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HistoryGuy99 in a spot-on post on the death of Kim Jong-Il:

A National Case of Stockholm Syndrome

….Kim Jong’s death moves the dynasty cycle to a point that follows the old Chinese proverb about dynasties or even successful families, that says, “Wealth only lasts three generations. The first generation builds it up, the second consolidates it, and the third squanders it.” 

This proverb is a metaphor for the rise and fall of dynasties down through the ages. The dynasties start when a charismatic visionary leader comes to power, and is followed by less talented and motivated leaders until the dynasty falls and chaos reins until another leader emerges to repeat the cycle. Most nations have moved beyond that cycle today. Even China, the source of the proverb, is moving forward with succeeding generations of leaders that unlike preceding dynasties, mirror institutions that have learned to seek new charismatic leadership, instead of relying on a family blood line that invites decadence to the point of being endemic.

Where does this leave people of North Korea? Listening to the mass wailing and demonstrations of grief as if each family had lost their beloved children, the thought that crossed my mind was that the entire country was a victim of the Stockholm Syndrome were the nation had their sense of esteem so suppressed that they actually came to love their masters. ….

Read the rest here.

Very much like the death of Joseph Stalin. Many of those shedding tears would have been en route to the Gulag had the old monster lived a few years longer.

 

General Ray Odierno, Chief of Staff of the US Army has a pretty good prospective professional reading list in the works with many titles of general interest to people in national security and foreign policy fields. He’s asking for feedback too.

Minus the Mustache of Understanding, whose inclusion seems to be required on lists of these kind, there are titles here that I would strongly recommend including McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom,  The Landmark Thucydides, Luttwak’s Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire and the best of military historians and strategists like Paret, Keegan, van Creveld and Parker.

I would recommend adding Acheson’s memoir Present at the Creation, for an understanding of policy and national strategy and Alan Schom’s critical and monumental biography, Napoleon Bonaparte: A Life, for a comprehensive understanding of Napoleon’s campaigns in context with his psychology and political leadership.

But what seems to really be missing from the General’s list is a good book on intelligence history and tradecraft.

Since the list is intended for military officers, it would not have to be a technical critique along the lines of Roberta Wohlstetter’s Warning and Decision (though that would not hurt) but something that gave a good overview, spymaster biography or history, would help.

I can think of many, but I’d like to see what the readership would nominate in the comment section. Have at it!

Hat tip to Lucien.

“…. But when the sons of these men received the same position of authority from their fathers-having had no experience of misfortunes, and none at all of civil equality and freedom of speech, but having been bred up from the first under the shadow of their fathers’ authority and lofty position-some of them gave themselves up with passion to avarice and unscrupulous love of money, others to drinking and the boundless debaucheries which accompanies it, and others to the violation of women or the forcible appropriation of boys; and so they turned an aristocracy into an oligarchy. But it was not long before they roused in the minds of the people the same feelings as before; and their fall therefore was very like the disaster which befell the tyrants.”-Polybius

One of the tenets of pop-centric COIN is that better governance will deliver the loyalty of the people who are the center of gravity over whom the insurgent and state contest. This usually means cajoling the state to reform and remove the worst abuses that serve to politically fuel the insurgency. Occasionally this is successful (El Salvador), frequently it is not (South Vietnam, Afghanistan) and in other cases it may be irrelevant as the method is eschewed in favor of indiscriminate brute force and punitive expeditions (Sri Lanka, Soviet COIN) but it begs the question of:

“What kind of governance is most likely to create insurgencies in the first place?”

Of insurgencies that are wholly indigenous, what form of government spawns them most frequently? A chart of historically recent insurgencies is given below containing who fought and who won (“negotiated” indicates a political settlemt “tie” of sorts, with some political accomodation and not settlements that are trucial “exit agreements” for the defeated belligerent): 

COUNTRY	GOVERNMENT	VICTOR
Aden	Colonial	Insurgents
Afghanistan (1979-1989)	Communist/Occupied	Insurgents
Afghanistan (2001-2011)	Republic/Occupied	Ongoing
Algeria (1954-1962)	Colonial	Insurgents
Algeria (1991-2006)	Dictatorship	Government
Angola(1961-1975)	Colonial	Insurgents
Angola (1975-2002)	Communist	Negotiated
Bolivia	Dictatorship	Government
Britain (N. Ireland)	Democracy	Negotiated
Cambodia (1970-1975)	Dictatorship	Insurgents
Cambodia (!978-1991)	Communist/Occupied	Negotiated
Colombia	Democracy	Ongoing
Chechnya	Republic	Government
China (1911-1949)	Dictatorship	Insurgents
Cuba	Dictatorship	Insurgents
Cyprus	Colonial	Insurgents
El Salvador (1930’s)	Dictatorship	Government
El Salvador (1970’s-1980’s)	Dictatorship/Democracy	Government
Greece	Monarchy	Government
Guatemala	Dictatorship	Government
India	Democracy	Ongoing
Indonesia (1945-1949)	Colonial	Insurgents
Indonesia (1965)	Dictatorship	Government
Iraq	Democracy/Occupied	Government
Israel (1st Intifada)	Democracy/Occupied	Negotiated
Israel (2nd Intifada)	Democracy/Occupied	Government
Jordan (Black September)	Monarchy	Government
Libya	Dictatorship	Insurgents
Malaya	Colonial/Republic	Government
Mexico	Democracy	Ongoing
Mozambique	Communist	Negotiated
Nepal	Monarchy	Insurgents
Nigeria (Biafra)	Dictatorship	Government
Nigeria (Delta)	Democracy	Ongoing
Nicaragua (1979)	Dictatorship	Insurgents
Nicaragua (1980’s)	Dictatorship	Negotiated
Palestinian Mandate	Colonial	Insurgents
Philippines (1899-1902)	Colonial	Government
Philippines (Huk Rebellion)	Republic	Government
Philippines	Dictatorship/Democracy	Ongoing
Rhodesia	Colonial/Apartheid	Insurgents
Saudi Arabia (Ikhwan Revolt)	Monarchy	Government
South Africa (Boer war)	Colonial/Occupational	Government
South Africa	Apartheid	Insurgents
Soviet Union (Basmachi Revolt)	Communist	Government
Soviet Union ( partisans)	Communist	Government
Syria (Hama Revolt)	Dictatorship	Government
Syria	Dictatorship	Ongoing
Vietnam (1930’s)	Colonial	Government
Vietnam (French War)	Colonial	Insurgents
Vietnam (American War)	Dictatorship	Insurgents
Yemen	Dictatorship	Ongoing
Yugoslavia	Occupied	Insurgents

The chart is fairly comprehensive, but I have not accounted for all movements or conflicts that can loosely be grouped under the heading of “insurgency” in the previous century. There are more. Corrections and additions are welcomed in the comments section. I also recognize that such a broad historical comparison as this chart involves a fairly massive degree of simplification of diverse examples. To some extent, simplification is unavoidable if insurgency is to be studied as a phenomenon at all rather than as an event in the history of a particular state or people.

EXCLUSIONS: 

Insurgencies before 1900.  A blog post cannot aspire become the encyclopedia of insurgency. 

The Russian Civil War (1918-1921) and the Lebanese Civil War of the 1980’s on the basis that while these conflicts contained many aspects of irregular warfare, they were primarily civil wars with extensive foreign intervention. The Greek and Chinese civil wars, by contrast are included because, despite foreign intervention in each case, the character of one of the belligerents in each conflict remained authentically and continuously insurgent in nature. The Greek communist army supported by Tito had previously been an anti-Nazi partisan force while Mao ZeDong’s Red Army were in rebellion against the Nationalist government before, after and to some extent, during, the WWII Japanese invasion of China.

Unlike the Vietnam War, the Korean War was neither an insurgency, nor a civil war, the adjunctive use of guerrilla operations by the North Korean and Chinese armies and the pro-DPRK apologetics of historian Bruce Cumings notwithstanding. The Korean War is better understood with Clausewitz than Galula.

The Soviet Bloc cases of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and Hungary in 1956 were excluded primarily because the resistance to Soviet domination was led by, or at least included, the leadership of the local satellite Communist Parties and governments, making those examples partially state vs. state conflicts. Of the two, Hungary presents a better empirical case for inclusion but from my readings of Soviet history, Khrushchev’s concerns were rooted in what he saw as counterrevolutionary and anti-Soviet elements in the Hungarian Party, army and security agencies and the Soviet response was a conventional invasion. I could be persuaded otherwise, but for now I am excluding Hungary.

The Katangan Secession – the reason here is my own lack of familiarity with the subject, as well as Mobutu’s later fall from power. Readers are invited to weigh in here or on any point.

Inadvertantly awol but intended to be included was Sri Lanka which recently crushed the Tamil Tigers. My error and one not easily remedied at this point for technical reasons, having tweaked the chart with another software program.

ANALYSIS:

Foreign Invasion 

First, if we wish to know what kind of governments most frequently suffer insurgencies, let us set aside insurgencies that derive primarily from resisting foreign invasion and occupation. While these conflicts are legitimately considered insurgencies, the cause of them is fundamentally external to the nature of the state. People have a natural, visceral and ingrained tendency to fight violent intruders and that reaction ought to be taken for granted and planned for accordingly. Even the much abused and absolutely impoverished peasantry of Russia rose up against Napoleonic armies and Nazi conquerors. So we would remove from consideration the cases of Afghanistan after the Soviet and American occupations, Yugoslavia, the Boer War, the Vietnamese occupation of Cambodia and the American occupation of Iraq and the Philippines as being externally provoked.

Likewise, insurgencies that are predominantly the creation of foreign powers, which would eliminate the US supported Contras in the 1980’s and parts of the Taliban like the Haqqani Network or Lashkar-e-Taiba in Kashmir (India however, has something like 17 ongoing insurgencies so it remains on the list). Also gone is Che Guevara’s quixotic and numerically insignificant expedition in Bolivia.

Totalitarian Dictatorships

To look at the chart, the type of government that seems to endure insurgency least often are, ironically, totalitarian governments. The USSR is listed with two revolts – the Basmachi in Central Asia in the 1920’sand the Banderists of Ukraine in the late 1940’s. The former began prior to the Revolution and Stalin’s absolute ascendancy and continued while Soviet governmental authority in Central Asia was still relatively weak. In the Ukraine, Bandera’s partisans only took root as a result of the chaos created by the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, which demolished the democidal grasp of Stalin’s NKVD apparatus there while replacing it with that of the genocidal SS. 

Historically, governments that exercised analogous control via terror to Stalin’s USSR simply did not endure insurgencies except in foreign territories they invaded, like Vietnam’s occupation of Cambodia. North Korea today, despite inhuman cruelties has not provoked an insurgency, nor did Nazi rule in Germany, the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia or even minor regimes like Enver Hoxha’s Albania, where efforts by the CIA to spark a guerrilla movement failed miserably. There is simply very little social “space” in a society atomized by terror and continuous surveillance for an insurgency to get started except by a spontaneous riot.

It is important to note however, as Jeane Kirkatrick did long ago, that totalitarian rule is qualitatively distinct from authoritarian rule. The USSR before an after Stalin was a different regime, regardless of outward continuity – and the same can be said of Communist China under Mao.

Democratic States 

The type of government that is next least likely to be fighting an insurgency at home are democratic ones – though they are perhaps very likely or most likely to be the states fighting them abroad.  The democratic states listed include Britain, Colombia, Israel, India, Mexico and Nigeria while the Philippines and El Salvador transitioned to democracy while fighting insurgencies and Iraq emerged from American occupation while an insurgency raged.

Of the democratic governments that fought insurgencies at home, Nigeria and the Philippines inherited their conflicts from previous dictatorships and all of the states have significant to severe demographic divisions based on language, religion, caste, tribe, ethnicity or legal status that are reinforced by economic discrimination and (except for Britain) serious to severe levels of corruption.

The economies of Mexico, El Salvador, Philippines and Colombia are historically oligarchic with the economic status quo being reinforced by extralegal violence in the rare instances where the government did not formally side with elite interests (usually because of factional disputes among the elite). The social complexities of Nigeria or India are too great to be delved into here but traditional structures and social relations were neither free nor highly mobile and that these legacies negatively impact or undermine democratic governance.

Of democracies that have not or have never needed to fight an insurgency, the supposition would be that liberal democracy represents the best vehicle for satisfying popular demands and defusing grievances. Further, there is an implicit assumption that democracies are functionally better at solving social and political problems and are less aggressive than dictatorships or traditional regimes. Therefore, a a key tenet of pop-centric COIN theory, the need for good governance, tends in practice to become conflated with implementing democratic and liberal reforms of regressive and repressive states, as was successfully done in El Salvador, to win over the loyalty of the population for the state.

I would like to believe that this theory is correct for intuitive and anecdotal reasons – it seems like common sense because our experience is that citizens of liberal democracies lead more prosperous, freer and more peaceful lives and are therefore unlikely to pick up arms against their government. Unfortunately, this reasonable assumption may be shakier than it appears and have little relation to success or failure of a COIN campaign.

The first problem with this line of COIN thinking is first, it mirrors the flaw in Democratic Peace theory – most democracies are of such new vintage historically that we are not assessing risks and probabilities from an adequate data set. Democracies have been, until the last twenty years, rare historical outliers. Of those democracies that have been around for the longest period of time – the European great powers, the United States and Japan – these nations have a formidibly warlike track record of military intervention or establishing the colonial empires that created the conditions for insurgency in most of the world’s hotspots. This alone should give us pause about the pacifistic nature of democracies if we have failed to learn this lesson from Thucydides.

The second problem is that good democratic governance does not equate with or guarantee military effectiveness of the counterinsurgent forces in the field. The shooting part of COIN wars matter and the “good guys” can lose when out-thought and out-fought; “bad guys” can be courageous, adaptive, highly motivated and militarily skillful adversaries. Nor does democratic governance ensure that wars of choice are fought for sound strategic reasons to accomplish affordable goals. The tendency toward idealism in democratic politics, making a war of choice attractive to an electorate can mitigate against maintaining a strategic perspective and tilt toward pursuing open-ended and ill-defined goals.

 The third problem is that the population is not always the “center of gravity” in 4GW or other non-maoist model insurgencies that have as a strategic objective something other than a takeover of the state. The population itself may in addition, be fundamentally illiberal in their orientation and inclined toward customs that are incompatible with Western notions of democracy or “good governance”.

Overseas, democracies are also historically active in fighting foreign insurgencies or aiding states to do so. Many of these examples are derived from the age of imperialism and the aftermath of decolonization that, as in the Malayan Emergency, became amalgamated with Cold War conflict between the West and Communism. It is also important to note, that liberal democracies are not strictly counterinsurgent/counterrevolutionary powers. Democratic states are also known to frequently aid or sponsor foreign insurgencies for ideological reasons, as under the Reagan Doctrine or the recent R2P intervention by NATO to aid rebels against Libyan dictator Col. Gaddafi.

Colonial regimes:

Colonial regimes along with authoritarian dictatorships most frequently faced insurgencies and generated many of the insurgent movements that lingered on into independence, fighting successor governments (Vietnam, Angola, Rhodesia etc.). While not the sole source of inspiration and historical experience, colonialism was the cradle of COIN theory with such luminaries as Callwell, Templer, Galula, Thompson and Fall as patron saints and the “red team” of Mao, Giap, Che, and Fanon on the other side.

Anti-colonial insurgencies are not considered to be in the same category here as insurgencies fighting foreign invasion because of the duration of colonial rule, decades or even centuries in length, mean that there are always other proximate causes for an insurgency than just the violent intrusion by foreign conquerors, though that grievance will always be present even if the memory of the event is purely historical. No power maintains itself for long periods of time without securing at least grudging political acceptance from a plurality of the population over which it rules and developing enough economic growth to make the imperial enterprise at least self-sustaining.

That said, despite their variable political nature of imperial powers, colonial administrations are almost always engaged in upholding unequal de jure privileges, even when the colonial territory is to be politically integrated into the mother country (ex. Algeria as a French department) or the imperial authorities are more liberal and solicitous of the indigenous population than are the colonial settlers ( ex. British Cape Colony). These unequal colonial priviliges typically relate to economic concessions that range from relatively normal productive capital investments (ex. British railroads in India) to rapacious looting and imposition of slave labor on a vast scale (ex. the Congo Free State under Leopold).

Colonial states are almost always minority governments of a settler/creole population and allied indigenous subgroup dominating a resentful majority excluded from the lion’s share of any economic benefits the regime is capable of generating. In the meantime, while badly outnumbered , colonial regimes tend to lack the overwhelming internal security capacity of the totalitarian police states, making control relatively fragile and dependent in part upon “divide and rule” political tactics. Markets do not operate freely but are arranged under  mercantilist restrictions designed for an export-driven economy based extraction of raw materials and commercial agriculture, a system that directly benefits only a narrow elite even within the privileged settler population. The mercantilist colonial economic structure is so durable that it is seldom dislodged even by independence, as the history of Latin America testifies, with a political elite assuming the privileged role once played by the imperial authorities and settler population.

Authoritarian dictatorships:

This category contains a highly diverse set of regimes, including the absolute monarchies on the list, with widely differing attitudes on political economy, foreign policy and social control. An authoritarian state may be a generally despised government controlled by a minority group (Baathist Syria, Rhodesia under Ian Smith) or it may enjoy nationalist legitimacy (Tito’s Yugoslavia, Egypt under Nasser) or even international respect (Singapore). They may also be bizarrely personalist tyrannies, like that of Jean-Bedel Bokassa, the cannibal emperor of the Central African Republic, or the aforementioned Colonel Gaddafi in Libya. Finally, most Communist states eventually mellowed from totalitarian dictatorships with supreme leaders to collective leadership based party oligarchies, China being the most successful example of such transitions.

In terms of insurgency, it is more difficult to generalize among authoritarian dictatorships than totalitatian ones, or even democracies. Repression alone is not the crucial variable as not all authoritarian states face an insurgent challenge at home and almost no totalitarian states do despite being several orders of magnitude more oppressive. It would be useful to draw distinctions between authoritarian states that faced insurgencies and those that did not.

Looking at authoritarian regimes that are or were free of insurgency – say for example, Nasser’s Egypt, Pinochet’s Chile, Tito’s Yugoslavia or Singapore and China today we notice that they share some nominally positive traits – competent leadership, nationalist or populist appeal, pro-active security policies, provision of public goods and/or effective economic policies – that reinforce or maintain the regime’s political legitimacy. Repression, even brutality, is more easily swallowed when the state is delivering a rising standard of living and is seen by the public as an effective guardian of communal values and reliable protector against threats. Even a certain amount of corruption is tolerable, from the perspective of the average citizen, if the elite polices its members to remediate gross abuses of power. Some minor corruption (baksheesh, na levo) humanizes a rigid system on the margins for people without access to powerful patrons and relieves frustration.

Authoritarian or autocratic states that faced serious insurgencies lack these qualities – South Vietnam, Afghanistan under Karzai, Nigeria, Batista’s Cuba, Nationalist China, the Philippines under Marcos – coupled repression with incompetence, alienation from the public, massively dysfunctional levels of corruption and economic stagnation that magnifies and focuses popular resentment against the regime and provide fertile soil for insurgency and revolution. Contrary to Machiavelli’s famous advice, the rulers of these states made themselves more hated  than feared – and usually were also helping themselves to the “patrimony” of their citizens along the way via looting on a scale that exceeded even that of the European colonial powers. The Arab Spring began in Tunisia where hatred for the family of the wife of President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali as a bloodsucking mafia burst like a flood and most recently toppled the mad Colonel Gaddafi, who is now estimated to have stolen $ 200 billion dollars from the Libyan people over the course of his 41 year regime.

CONCLUSIONS:

• Insurgencies do not appear everywhere and where they appear they do not all enjoy similar success. Some are crushed virtually before they begin; others take over the state only to face new insurgencies against their own brand of government. Local conditions matter a great deal in determining whether an insurgency will appear at all, with some of the most monstrous governments in human history reigning unchallenged while relatively mild tyrannies are ignominiously toppled. A sufficiently omnipresent security regime, while economically wasteful, can make an insurgency’s emergence virtually impossible.
• Oligarchical policies seem to increase the likelihood of rebellion by being repressive, economically exploitative, politically unrepresentative and also incompetent, governing in opposition to the interests of a majority of the population. Most of the states comprising historical cases on the insurgency table, though not all, were oligarchical to a significant degree, including the democratic states. However we can qualify this by recognizing that some states that are politically organized as oligarchies, one-party dictatorships such as China, are also capable of moderation and pursuing a version of enlightened authoritarianism and competent governance that secures a degree of genuine popular support. At least for a time.
• Democracies are janus-faced in terms of insurgency. On the one hand, excepting the French Fourth Republic, advanced liberal democracies in the last century have rarely faced a serious rebellion at home (the 1970’s wave of upper-class Marxist terrorism never exceeded a handful of terrorists). On the other hand, these same democracies have an extensive historical record of provoking insurrection in overseas colonial possessions, fighting insurgencies on behalf of client states or even sponsoring insurgents as proxies against unfriendly states. This uneasily complicated relationship between democratic governance qand insurgency mitigates any unstated assumptions regarding promotion of democracy as a natural adjunct of COIN; democracy can be highly subversive of traditional mores or it can manifest itself as intolerant and illiberal majoritarianism.
• Pop-centric COIN is a paradigm for fighting insurgency that is more suitable for some scenarios than others. As such, it would an error to keep it as official doctrine but it would likewise be an error to get rid of it entirely. An array of different COIN approaches of which pop-centric COIN is only one, would be a more realistic replacement; with the caveat, stated many times by many experts, that local conditions should determine and shape a COIN campaign rather than resorting to an established template.

[ by Charles Cameron — why is non-actionable (useless) intelligence sometimes the most intelligent (useful)? – importance of multiple frames for complex vision ]
.

I have fun choosing my data points, I’ll admit, and I enjoy the art of juxtaposition for its own sake — but the particular juxtaposition above is frankly useless.

Readers of the Chuang-Tzu, however, will be familiar with the idea that the useless is not without its uses…

Here, then, is the method to this madness.

What I want to establish in myself – and in others who choose to follow me – is a rich supply of frames, of analogies, of patterns that can be seen at a glance. And the ways to do this are (a) to read widely in those arts and sciences which make frequent use of symmetry, analogy, metaphor, and pattern, and (b) to practice, oneself, the techne of analogy-, metaphor-, symmetry-, and pattern-making.

1.

In the two image-frames above, the lower image shows a still from a Haqqani network training video from SITE — which could be viewed as the fulfillment (albeit in Afghanistan, and waking reality) of a prophecy made earlier (about Scotland, a not-entirely-dissimilar country, mountainous, clannish, proud), in suitably oracular fashion, in Shakespeare’s Macbeth Act IV Scene 1 (shown in the upper frame, from the First Folio edition).

Here, you might say, the Taliban come to high Dunsinane Hill.

But…

This is not actionable intelligence.

The injunction to “keep a lookout for people on the move pretending to be trees” is not a useful addition to tradecraft.

It is, however, vivid. And it’s an instance of “the leap” from one idea to another that’s at the heart of the process of insight and discovery. It is an example of a specific skill of considerable analytic importance.

2.

Karl Weick and Kathleen Sutcliffe, in Managing the Unexpected: Assuring High Performance in an Age of Complexity, p. 42, [quoted in Fishbein and Treverton and Jeffrey Cooper ] define mindfulness thus:

By mindfulness we mean the combination of ongoing scrutiny of existing expectations, continuous refinement and differentiation of expectations based on new experiences, willingness and capability to invent new expectations that make sense of unprecedented events, a more nuanced appreciation of context and ways to deal with it, and identification of new dimensions of context that improve foresight and current functioning.

How’s that for a prose version of the basic OODA insight?

3.

Obviously, I am not talking about the kind of tactical intelligence that is concerned with materiel and logistics here, but with mindset and morale.

This may get overlooked, since…

Emphasizing current intelligence for actionable exploitation may have created an unintended mind-set that undervalues the immense importance of knowing and understanding the adversary’s intentions throughout the course of the confrontation, even at cost of foregoing exploitation of these sources for temporary advantage on the battlefield or in the diplomatic conference room.

[Cooper, Curing Analytic Pathologies: Pathways to Improved Intelligence Analysis, p.30]

4.

What I am talking about here is that “willingness and capability to invent new expectations that make sense of unprecedented events, a more nuanced appreciation of context and ways to deal with it, and identification of new dimensions of context that improve foresight and current functioning mentioned above.

New dimensions of context? What this boils down to is multiple frames of vision… which the IC understands very well, as expressed in the often-repeated chess master analogy — good for strategic thinkers of all stripes. Here’s Robert Sinclair‘s version, in Thinking and Writing: Cognitive Science and Intelligence Analysis, p. 13:

Simon estimates that a first-class player will have 50,000 of these patterns to call on — by no means a small number, but orders of magnitude less than the theoretical possibilities that flow from any given position. The expert can use them to drastically reduce the number of choices he must consider at any point in a game, with the result that he often hits on an effective move with such speed that the observer attributes it to pure intuition.

Enter Neustadt and May, whose book Thinking in Time Zen reviewed here just the other day — enter, in fact, history, as a store of stories.

Richards Heuer explains [Psychology of Intelligence Analysis, p. 38]:

An analyst seeks understanding of current events by comparing them with historical precedents in the same country, or with similar events in other countries. Analogy is one form of comparison. When an historical situation is deemed comparable to current circumstances, analysts use their understanding of the historical precedent to fill gaps in their understanding of the current situation. Unknown elements of the present are assumed to be the same as known elements of the historical precedent. Thus, analysts reason that the same forces are at work, that the outcome of the present situation is likely to be similar to the outcome of the historical situation, or that a certain policy is required in order to avoid the same outcome as in the past.

And the analogies and insights can come from fiction as well as history, as Charles Hill is quoted here as saying:

That is why Alexander the Great carried the Iliad with him on his conquests, and why Queen Elizabeth studied Cicero in the evenings. It is why Abraham Lincoln read, and was profoundly influenced by, Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass,” and why Paul Nitze paged through Shakespeare on his flights to Moscow as America’s chief arms negotiator.

Further, the appropriate insights and possible framings can come from future and/or speculative histories — hence the meetings between IC members and various science fiction authors and thriller screenwriters which then DDI Jami Miscik arranged in an attempt “to see beyond the intelligence report and into a world of plot development”.

As I noted a few days back, I’m particularly impressed by Frank Herbert‘s ability to recognize the importance of the oil / desert / ecology / major powers / jihad / Mahdi complex – back between 1957 and 1965, while writing Dune.

5.

But all this takes me back to a comment I made a while back on Mark Stout‘s On War and Words blog, on “the notion of the kinship of spycraft and literature.” I wrote there:

I think that idea has a lot of merit. Chaucer was a spy, as was Kit Marlowe, and Wordsworth, and Basil Bunting. Somerset Maugham and Graham Greene spied, and John le Carre – and if I’m not mistaken, much of the early OSS was recruited from the Yale literature department by the likes of Archibald MacLeish…

My own suggestion would be that this is because the literary mind is well suited to understanding and expressing complex relationships, just as (it has been suggested) the engineering mind is suited to seeing things in black and white – you’ve probably seen Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog’s paper on Engineers of Jihad, in which they determine that “engineers, in particular, were three to four times more likely to become violent terrorists than their peers in finance, medicine or the sciences”.

I don’t know whether that allegation is accurate, or just an artifact of their research methods – but if it’s true that literature offers a different (and in some ways more subtle) means of modeling the kinds of complex situation we’re all facing these days, maybe we need to increase the intake of lit and humanities majors into the IC, and stop being so tech-centric about our analytic methods. The human mind might just be better at selecting and connecting the right dots than our datamining programs.

Keith Oatley‘s paper Shakeapeare’s invention of theatre as simulation that runs on minds might give us a hint or two.

And we’re back to Shakespeare.

6.

Why?

Because what’s important in all this is the quality of imagination expressed. And the core insight is that the greatest poets, dramatists, science fiction writers and historians create pocket universes — worlds invented or perceived in which the logics of the many binary oppositions, tides, undertows, tipping points and emergent patternings of our profoundly complex world are found in miniature.

The mind in a nutshell, the world in a grain of sand…

Perhaps clearest statement of this perspective comes from the great scientist Gregory Bateson, who writes about poetry in these terms:

One reason why poetry is important for finding out about the world is because in poetry a set of relationships get mapped onto a level of diversity in us that we don’t ordinarily have access to. We bring it out in poetry. We can give to each other in poetry the access to a set of relationships in the other person and in the world that we are not usually conscious of in ourselves. So we need poetry as knowledge about the world and about ourselves, because of this mapping from complexity to complexity.

7.

If it is great imaginative power that provides the deepest insights into a complex world, great minds and hearts will be those you need to follow — not minds cowed by the pressures of bureacracy and success.

“You want some new ideas? Read some old books” Marine Gen. James Mattis told his audience at the 14th annual American Veterans Center conference the other day, in a speech which “recommended books by and about leaders like Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King Jr., George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.”

Great hearts, great minds. And not always well-tolerated by those around them.

8.

Jami Miscik again, at a conference discussing “The Power of Impossible Thinking: A Prerequisite for Profitable Growth“:

Embrace the maverick.

Miscik is clear that the purpose isn’t only to be widely read, but to be independently and courageously thoughtful.  Bureaucracies are not by nature the most friendly places for independent thinking, stove-piping and soloing, seniority and comfort all militate against it — hence the need to embrace the maverick, to develop (in fact) a culture that embraces the maverick.

Miscik addresses that issue, too: “She also warned the audience that a single spate of change is not enough; an organization will always have to change again.”

Or as Sinclair has it in Thinking and Writing (op. cit., p. 9):

I do believe diversifying the workforce in this way would require a cultural shift at least comparable to that involved in a shift to online substantive collaboration. Without such a shift, the directorate, like any organism under threat, would identify people who failed to fit the dominant pattern as foreign bodies and extrude them.

9.

I am thinking, in all this, of those whose task it is to provide the richest, highest level analysis of “the adversary’s intentions” — the readers of minds by which history is about to be written.

Those whose job it is to be concerned about the threats that face us, from the Haqqani, from the Chinese, from Pakistan, from wherever, will do their job better, with greater insight – with greater critical doubt and critical confidence – if their minds are richly sown with myths and histories, matter for analogies pattern languages, than if they have focused down along the scope of a single silo…

As Mattis, Hill, Miscik, Sinclair, Bateson, Oatley, Heuer and company, each in their own way, suggest…

10.

When you come right down to it, audacious, insightful thinking is its own form of special ops.

[by J. Scott Shipman]

The Forum and The Tower by Mary Ann Glendon

“The relationship between politics and the academy has been marked by mutual fascination and wariness since the time of Plato.”

The first sentence on the flap of the dust jacket of this very good and informative small book. Professor Glendon, who is the Learned Hand Professor of Law at Harvard Law school, set out to write a book for her students that would answer ageless questions such as:

“Is politics such a dirty business, or are conditions so unfavorable, that couldn’t make a difference? What kinds of compromises can one make for the sake of getting and keeping a position from which one might be able to have influence on the course of events? What kinds of compromises can one make for the sake of achieving a higher political goal? When does prudent accommodation become pandering? When should one speak truth to power no matter what the risk, and when is it acceptable, as Burke put it, to speak the truth with measure that one may speak it longer? When does one reach the point at which one concludes, as Plato finally did, that circumstances are so unfavorable that only the reasonable course of action is to “keep quiet and offer up prayers for one’s own welfare and for that of one’s country”?”

Professor Glendon answers these questions and more through brief examinations of the lives and works of some of history’s most important figures:

Plato

Cicero

Justinian, Tribonian, and Irnerius

Machiavelli

Thomas Hobbs and Edward Coke

John Locke

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Edmund Burke

Tocqueville

Max Weber

Oliver Wendell Holmes

Eleanor Roosevelt and Charles Malik

All in all, I believe Professor Glendon has provided a uniquely valuable book to help her students and other readers to answers those questions. In short but focused chapters of about 20 pages each, she provides mini-biographies of the subjects above and how they answered the some of the questions both in their lives and in their philosophy. Some of her subjects were thinkers lacking the abilities for the public square, Plato, for instance, but were enormously influential just the same. Rare were those like Cicero and Burke who were equally comfortable in the political arena or the academy.

My favorite chapters were on Plato, Cicero, Machiavelli, and Burke—mostly because I’ve read a respectable amount of their work. That said, I have not read Plato’s The Laws—and Professor Glendon suggests it is much better than The Republic—which I have read and did not much enjoy. Not surprisingly, The Laws will be on my list for this winter.

The inclusion of Eleanor Roosevelt and Charles Malik was something of a surprise, but Professor Glendon is weaving a sub-story through each chapter and illustrating how Roosevelt and Malik’s work on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was something of culmination and extension of over 2,000 years of thinking and political action—not in the context of human progress towards a utopia of sorts, which she wisely rejects,  but rather a reflection the common threads of political thought throughout history.

While this is not criticism, I would have liked to have seen a chapter on John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, and a chapter on Karl Marx, whom she frequently mentions.

This is a book that is approachable and readable, and in our tumultuous domestic and global political climate, important.

She closes with this illuminating sentence:

“If one message emerges from the stories collected here, it is that just because one does not see the results of one’s best efforts in one’s own lifetime does not mean those efforts were in vain.”

Professor Glendon is to be commended for a job “well done!”

The book comes with my highest recommendation and may be the best book I’ve read this calendar year. Add this book to your must read list.

.
Referenced works you may find of interest (some of these works are out of print and expensive—for simplicity I’ve used Amazon links): 

The Laws of Plato, translated by Thomas Pangle

Cicero: The Life and Times of Rome’s Greatest Politician, by Anthony Everitt

Cicero, A Portrait, by Elizabeth Rawson (Glendon praised this book.)

A Panorama of the World’s Legal Systems, John Henry Wigmore

The Life of Nicolo Machiavelli, Roberto Ridolfi

The Prince, translated by Harvy Mansfield

Machiavelli, by Quentin Skinner

The Lion and the Throne, Catherine Drinker Bowen

The Spirit of Modern Republicanism, by Thomas Pangle

Statesmanship and Party Government, by Harvy Mansfield

The Great Melody, A Thematic biography of Edmund Burke, by Conor Cruise O’Brien (I read this wonderful book in 1992 when it was released: highly recommended.)