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Abu Muqawama – “LTC John Nagl to retire”

Thomas P.M. Barnett – “Flunk the SysAdmin, lose the Leviathan”

The Washington Monthly -“The Army’s Other Crisis: Why the best and brightest young officers are leaving”

I enjoyed reading and was impressed by LTC John Nagl’s Learning How To Eat Soup With A Knife and I heartily recommend it. I have no doubt that he has been given a better offer – probably a much better offer financially and one more in line with his demonstrated abilities – than rolling the dice and sticking with a career in the “up or out” U.S. Army.  I’m also certain that Col. Nagl will be contributing to the war of ideas long after he ceases to be a uniformed part of the war and that Nagl probably made the best decision possible for himself and his family. Anyone who believes that a post-Iraq U.S. Army won’t restructure itself by downsizing it’s most talented warfighters in favor of career desk jockeys simply wasn’t paying attention during the 1990’s.

As the links demonstrate, Nagl is merely the well-known face of an ominous trend. When an institution – be it military, educational, corporate, civic, religious – reaches a point where it is merely a farm team that regularly sends it’s best and it’s brightest elsewhere then it is an institution on it’s way out. There is something worse than “breaking the Army”; broken armies get rebuilt because restoring them to health is a national priority. No, the real danger for the U.S. military is an Army that “embraces mediocrity” because if mediocrity becomes entrenched it will not be removed by anything shy of a near-total housecleaning of the general officers. Can you see America’s “no-accountability” Boomer elite doing that ? Or even recognizing if it needed to be done?

I can’t.

ADDENDUM:

Fabius Maximus -“Recommended reading: transforming the Army, the hard way” and “The Army is losing good people. That is only a symptom of a more serious problem.”

Intel Dump -“John Nagl has left the building”

SWJ Blog – “Nagl to Leave Army”

Kings of War – “High-Profile Officer Nagl to Leave Army, Join Think Tank”

Neptunus Lex -“Brain drain?”

Armchair Generalist – “Nagl Leaving the Army“

Read the basics of the Pushtunwali (PDF). Hat tip to Jedburgh.

More excellent links about Pushtunistan here at The Small Wars Council.

Have an ISP issue going on; hopefully temporary. Blogging may or may not be light.

A while back, Dr. Tom Barnett   shared his reading bibliography for writing Book III. Since then, I’ve seen book posts by Brad at Potbanger’s, HistoryGuy99 at HG’s World and at The Strategist. All well worth taking a look at and moreover, they have all inspired me to set my newest additions into Slideshare, a picture being worth a thousand words.

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A brief excerpt from the comment from blogfriend Charles Cameron:

“The warfare of the Aztecs, the berserkers seeking Valhalla, and most significantly today, the Islamists seeking martyrdom – these are not “rational actors” in a sense that tweaking our Prisoners Dilemma tables will not address.

To know them, we must think not merely our of the box but out of boxes, take not just the road less traveled but a path so overgrown a machete is required to cut it, and no one can say whether it was a path before, or is new found land, a haunt of owls or badgers, or an habitation of ghosts… a trackless track as zen might call it, crossing the Cartesian rift between brain and mind, passing between real and imaginal, fact and myth, story and history as easily as we might pass between Colorado and Wyoming.”

That resonated with me earlier today when I read a blurb in the current issue of The Atlantic Monthly ( who appear to owe Ralph Peters some kind of credit for their   cover story) regarding the disproportionate number of engineers in the ranks of Islamist terrorists, which led me to google these fine papers, posts and theads:

The Engineers of Jihad (PDF) by Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog-  The original paper

Soob -“Engineers of Jihad ” – Excellent analysis by Subadei’s co-blogger Munz

The Small Wars Council – “Engineers of Jihad” 

Foreign Policy – subscription required ( sorry, cheapskates)

RichardDawkins.net –  Worthless, normatively speaking but contains mocking speculation for comic relief

Belgravia Dispatch – illustrates the 4GW angle

Most MENA nations have very limited systems of public and private education and literacy rates are far lower than state figures generally admit. In some instances, Arab states may have illiteracy rates reaching into the 40th percentile.  The well educated, multilingual and scientifically trained are a definite elite in the Arab-Islamic world diverging socially and psychologically from a majority who speak only colloquial Arabic or an ethnic minority language and  (possibly broken) colloquial Arabic.  See Dave Schuler’s comments on Diglossia. Moreover censorship, repression and the boundaries of permissible social, political and cultural discourse vary significantly from Tangier to Bahrain.

In this climate, an engineering education creates a mind capable of rigorously rigid – one might say predisposed to doctrinaire – logical thinking in terms of process with an artificially circumscribed mental palette of content. Narrow vision and a powerful intellect will yield different answers to problems than will a panoramic vision and a powerful intellect. Islamism would serve to reinforce the tendency toward rigidity while ramping up the emotional intensity of the response to frustrating obstacles to solving problems.

Could the “Cartesian rift” or dichotomy of which Charles writes be healed by greater access to liberal education in the Mideast? Ideally, yes, as both a world of possibilities would open up alongside a propensity to question received authority that liberal education brings. On the other hand, the report by Gambetta and Hertog puts humanities majors as disporortionately represented among secular, leftist, terrorists so liberal ed may simply stir the domestic pot in the Mideast  because most societies there remain, to a degree, repressive tyrannies in terms of politics.