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YOUR SYSTEM ADMINISTRATION FORCE CANNOT HAVE FEET OF CLAY

Much has been written about the immense difficulties experienced by the U.S military in occupying Iraq and defeating the multifaceted Iraqi insurgency. While tactics, politics and civilian leadership have all come under fire, most critics have zeroed in on having insufficient numbers of troops, blaming in particular Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and then Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz for overruling Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki’s recommendation for a much larger invasion force. As it turned out, Saddam’s much-feared but ramshackle regime probably could have been toppled by a lower numbers of troops closer to what had been advocated by Wolfowitz but the occupation of Iraq would have been better served by the larger force recommended by Shinseki. Better served but I would argue not well-served. Numbers alone are not the whole story – something critics and supporters of the war alike have missed entirely.

Dr. Barnett in The Pentagon’s New Map illustrated the “Leviathan” – ” System Administration” division of task and structure that the U.S. military is going to need to adapt to in the 21st century. In Blueprint for Action, Barnett expounds on the lessons Iraq has had for that conceptual division. They are numerous and I will leave them for my future review of BFA . I will however, add my two cents to the discussion. The overlooked aspect of this debate has been the critical misallocation of skills in Iraq – something that will continue even if the military is re-orged into Sys Admin and Leviathan forces unless the problem is recognized and taken into account.

Both Sys Admin and Leviathan forces – or any effective military for that matter – require a continuum of skills to function in the field for any extended period of time. Leviathan would have an overall systemic bias toward very high-end and specialized skill-sets but even so it would still need its share of clerks, cooks and humble enlistees to do mundane tasks like delivering the mail, emptying the trash, pulling guard duty and K.P. System Administration, being very human intensive in terms of security and interactivity with locals, requires a far larger number of personnel to perform low-end skill tasks that while not very glamorous, in the aggregate, if left undone, will create mission failure, low morale and numerous situational hazards. Sys Admin has its high-end skill slots to be sure, particularly in engineering and logistics, but the ratios are skewed differently than with Leviathan.

In Iraq the United States has a high-end skill-set military force configured structurally to destroy other great power conventional militaries attempting to do Sys Admin work while simultaneously waging a counterinsurgency war. We are not simply short ” X” number of boots – though more boots would help – we have local commanders cannibalizing their highly skilled experts in a seat-of-the pants manner to do the mundane tasks needed to simply keep the unit functioning as a military force. We are short on the low-end skills and this is creating massive systemic ineffiencies, essentially diseconomies of scale. One contact of mine who served in Iraq doing some rather dangerous field work during the CPA period first as a USG official then as a private contractor, put it this way:

“…The US Army is horrible understaffed,there are 33% of the interrogators in the military as there were 10 years ago and there weren’t enough then. The army is short in nearly every manning position so if a commander happens to have an interrogator there is not guarantee that they will be working in that capacity, they may well be a mail clerk because the unit doesn’t have enough of them either.”

The absence of a robust amount of low end but vital support personnel are part of the problem and one not solved by getting more of the same. Or by hiring a legion of private contractors to to freelance problems as best they can. You don’t use Navy SEALS to do bodyguard duty, you don’t want psychological warfare experts supervising the motor pool. Any economist looking at what the military is doing or is forced to do with it’s people would predict a series of negative outcomes as the effects of inefficiency begin to accumulate.

High-end skill-set personnel will do low-end jobs for a time, to pitch-in and help as it were, but in the end they get sick of being misused and leave the service, taking their valuable skills elsewhere.

LARRY JOHNSON ON KATRINA AS A FAILURE MODEL FOR TERROR RESPONSE

Mr. Larry Johnson is a former CIA analyst and Deputy Director for the State Department’s Office of Counterterrorism and is currently the CEO of BERG associates. He blogs at No Quarter:

“KATRINA AS A TERRORIST RESPONSE“

“The unfolding disaster along the Gulf Coast is only going to get worse, unfortunately. I spoke today to a friend in Louisiana who has two sons that serve in the Louisiana State Police. There are still stories not fully covered by the media. My friend’s boys, for example, were in a shootout last night with a rampaging gang in New Orleans. When the sun goes down the jackals come out. We will see more images of Americans shooting Americans in the coming days.

Given the scale of the disaster along the Gulf Coast it is essential that the response be Federalized and that NORTHCOM be put fully in charge of coordinating and directing the humanitarian and crisis response operation. Unlike the current head of FEMA, the Commander of NORTHCOM is an experienced officer who knows how to command large scale operations”

KESLER ON THE PLAYING THE RACE CARD IN NEW ORLEANS

I strongly agree with Bruce that looking for a racial angle here is wrong both in the normative sense as well as accuracy and those that go that route are opportunistic jackals. Losing an American city would be pretty high political price for any politician to pay to express personal prejudicial sentiments. Likewise most poor, African-American, citizens of New Orleans were not looters but were the victims of looters, thugs and systemic governmental incompetence.

Bruce Kesler on ” Is it Racism in New Orleans ” at The Democracy Project. An excerpt:

“Some on the left or among Blacks charge that the lack of attention and speed in helping the mostly Black victims we’ve seen on TV is due to racism. I won’t link to them, as I refuse to give their racism further currency. I, also, disagree with some on the right who charge that the fault resides mostly in a welfare or entitlement mentality of those in the Black community or its Black and liberal leadership not making New Orleans a richer city. Again, I won’t link to them, as I refuse to give their ideologically extreme filter further currency.

Both camps miss the simpler explanation. The fault, more simply, lays in both the limitations of any government to foresee and adequately prepare for all contingencies, compounded by the stubborn failure of the city and state leadership to more energetically prepare and their resistance to enthusiastically cooperate with federal authorities. Race and political affiliation has far less to do with either than sheer inadequacy and self-defensive CYA. It was not a Rudy Guiliani moment.”

“It was not a Rudy Guiliani moment”

Of course, Bruce understates… but does it well.

NEW ORLEANS: LESSONS OF A FAILED STATE [ Updated]

Charitably speaking, the debacle that was New Orleans after Katrina was a complete and utter national disgrace. The Department of Homeland Security had its first big test and failed so miserably that the Congress should consider liquidating it and going back to the drawing board. The State of Lousiana and city government of New Orleans also stand revealed as abjectly incompetent and unable to provide even minimal services and rule of law in a crisis situation that everyone had ample warning was coming. Lastly, an ominous percentage of the citizens of New Orleans failed the basic test of civilized humanity and instead reveled in barbarism. By the standard we use to judge nations, New Orleans is a failed state. Sadly, a great American city can now be considered as part of the Non-Integrating Gap.

I referred to New Orleans a few days ago as ” Mogadishu on the Mississippi“. NuSapiens asks if it had become a “ feral city “, quoting Richard Norton:

“In a feral city social services are all but nonexistent, and the vast majority of the city’s occupants have no access to even the most basic health or security assistance. There is no social safety net. Human security is for the most part a matter of individual initiative. Yet a feral city does not descend into complete, random chaos. Some elements, be they criminals, armed resistance groups, clans, tribes, or neighborhood associations, exert various degrees of control over portions of the city. Intercity, city-state, and even international commercial transactions occur, but corruption, avarice, and violence are their hallmarks. A feral city experiences massive levels of disease and creates enough pollution to qualify as an international environmental disaster zone. Most feral cities would suffer from massive urban hypertrophy, covering vast expanses of land. The city’s structures range from once-great buildings symbolic of state power to the meanest shantytowns and slums. Yet even under these conditions, these cities continue to grow, and the majority of occupants do not voluntarily leave.”

What lessons can we draw ? A couple come to mind:

LOGISTICS:

Agencies like FEMA that purport to be disaster coordinators should actually be run people who have the practiced understanding of large-scale logistics. Either bring in retired military personnel with such experience, the U.S. military being the premier logistical organization in the world, or have the Pentagon train USG civvies in the art. Traditionally, FEMA is run by a partisan crony of the president’s. Katrina provided a good excuse to end that practice.

THE UNDERCLASS AS AN INSTANT INSURGENCY:

A few days ago we had a lively debate here about America’s own Non-Integrating Gap and what kind of ” system administration” should happen domestically. Or even if that would be a good idea. Well…I can’t say that the ” what” or ” how ” are resolved but New Orleans just demonstrated why something needs to be done. A critical mass point has been reached.

Every American city ( and not just cities either) has a subset of the population that is so antisocially detached, disconnected and potentially dangerous that disaster planners must expect that ” instant insurgencies” will arise from the underclass in the advent of a natural disaster or terrorist attack. Cook County, Illinois, where I reside, is also home to 80,000 gang members, the most dangerous of whom already exist in sophisticated organized crime entities that have infiltrated the Chicago Police Department and even their anti-gang units. Good behavior cannot be expected from them if a 9/11 or Katrina magnitude disaster hits Chicago.

INDIVIDUAL PREPAREDNESS:

Every family or individual needs to be able to have a plan to cope for a short-time in the advent of a mass disaster for at least five days to a week. That means minimally, food, clean drinking water, basic medical supplies, a battery-operated radio and realistically, a firearm and someone trained in its use.

Not every locality will see the total societal break-down during a crisis that happened in New Orleans but you never know how your neighbors will act until they are put to that test. The U.S. government may not be on hand to help you either – at least not at first.

UPDATE – DHS:

Here’s why DHS needs to be rethought entirely – even when it is aware of a problem it is too enormous, poorly organized and badly run to respond. (Hat tip to Bruce Kesler )

THE SYMPOSIUM OF DREAMS [ Updated ]

Participating in a symposium or various kinds of public roundtable discussions rank lower on the academic scale than publishing books or monographs. Perhaps even lower than getting a good quote in the New York Times. This is understandable. In my view, most of these events are less than dynamic with a lot of faux-casual, self-deprecating remarks and longwinded, meandering, insufficiently moderated, serial monologues by inadequately prepared speakers.

On the other hand, the problem is not really the format but the participants themselves. Having mean expertise in a niche subfield is no guarantee of eloquence. Or brilliance. Perhaps universities and various policy associations would be better off having fewer symposiums except when they can assure themselves of participants who crackle with intellectual force and are willing to get outside their comfort zones in front of an audience. The actual value of a symposium for the participants is the generation of new concepts and perspectives via horizontal thinking and inter/intradisciplinary engagement; the value for the audience comes from the model of cognition being presented.

Here are some hypothetical examples of ” Dream Symposiums” that range from the merely unlikely to the impossible (i.e. the ppl are dead) that would, nevertheless, rock.

AMERICAN STRATEGY

John Keegan, Henry Kissinger, Thomas P.M. Barnett, William Lind, Robert Kaplan, John Mearsheimer, Richard Perle, Bill Clinton,Donald Kagan, Zbigniew Brzezinski

ISLAMISM AND TERRORISM

Juan Cole, Martin Kramer, Oliver Roy, Bernard Lewis, Steve Emerson, Michael Scheuer, Gilles Kepel, Steve Coll, Jessica Stern, Paul Wolfowitz

FUTURISM AND SOCIETY

Alvin Toffler, Buckminster Fuller, Herman Kahn, Isaac Asimov, Mortimer Adler, Freeman Dyson, Carl Sagan, Ayn Rand, Arthur C. Clarke, Richard Feynmann, Neal Stephenson*, Ray Kurzweil **, Thornton May and Richard Thieme ***

FIRST PRINCIPLES IN SCIENCE by Dr. Von

* Jacob H.
** Matt McIntosh
*** Stuart Berman

Many thanks to everyone for the additional suggestions. You gentlemen cued me to some people I need to know more about.