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[by J. Scott Shipman]

Since the original post of “No one is really listening, they are just pretending,” there are indications that pretending may actually be doing institutional harm.

The US Naval Institue recently sponsored the Joint Warfighting Conference 2012, and my friend Lucien Gauthier (YN2/SW) wrote a very good recap of the event. In his post, Lucien remarked on the comments of retired USMC General James “Hoss” Cartwright. Cartwright’s comments have been described by others around the blogosphere as “unleashed,” and indeed his comments may have raised a few eyebrows. But this sentence of Lucien’s post, while perhaps stating the obvious may reveal one challenge the Navy and DOD face in the credibility and trust department:

“Gen Cartwright had the luxury of no longer being in uniform and so his candor was particularly poignant.”

Now I don’t know General Cartwright, but I know people who do and they report he is a fine officer, and my remarks aren’t about him, but the implications of Lucien’s observation. The suggestion “…the luxury of no longer being in uniform and so his candor…”  struck me, for what is the reverse? “…in uniform, no candor?” If our highest ranking officers wait until they are retired to be candid, what does that say for those remaining in uniform, and what does it say about the environment? Does the environment inspire pretending? How many serving “pretend” daily just to get by, or worse, to get promoted?

A few months ago in a conversation with a young naval officer, one of the brightest I know, I was talking about “to be or to do” and the value of honesty always. The officer remarked, “Well sometimes you have to let the boss think the idea was his…” or something to that effect. I made the point that this is part of the problem: if these leaders are so uptight they need to be handled, then they are part of the problem. Trust can grow only where honesty is ubiquitous.

Recently, the Navy Times published a short query entitled, “Tell us what you think: Faith in Navy Brass?” One of the questions surprised me: “Do you trust the Navy’s leadership and still take them at their word?” If those who responded (be sure to read the comments) are to be believed, the answer is a resounding, “no.” Curiosity piqued, I conducted an informal poll among a small group of naval officers (active duty and retired) asking the same question. The answer: “no.” Since my Navy days, I’ve heard the old saw, “A bitching Sailor is a happy Sailor,” but this seems different.

At least ten commanding officers have been relieved of command eight months into 2012. Two were relieved due to unfavorable command climate surveys, so one could conclude the Navy is listening and taking action in some quarters. The recent decision by Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus to require breathalyzers of Sailors and Marines reporting for duty introduces evidence of distrust, and his decision is nothing short of institutional micromanagement. At their core, a micromanager does not trust their subordinates.

When the folks on the pointy-end of the spear aren’t trusted, leaders should not be surprised when those folks return the favor. So to leaders, while you may think some of your subordinates agree with you, they may pretending, and are you ok with that? Are you ok with that if you learn you are the cause? Less pretending, more honesty.

Postscript: For more evidence, check out his post at the USNI Blog, The Wisdom of a King. Another fine example of the importance of trust can be found in a September 2012 Proceedings article by LCDR B.J.Armstrong, Leadership & Command (both come highly recommended).

Cross-posted at To Be or To Do.

A while back, Charles Cameron had a post on the Ghazwa E Hind that served as my introduction to an oddball Pakistani agitator named  Zaid Hamid.  The colorful Mr. Hamid seems to be Pakistan’s fully militarized version of Glenn Beck fused with an Islamist George Friedman, with perhaps an astrologer and Rip Taylor thrown in for good measure. In discussing this figure, ZP commenter Omar offered:

….But this clown has serious backers. The deep state systematically uses these clowns to prepare the “information space” for their plans. ..and they are not kidding around. 

Zaid Hamid made a recent appearance in another post by Charles, so I felt inspired to look at him more closely and discovered that Hamid, who has a fondness for 4GW verbiage, has his own think tank, Brasstacks which publishes “geostrategic analysis”, largely about alleged “Hindu Zionist” (?) conspiracies to destroy Pakistan. These papers are fascinating, in a car-crash sort of way, much like a political intelligence letter from the LaRouchies. There is also a blog by Hamid, where his latest post remarkably declares Pakistan’s late dictator, the ruthless General Zia ul-Haq, a “shaheed”.

My question, since Hamid appears to stir controversy and criticism within Pakistan, is what is his real level of influence in Paskistani society? Comments welcome.

The latest in the series of COIN interviews by Octavian Manea:

COIN and Other Four-Letter Words: Interview with AfPak Hand Major Fernando Lujan 

OM:  In early 2009, I made a tour of a few DC think tanks.  At the time everybody was talking about COIN. Why did COIN become a dirty word, today? Why do you still believe in COIN doctrine?

FL:  Well, frankly I get a bit nervous whenever I hear the words “believe” and “doctrine” in the same sentence… the same way I get nervous when I hear people refer to the current counterinsurgency manual, FM 3-24, as “the good book.”  The counterinsurgency manual should never be dogma, never be seen as some sort of universal solution.  The manual was an attempt to change the culture of the Army at a time when we desperately needed it.  It was written by a group of very smart people who tried to include some lessons from Cold War-era insurgencies, but let’s not fool ourselves–it was written in extremis, for forces struggling through their rotations in Iraq from 2006-2010.  It did a pretty good job helping those units.. and it serves as a decent framework for one type of counterinsurgency effort–the resource intensive, ‘boots heavy’ sort that we saw in Iraq and Afghanistan.

 But we should not lose sight of the fact that this type of massive COIN effort is only one extreme of a long continuum of policy options, undertaken when the situation in both countries had already deteriorated so much that major reinforcement became the ‘least bad’ choice in the minds of our civilian leaders.  If we want to keep COIN from becoming a ‘dirty word,’ as you say, we need to make this distinction clear, and leave room for alternate, smaller footprint models.  The next version of the doctrine should not just pull lessons from Iraq and Afghanistan–but also from Colombia, the Philippines, El Salvador, the Sahel, and the myriad of other places we’ve been involved in over the past decades.  To the credit of the Army and Marines, Ft. Leavenworth is in the midst of rewriting the manual as we speak–but it remains to be seen what kind of message the final product will send.  Will we have a cookie cutter model with the five standard lines of effort, built around heavy resources and a 5,000-man brigade combat team or will we have a manual that offers a broad toolkit of different approaches–some civilian-led or embassy ‘country team’ based, some more heavily reliant on targeting and offshore training or 3rd party actors, et cetera.  Knowing what we know about land wars in Asia, I’d personally much rather see the latter…..

Read the rest here.

[ by Charles Cameron — Escher, Borges, simulating the future, wargames, A Pattern Language, Sembl ]
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Ridiculous phrase, a library of windows. Unless you think, as I do, of books as windows onto different worlds, in which case it makes a whole lot of sense, and a decent library has more windows onto more profoundly different worlds than any physical room — and here we are getting into the territory of Jorge Luis Borges (links to Library of Babel) and Maurits Escher (image above).

And let me just state for the record that Godel Escher Bach could just as well have been Escher Carroll Borges, and that a comparison between the logics of Escher and Borges is one of the desiderata of our times.

That’s a Sembl move.

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Let’s expand the concept of window to include the sort of inter-worldview glimpse that Haaretz describes today here:

Last week, in a small beit midrash (study hall) named after Rabbi Meir Kahane in Jerusalem’s Shmuel Hanavi neighborhood, an emergency meeting was convened to discuss instigating freedom of religion and worship on the Temple Mount. It was a closed meeting attended by representatives of the Temple Institute, HaTenu’ah LeChinun HaMikdash (the Movement to Rebuild the Holy Temple) and the Temple Mount Faithful, as well as two representatives of Women for the Mikdash, and others. The activists met to try to understand how they could overcome the authorities, who they believe are plotting against them, and return to the Temple Mount. At this meeting, Haaretz was offered a rare behind-the-scenes glimpse of the most ardent activists in the battle to Judaize the Temple Mount.

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Here’s the meat of the post, as yet uncooked. Back in 2005, but brought to my attention today by Rex Brynen at Paxsims, is this piece from Strategy Page:

After eight years of effort, and spending over $300 million, the U.S. Army has officially received its new wargame (WARSIM) for training battalion, brigade, division, and as big as you want to get, commanders, and their staffs. Now even the most elaborate commercial wargame would not get $300 million for development, and eight years to create the system. But wargames for professional soldiers have different requirements, and a troublesome Department of Defense bureaucracy to deal with. First, the requirements. Commercial wargames shield the player from all the boring stuff (support functions, especially logistics.) But professional wargames must deal with these support activities, because in a real war, these are the things commanders spend most of their time tending too. …

WARSIM covers a lot of complex activities that a commander must deal with to achieve battlefield success. Besides logistics, there’s intelligence. Trying to figure out what the enemy is up to is, next to logistics, the commanders most time consuming chore.

— which in turn was referenced by Michael Peck writing in a Kotaku piece today titled Why It’s So Hard to Make a Game Out of the 21st Century:

Let’s build a game. Let’s make it a strategy game. We will realistically simulate global politics in the 2030s. Perhaps a sort of Civ or Supreme Ruler 2020-type system.

Where shall we start? How about something easy, like choosing the nations in the game? It’s simple enough to consult an atlas. We’ll start with Britain…but wait! Scotland is on the brink of declaring independence from the United Kingdom. Should Britain be a single power, or should England and Scotland be depicted as a separate nation? What about Belgium splitting into Flemish and Walloon states? And these are old, established European nations. How will states like Syria and Nigeria look in two decades? It was only a bit over 20 years ago that the Soviet Union appeared to be a unshakeable superpower that controlled Eastern Europe and Central Asia.

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Let’s cook that meat, let’s make a meal of it.

Peck’s piece goes into many other ways in which predictive gaming isn’t terribly productive.

But it left me asking the question, what would I do with a game-sized budget, if my aim was to push military and intelligence towards greater insight.

And my answer would be to embed information in walls. In corridors…

To build windows at sparse and irregular intervals into the internal corridors that connect any given office in the Pentagon or three-letter agency — or my local preference (hush, I know it’s the Glorious Fourth tomorrow) MI-5 and -6 — through which analysts and decision makers can glimpse snippets of information.

Which can then fall into the deep well of memory.

It is deep within that well of half-forgotten knowledge, ST Coleridge tells us, that the “hooks-and-eyes of memory” link one thought with another to build a creative third.

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A wall, then. I would build a wall embedded with facts and fancies, maps and illustrations, graphs and stats, film clips and news clips, anecdotes and quotes — even, perhaps, tiny alcoves here and there with books free for the taking, music CDs, DVDs of movies, old, new, celebrated, strange…

And I would be constantly shifting and rearranging the “views” from my windows, so that what was seen yesterday would not be what would be seen tomorrow — yet with a powerful index of words, topics, themes, memes, image contents, names of actors, newscasters, authors and so forth, so that what was once seem and dimly recalled could be recaptured.

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The concept here is pretty much the exact opposite of having a huge black poster proclaiming Creativity Matters!

Don’t get me wrong, creativity does matter (get that poster and others here), but it “works in mysterious ways its wonders to perform” — and the way to entice it is to see things out of the corner of the eye…

The windows I’m looking for, therefore, offer glimpses you wouldn’t necessarily notice if you were deep in thought or conversation, and conversely, wouldn’t see twice and grow so familiarized to that they’d become irrelevant by repetition. They’d be glimpsed in passing, their esthetic would be that of Christopher Alexander’s Zen View, pattern 134 in his brilliant work — the closest we have to a Western I Ching — Pattern Language:

The idea, then, is to seed the memory with half-conscious concepts, patterns, facts and images, carefully selected and randomly presented — so that those hooks and eyes have the maximum chance of connecting some scrap of curious information with a pressing problem.

Which is how creativity tends to work.

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That way each corridor becomes a game-board — but it is in the analyst’s focused mind that the game is played and won.

What you’d get, in effect, would be community-wide, ongoing free-form gameplay in complete alignment with the web-based game we’re currently developing at Sembl. Games of this genre will also have powerful application in conflict resolution.

And peace.

Adam Elkus directed my attention today on Twitter to a new piece by William S. Lind, “the Father of 4th Generation Warfare” at The American Conservative:

Unfriendly Fire 

….The Soviet army focused its best talent on operational art. But in Afghanistan, it failed, just as we have failed. Like the Soviets, we can take and hold any piece of Afghan ground. And doing so brings us, like the Soviets, not one step closer to strategic victory. The Taliban, by contrast, have found an elegant way to connect strategy and tactics in decentralized modern warfare.

What passes for NATO’s strategy is to train sufficient Afghan forces to hold off the Taliban once we pull out. The Taliban’s response has been to have men in Afghan uniform— many of whom actually are Afghan government soldiers or police—turn their guns on their NATO advisers. That is a fatal blow against our strategy because it makes the training mission impossible. Behold operational art in Fourth Generation war.

According to a May 16 article by Matthew Rosenberg in the New York Times, 22 NATO soldiers have been killed so far this year by men in Afghan uniforms, compared to 35 in all of last year. The report went on to describe one incident in detail—detail NATO is anxious to suppress. There were three Afghan attackers, two of whom were Afghan army soldiers. Two Americans were killed. The battle—and it was a battle, not just a drive-by shooting—lasted almost an hour.

What is operationally meaningful was less the incident than its aftermath. The trust that existed between American soldiers and the Afghans they were supposed to train was shattered. Immediately after the episode, the Times reported, the Americans instituted new security procedures that alienated their native allies, and while some of these measure were later withdrawn,

Afghan soldiers still complain of being kept at a distance by the Americans, figuratively and literally. The Americans, for instance, have put up towering concrete barriers to separate their small, plywood command center from the outpost’s Afghan encampment.

Also still in place is a rule imposed by the Afghan Army after the attack requiring most of its soldiers to lock up their weapons when on base. The Afghan commanding officer keeps the keys….

Lind has lost none of his skill for zeroing in on which buttons to push that would most annoy the political generals among the brass.

However, I think Lind errs in ascribing too much credit to the Taliban here. A much simpler explanation is that the usually illiterate ANA soldier is a product of the same xenophobic cultural and religious environment that created the Taliban, the Haqqanis, vicious Islamist goons like Gulbuddin Hekmatyar or the Afghan tribesmen who slaughtered the retreating garrison of Lord Elphinstone in 1841.

While the Taliban have infiltrators, it remains that many of the “Green on Blue” killings are just as easily explained by personal grievances, zealous religious bigotry, indiscipline, mistreatment by American advisers or Afghan superiors and sudden jihad syndrome. While it is impolitic to emphasize it, Afghan betrayal and murder of foreign allies (generally seen as “occupiers”) is something of a longstanding historical pattern. The Taliban capitalize on it politically but they are not responsible for all of it.