Joseph Fouche

An Uncomfortable Intimacy

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Following up on Lex’s point…

For most  of the course of human events, mankind lived in tribes.  Behavior was regulated by intimate and persistent relationships, many with blood relations. The prolonged development required by human children assumed prolonged immersion in a cultural torrent fed by close physical proximity to fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents, and the occasional stray outsider. Through this immersion, acceptable behavior was impressed on a child’s mind through a mix of deliberate and accidental lessons cumulatively applied over decades. When personal survival depended entirely on face to face relationships with others, the incentive to conform to what the tribe found acceptable was strong.

As Peter Turchin discussed in War and Peace and War, every human group, including tribes, is made up of three kinds of people:

  • knave: puts individual  interests before group interests
  • saint: puts group interests before individual interests
  • moralist: conditionally puts individual interests before group interests

If moralists can punish knaves for not pursuing group interests, they will willingly put group interests ahead of their individual interests. If moralists can’t punish knaves, they opt out of pursuing group interests and only pursue their individual interests.

Since any human group is roughly ¼  knave, ¼  saint, and ½  moralist, this potentially pits ¾  of the group against the knaves. Within a tribe, knaves face an additional problem: the size of a tribe is usually smaller than Dunbar’s number. Dunbar’s number is the “number of individuals with whom a stable inter-personal relationship can be maintained” within the limits of the human mind. If group size is less than Dunbar’s number (around 150 people), moralists can know who’s a knave and who isn’t, allowing them to monitor and punish known knaves.

Consistent face to face intimacy with saints or moralists makes knavery difficult.

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This is Profoundly Stupid…

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The city of  Philadelphia, Pennslyvania is home to USS Olympia:

USS Olympia was a protected cruiser in the United States Navy during the Spanish-American War. She is most notable for being the flagship of Commodore George Dewey at the Battle of Manila Bay. The cruiser continued in service throughout World War I and was decommissioned in 1922. As of 2010, Olympia is a museum ship at the Independence Seaport Museum in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Olympia is the world’s oldest steel warship still afloat.

Not for long, it seems:

Now the Olympia – the last surviving vessel from that 1898 conflict – could face an ignoble end as an artificial reef off Cape May if a new benefactor cannot be found.
 
The Independence Seaport Museum and the Navy have already checked with officials of New Jersey’s Artificial Reef Program on the possibility of sinking the ship, once a source of national pride.
 
“Another option would be scrapping Olympia,” said James McLane, interim president of the museum, which owns the ship and is adjacent to it at Penn’s Landing. “But the Navy has told us that ‘reefing’ is better because it would allow divers to go down on it and would preserve Olympia.”
 
The museum can no longer afford the ship’s upkeep, McLane said. At least $20 million is needed to tow, restore, interpret, and endow the deteriorating vessel.

Fortunately, as Dmitri Rotov points out, the state of Pennsylvania has its priorities straight:

Tough economic times – but the $20 million needed to rehab the Olympia is  exactly the amount allocated in the new state budget for an  Arlen Specter library and a  John Murtha “Center for Public Policy.”

Worth Reading: Special Operations and Strategy: From World War II to the War on Terrorism

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Politics trickles down while tactics trickles up.

That’s especially true of military factions. Take retired U.S. Army Colonel Douglas Macgregor. Macgregor has three claims to fame:

  • He was in command of 2nd Squadron, 2nd Calvary when it ran into a wing of the Iraqi Republican Guard during Operation Desert Storm. His squadron destroyed an entire enemy brigade in forty minutes in what has become known as the Battle of 73 Easting.
  • He wrote a book advocating a massive reorganization of the U.S. Army called Breaking the Phalanx. It made him very popular with the top brass. As popular as a bad rash.
  • He created the core operational concept for the initial invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Macgregor is a man who speaks his mind and means what he says. He is an unabashed and unapologetic U.S. Army Armor officer. If you don’t know what an unabashed and unapologetic Armor officer looks like, Macgregor spends over  an hour in this  lecture at Chicago’s own Pritzker Military Library putting the mind of  a U.S. Army Armor officer on exhibit. Macgregor’s variant on the Armor worldview is tactical in that his intra-service politics have become “tacticized” and it’s political in that his tactics have become politicized.

In his lecture, Macgregor strongly implies that the counter-insurgency (COIN) warfare waged in Iraq and Afghanistan is a conspiracy by the U.S. Army’s light infantry against his beloved Armor. This is because COIN requires large numbers of “boots on the ground” which means that resources are being diverted from Armor to the light infantry. An unspoken subtext of Macgregor’s implications are that Armor (and its officers) are losing power to those treacherous light infantry officers.

Since the division of power is the essence of politics, this means that the debate between Armor and light infantry is political even though Armor and light infantry are both Army and they are only distinguished from each other light by their tactical roles. Ironically, a tactical distinction has created a political fault line. This makes the formation of strategy, which has to link tactics and politics, much more difficult. If a chosen strategy favors Armor, as Macgregor advocates, or if it favors COIN, as advocated by Macgregor’s chosen arch-nemesis David Petraeus, the formation of strategy is reduced to sweeping up the debris left over after a vicious struggle between competing factions whose living depends on their particular tactical vision being funded. Strategy ends up being shaped by politics from above and tactics from below, leaving it politicized and tacticized but not strategized.

Of course Macgregor’s advocacy can’t be reduced to purely political calculations. Armor, like any human community, has its own narratives and its own culture. If you drink the Kool Aid they serve at the company picnic for long enough, eventually you’ll start to think like the Kool Aid. Culture is shaped by the nature of an organization, its role, and its need for resources. Narratives that attract resources to their organizations tend to thrive. Narratives that don’t tend to wither away. Macgregor, like any American armor advocate dating back to George S. Patton and Dwight D. Eisenhower (Patton led the first American tank corps into battle during World War I while Eisenhower (much to his frustration) led the stateside armor training at Gettysburg, PA), has learned what sells:

Easy Button
Easy Button

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Don’t Trust Any General Over 50?

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Over at the (American) Civil War Bookshelf, Dmitri Rotov posts on Generals who faint and raises this point:

General Mansfield
General Mansfield

General Petraeus will be 58 in November. General Mansfield was 58 when he was killed in battle. Mansfield, shown right, had not fainted up to that point, at least not on the record. He is the oldest looking general I have ever seen. The Civil War reader, first encountering Mansfield, asks, “What the hell?” The newspaper reader, encountering Petraeus, thinks “How youthful and fit.”
 
Petraeus and Mansfield. One slogs around all day in Maryland or Virginia mud, heat, and frost in heavy boots and wool clothing as a kind of daily fitness program; the other mans a desk in Floridian air conditioned comfort between inspections, briefings, and rounds of self-imposed exercise.
 
None of this is intended to slight Petraeus but to make the point that one can run, jump, exercise, whatever, and it will not change that one is 58 years old. Fainting or worse are possible. Forget about 60 being the new 40. Mansfield was remarkable – exceptional – and no basis for broad army policy.
 
Joe Hooker was our fain[t]ingest [American Civil War] general but his faints were accompanied by blood loss and concussion. Remember how you thought he was a geezer in the summer of 1862 at 47 years of age? That’s 11 years younger than Petraeus, 11 years older than McClellan.
 
And speaking of older generals, how old do you make Lee in the summer of 1862? He was 55, three years younger than Petraeus. Lee – another exception and no basis for policy.
 
In J.F.C. Fuller‘s book Generalship: Its Diseases and Their Cure, he names three pillars of generalship: courage, creative intelligence, and physical fitness and he attributes all three to “the attributes of youth rather than middle age.” He does not find courage and creative intelligence among middle aged officers as a rule, and he would be dismayed at the current leadership of the U.S. military.
 
Under Petraeus, directing the Iraq war, we find Ray Odierno, 56. Under Petraeus, directing the Afghanistan war, we find Stanley McChrystal, 55. At the top, this is an army of Mansfields. We love Mansfield but is this a good thing?

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The Cure For Spills, Peaks, and Crazy Foreigners…

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Howard Bloom argues that America needs a space vision. Like solar power…FROM OUTER SPACE!

Space Solar
Space Solar

Bloom argues that space solar power is the solution to America’s energy needs. With space solar power, this nation would put satellites in orbit around the Earth. These satellites would collect the plentiful   solar power in space that’s just sitting there unused, ready to reduce your power bill, convert it into healthy radiation, and beam that radiation back to the Earth where it can be converted into power. Space solar power would have no problem with spills, weather, eminent domain, NIMBY, waste, Indian attack, pollution, or allergies. Other than the small technology, engineering, and financial hurdles, Bloom faces one massive hurdle in convincing the American people that this is the vision for them: the term solar power.

When the average red-blooded American hears the term solar power, they think of one thing:

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