[by J. Scott Shipman]

Creating a Lean R&D System, by Terry Barnhart

Friend of this blog, and friend, Terry Barnhart’s new book is available on Amazon. Terry is one of the leading thinkers among those who admire John Boyd’s work.

Terry has spoken at the last three Boyd and Beyond events, and much of the substance of those talks are reflected in this book. I’ve read most of it, and believe it will have wide applicability outside the “lean” community. His sections on the use of A3’s (the subject of his talks at B&B this year) for problem identification/solution and rapid learning have potential at the personal and the organizational level. At the core, Terry is advocating a culture of innovation and providing tools he has proven in practice.

Recommended.

A version is cross posted at To Be or To Do.

[by J. Scott Shipman]

This is worth the 20 minutes. Strategy without clarity, isn’t. There is no clarity or strategy to our current problems in Afghanistan.

“We have killed all the slow and stupid ones. But that means the ones that are left are totally dedicated.” Ambassador Ryan Crocker

Cross posted at To Be or To Do.
H/T Feral Jundi at Facebook.

As you probably already know, the US Embassy in Cairo Egypt was stormed today by Islamists supposedly angry about a video on Youtube supposedly made or endorsed by anti-Muslim Quran-burner and bigot Rev. Terry Jones. The embassy, deliberately left without sufficient protection by the Egyptian government of Islamist President  Mohamed Morsi, was overrun, Islamists tore down the US flag and hoisted the black flag of al Qaida while a senior Muslim Brotherhood official has called on the US to “apologize”. All on the anniversary of 9/11.

The US Consulate in Benghazi, Libya was attacked by an Islamist militia with RPGs and small arms, sacked and burned, killing at least one American.

The Obama administration has gambled heavily upon a Mideast policy of engagement verging into appeasement and sponsorship of Sunni Islamist groups’ political and even revolutionary aspirations in the hopes of  co-opting “moderate” or “pragmatic” Islamists into a durable partnership with the United States. The new regime of American-educated Mohammed Morsi, represents the cornerstone of this policy, alongside the Libyan Revolution that toppled Gaddafi. This initiative has been delicately balanced, Nixon-style, with a very tough campaign of unapologetic targeted drone strikes on hard-core al Qaida terrorists in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia.

If you have a sense of deja vu, you are harkening back to 1979, when another Democratic administration and an arrogantly uninformed group of senior State Department officials severely misread another, that time Shia, Islamist revolution. We lost several embassies then as well and endured a national humiliation of the Iranian hostage crisis.

But give the Carter administration, it’s due: when the embassy in Teheran was seized or the one in Islamabad burned by military-sponsored Islamist mobs, no State Department official at the time responded with quite this level of truckling moral cowardice and incompetence:

@Mbaha2

@USEmbassyCairo you say all humans are equal but the truth is you hate Muslims and describe us as terrorists when u are the real terrorists

@USEmbassyCairo

@mbaha2 No, that’s not true. We consistently stand up for Muslims around the world and talk abt how Islam is a wonderful religion

Perhaps the time for anxiously politically correct FSOs describing Islam as “a wonderful religion” to an online Salafist hater could wait a few days, at least until Egypt restored the American embassy to it’s sovereign status with an apology and the body of the slain American diplomat is returned to their family from Libya for a decent burial?

There is quite a buzz going in mil and defense blogger circles over the recent op-ed savaging in The American Conservative by Kelley Vlahos regarding Dr. John Nagl and COIN. Unfortunately for Vlahos, little of it that I have seen online or privately is favorable – including from some people who I know are less than well-disposed toward COIN or the COINdinistas.

Speaking as someone who was one of the earlier voices to remark that the political moment of pop-centric COIN had passed, I found Vlahos’ post to largely be ill-tempered, context-distorting, schadenfreude.

But hey, judge for yourself. My comments will be in normal text:

Learning to Eat Soup with a Spoon 

….Then Tom Ricks, Washington Post correspondent-court scribe, conducted a full-blown high school popularity contest, literally ranking the “brains behind counterinsurgency’s rise from forgotten doctrine to the centerpiece of the world’s most powerful military.” In this cringe-worthy “top ten” published in Foreign Policy in December 2009, Ricks places “King David” Petraeus at Number 1, and then Nagl, whose Oxford dissertation-turned-Barnes-and-Noble-bestseller Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife made him a counterinsurgency “scholar,” among other bright lights of the time. Nagl, Ricks predicted, would be “in a top Pentagon slot within a year or two.”

That was just three years ago. Today, there is no better symbol for the dramatic failure of COIN, the fading of the COINdinistas and the loss that is U.S war policy in Afghanistan than this week’s news that Nagl is leaving Washington to be the headmaster of The Haverford School, a rich preparatory school (grades k-12) for boys on Philadelphia’s Main Line.

Hmmmm. I guess General Petraeus as CIA Director and General Mattis as Combatant Commander of CENTCOM are therefore examples of a rare form of career failure.

And really, only a subpar military officer would involve himself in educating young people. Shame on you, John Nagl, for joining such a shady group of misfits.

….That’s right — Nagl, once called the Johnny Appleseed of COIN, who reveled in his role as face man, tutoring reporters with practiced bookish charm on the “the new way of war,”  and burnishing his personal story to convince everyone that he was a counter-insurgent before his time — a modern T.E. Lawrence — is packing up for good. Turns out that despite all the high hopes, the COINdinistas hit the brass ceiling with a smack, especially once it became clear that the magic they sold was a bag of beans….

Again, most of the COINdinistas, so-called, have not hit some kind of brass ceiling  nor are they secretly running the Army or the administration. Most are  in perfectly respectable but unremarkable ranks, institutional positions or jobs in the private sector. HR McMaster is now a brigadier major general, Con Crane is a director at the US Army Military History Institute, Kalev Sepp is a lecturer at the Naval Postgraduate School, Montgomery McFate holds the Minerva Chair at NWC,  General Jack Keane sits on several corporate boards, Fred Kagan is still at AEI,  Andrew Exum is at CNAS, David Kilcullen is the  CEO at Caerus Associates and so on.

By Washington standards, this is a relatively modest level of policy influence or promotion (Petraeus and Mattis excepted). If you want to look at rapid advancement through political connections, consider Al Haig rising like a rocket from LTC to full general and NATO Supreme Commander due to his proximity to Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger. Or the unusually gilded career path of Colin Powell.

That said, there are many grounds, theoretical and practical, to find fault with pop-centric COIN theory and FM 3-24, from an anti-empirical legacy assumption of a Maoist model of insurgency, to a fundamental confusion of tactics and operational art with strategy to the hardening of COIN from a fairly flexible emergent doctrine in Iraq into a rigid, micromanaging, ROE dogma in Afghanistan. COIN is ripe for revision, not excision and substantive, informed, critiques of the wars of the past decade are sorely needed by scholars, military officers and defense intellectuals. Irregular conflict is never going away any more than war will go away.

Unfortunately, Vlahos was too busy with gossipy smears on Nagl’s character to make any substantive points of that nature which would have made her column something more than ad hominem rubbish.