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Hint: You need to know your Boyd.

British political consultant James Frayne at Campaign War Room explains:

Creating an effective war room

….War rooms are therefore places which can pull in relevant information, which can process it effectively by working out what is most important at a given moment, and which can make timely decisions as a result of processing this information. They must become expert in Boyd’s OODA loop – Observe, Orient, Decide, Act (although I appreciate some prefer to think of this the other way round – you inevitably act first, and observe after).

War rooms should have the following characteristics:

• They must have clear objectives. In electoral politics, the objective is clear: win the election. In permanent campaigns or in business, objectives are usually less clear. Is the war room there to act as a rapid rebuttal machine, for example, to defend a business’ reputation (Wal-Mart set one of these up back in 2005)? Or is it to help re-organise a business? War room staff must know exactly why they are there.
• They should have a small staff and clear lines of authority. War rooms are often created because prior decision-making structures failed, perhaps because there were too many people involved in discussions, or because no one knew where authority lay. These were reasons why the most famous political war room of all – Clinton’s in 1992 – was created. They need be tight so that people don’t get bogged down by endless people given their opinions, and they need to have clear lines of authority so that everyone knows who can make what decision.
• They must have executive authority. It sounds like an obvious point and in many ways it is, but I remember one campaign where we worked in the campaign office but ultimate authority for decisions lay off-site. It was a debacle as you can imagine. War rooms must contain those people who can actually make decisions.

Read the rest here.

Former Governor, former Presidential candidate and former Chairman of the Democratic National Committee Howard Dean unveiled the Democratic Party’s trial balloon for the election of 2012. Normally, I bold all the text in an excerpt but I will do so from this POLITICO post only selectively:

….Appearing on “Fox News Sunday,” Dean, who’s also a former Democratic national chairman and hero of liberals, asserted Fox News failed to vet video footage of a speech misleadingly excerpted to make it appear that Sherrod was boasting of using her post as an Agriculture Department official to discriminate against a white farmer.

“I don’t think Newt Gingrich is a racist, and I don’t think you’re a racist,” Dean told Fox News host Chris Wallace, “but Fox News did something that was absolutely racist. They took a – they had an obligation to find out what was really in the clip. They had been pushing a theme of black racism with this phony Black Panther crap and this business and this Sotomayor and all this other stuff.”

When Wallace interrupted Dean to point out that Fox did not air the excerpted Sherrod footage until after the Obama administration had fired her based on it , Dean shot back “It was about to go on Glenn Beck, which is what the administration was afraid of.”

And Dean mildly rebuked the Obama administration, as well, saying, “We’ve got to stop being afraid of Glenn Beck (a Fox News host) and the racist fringe of the Republican Party. But Fox News was not blameless during this. You played it up.”

Dean dismissed Wallace’s point about timing, asserting “you didn’t do your job,” and charging that Fox News has helped the Republican Party foster racism by focusing on allegations of reverse racism.

“The tea party called out their racist fringe and I think the Republican Party’s got to stop appealing to its racist fringe. And Fox News is what did that. You put that on,” Dean said. “Continuing to cater to this theme of minority racism and stressing comments like this – some of which are taken out of context – does not help the country knit itself

In just this brief section where Dean is quoted, he used the word “racism” or a variant seven times and is paraphrased saying it twice more. Most likely, the transcript of the show will tally more uses of “racist” than just seven to nine in a few minutes of air time. Now either Howard Dean, a wealthy man born into a elite family, a graduate of St. Georges prep and Yale University, a physician and very successful governor, has only a rudimentary vocabulary or Dean was doing a crude imitation of George Lakoff’s  verbal “framing” and testing the Democratic Party’s none-too-subtle campaign theme:”All Republicans are racists”.

The underlying issue here is not about Shirley Sherrod or even racism, but of political power.

It seems likely at this point in time that the Democratic Party is headed for a reprise of their 1994 electoral disaster, despite the Republican Party being incompetent and bankrupt of both leadership and ideas ( in fact, given the demonstrated ineptitude of Micheal Steele as the GOP spokesman, the bast tactical stance for Republicans might be to just shut-up and only speak from unimpeachable ground that 60 % + of the public agrees with).  The war is not going well and the economy is worse, while taxes and spending are going up. That all of this is not the fault of Democrats is irrelevant because enough of it is and having all the power, the voters see them as accountable.. Having decided to govern from the left of center – maybe not Netroots Left, but left of moderate Democrats and Independents, under the aegis of Pelosi and Reid – the Democrats have irrevocably branded themselves for this election cycle and probably the next.

Not having any appealing points for undecided voters and independents leaves the Democrats the option of the hardball attack with the objective of mitigating the damage. How does trying to build an association between the word “racism” and “Republican” do that as it obviously fires up the Republicans to come out and vote by angering them?

Partisan liberals (note: I am not saying all liberals or all Democrats, just the zealous partisans) tend to believe that the only viable explanation for people not accepting their political agenda and exercise of power is a) Stupidity, or b) Evil motivations – among which, racism is the most evil of all.  In other words, there is no “legitimate” basis of democratic disagreement with them, only error and malice. Which is why many partisan liberals today, like the ranters exposed on Journolist, often come across to non-liberals as humorless authoritarians in a way that past liberals like Hubert Humphrey, William Brennan or Barbara Jordan never did. This campaign theme, while partisan liberals enjoy attacking Republicans immensely, isn’t for them either. They already are sure votes and maxed out political donors.

No, the target audience for Dean’s framing are the younger, basically apolitical, white voters who came out and voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and whom polls suggest won’t do so again. A second group are socially liberal, Democratic-leaning, independent swing voters. A coordinated drumbeat of prominent Democrats relentlessly attacking opponents as “racists” is designed to keep the first group at home on election day so that they do not vote Republican and to motivate the second group to come out and vote against them. In swing districts and states this might keep a few seats in Democratic hands that might otherwise go to the GOP and it could permanently tarnish or destroy some Republican politicians and turn them into damaged goods.

This is not a stupid tactic. It might not matter, if public sentiment is as angrily anti-incumbent and anti-Democrat as some polls suggest but such a framing campaign is based upon reasonable evidence that negative memes work, that charges of racism are an effective form of slander in American society, that Republicans are highly unlikely to mount an effective counterattack and that a majority of voters are only dimly aware of the factual details of political life. The prospect of losing power makes it a worthwhile gamble for Democrats – especially if figures whom voters cannot punish, like Howard Dean, lead the charge ( it also helps that a certain percentage of members of Congress of both parties harbor some degree of racism, anti-semitism, homophobia, religious bigotry, misogyny or other unseemly prejudices more obscure and tend to do and say things that give evidence of such beliefs. Public life is a target rich environment for take-down efforts).

Could Republicans respond effectively? Of course. There’s all sorts of ways to go for the jugular here, but they probably will not. Newt Gingrich, for example, could have demolished Dean on live television but he chose not to do so because Newt himself plays the “framing” game far better than does Dean and explaining to the uninformed what Dean was doing diminishes Gingrich’s own future rhetorical effectiveness with said uninformed public. Most other Republican leaders lack Gingrich’s intellectual firepower and debating skills and would either try to ignore the charge of racism (a loser move) or fall into protesting their lack of racism so as to better make themselves the object of ridicule as well as abuse.

The poor Republican Party, so close to power and so far from strategy.

I don’t know what the ultimate effects of the Health Care Bill will be because….well….no one has actually read this far reaching, highly partisan, Democratic legislation. I’m not sure even the Congressional leaders can state categorically what they just voted on. Support and opposition was largely faith-based.

I can say that the 2010 election is going to be brutal.

I am reposting Lex’s post in full. Basically, Illinois needs a thorough housecleaning of both parties – it’s a cataclysmic mess here.

Adam Andrzejewski

Adam Andrzejewski is the only person running for the Republican nomination for Governor of Illinois who presents any hope of turning around the dire decline we are facing.

I had the pleasure of meeting Adam recently, and he confirmed the positive impression I got from his website. He is very smart, aware of the gravity of the problems facing Illinois, and has some concrete plans to change the way business is done here.

I was most impressed with his proposals to take on the culture of corruption that has made the once-great State of Illinois a national and even global joke.

Take a look at the issues pages on Adam’s site. Then compare the specifics he offers with, for example, the nonexistent proposals on Jim Ryan’s site, or the comparatively vague proposals of the long-time insider, and purported front-runner, Andy McKenna.

The insiders in both parties are so tightly wound in Illinois that they are referred to as “The Combine.” The GOP serves as nothing more than the junior partners in a combined Machine, and appears to have no principled differences whatsoever from the Democrats.

Adam’s candidacy presents a chance to move toward a genuine two-party political process in Illinois, and to start getting the financial mess under control.

Let me also address the cynical response that he “can’t win.” There is a large field, turnout will probably not be huge, and it won’t take much for one of the GOP candidates to pull ahead. So, vote for the best guy.

Plus, as Lech Walesa – an Adam supporter – put it: “Nobody gave us a chance to win over the communists. Nobody. And we proved them wrong.” The Combine can also be beaten.

Please take a look at Adam’s site if you are an Illinois voter.

Learning to Eat Soup with a Spoon Again……

There has been, for years, an ongoing debate in the defense and national security community over the proper place of COIN doctrine in the repertoire of the United States military and in our national strategy. While a sizable number of serious scholars, strategists, journalists and officers have been deeply involved, the bitter discussion characterized as “COINdinista vs. Big War crowd” debate  is epitomized by the exchanges between two antagonists, both lieutenant colonels with PhD’s, John Nagl, a leading figure behind the U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual and now president of the powerhouse think tank CNAS , and Gian Gentile, professor of history at West Point and COIN’s most infamous arch-critic.

In terms of policy and influence, the COINdinistas ultimately carried the day. COIN advocates moved from a marginalized mafia of military intellectuals who in 2004 were just trying to get a hearing from an  indifferent Rumsfeld Pentagon, to policy conquerors as the public’s perceptions of the “Surge” in Iraq (masterminded by General David Petraeus, Dr. Frederick Kagan, General Jack Keane and a small number of collaborators) allowed the evolution of a COIN-centric, operationally oriented, “Kilcullen Doctrine” to emerge across two very different administrations.

Critics like Colonel Gentile and Andrew Bacevich began to warn, along with dovish liberal pundits – and with some exaggeration – that COIN theory was acheiving a “cult” status that was usurping the time, money, talent and attention that the military should be devoting to traditional near peer rival threats. And furthermore, ominously, COIN fixation was threatening to cause the U.S. political class (especially Democrats) to be inclined to embark upon a host of half-baked, interventionist “crusades“in Third world quagmires.

Informed readers who follow defense community issues knew that many COIN expert-advocates such as Nagl, Col. David Kilcullen, Andrew Exum and others had painstakingly framed the future application of COIN by the United States in both minimalist and “population-centric” terms, averse to all but the most restrictive uses of “hard” counterterrorism tactics like the use of predator drones for the “targeted assassinations” of al Qaida figures hiding in Pakistan.

Unfortunately for the COINdinistas, as George Kennan discovered to his dismay, to father a doctrine does not mean that you can control how others interpret and make use of it. As the new Obama administration and its new commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal conducted its internally contentious review of “AfPak” policy in 2009 on what seemed a geological time scale, the administration’s most restless foreign policy bigwig, the Talleyrand of Dayton, proposed using COIN as nation-building on steroids to re-create Hamid Karzai’s Afghanistan as the secure, centralized, state that it has never been.  Public reaction to this trial balloon was poor and the administration ultimately pared down General McChrystal’s troop request to 30,000 men, hedging a COIN based strategy toward policy suggestions made by Vice-President Biden.

So, COIN still reigns supreme, albeit with trimmed sails?

No.

We are forgetting something important about the ascendancy of COIN. It was not accepted by a reluctant Pentagon and the Bush administration because COIN is a very effective operational tool in the right strategic context – although that is certainly true. Nor was it because the advocates of COIN were brilliant policy architects and advocates – though most of them are. COIN became the order of the day for three reasons:

1) The  “Big Army, fire the artillery, fly B-52’s and Search & Destroy=counterinsurgency” approach proved to be tactically and strategically bankrupt in Iraq. It failed in Mesopotamia as it failed in the Mekong Delta under Westmoreland – except worse and faster. Period.

2) The loudest other alternative to COIN at the time, the antiwar demand, mostly from Leftwing extremists, of immediately bugging-out of Iraq, damn the consequences, was not politically palatable even for moderately liberal Democrats, to say nothing of Republicans.

3) The 2006 election results were a political earthquake that forced the Bush administration to change policy in Iraq for its’ own sheer political survival. COIN was accepted only because it represented a life preserver for the Bush administration.

We have just had another such political earthquake. The administration is now but one more electoral debacle away from having the president be chased in Benny Hill fashion all over the White House lawn by enraged Democratic officeholders scared out of their wits of losing their seats next November.

Republican Scott Brown, the winner in a stunning upset in Massachusett’s special election for Senator, certainly had no intention of undermining President Obama’s commitment to Afghanistan. To the contrary, he is for it in a far more muscular manner than was his hapless Democratic opponent. But that’s irrelevant. What matters is that in all the recent elections, Democrats have been clobbered by a “Revolt of the Moderates” – socially liberal, fiscally conservative, independent voters who came out in 2008 for Obama and are now shifting radically away from him. For the next year, politicians of both parties will be  competing hard for this bloc which means “deficit hawks” will soar higher than defense hawks.

America’s nine year drunken sailor spending spree is officially over.

Defense experts have long known that the post-9/11, record DoD budget expenditures were not going to be politically sustainable forever and that either a drawdown of combat operations or cancellation of very big, very complicated and supremely expensive weapons platforms or some combination of both would eventually be needed. That eventuality is here and will increase in intensity over the next five years, barring an unexpected economic boom. Spending $60 billion annually on Afghanistan, a nation with a GDP of roughly $ 20 billion, for the next 7 years, is not going to be in the cards. Not at a time of 10 % unemployment, when the Congress will be forced to cut Medicare, education, veteran’s benefits, eliminate COLA’s on Social Security or raise the retirement age and income taxes. Who is going to want to “own” an ambitious “nation-building” program at election time?

There is a silver lining here. Really.

COIN is an excellent operational tool, brought back by John Nagl & co. from the dark oblivion that Big Army partisans consigned it to cover up their own strategic failures in Vietnam. As good as COIN is though, it is not something akin to magic with which to work policy miracles or to substitute for America not having a cohesive and realistic grand strategy. Remaking Afghanistan into France or Japan on the Hindu Kush is beyond the scope of what COIN can accomplish. Or any policy. Or any president. Never mind Obama, Superman, Winston Churchill and Abe Lincoln rolled into one could not make that happen.

Association with grandiosely maximalist goals would only serve to politically discredit COIN when the benchmarks to paradise ultimately proved unreachable. Austerity will scale them back to the bounds of reality and perhaps a more modest, decentralized, emphasis. COIN will then become a normal component of military capabilities and training instead of alternating between pariah and rock star status inside the DoD.

Austerity may also force – finally – the USG to get serious about thinking in terms of comprehensive and coherent DIME-integrated national strategy (Ok – this is more of a hope on my part). Instead of having every agency and service going off in its own direction with strategic nuclear arms reductions being proposed out of context from our conventional military obligations and urgent security threats we might stop and look at how the two fit together. And how these should be in sync with our fiscal and monetary policies and our need to deeply invest in and improve our unsteady economic position in a very competitive, globalized world. The latter is of much greater strategic importance to national security than Afghanistan or whether or not Israel and Hezbollah fight another mini-war.

We are all COINdinistas now. Instead of being controversial, COIN having a secure place in our operational arsenal of ideas has become the new “conventional” wisdom; it is past time to look at some of the other serious challenges America has ahead.

ADDENDUM I:

First, I wanted to thank everyone for their lively responses, both comments as well as email. The critiques are very helpful, as are the large number of PDFs and links to related material. I am trying to catch up on my replies but first, I wanted to feature a link to Andrew Exum ‘s related but inside baseball article up at Boston Review:

The Conflict in Central Asia will likely mark the end of the current era of Counterinsurgency 

 ….Whether or not the United States and its allies are successful in Afghanistan, the conflict in Central Asia will likely mark the end of the Third Counterinsurgency Era. Counterinsurgency warfare has its roots in the colonial experiences of France and the United Kingdom as well as the pseudo-colonial experiences of the United States in the Philippines and Latin America. In the First Counterinsurgency Era, nineteenth-century French colonial military commanders such as Hubert Lyautey, Thomas-Robert Bugeaud, and Joseph Gallieni devised rudimentary “hearts and minds” campaigns that were—though often just as brutal as the conventional warfare of the time—at odds with then-contemporary thought on the employment of military force. 

….Michael Semple —with two decades experience working in Afghanistan and Pakistan—believes that it is, and that the Taliban and its allies cannot win. The balance of power, he argues, has shifted toward the Taliban’s natural enemies, and the Taliban hides this reality by dressing their civil war in the clothes of an insurgency being fought against Western powers. If this assessment is right, there may yet be hope for U.S. and allied efforts in Afghanistan. Because President Obama has pledged to begin a withdrawal from Afghanistan in eighteen months, time may be too short to execute a comprehensive counterinsurgency campaign. But there may be sufficient time to build up key Afghan institutions and allow Afghans to fight a civil war that will no doubt continue after the United States and its allies begin to withdraw.

ADDENDUM II – LINKS To This Post:

Most of these bloggers have extended the discussion into new dimensions or aspects. I will put a short, explanatory tag next to each where warranted.

RBO (Pundita) – The cavalry has arrived: Mark Safranski takes on COIN; Pundita takes on Pakistan  Extensive examination of Pakistan

In Harmonium (Dr. Marc Tyrell) – Is the post-COIN era here?  The conceptual-perceptual-cognitive implications of this debate

Shlok Vaidya – Zen is right  Constraints and innovation….and a great post title!

Newshoggers (Dave Anderson) – COIN’s coins; political constraints on COIN  COIN = Clausewitzian disconnect

Wings Over Iraq – Link of the morning is here…  And the bonus Nagl/Gentile mash-up graphic!

SWJ Blog – The Post-COIN Era is Here  Comments on link excerpt have begun……