zenpundit.com

[Mark Safranski / “zen“]

Dr. Frank Hoffman has a piece up in Eurasiareview.com assessing the merits of an idea that in my humble opinion has some utility not merely for the incoming Trump administration but the institutional national security bureaucracy – a Strategy Board.

A Presidential Strategy Board: Enabling Strategic Competence – Analysis

The National Security Council (NSC) staff was once called the Keepers of the Keys, managers of the coordinating process that is central to an administration’s ability to plan and conduct a successful grand strategy.[1] The NSC has had an evolving role, as has its staff.[2] The NSC evolves to the strategic context that any administration faces, and it must also reflect the information processing and decision-making style of the president. The inbound Trump administration will soon face the challenge of integrating America’s diplomatic, military, and economic tools and applying them globally and coherently.

Many have offered advice on how to properly focus NSC staff as well as the “right size” of the group. NSC structures and processes are designed to fulfill the needs of the president and should support his policy and decision-making requirements. These may vary from president to president to fit information processing and decision-making styles as well as the character of an administration’s foreign policy. Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, the president-elect’s National Security Advisor, will manage the evolution of the NSC team to best support Mr. Trump and establish processes and coordinating mechanisms to tee up presidential decisions and implement the foreign policy initiatives of our 45^th President.

[….]

More importantly, we have misdiagnosed and mislabeled the problem. The White House’s real shortfall is strategy formulation, not planning. Strategy is not planning, but a good strategy enables proper planning.[20] Hence, I contend that the solution lies in creating a Strategy Board.

The Deputy National Security Advisor—President-elect Trump has tapped K.T. McFarland for the position—would chair the Strategy Board, and the board would not duplicate the existing system of Deputy and Principal’s committees. Its composition would include serving government officials below the existing committee structure from the Departments, NSC, and Office of Management and Budget (OMB) staff members as well as external members from outside government. Like Eisenhower’s board, this group would be charged with anticipating problems, generating solutions independent of Departmental preferences/inclinations, and proposing cost effective strategies. The planning details of approved strategic initiatives would be delegated to the respective Departments.

The board would conduct long-range strategic planning processes for presentation to the Deputy and Principal’s Committees at regular periods, including presidential strategy directives assigning priorities and resource allocations that would shape or inform Departmental budgets.[21] OMB representation would improve the connection between policy and budgets, enhancing long-term implementation and strategic coherence.

Read the whole thing here.

This is a good idea as strategic excellence has been a quality not greatly in evidence in American statecraft in the previous sixteen years and many have argued that we have been adrift since the end of the Cold War. The time horizons of the NSC and the IC are chronically driven by a sense of urgency toward the short term, to “reporting” over “analysis”, to tactics and political gestures over strategic perspectives – something a strategy board with some gravitas in its members would help counterbalance.

I had a related proposal five or six years ago that was more blue sky than Dr. Hoffman’s strategy board, focusing on the long to very long term American grand strategy:

Time for a Grand Strategy Board? 

….The President of the United States, of course has a number of bodies that could, should but do not always provide strategic advice. There’s the Defense Policy Advisory Board, an Intelligence Advisory Board,  the National Intelligence Council, the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff, the Office of Net Assessment and not least, the NSC itself and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, whose Chairman, by act of Congress, is the military advisor to the President and Secretary of Defense. While strategic thinking does percolate from these entities, many have very specific mandates or, conversely, wide ranging briefs on matters other than strategy. Some operate many levels below the Oval Office, are filled with superannuated politicians or have personnel who, while intellectually brilliant, are excessively political and untrained in matters of strategy. The Joint Chiefs, the professionals of strategy, are highly cognizant of the Constitutional deference they are required to give to civilian officials and are very leery of overstepping their bounds into the more political realms of policy and grand strategy.

What  the President could use is a high level group just focused on getting strategy right – or making sure we have one at all.

I’m envisioning a relatively small group composed of a core of pure strategists leavened with the most strategically oriented of our elder statesmen, flag officers, spooks and thinkers from cognate fields. A grand strategy board would be most active at the start of an administration and help in the crafting of the national strategy documents and return periodically when requested to give advice. Like the Spartan Gerousia, most of the members ( but not all) would be older and freer of the restraint of institutional imperatives and career ambitions. Like the Anglo-American joint chiefs and international conferences of WWII and the immediate postwar era, they would keep their eye on the panoramic view.

Read the rest here.

We have seen in many administrations and not least in the last two, a tendency toward insularity and groupthink, to politicized intelligence, to cutting subject matter experts out of the policy loop to better put forward much cherished but stridently evidence-free ideas and a general approach that eschews basic strategic thinking in favor of grasping for momentary tactical advantages to please domestic political factions. This lack of overarching strategy to tie together the strands of policy so that our bureaucracies pull in the direction of reality is why we lose wars and repeatedly get diplomatically outmaneuvered on the world stage by second and third rate powers.

A strategy board would not be a silver bullet. It won’t cure White House micromanagement by itself or keep the NSC from going rogue or make Defense, CIA or State produce workable options for the POTUS in a timely fashion. But a strategy board could well help clarify thinking at the inception and challenge the various players to pull together intellectually and operationally. It could makes things better.

And at the rate America has been going lately, we could hardly do worse.

[ by Charles Cameron — Scots by clan, audibly British to American ears, and American by friendship, long residence, and weather preference ]
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Here’s a pair of tweets I picked out to comment on a while back, when writing was a lot more effort than is is now — and will hopefully be in the near future. The second is pretty obviously a serpent-bites-tail example, but I suspect “haggis” and “Scottish” are close enough conceptually (staggeringly close) to qualify the first as a serpentine loop too — why else would Rifkind have mentioned the Scottishness of the fiver?

Man in North London butcher just turned down my Scottish fiver when I was literally buying a haggis with it. This is a new low.

— Hugo Rifkind (@hugorifkind) December 23, 2016

I wonder if politicians should have to swear an oath to the British value of not making people swear oaths to British values.

— Hugo Rifkind (@hugorifkind) December 18, 2016

Serpent-bites-tail logic is pretty cut and dried — but it can express itself in some pretty elusive / allusive forms.

**

Scots wha hae!

[ by Charles Cameron — delighted to find Ramanujan is not alone in dreaming of mathematics ]
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When the Hinduism Today writer above says people found Ramanujan‘s assertion that his equations were given him in dreams by the local goddess Namagiri “irksome” he was understing the case: many mathematicians are allergic to the idea of a goddess providing inspiration to a mathematician in a devotional dream state. Thus Krishnaswami Alladi, in his Review of the Movie on the mathematical genius Ramanujan, writes:

The legend is that the Hindu Goddess Namagiri came in Ramanujan’s dreams and gave him these formulae..

See? It’s a legend, a priori, since “goddesses” don’t exist.

John Nash, he of the Beautiful Mind, game theory equilibria, and the Nobel Prize, on the other hand — if he provides inspiration to a fellow mathematician in a dream?

Why, his solution can be acknowledged as such in a learned paper..

[by A. E. Clark]

The Sicilian debacle that unfolds in Book VII arises from more than one cause and offers more than one lesson: but this reader was struck by the recurring motif of timing, which the Athenians keep getting wrong while their adversaries usually get it right. An obvious approach to this subject is through the Greek word kairos, which denotes an opportune moment that must be seized promptly when it comes along. Wikipedia has an interesting overview of how this concept, which appears to have originated in archery or perhaps the craft of weaving with a shuttle, came to be elaborated in classical rhetoric and Christian theology. Its military applications are obvious. In his Funeral Oration, Pericles notes, tou de polemou hoi kairoi ou menetoi: in war, moments of opportunity do not linger. (1.142.1)

Thucydides makes it clear that Gylippus, from his first entrance on the scene, is a man of kairos.  “[H]e had arrived at a critical moment” (7.2.4); “at last he thought that the moment had come” (7.5.2); the word in both instances is kairos. The Athenians by no means lacked such insight, but usually they failed to act on it: it is worth reading carefully the analysis Lamachus gave at Syracuse in 415, after which he allowed himself to be overruled (6.49.1-4). The Athenians repeatedly tarry precisely when decisive action is needed. Thucydides credits Demosthenes with proceeding to Sicily “without delay,” but the account suggests otherwise: the general stops at various places to build forts, ravage territory, and collect troop increments of marginal utility (7.20.2-3, 7.26, 7.33). By contrast, in this fateful summer of 413, the Spartans begin their invasion of Attica “in the first days of spring, at an earlier period than usual.” (7.19.1)

After they have been defeated but when they can still escape, again and again the Athenians prove fatally dilatory. The generals disagree after Epipolae, and so do nothing (7.47-49). The Athenians finally decide to sail away when the enemy brings in a fresh army, but a lunar eclipse persuades the superstitious Nicias to defer the departure by 27 days (7.50.4). They let themselves be cheated of their last chance to slip away by land when they uncritically accept a spoofed message of disinformation telling them to wait (7.73.3-7.74.1).

The very Greek theme of kairos, then, reverberates through this drama: the Spartans and the Syracusans know how to seize it, while the Athenians don’t, and that spells the difference between victory and defeat. But I will confess that this is not what first occurred to me as I read Book VII. Instead I heard echoes of a work of strategy by an author who certainly never read Thucydides and was steeped in a profoundly different culture. Go Rin No Sho, the “Book of Five Rings,” by a masterless samurai of the early seventeenth century, subsumes both individual dueling and large-scale warfare under the same “art of the advantage.” Miyamoto Musashi knew about kairos, but he called it Crossing at a Ford.  Of particular relevance to students of Book VII, he explores with Delphic intensity the role of hyoshi: timing (or ‘rhythm’).

The way to win in a battle according to military science is to know the rhythms of specific opponents, and use rhythms that your opponents do not expect, producing formless rhythms from rhythms of wisdom. (transl. Cleary)

If that key passage from near the end of the Earth Scroll sounds too much like a fortune cookie, be assured that Musashi explores the matter in greater detail. He stresses pre-emption, the seizure of the initiative by attacking suddenly, or by interrupting the enemy’s attack at its very inception, or by exploiting momentary imbalances when you are attacking each other more or less simultaneously.

Unfortunately, I do not know Japanese, and the language of Musashi presents difficulty even for those who do. Go Rin No Sho was probably a set of notes meant to supplement allusively an oral teaching that is unavailable to us. The translations by Thomas Cleary and William Scott Wilson are both respected by experts, but they differ from each other enough to indicate that the text must not be entirely clear. Here are two fine articles by Musashi enthusiasts that unpack some of the subtleties:

http://kenshi247.net/blog/2012/07/20/hyoshi/

http://ichijoji.blogspot.com/2013/07/hyoshi-timing-rhythm-and-translation.html

In practice, Musashi was a past master at screwing up his adversaries’ timing and finding ingenious ways to fluster them. He often showed up late for his duels and is reported to have despatched his most formidable antagonist by wielding not a sword but a long bludgeon that he had whittled from an oar while being ferried to the battle-ground.

…start by making a show of being slow, then suddenly attack strongly. Without allowing him space for breath to recover from the fluctuation of spirit, you must grasp the opportunity to win. Get the feel of this. (transl. Wilson)

This style is perfectly exemplified in Ariston’s “lunchtime” trick (7.39.2 – 7.40.4), which hinges on syncopated rhythm.

In the disastrous night battle at Epipolae, the turning point seems to have been a sudden change in rhythm which unbalanced the Athenians. They got used to an accelerating advance ( . . . the victors immediately pushing on” 7.43.5), and committed themselves to it by forgoing any consolidation (“the Athenians now advanced with less order, wishing to make their way as quickly as possible” 7.43.7). Being brought to a standstill and driven back by the Boeotians was a disorienting change of pace.  (“The Athenians now fell into great disorder and perplexity” 7.44.1)

Musashi noted the frequency with which deadlock arises in warfare and suggested antidotes to it.

Letting Go Four Hands is for when you and an opponent are in a deadlock and no progress is being made in the fight. It means that when you think you are going to get into a deadlock, you stop that right away and seize victory by taking advantage of a different approach. (transl. Cleary)

and, more psychologically,

When fighting with enemies, if you get to feeling snarled up and are making no progress, you toss your mood away and think in your heart that you are starting everything new. As you get the rhythm, you discern how to win. (transl. Cleary)

This is what the Athenians needed to do during the climactic naval battle of 7.70-71, in which the two sides seemed evenly matched (in unbearable suspense to the onlookers) and the Syracusan victory did not come until “after the battle had lasted a long while.”

Musashi was not a merciful man.  He wrote,

  . . . when opponents are demoralized and weakening, you concentrate your force on crushing them . . . In the context of individual martial art too, when your opponent is not as skilled as you are, or when his rhythm is fouled up, or when he starts to back off, it is essential not to let him catch his breath. Mow him right down . . . The most important thing is not to let him recover.

The Syracusans’ resolve to exploit their first naval victory to the fullest (7.56.2) and later their relentless pursuit and annihilation of the fleeing Athenian remnants exemplify this ethos.

In Musashi’s time, schools of swordsmanship had different opinions as to what the warrior’s eyes should chiefly focus on. His adversary’s sword? His adversary’s eyes, or feet? In the Wind Scroll, Musashi says the eyes should focus on “the hearts and minds of the people involved . . . on the state of the opposing troops,” but in a broad vision that takes in “the conditions for battle . . . the strength and weakness of the occasion” so as never to lose sight of the big picture. The speeches of Gylippus and Nicias offer an interesting contrast: Nicias talks about his men, their fate, their virtue. Gylippus addresses the motivations of his troops and their advantages in the battlespace at hand but, notably, he also analyzes the state of mind of the enemy and shares the intelligence he has received about it. (7.66.3 and 7.67.4)

I invite Roundtable readers who have shuddered through Book VII to pick up the Book of Five Rings, with particular attention to the Fire Scroll, and see whether they too find it a surprisingly apt commentary on the Syracusan campaign.

Everything can collapse. Houses, bodies, and enemies collapse when their rhythm becomes deranged. . . when the enemy start to collapse you must pursue him without letting the chance go. (transl. Wilson)