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SPEAKING OF THE COUNCIL…

The Ralph Peters op-ed has sparked a much more interesting discussion of strategy, Pentagon policy and Iraq at the Small Wars Council than is contained in the original article. Nice work, guys !

ANTICIPATING A BARRAGE OF NEGATIVE LEAKS FROM STATE

The Bush administration is pushing through a much needed reform of overseas personnel assignments in the State Department that prioritizes national security over careerism, PC gender/multiculturalism concerns and “office politics” connections that dominated the previous selections process:

“The State Department has begun the first major overhaul of its assignment system in decades, making it more difficult for U.S. diplomats to avoid serving in Iraq, Afghanistan and other dangerous posts that the Bush administration views as crucial in the war on terrorism.Senior department officials said that no jobs will be available for bidding by Foreign Service officers until all open positions in the critical posts have been filled. They also said that they would resort to “directed assignments” if the new scheme fails to achieve the desired results.”We are going to start filling the toughest posts first,” one senior official said. “We are still doing this on a voluntary basis, but, obviously, if we ever have to go to directed assignments, we will, because the bottom line is, you have to get your best, most talented people in the hardest and most important positions.” Another official said that the best way for Foreign Service officers to ensure they have another job when their current assignment ends will be to opt for Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan, Pakistan and other hardship posts in the Middle East, Africa and South Asia…”

I wish to emphasize that I have great respect for FSO’s. The risks that many of them face, sometimes operating in dangerous and fluid situations, are often unknown to the public and usually are forgotten by Congress. More of their unvarnished observations should make it up the food chain to key decision -makers than actually survive, in watered down form, armored by caveats into a state of meaninglessness. The State Department historically, for its many faults, does not receive the appropriations it actually needs to do it’s job properly, invest in its personnel or carry out long-term strategic planning. Our career diplomatic personnel, particularly those who land difficult field assignments, need more support and fewer constraints from Washington.

That being said, our national security priorities must drive State Department policies, not the reverse. If you are in the Foreign Service and the idea of serving in Iraq is too much for you because of the danger or because you fundamentally disagree with the Bush administration’s entire Mideast policy, then now is the time to look for another line of work. Presidents will come and go and policies will change, but any given president must be able to allocate diplomatic resources to critical foreign policy hot spots on an as-needed basis.

A more engaged diplomatic corps may mean less need to use the Marine Corps.

Hat tip to Dave and The Small Wars Council

ENTERRA DiB AND THE NATIONAL TERRORISM STRATEGY

Steve DeAngelis of ERMB ( and a newly minted Visiting Scientist at the prestigious Oak Ridge National Laboratory -congrats Steve!) is commenting with greater directness these days on military , intelligence and foreign policy questions. This a welcome development and no doubt a result of Steve’s collaboration with Dr. Barnett and recent ventures by Enterra to connect with the IC.

Yesterday, Steve took a look at the new National Strategy for Combatting Terrorism released by the Bush administration, and offered a cogent analysis:

“The new strategy notes that the war on terrorism is about both arms and ideas. “Arms and ideas,” however, provide too narrow a focus for countering this very complicated challenge, a point the document actually makes.

…What struck me most about this long-term strategy is how closely it parallels what I have been promoting for our Development-in-a-Box approach. First, it talks about establishing international standards and best practices, which is exactly what makes Development-in-a-Box different than past approaches. Second, the strategy talks about needing a new architecture for dealing with this problem. Enterra Solutions is working with a number of groups to help them develop a Resilient Technology Architecture to help meet this need. Finally, the strategy stresses the need for establishing a community of practice, an approach I have indicated is critical in the development world as well. The President is simply encouraging the establishment of one of many such communities that need to be created. We all know that drafting a strategy doesn’t necessarily mean that it will be implemented properly. The basic approach for long-term success is promising. Let’s hope it survives a change in administrations.”

Steve elucidated the DiB principles at greater length in a prior post, “Wiring Rwanda to the World“:

“1. Start with security. When Kagame seized control of Rwanda, he tried to establish a coalition Tutsi/Hutu government that would make all citizens feel more secure. Were a civil war still raging in Rwanda, Wyler’s venture would never have gotten off the ground.

2. Use accepted standards and best practices when establishing infrastructure. Wyler transplanted technologies and standards used in the U.S. to ensure that once his system was in place it would work properly.

3. Create a customer base. Wyler tries to make every customer a sales person for his services. By selling cheap Internet access in small increments, Terracom has hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of potential customers. Wyler also showed others how they could be entrepreneurs themselves by selling Terracom products.

4. Establish a community of practice. By starting with schools, institutions, and small businesses as well as working with the government, Wyler concentrated on building a community of practice that could help him succeed in his venture. They became virtual owners of the project, because their future success in some measure would be determined by Wyler’s success.

5. Seek alignment among all players. When Wyler found it difficult dealing with the government-owned monopoly, he bought it. When that avenue is unavailable (which it rarely is), a way must be found to align government and business policies so that unnecessary conflicts don’t stymie progress. Wyler didn’t enter the Rwanda market out of altruism. He expects to make money. The government understands that profitable companies pay better wages, pay more taxes, invest more in their infrastructure, etc. The goals of one enterprise (though different than the goals of the other) are different but complementary. Complementary strategies among players can generally be found and they should be a priority. “

A few brief remarks by me; I will analyze the strategy paper itself in a separate post and will limit myself here to the intersection of DiB and implementation of the counter terror strategy:

DiB point # 3, ” Create a customer base” is on par in terms of counterterrorism with providing security. It is simply that important and has been the area of greatest American weakness. The efforts and developing a culturally attuned, linguistically competent, intellectually creative, strategic influence policy aimed at isolating Salafist-Jihadi extremists from their co-religionists have been insufficient.

Part of the problem is the need for an unavoidably time-consuming build-up in personnel with the requisite cultural intelligence and linguistic skill-sets to do the variety of tasks – analysis, interrogation, translation, operational planning, information operations – that need to be done. At best, it is an 8-10 year investment but our current deficits can be remediated to a degree by point # 4.

Moving the IC and military out of the highly compartmentalized, vertical thinking, Cold War era, view of internal security uber alles and toward building a counterterrorism Community of Practice is vital. A community that embraces expertise outside of the insular and narrow confines of beltway bureaucracy and integrates private sector, academic and where appropriate, foreign talent to vastly accelerate the cycle of innovation and knowledge dispersal. Greater horizontality in thinking, greater interconnected modularity in community structure.

In turn, this morphs into Steve’s fifth point of seeking alignment. I would go a step further – the broad private-public community of practice should be “aligned”; the public IC-diplo elements should leapfrog beyond alignment to begin building “jointness” in their activities the way the military began to do in the early-mid 1980’s. A system administration force for counterterrorism where synergy of action, not bureaucratic chart reorgs, is the objective.

DiB principles can be directed as usefully at our own bureaucratic systems as societies languishing in the Gap.

LINKS:

tdaxp -“Like CPUs and Operating Systems, Countries Matters

Dr. Barnett “Jaffe profiles Abizaid and his definition of SysAdmin as the tool to win the Long War”

Conversation Base Blog “Systems approach on a global scale: Military-Market Nexus“

Homeland Security Watch -“DHS issues final rule for handling private-sector CI information“

ON NIXON, PART III

The Long Shadow of Richard Nixon: Foreign Affairs

When I was an undergraduate, one of my professors, who was a political historian and an avowed liberal Democrat, said that he expected that if Richard Nixon lived long enough, America would see his final comeback as Secretary of State. Well, Nixon did not live quite that long, but he did survive to become the elder statesman of American foreign policy receiving warm receptions in such surprising quarters as the Clinton White House. Far warmer and more public a reception than Nixon had received under Clinton’s Republican predecessors.

Richard Nixon, by virtue of the Watergate conspiracy that forced his unprecedented resignation from the Presidency of the United States, ranks near the bottom of presidents in annual polls of American historians. Yet despite this grand debacle, Nixon’s accomplishments as president and politician dwarf all but but those of our most respected chief executives. Richard Nixon stood for a hardheaded brand of realism in foreign policy, a pursuit of American interests executed with an almost Machiavellian level of intrigue, directed as much against his own subordinates or the Congress as at America’s adversaries.

Most presidents, being politicians previously interested in domestic policy, come to learn about foreign affairs “on the job” and usually leave office with a different perception of foreign affairs and the exercise of American power than the one with which they were elected. “Doves” like Jimmy Carter grew more “hawkish” under the weight of constant crisis and Cold War “hardliners” like Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan all sought peace agreements with ” the Evil Empire”. Experience tempers preconceptions and ideology through hard lessons.

Nixon is one of the few exceptions who came in to the presidency ready not to learn about foreign afffairs, but to teach.

From his earliest days as a congressman, Nixon thought deeply about foreign policy questions and actively tried to burnish his credentials on international affairs at every step of his career, cultivating foreign statesmen and willing Establishment figures with whom Nixon otherwise had serious political disagreements, like Thomas Dewey, Nelson Rockefeller and Henry Kissinger. In contrast, Nixon appeared at times to think most of his natural allies on the anti-Communist right, with the exception of Robert Taft, were only little better than fools (in some instances, such as his unsavory colleagues at HUAC or the hapless William Knowland, Nixon was right).

Despite Nixon’s strenuous efforts to court the GOP wing of the Establishment that viewed him with disdain, and to keep the loyalty of a conservative wing that increasingly harbored suspicions, Nixon might never have been elected president were it not for the Vietnam War. It was this strategic disaster by the Kennedy-Johnson administrations that ressurrected Nixon from the political grave and divided the majority party sufficiently that a basically unpopular man from a minority party could win in 1968. LBJ, with an assist from the stridently belligerent racism of George Wallace, had managed to make even Richard Nixon look like the candidate of hope.

Nixon’s particular genius was to enter office aware not that American foreign policy needed to change but the world had changed and that this shift was transcendant in its importance. Nixon perceived the twilight of bipolarity not as something to be resisted but as an opportunity to be seized and Nixon seized it with a surprising ruthlessness. Nixon penned a critical article in Foreign Affairs in 1967, “Asia after Vietnam” where he obliquely indicated that America’s strategic future was not in Europe, or Saigon but north of Hanoi. And Nixon pursued this vision with zeal and daring.

It is sometimes argued, that Nixon’s opening to China is an overrated diplomatic event, that restoration of ties between the United States and China were an eventual certainty. These critics lose sight of the fact there is a qualitative difference in diplomatic relations with China today because a powerful United States took the initiative to reach out to a weak and vulnerable China instead of waiting until the day when China itself had grown too powerful to ignore.
Nixon’s farsighted acceptance of a distant but emergent multipolarity created a triangulation with an expansionist USSR that created “room” for other centers of power to grow alongside the United States but in opposition to Soviet hegemony. The longitudinal ” correlation of forces“, to use Communist parlance of the time, that had favored the Soviets for a quarter century, had been at a stroke, reversed.

Richard Nixon was never much of an economist, it was a subject off of his radar screen and he leaned heavily on George Schultz, John Connally and others, but it was Nixon who helped set the geopolitical table for globalization to happen sooner rather than later.

Next, Part IV – Watergate and the Legacy of Richard Nixon

RECOMMENDED READING

A mix of blogospheric hits…as I see it.

From Bruce Kesler at Democracy Project -“ 9/11 is Democracy Day (NY Daily News)” which highlighted the op-ed “Make 9/11 a national holiday? Yes ” by Dr. Philip Napoli.

James McCormick at Chicago Boyz – “VD Hanson — A War Like No Other“. I was also the recipient of kind words from Lexington Green who is patiently waiting for me to finish my Nixon piece.

A dour assessment about Iraq by Colonel W. Patrick Lang at Sic Semper Tyrannis. Lang also has another post that indicates evidence of John Robb’s hypothesis of Iraq’s “granular” intra-sectarian disintegration.

Marc Schulman at American Future on the transnational progressive attack on the ancient right of self-defense ( and one completely bizarre in terms of reasoning as trans-progs casually invoke natural law theory when it suits their agenda to do so).

That’s it.