors, physicists and artists. There has long been a comparative and to an extent correlative association of ADHD or “hyperactivity” with creativity, high levels of intelligence and depression though of course not everyone with ADHD is creative, intellectually gifted, depressed or working for an intelligence agency. The correlation though has also been noted in MRI brain scan studies of children so it would appear to have a physiological basis that might explain why the CIA needs to have its own psychiatrists for reasons beyond the stress generated by a career in intelligence work – self-selection bias in people who apply to become employees.

(Hat tip to….one of my twitteramigos….I can’t find the tweet, damn it!) 

The New York Times had a major and significantly positive profile of former Speaker of the House Newt Gincrich the other day ( Hat tip to Nate). It’s worth reading. The NYT gets many things right about Gingrich and Gingrich nails many of the problems currently bedeviling the Republican Party:

Newt. Again.

 …..Now, as Republicans on the Hill begin to awaken from a November beating that left them semiconscious, Gingrich finds himself, once again, at the zenith of influence in conservative Washington. It is a fortuitous collision of man and moment. Having ceded the agenda to a Republican president for the past eight years (and having mostly obsessed over White House scandals for much of the decade before that), Republicans now find that they have strikingly little to say that isn’t entirely reactive – or reactionary. “It was like ‘The Matrix,’ when Keanu Reeves wakes up and his eyes hurt because he hasn’t used them,” David Winston, a pollster for House Republicans, told me recently, talking about the 2006 election that relegated Republicans to the minority for the first time since 1994. “We just didn’t know how to do ideas anymore.” Whatever else you think of Gingrich, he has always been considered a prospector in bold and counterintuitive thinking – floating ideas, throughout his career, that have ranged from giving every poor child a laptop to abolishing the entire concept of adolescence.

….Gingrich is all about offering, as he puts it, a “better value” for the American customer – constructive solutions Republicans can take on the road during the next midterm election season and beyond. “Most Republicans are not entrepreneurial,” he lamented to me. “They’re corporatists. They like the security and the comfort of a well-thought-out, highly boring boardroom meeting in which they do a PowerPoint once. And it worries them to have ideas, because ideas have edges, and they’re not totally formed, and you’ve got to prove them, and they sound strange because they’re new, and if it’s new how do you know it’s any good, because, after all, it’s new and you’ve never heard it before.”

Newt is a horizontal thinker with a high level of expertise in a number of fields and a considerable degree of creativity. As a political figure, he does several important things exceptionally well:

• First Newt conceives of politics in strategic, structural, longitudinal, terms.
• Secondly, Newt is an idea merchant. He has them and he is quick to recognize the potential of ideas generated by others. Often, Newt’s capacity for horizontal thinking leads him to appropriate attractive concepts or proposals that are neither “conservative” or even “political” and make them conservative Republican signature policies.
• Third, Newt excels at crafting and framing tactical messages. He regularly comes up with phrases  that have strong memetic “pull” or “hooks” to them and distill the essential idea out of a complicated policy and he can use this ability to punish enemies or promote his own side. This is not the same thing as being a great tactician. Arguably, when Newt as Speaker had to juggle managing the House, formulating strategy and tactics, the latter consistently suffered to Newt’s personal disadvantage. Gingrich demonstrated better tactical skills as a Minority Leader and especially as a Whip but he had far fewer distractions at that time.
• Fourth, Newt cultivates leadership in others. He makes connections. He educates. He gives his assistance freely and promotes the careers of proteges and allies.

This is not to say Newt is without flaws. Politically, for the Democratic Party, Newt is a “target rich environment” whose unpredictability in the public spotlight can generate incidents that become the story rather than the message Newt was trying to get across. However, lacking any official position, it is much harder for Democrats to represent any gaffe by Newt as coming from the Pope of the GOP. In fact, engaging Newt directly in public debate at this time, especially by a senior member of the Democratic Party leadership or President Obama, will superempower Gingrich politically and increase his influence and profile regardless of what they say. The mere fact they are saying anything confirms Gingrich’s status as a major “player”. Nor can they ignore him forever if his advice permits the Republicans to score significant victories.

Gingrich has his opponents in a familiar bind and I’m sure he likes it that way.

Just read this profile of Dr. (Gen.) Shimon Naveh, via Soob via Ubiwar.

….Naveh describes his last and perhaps most important military-academic project, OTRI, as a chronicle of failure. “It was a failure of the group and also my personal failure, but in a far deeper sense it was the IDF’s failure. The IDF has not recovered because it doesn’t have the ability, unless it undergoes a revolution.”Naveh, who established OTRI together with Brigadier General (res.) Dov Tamari, draws on imagery from the world of construction to explain the project. “We wanted to create an intermediate level between the master craftsman, the tiling artisan or the electrician, who is the equivalent of the battalion or brigade commander, and the entrepreneur or the strategist, the counterpart of the high commander, who wants to change the world, but lacks knowledge in construction.”Between the two levels, he continues, is the architect/commander-in-chief, whose role is “to enable the system to understand what the problem is, define it and interpret it through engineers.” In the absence of this link, he maintains, armies find themselves unable to implement their strategic planning by tactical means. “Entrepreneurs and master craftsmen cannot communicate,” he says.Already in his first book, “The Operational Art,” published in 2001 and based on his doctoral dissertation, he described the level of the military architect: “The intermediate level is the great invention of the Russians. [The military architects] occupy the middle, and make it possible for the other fields, from politics to the killers, to understand, plan and learn.”

An interesting and to me well constructed analogy by General Naveh that rings true to me from what I know of the Soviet history. Naveh perfectly describes the peculair adaptive requirements forced on the Red Army by the nature of the Soviet political system, especially as it existed under Stalin from the time of the Great Terror forward ( 1936 -1953). Stalin wiped out much of his senior military leadership of the Red Army during the Yezhovschina in 1937 and decimated the junior officer corps to boot, leaving it thoroughly demoralized and rigidly shackled to political comissars who were, like the military commanders, completely paralyzed with fear ( the Red Navy officer corps was basically exterminated en masse).

When Operation Barbarossa commenced in June, 1941, the dramatic Soviet collapse in the face of the Nazi onslaught was due in part to Stalin’s maniacal insistence that Germany was not going to attack and that assertions to the contrary were evidence of “wrecking” and “provocation” – crimes liable to get one immediately shot. Even a high ranking NKVD official, Dekanazov, whom Stalin made ambassador to Berlin, was personally threatened by Stalin for daring to warn the Soviet dictator about Hitler’s imminent attack.

That being said, Stalin quickly realized during the 1941 retreat that he had debilitated his own army by decapitating it and his own judgment as supreme warlord was no substitute at the front lines for what Naveh terms “operational art”. Stalin the entrepreneur-grand strategist needed competent military architects like Zhukov and Rossokovsky to plug the gap with the craftsmen and Stalin not only promoted and protected them, he tolerated their dissent from his own military judgment and sometimes yielded to their concerns. Very much unlike Hitler who could seldom abide criticism or deviation from his general officers or learn from them. Stalin improved as a war leader from interaction with his generals; Hitler did not and if anything grew worse over time – as did the Wehrmacht’s tactical-strategic disconnect.

The above anecdote represents the rich level of depth behind Naveh’s offhand and seemingly disjointed references. There’s a lot of meat there behind the dots Naveh is connecting but the uninitiated will have to be willing to dig deep. I’m cool toward Naveh’s reliance upon French postmodernism but I admire the breadth of his capability as a horizontal thinker and theorist. However, Naveh needs an “architect” of his own to translate for him and make his complex ideas more readily comprehensible to the mainstream. I will wager that few Majors or Lt. Colonels, be they U.S. Army, IDF or Russian, read much Focault these days.

ADDENDUM:

The SWJ had an interview with Dr. Naveh on his theory of Systematic Operational Design in 2007

Dr. Naveh’s book is In Pursuit of Military Excellence: The Evolution of Operational Theory (Cummings Center Series)

Joint Force Quarterly (via Findarticle) -“Operational art”

Jerusalem Post – “Column One: Halutz’s Stalinist moment“

It’s not often that I cite a MSM piece for it’s balance and thoughtfulness but I will recommend this one, from Alec MacGillis of MSNBC:

Academic elites fill Obama’s roster

All told, of Obama’s top 35 appointments so far, 22 have degrees from an Ivy League school, MIT, Stanford, the University of Chicago or one of the top British universities. For the other slots, the president-elect made do with graduates of Georgetown and the Universities of Michigan, Virginia and North Carolina.

While Obama’s picks have been lauded for their ethnic and ideological mix, they lack diversity in one regard: They are almost exclusively products of the nation’s elite institutions and generally share a more intellectual outlook than is often the norm in government. Their erudition has already begun to set a new tone in the capital, cheering Obama’s supporters and serving as a clarion call to other academics. Yale law professor Dan Kahan said several of his colleagues are for the first time considering leaving their perches for Washington.

“You know how Obama always said, ‘This is our moment; this is our time?’ ” Kahan said. “Well, academics and smart people think, ‘Hey, when he says this is our time, he’s talking about us.'”

Indeed. The Obamas may be moreso part of the bipartisan elite than were the Clintons whom academia overwhelmingly cheered, as Bill Clinton never could ( as Alec MacGillis duly notes) shed his ties to the Southern, good ol’ boy, wheeler-dealers of the courthouse clique. To an extent, Clinton reveled in winking at the corruption of his hambone cronies in wry TV soundbites. President-elect Obama is in far less of a hurry to bring Chicago’s more colorful political personalities to Washington and probably will not do so for several years until after Federal trials of Tony Rezko and investigations into city hall and the governor’s mansion and likely Federal trial of Governor Rod Blagojevich (D-IL) in Illinois have run their course.

I’m not unhappy with Obama’s appointments, finding them so far to be well qualified and I’ll offer high praise for Obama’s selection of General Jones and Secretary Gates. The Small Wars/COIN bloggers are jumping for joy and the national security bloggers, along with the conservative political bloggers, should be pleased; the next Defense Secretary or Secretary of State might easily have been Anthony Lake. It’s a more conservative national security group than any time during the Clinton administration. Count your blessings folks.

What strikes me as amusing though is the entirely visceral, euphorically emotive and almost tribal “he’s one of us” support from the elite for the President-elect. Reactions that run against the supposedly cerebral and “reality based” pretensions of empiricism and skepticism for which they make a claim but seldom practice because most of them are highly-trained, vertical thinking, experts. When you are accomplished within a domain and have built a reputation by operating within its’ often complex (to laymen) rule-sets, the price is often an acquired blindness that prevents you from challenging the cherished shibboleths of the group.  To look across domains and question fundamental premises in horizontal thinking fashion is to be the bull in the china shop. Or the skunk at the garden party. Or both.

Thorstein Veblen, who saw primitivism re-enacted in advanced capitalist societies would have understood this very well. So would Thomas Kuhn. The Bush administration, with its CEO-ex-jock mentality, was accurately criticized for it’s arrogant insularity and dismissal of critics and contrary evidence. I don’t know about you but I’ve been around an awful lot of very smart academics, including relatives and while their cognitive prowess is admirable, the unwillingness of many of them to reconsider assumptions in light of evidence ( or even notice that they need to do so) can be every bit as stubborn as that of a Wall Street “master of the universe”.

It’s great that Obama is appointing brilliant academics to high posts. Just throw some divergent, unorthodox, thinkers into the mix to keep them honest.