CURRENTLY READING
Curing Analytic Pathologies:Pathways to Improved Intelligence Analysis by Jeffrey R. Cooper.
If, like me, you enjoy contemplating issues of human cognition, intelligence analysis, reforming the CIA and IC bureaucratic culture, you will probably find this a fascinating read. If not…well…it is 73 pages of what I just described. :O)
Hat tip to Defense Tech.
Hat tip to Secrecy News ( which I will soon add to the blogroll).
ANCIENT ROME AND GLOBALIZATION
An interesting and well-crafted essay by Harold James at HNN that fuses analogies with imperial Rome and Great Britain with Schumpeterine creative destruction. ” Our Roman Predicament ” postulates what the Old Marxists might have called the “contradiction of capitalism”, that geopolitical success of the liberal order undermines itself. A nod to cyclicalism, a theory that stretches back to Polybius:
“In these monumental and parallel works, Smith and Gibbon explored what I term the “Roman predicament”: the way that peaceful commerce is frequently seen as a way of building a stable, prosperous and integrated international society. At the same time, the peaceful liberal economic order leads to domestic clashes and also to international rivalry and even wars. The conflicts disturb and eventually destroy the commercial system and the bases of prosperity and integration. These interactions seem to be a vicious spiral, or a trap from which it seems almost impossible to escape. The liberal commercial world order subverts and destroys itself, and Smith’s gloomy concluding chapters are a long away from the apparently optimistic beginning with the immense productivity gains possible as a result of the division of labor.
…Today there are no grounds for thinking that the United States – or the global economic system – has reached any kind of inherent limit to growth. The pace of technical innovation even seems to be increasing, and the U.S. is one of the world’s most dynamic and innovative societies.
The possibility of an unraveling of the U.S. position comes rather from political developments that respond to the uncertainties of the new economy as well as the new security situation. Some of the backlash stems from fears of immigration, even though it is precisely the openness to immigration that has made the U.S. so dynamic. Our political and social psychology responds to globalization by imagining an idealized safe and closed off world. The more we think of the military and security challenge, the more likely we are to try to close ourselves off. “
I am not persuaded by James argument of the decisive nature of inequality, which he correctly diagnoses as evidence of economic growth. Human beings have an immense capacity to tolerate political and economic systems that produce both real and relative inequality – what they tolerate poorly is personal regression to a lower status. Peasants, who are acclimated to famine, have rebellions; the newly hungry urbanite though, will make a revolution.
I also found James section on rule-sets superficial and weak:
“The central problem is that we need rules for the functioning of complex societies, whether on a national (state) level, or in international relations. But we do not always comply voluntarily with rules, and rules require some enforcement. In addition rules need to be formulated. The enforcement and the promulgation of rules are both consequences of power, and power is concentrated and unequally distributed. Even when we think of voluntarily negotiated rules, there is the memory of some act of power, the long shadow of a hegemomic strength – the shadow of Rome – falling on the negotiators. The propensity for subversion and destruction of a rule-based order comes about because and whenever there is a perception that rules are arbitrary, unjust, and reflect the imposition of particular interests in a high-handed imperial display of power. “
That section cried out for deeper treatment.
Rules need to be enforced, certainly but they do not simply flow out of ” hegemonic power” but must reflect the conditions in which the hegemonic power, so-called, operates. They need to match reality, partly as a matter of functionality and so as to also have legitimacy in the eyes of the ruled. Legitimacy comes in part from the character of the power attempting to secure compliance but the rule itself must make sense or provide a recognizable benefit. Rules rise or fall on securing at least the grudging voluntary compliance from the vast majority of society. Catch-22 situations breed resistance and can result in a hoplesss task in terms of enforcement ( Napoleon’s Continental System proved so unenforceable that the French government eventually granted exemptions to legitimize some of the ongoing smuggling and profit from it).
Despite having numerous disagreements with the author on a nuber of levels, I still found it a stimulating piece of synthesis.
DIMENSIONS OF RESILIENCE
Steve DeAngelis, founder of Enterra Solutions was kind enough to comment on my recent post over at his Enterprise Resilience Management Blog:
“This is an important discussion. While we’re grateful for Mark’s positive comments about Development in a Box, we are even more grateful that we can join a conversation about the ways in which the Enterprise Resilience Management framework interacts with and transforms organizational culture. Enterprise Resilience Management is not just a technology solution — though it has a significant technology component. And it is not just a management methodology, though it starts with a comprehensive assessment of critical assets and the processes and best practices that support them. Rather, the framework combines best practices and technology to create an entirely new organizational architecture. Methodology and technology, working together, break down the barriers between organizational silos and create new systems — both cultural and technological — for whole-organization response.
The resilience of an organization depends only in part on its willingness to adopt new technologies. Resilience also depends on the ability of people — leaders, line managers and staff — to create a resilient culture.”
Very true. An important point which leads me to explain why I consider “Resilience” to be a meta-principle governing an emerging world where the governing paradigm will be a complex system of systems. Evidence of resilience as a phenomena is manifested across both an enormous scale of magnitude and in multiple domains, including:
3. Ecological-Environmental-Economic systems
5. Security Policy and Counterterrorism
6. Human Psychology ( see NYT here)
There are probably infinite possibilities here.
I would expect that any in any adaptive complex system , regardless of the field in which it is traditionally categorized, evidence of resilient characteristics will be readily discoverable ( at least until you reach quantum or cosmological extremes of scale, there I’d have to hedge my hypothesis and let more qualified people speak to that). I would further suggest, more to Steve’s point in his post, that overlapping levels of resilience will be highly beneficial.
An organization with a resilient culture will help its employees or members become more resilient themselves by providing a shared “cognitive template” or schema that encourages the practice of resilient behaviors, which with time, may become internalized. Conversely, psychological resiliency among key personnel – the leaders and “hubs” of the organization’s social network – are indispensible in building a coherent organization from the ground up or weathering a severe crisis. Resilient leadership operating in a resilient organizational culture are apt to be synergistically reinforcing and, therefore, likelier to pass on the institution and its mores to successive generations.
How many generations ? If you think of corporations, states and organized religions in terms of their formal structures, the timeline now runs into centuries. In a few cases, thousands of years.
Now that’s what I call being resilient.
RECOMMENDED READING
Trying to make a few topical connections today with these:
On the Atomic Bomb:
Marc Schulman at American Future -” The Decision to Use Atomic Weapons Against Japan (Updated) ” and Phil Carter at Intel Dump -” The Making of The Atomic Bomb“.
Christopher Hitchens vs. Juan Cole :
( ok,ok,ok, – totally frivolous subject,but it’s Sunday, my head hurts, and I found it amusing)
Jeff Medcalf at Caerdroia -“Hitchens v Cole” , Snarksmith -“He Scooped Me On My Own Stuff!” and The News Blog -” Why do people keep fucking with Juan Cole? “
The al Qaida Tapes:
Colonel Austin Bay -” Al Qaeda’s Ideological Crisis“, Abu Aardvark-“AQ’s media strategy: strength or weakness?“, Collounsbury -” Al Qaeda & Media, a quick reflexion on Bou Aardvark” and finally Curzon at Coming Anarchy – “How do you shoot this thing? “
Nanotechnology & War :
Curtis Gale Weeks at Phatic Communion– ” Unto the Next Generation“
That’s it.
TRYING TO ” GOSS” OVER PROBLEMS AT THE CIA [ UPDATED]
A brief comment on the departure of Porter Goss:
Goss meant well and worked very hard but he was caught between a rock and a hard place after the Intel reform bill.
The CIA career senior management ( above station chief level) who were fired/resigned since Goss arrived as DCI are usually portrayed as ” anti-Bush”, technically that is true but their motivations did not originally come from partisan politics. They are the generation of the Pike-Church hearings and the Schlessinger-Turner DCI era and as a matter of professional practice are exceptionally risk-averse. They don’t like HUMINT, they don’t like covert ops, they don’t like bold judgments in NIE documents and they employ lawyers at every step of the process to ensure that nothing actually gets accomplished.
It was inevitable that this bureaucratic cohort was going to oppose a forward role in the war for the CIA or a revitalization of covert ops. They dragged their feet in the Clinton era when that administration wanted action but clashing sharply with the Bush agenda was a given, though the levels of rearguard intrigue these employees mounted against administration policy was unprecedented in American history. Firing the malcontents was the best service Goss rendered during his tenure as DCI as covert intelligence agencies really can’t be in the business of sabotaging the directives of their democratically elected superiors.
The intel reform bill that created the DNI position was also a recipe for bureaucratic conflict since it more or less took the DCI role away from the DCI while leaving the DNI line of authority exceptionally vague. Negroponte, moreover, is a very smooth, very effective, troubleshooter who has been involved in the intersection of the covert ops, diplomacy and military intervention since the 80’s. Success here as DNI meant steamrolling over Goss and establishing the authority of DNI over the IC, so that is what Negroponte did. He simply outclassed Goss by several orders of magnitude as a bureaucratic insider and did not have any baggage to defend or distractions weighing him down that hobbled Goss ( the fact that Goss was reportedly spending up to 5 hours a day on the PDB was a sign that there were major problems happening, the DCI should briefly do the ” final edit” not be deeply involved in drafting the PDB itself) .
The only way the DCI-NDI relationship will work is if the DCI becomes effectively the DNI’s main deputy for HUMINT as the NSA head is for SIGINT which is why Hayden is going to be the new DCI, he’s already in the deputy position and owes the CIA bureaucracy nothing ( unlike Goss who had, despite his feuds, deep institutional loyalties).
ADDENDUM:
I’m pretty sure the DIA was already freelancing HUMINT to some degree during the 90’s due to the total disinterest of the Clinton administration in the IC and their general incomprehension of how the Defense Department functioned. Rumsfeld is simply greatly expanding on a precedent.
ADDENDUM II:
This could not have helped either. Guess Earl was on to something.
ADDENDUM III:
Ultraconnected David Ignatius at The Washington Post has released a new meme of Porter Goss as the Les Aspin of the IC:
“What may have hurt Goss most inside the White House was sharp criticism from a hush-hush group known as the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. This blue-ribbon group is headed by Stephen Friedman, a former chairman of Goldman Sachs and former White House economic adviser. Because its members include many prominent business executives, the board could offer a nonpartisan, CEO’s view of how Goss was running the agency. I’m told some of the board’s judgments on Goss and his management team were devastating.”
This very well may be true but I think the abrupt timing of Goss’ departure was his choice, not the administration’s and everything including the kitchen sink is going to be thrown at the man. As an aside, I like having figures with experience in international markets on the PFIAB but I’d be uncomfortable of that is the entirety of the membership.
ADDENDUM IV:
Bloggers commenting on Goss/CIA:
Collounsbury
Captain’s Quarters
Kevin Drum
The Glittering Eye
Whirledview
Nadezhda New !
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