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MUSINGS AND RECOMMENDATIONS

A hectic day. There will not be much blogging tonight as I am preparing the third installment of my Military Theory series at Chicago Boyz, hopefully will put it up tomorrow. The rest of the evening was devoted to gathering some of my material for Sean and Tom and, most importantly, helping my daughter with her dinosaur diorama. An effort that involved large amounts of colored clay, toothpicks, a shoebox and crayon drawings of Megalosaurus in action.

Two unrelated recommendations to read:

shloky is in fine form today: “Private Militaries and Market States” and “Super Empowered Individuals + Elections“

“Hiss Was Guilty” By John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr

Haynes and Klehr, two historians who know the documentary evidence of Communist espionage and subversion in America like few others in the field, deserve thanks for their tireless vigilance in countering attempts by Leftist activists to engage in denial and obfuscation of the historical record regarding Soviet spy Alger Hiss.

Once, defending Hiss was a cottage industry among American intellectuals; today it is a sign of kool-aid consumption.

IS J.L. KIRK AND ASSOCIATES AN EXAMPLE OF “AUTO-BORKING”?

When Ronald Reagan nominated the highly regarded but arch-conservative legal theorist Judge Robert Bork in 1987 to become a justice of the United States Supreme Court, liberal activist groups in conjunction with the then monolithic MSM, “swarmed”. Judge Bork was slandered by Senator Ted Kennedy in an opening salvo of an unprecedented political campaign by the Democrats to personally destroy a judicial nominee out of loathing for his judicial philosophy and fear of his intellectual prowess. Judge Bork’s nomination was duly defeated, the Reagan administration was dealt a severe political setback and a new verb entered the political lexicon; to be vilified and disqualified from a position was to be ” Borked”.

As Dan of tdaxp has ably documented, an obscure yet arrogant and allegedly shady, headhunting company known (currently- but I wager not for much longer) as J.L. Kirk and Associates has apparently accomplished the business equivalent of scoring on one’s own goal. By attempting to bully a blogger into silence about her ( seemingly legitimate) consumer complaint against them, J.L. Kirk ‘s corporate suits have ” Auto-Borked” their own company’s reputation. As Dan has reported, the story is now reaching regional TV news. I’m guessing national news before Friday of this week and then, perhaps, the sharks will begin circling J.L. Kirk until they reach their own ” Imus Moment”.

Good job boys! Just think of the trouble you might have avoided by being gracious and helpful to your customer instead of belligerent and aggressive. You’d almost think that a company that pro-actively litigious had something to hide

THE NIXONIAN CENTURY = CAPITALISM WITH A CHINESE FACE!

President Carter, Fmr. President Nixon and Chinese General-Secretary Deng Xiaoping at a State reception for Deng at the White House.

“Barnett: Nixon and Deng: architects of our globalized world ” by Dr. Thomas P.M. Barnett .

As someone who did extensive – verging on the tedious – research in grad school into the heart of darkness called the Nixon administration, I really enjoyed this piece; Tom wraps up some excellent historical analysis in the very limited (in terms of word count) format of a newspaper column. An excerpt:

“Nixon’s reaching out to both the Soviet Union and China in the early 1970s could not have been more surprising, given his pre-presidential history as a vicious anti-communist. But, by doing so, Nixon effectively ended the Cold War by the start of his second, deeply troubled term in 1973.

In disassembling Maoism, Deng chose the latter route, validating both Nixon’s previous strategy and discrediting Gorbachev’s later decision to pursue political glasnost before economic perestroika in the now-defunct Soviet Union.”

The story of Deng Xiapoing’s political career is far less well-known to Americans than is Richard Nixon’s, obscured as it is by partisan feelings stretching all the way back to the Hiss Case. Like Nixon, Deng was highly placed in politics for a half century ( more actually as Deng was a veteran of the Long March) and like Nixon, Deng suffered political disgrace and manuvered his way back to the apex of power. Unlike Nixon, the stakes for Deng were much higher; he could have easily met his death at the fickle hand of Mao as did numerous top leaders of the CCP. In the struggle to succeed Mao, the sinister Gang of Four certainly sought Deng’s death and Hua Goufeng his permanent retirement (or worse) from politics.

Another parallel with Nixon would be Deng’s pragmatic, if brutal, realism which expressed itself both in Deng’s relative indifference to Marxist dogma and a willingness to use force to preserve national “face” ( Nixon would have said ” credibility”). Deng’s punishment campaign against Vietnam in 1979 and his crushing of incipient Chinese democracy in 1989 flowed from the same line of reasoning. Moreover, unlike the Soviet Communist Party leadership where the Red Army was separate and subordinate to the Party, China’s Maoist guerilla legacy meant that for the first two generations of leaders that the Party was the Army and the Army the Party. Deng was a famous military leader and commanded the moral authority within the CCP to act as a “commander-in-chief” figure in a way only a few other aging seniors could match.

Naturally, the parallels are less significant than the differences between the two men. Richard Nixon was a master politician who loved power and had an enemies list but Nixon operated in a democratic system and an open society. Deng did not need to make any lists and his relatively benevolent treatment of fallen party rivals in his later years should not ( as with Nikita Khrushchev’s career under Stalin) be allowed to erase the bloody history of his service to the CCP under Mao ZeDong.

That being said, I believe Dr. Barnett has weighed both men on the scales of history with rough justice; Nixon and Deng had a global impact that was more to the good than to the bad.

RECOMMENDED READING

A very meaty and militaristic edition today. Thankfully, friends and readers have sent me so many good links that I had to break nary a drop of sweat this Sunday:

Top Billing !: Kilkullen vs. Luttwak on Counterinsurgency Warfare:

Dr. Edward Luttwak – “Dead End“

LTC. David Kilcullen – “Edward Luttwak’s “Counterinsurgency Malpractice“

(Hat tip to SWJ Editor and all around good guy, Dave Dilegge.)

Dr. Thomas H. Henriksen – “Security Lessons from The Israeli Trenches“

(Hat tip to Chicago Boyz eminence grise, Lexington Green – now back to blogging!)

Dr. Andrew J. Bacevich – “Warrior Politics” ( beware, Atlantic online subscription wall)

Max Boot – “The Military’s Media Problem“

(Hat tip to blogfriend and impassioned commentator EB at Hidden Unities .)

John Robb – “HOLLOW STATES“

Soob – “Online 5GW? Online 4GW?”

The Russians may not have invented, strictly speaking, “Disinformatsiya” but they certainly were good at it back in the day. We still have idiots running around who believe that J. Edgar Hoover wore a dress or that the CIA/Pentagon created AIDS, as a result of KGB memes.

( Hat tip to Curtis at Dreaming 5GW)

Matt at MountainRunner – “Readings on civil-military relations” and “Who should manage US public diplomacy, State or Defense?“

Mountain Runner is one of those rare blogs that consistently punch above their weight in terms of quality. Highly recommended for blogroll addition if you are looking for one that covers national security issues.

That’s it!

JACKSONIAN AND OTHER RESPONSES: EXTENDING THE CONVERSATION

Bruce Kesler at Democracy Project asked me to respond in greater detail to the critical feedback that the post on Modern Foreign Policy Execution sparked, in particular, Dave Schuler’s post that I linked to yesterday and to a detailed treatise by Kurt Hoglund at The Jacksonian Party. Bruce has kindly put my remarks up in his post “The Difficult We Do Today; The Impossible Just Takes A Little Longer” where he expounds on the need for reform of foreign policy structure to be a task for which we must take the long view but for which steady pressure must be applied. Bruce explains:

“Schuler’s skepticism is warranted, but self-limiting. As we used to say in the Marine Corps: The Difficult We Do Today; The Impossible Just Takes A Little Longer. That’s not meant to infer that our foreign policy become Marine-like in spirit, but to suggest that focus and organization coupled with faith in mission will overcome.

….I believe that although difficult, and the impossible will take a bit longer, that one inevitable result of our current troubles will be the development of a flatter interdepartmental foreign policy and execution that will be much more informed, prescient, coordinated, and effective.”

I agree. This is going to be politically difficult because we are proposing taking some power away from senior Washington mandarins – both in the positive as well as the liberum veto sense – and moving it to the experienced field hands who will be collectively given the financial independence ( perhaps by initiating ” foreign policy block grants” instead of line-item departmental appropriations) and tasking authority to accomplish foreign policy objectives. If ever seriously proposed by a president ( even in watered down form), there will be an epidemic of apoplexy inside the beltway and every knife will come out to stop this reform from becoming a reality. Nevertheless, the weight of cultural evolution, technological innovation and globalization will continue rushing forward in the world whether bureaucrats like it or not. Networks are here, friendly and hostile and they must be engaged.

Regarding Mr. Hoglund’s post, the “Jacksonians” occupy an aggressive but “swing” position in American politics according to the taxonomy developed by Walter Russell Mead ( a subject Dave has previously explored in his informative posts here and here). Their attitude might be epitomized by the military writer Ralph Peters – they are seekers of clean and clear victories and have scant patience for the building of nations. Despite my being more ” Wilsonian” than is Hoglund, he has keyed on to the same problem that I have discerned (frankly, the current foreign policy process is going to produce mediocre results regardless of whether the president is a neoconservative adventurer or a dovish isolationist – the bureaucracies pursue their agendas under every president). An excerpt from “Taming the Turf Wars “:

“The topics cited in the Article I cover in Reforming the Intelligence Community, which looks at the massive and internecine ‘turf wars’ as the main problem for the IC and getting the best cross-specialization INTEL available for multi-level analysis and then synthesis of knowledge. This would require not only a complete overhaul of how work is approached, but remove the Agencies from the ‘product ownership’ area and put them into a ‘skills management’ role. By enforcing the idea that certain types of INTEL can stand alone, the entire IC is dysfunctional as there is no lower level cross-agency working system. Thus each Agency gets its own view of the INTEL it *has* but no ability to synthesize across many Agencies and outlooks. Here non-traditional INTs such as economic and agricultural forecasting would also come into play for a full synthesis of necessary knowledge types available. By removing the Agency fiefdoms and making INTEL gathering and analysis a shared Community Level activity, the internecine turf wars are removed and Agencies are judged on how well they manage contributed skills within the Community at large, not how much work product and viewpoint they turn out. This does require moving clandestine ops back to something directly under Presidential control, like the old OSS. They can be sent to gather specific INT needs, but only with full knowledge and approval of the President.”

Aside from my remarks that Bruce has published, the National Intelligence Council is supposed to help in the synthesizing process and was somewhat more aggressive in doing so, reportedly, under NID John Negroponte. Assuming that was the case, that synthesis is being layered on top of the analytical process, like frosting on a cake, rather than occurring in the mixing of the batter by the analytical ” cooks”. There people out in the blogosphere with direct experience working in the IC and the NIC who are better placed than I to comment further here.

A further point on synthesis, I had envisioned these field teams be appropriately IT-networked so as to allow continuous virtual as well as F2F collaboration. Critt Jarvis at Conversationbase, himself a former member of the IC community, responded with a post “Modern foreign policy execution needs mass collaboration“, tying my idea to the principles enunciated in the networked book Wikinomics and to Dr. Barnett’s A-Z Ruleset. Further and deeper exploration of the topic of the intersection of the IC with the tools of IT can be had by diving into the archives of Haft of the Spear and Kent’s Imperative, both of which I heartily recommend.