With the demise of Public Enemy #1, and talk of what this means for the ‘war’ on terror…..it’s actually a good time to think outside the conventional paradigm about what components encompass national security. Two eminent military strategists do exactly that in a recently released paper, that’s well worth a read.

Some traditional advocates of stout military deterrence will likely deride it as a wasteful expenditure of time, money and effort. But the bottom line is that we can continue the current policies [which I find misguided] and embark on a new path. They are not mutually exclusive, and the points Mykleby and Porter lay out don’t seem to have a down side where it concerns resource management and homeland security.

This Strategic Narrative is intended to frame our National policy decisions regarding investment, security, economic development, the environment, and engagement well into this century. It is built upon the premise that we must sustain our enduring national interests – prosperity and security – within a “strategic ecosystem,” at home and abroad; that in complexity and uncertainty, there are opportunities and hope, as well as challenges, risk, and threat. The primary approach this Strategic Narrative advocates to achieve sustainable prosperity and security, is through the application of credible influence and strength, the pursuit of fair competition, acknowledgement of interdependencies and converging interests, and adaptation to complex, dynamic systems – all bounded by our national values.

It is time for America to re-focus our national interests and principles through a long lens on the global environment of tomorrow. It is time to move beyond a strategy of containment to a strategy of sustainment (sustainability); from an emphasis on power and control to an emphasis on strength and influence; from a defensive posture of exclusion, to a proactive posture of engagement. We must recognize that security means more than defense, and sustaining security requires adaptation and evolution, the leverage of converging interests and interdependencies. To grow we must accept that competitors are not necessarily adversaries, and that a winner does not demand a loser. We must regain our credibility as a leader among peers, a beacon of hope, rather than an island fortress. It is only by balancing our interests with our principles that we can truly hope to sustain our growth as a nation and to restore our credibility as a world leader.

A National Strategic Narrative

BZ to all the SOF personnel…that is all…

Hello readers! I will be back to posting soon, hopefully with a new post by the end of the week…Sorry for the delay, but sometimes life gets in the way. I’m looking forward contributing to Military Pundits again.

Marriage is an act of union between two people who commit to spend their lives together. It is a voluntary act between two consenting adults that needs no sanction from the state. If the couple desires a religious blessing to be bestowed on that union, they are free and able to proffer the clergy of their choice to receive that blessing.

The state wishes to consolidate it’s power in any and every way possible. The fact that a requirement exists not only to receive state sanction [in most cases, but not all], but to be taxed for the privilege of that sanction speaks volumes.

Of course, we know the reason behind DOMA in the first place. It was designed overtly and specifically to keep homosexuals from entering into a union of matrimony, a union that fundamentalist Christians believed to be in their purview and theirs alone. To defend that argument, they rely on the intellecually debunked assertion that ‘gay’ marriage somehow harms or ‘tears apart’ heterosexual marriage.

But you don’t see the hypocrites arguing to outlaw divorce…….

As for the constitutionality of not enforcing a law…..we’ve allowed Signing Statements, right?

Bottom line up front, I know that there will likely be some growing pains and serious incidents involving the repeal of DADT and the ability for gays to serve openly in our military. But unless the faith in this nation is waning, and we’re not really that exceptional after all….we can look to other western, industrialized nations who have gone through this and survived quite well. It is the right thing to do.

Anyone who professes a belief in the sovereignty of the individual has to support equal rights for homosexuals or they are a hypocrite. The conservative value of supremacy of the individual over that of the collective cannot be subject only to a protected class, or we’re not talking about a Republic anymore. If a basis of discrimination is founded on a biblical belief, fine. The deep personal relationship between you and whatever you think created you is just that. It’s not a basis for governing over your fellow citizens unless it also has secular value. Discrimination in this case does not meet that test. Feel like quoting Leviticus? I’ll come right back at you with a bushel full of other excerpts from the bible that haven’t found their way into law for some very evident reasons. So if you profess your faith in a 2000 yr old tome, as the word of god….don’t be picking and choosing only those tenets that you want to live with.

Whenever a debate is had between myself [or other supports of individual rights] and fierce opponents of gay marriage, DADT, gays in general, etc…the opposition argument always centers on the sexual act. They do this in an attempt to elicit an emotional response towards the conditioning that we’ve all grown up laboring under. The meme is that two guys together sexually is…icky. Well the mental image doesn’t exactly get my motor running, but I note my own hypocrisy where it pertains to two women in a similar situation. And by looking at sales of pornography….I’m hardly alone.

The debate from the oppositions side never addresses the fact that gay men and women are chemically and biologically attracted to another consenting adult It merely happens to be of the same sex. The idea of dating to find the right person to spend the rest of your life with in a committed relationship seems to be lost on these opponents. Admittedly, many spectacles of Pride Parades and such haven’t helped their image, but these are a minority, no matter how often the Allegedly Liberal Media replays them.

In the military specifically, DADT ran counter to the core values that the military espouses. The focus of repeal is centered on hypotheses of increased casualties, plummeting morale and incidents of violence. What is almost never inserted is the fact that all of the above would be instigated by straight soldiers. So opponents would have you believe that the military would suffer [even herald the end of our nation if you listen to some prominent religious homophobes], but the fact that the immaturity, bigotry and sedition of straight soldiers at the core of all of these hypotheses are conveniently left out. Sort of like the battered women syndrome….sure I beat her…but she was asking for it, she didn’t know her place.

I debate this quite often on a few MIL/LEO discussion forums, and though there are few voices of reason, the general meme is what I laid out above. Few are armed with logic or reason, but emotion abounds.

Military members can have their immediate family visit them at Walter Reed and Bethesda after being maimed in theater; military members can have the support of their spouse, and bring them to unit functions and Family Readiness Group meeting; military members can openly date in attempts to find the person they want to spend the rest of their life with in a committed, loving relationship.

Only if they’re straight.

Real patriots don’t deny these rights and privileges to their fellow American citizens based on the chemical attraction between consenting adults. Real patriots sack up and act like men and women…..instead of children.

Has the “GWOT” been at all effective in defeating Al Qaeda? By what measurement?

We have allowed Al Qaeda to morph from an entity who was comfortably ensconced in a semi-autonomous failed state, more or less coalesced in a general area…..into an entity that has proliferated and bounded outside our scope of observation and span of influence. When Al Qaeda planned the 9/11 attacks, they knew that we would retaliate in some form or fashion by kinetic means. We knew that the cadre was located, by and large, in Afghanistan. And they knew that we knew.

So Al Qaeda, knowing that we could not resist the temptation to bring our military to bear in a tantrum of massive and overwhelming force, made their comfortable accommodations known to us. The serious minded of us know that terrorist cells need only a collection of safe-houses and primitive communications systems in which to plan and operate. Terrorists know that we can interdict satellite phone transmissions at will. So my premise has been, and remains, that Al Qaeda knowingly lured us into a massive military undertaking in Afghanistan. That’s really the only way to grind down a superpower. No amount of tactical attacks against the soft underbelly of American culture will succeed, it will only further erode the concept of liberty for it’s citizens…as we are seeing daily; which in turn is a peripheral victory in the campaign.

By the time of the Tora Bora campaign, a relative few Al Qaeda cadre remained behind to propagate the myth that they could be militarily surrounded and defeated. Those few have now vanished and established cells and support structures in countless nations in the region, leaving us to spend a generation in futile combat against the hapless and unwitting Taliban. We are left struggling to compose public relations friendly faux-victories in the form of killing the revolving and apparently least enviable job in AQ – the #3 man.

Meanwhile our over-reliance on long distance technology gives us daily updates by breathless newsbabes, reporting that XX ‘suspected militants’ were vaporized by another drone attack. More often than not, the suspected militants were real civilians…thus justifying Al Qaeda’s propaganda messages.

So the measurements for any sort of success can be summed up in about three metrics:

1: Are we more or less safe now than before 9/11? The answer if you listen to government is apparently less safe. Unless we purchase the next greatest technology from a corporation that will turn our tax dollars into more profit, we cannot hope to be kept safe from the terrifying menace. Unless we give up just a bit more individual sovereignty…our library checkout lists…..every meter reader an informant….our e-mails and phone conversations subject to surveillance…we apparently cannot hope to be kept safe from the cave dwelling offspring of goat herders.

2: Our military, after the aforementioned tantrum of muscle flexing, now stands mired in two occupied nations, unable to maintain a rapid reflexive and responsive posture to combat any future threat or any actionable intelligence. We remain engaged in a generational conflict against a host of entities who not only had not attacked us, nor maintained the means to do so…are unable to proliferate a threat outside of the borders they inhabit. Ironically, the patriotism has been and remains in question of those who bring these fact to light.

3: Is Al Qaeda diminished since 9/11? While people like to state that we’ve had no additional attacks on the homeland or that Al Qaeda is not capable of large scale attacks after our ‘relentless pursuit’ of them. But we know from captured documents and laptops since around 2003, that Al Qaeda is not interested in successive large scale attacks. The cost-benefit analysis isn’t in their favor. What works, as we have witnessed, are peripheral attacks against allies and targets outside the US span of direct influence. The information war is far more profitable to Al Qaeda’s goals than the kinetic war.

What significant alterations can we make in our strategic plan to combat terrorism?

We must remove the benefits of and the moral arguments for supporting terrorist groups. It goes deeper than the religious aspect. Religion has been merely a vehicle for the cause. The root causes of terrorist success are far more connected to poverty, education and despotic regimes who enable both. Balancing meaningful alliances with nations in the middle east that can combat those root problems with a tempering of alliances and military aid to major protagonists [Israel] will be more profitable than military invasions of minor annoyances and proxies.

Law enforcement interdiction and intelligence sharing agreements with those nations, and a retooling of our special operations forces to meet the threat are another logical step.

What is the metric for success? Or are we consigned to a forever war…ala….”we’ve always been at war with [Eastasia] Al Qaeda”?

Al Qaeda is a trans-national terrorist organization, a product of the market state…so comparisons to previous models, or especially state based regimes such as the Khmer Rouge are inapt. We don’t yet know what the metric for victory can look like. We know what defeat looks like, we’re seeing the precursors to that this very day. One simple fact of the matter is that perpetual war is profitable. Not for you and I, but for consolidation of state power and the careers of administrative and military officials and advocacy organizations. The post government careers of those who make a living hyping the tangible threat of terrorism to obscene proportions is immeasurable. The John Bolton’s, Frank Gaffney’s and Liz Cheney’s among us wouldn’t be a blip on the national radar were it not for the hyped threat.

If you get a chance head over to http://www.blackfive.net/main/2010/08/if-i-die-young.html and read that little piece put up by Deebow.

The Cordoba Center makes no more difference to me than a fundamentalist Christian Church near the Murrah Federal Building site. For those who see this as a symbolic victory for Jihadists, I say this. Extremist Islam already got their victory when they spent the money for plane tickets and box cutters, and in return got the worlds only superpower sucked into a decade long war [and counting] while bleeding it’s own economy white. Dubious symbolic victories are not only not worth the lives of Americans, but also not worth compromising our Constitutional principles. We’ve been playing into Al Qaeda’s hand since before 9/11, why continue?

Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic pens a piece addressing the Imam heading the Cordoba Initiative:

This seems like such an obvious point, but it is apparently not obvious to the many people who oppose the Cordoba Initiative’s planned mosque in lower Manhattan, so let me state it as clearly as possible: The Cordoba Initiative, which is headed by an imam named Feisal Abdul Rauf, is an enemy of al Qaeda, no less than Rudolph Giuliani and the Anti-Defamation League are enemies of al Qaeda. Bin Laden would sooner dispatch a truck bomb to destroy the Cordoba Initiative’s proposed community center than he would attack the ADL, for the simple reason that Osama’s most dire enemies are Muslims. This is quantitatively true, of course — al Qaeda and its ideological affiliates have murdered thousands of Muslims — but it is ideologically true as well: al Qaeda’s goal is the purification of Islam (that is to say, its extreme understanding of Islam) and apostates pose more of a threat to Bin Laden’s understanding of Islam than do infidels.

I know Feisal Abdul Rauf; I’ve spoken with him at a public discussion at the 96th street mosque in New York about interfaith cooperation. He represents what Bin Laden fears most: a Muslim who believes that it is possible to remain true to the values of Islam and, at the same time, to be a loyal citizen of a Western, non-Muslim country. Bin Laden wants a clash of civilizations; the opponents of the mosque project are giving him what he wants.

The loss of people during a terrorist attack, while tragic, is a solitary event. Denying civil rights to other Americans based upon conjecture and emotion has farther reaching ramifications, and will eventually [if not immediately] effect far more people. If the people behind the Cordoba Community Center can be treated differently due to our emotional reaction….so should Christian fundamentalists, due to advocating violence and legal disparity towards citizens that they don’t like.

When confronted with a situation such as this [where there is no discernible nor provable threat to US security], we can either uphold the American exceptionalism that is continually brayed about by ‘patriots’…or we can sink into the morass that defines cultures such as extremist Islam.

As Andrew Exum writes on his blog Abu Muqawama:

Where the Bill of Rights really has its value is as a check against the tyranny of the majority. It’s for times like these when the passions of Americans — stoked by the memory of September 11th — cause us to do and say things that spit in the face of the freedoms we claim to cherish.

Defending America starts with defending our values. “We” are America. And “we” are Christians and Jews and Muslims and Athiests. A movement to restrict the freedom of one of us to worship — and a corresponding move to demonize a minority religion — is an affront to us all.

As the Republican mayor of New York put it yesterday, “I believe this is as important a test of the separation of church and state as any we may see in our lifetime – and it is critically important that we get it right.”

Though there are several…..one of the stark incongruities applied to this debate is that with such an allegedly liberal media, the right wing has been able to frame the debate and whip up hysteria to the point where logic and reason are the minority. The use of hyperbolic phrasing is intentional and lapped up eagerly by the undereducated. The media can’t seem to call it a Community Center [which it is], they must refer to it as a Mosque, as if that is the sole role of the real estate. They repeatedly echo the meme that the site is ON or AT Ground Zero. This is but one more instance where the alleged Constitutionalists allow emotion to override the very tenets they claim to support.

Why no outrage over the Mosque in the Pentagon? Are the 9/11 victims of that location any less sympathized than NYC? Or does that not fit the script, as it would come perilously close to sounding like not ‘supporting the troops’?

And the question that nobody appears capable of answering – how far away from ground zero is ‘near’?

Clearer heads will prevail in the legal sense, as there is no recourse for denying the building of the community center. But that won’t be the script for a large number of people. Americans by and large cling to the belief that American actions in no way fed into the breeding of Islamic terrorism. Remember, talking heads and Presidents have told them that they ‘hate us for our freedoms’. This level of American exceptionalism has the inbred reflex of a disregard for inconvenient facts and undeniable truths.

As part of this meme, the community center becomes a Mosque; the Imam simply must be a radical Muslim; and the families of 9/11 victims [only in NYC apparently] will simply not be able to function with another Mosque [since there are already several] in the vicinity of ground zero. Thus, we get yet another chance to herald American innocence and legitimize our reckless foreign policy.

To use the logic of the opposition against them….as we are engaged in counter-insurgency operations on two fronts, and the support of the local [Muslim] population is essential for any form of success…..the vicious fear based opposition to Cordoba and other Mosques around the nation actually undermines that effort. Thus those allegedly pro-Constitution right wing patriots don’t support the troops.

The military — the Army specifically — discusses framing a problem correctly in order to solve it. As W. Edwards Deming (the process guru who made Toyota what it is) stated, “If you do not know how to ask the right questions, you discover nothing.” In the Army’s effort to frame a problem correctly and ask the right questions, they have applied Design to the most recent version of FM 5-0. The problem is that Design applies to an unscalable world, and as I will explain below, we live and fight in a scalable world.

First off, what is the difference between scalable and unscalable? Scalable is easily defined by the life of a typical hourly worker. If they work 35 hours a week, they get paid their hourly rate times 35 hours. The laws of scalability dictate that input will produce corresponding results, and additional input will produce additional corresponding results. Unscalability has no such laws. Additional work might generate negative results just as easily as it might generate exponential results. Bill Gubman (fictitious person) spends a few years designing a clever software program and sells 8 copies to family and friends. Bill Gates spends a few years designing a clever (and occasionally frustrating) program, and becomes the richest person in America. Proponents of social justice claim that “it’s not fair,” but there is no Fairness law in the unscalable world.

Whereas the scalable world provides us a consistent, predictive environment, the unscalable world is characterized by persistent unscalable activity which, due to its persistent nature, we believe is scalable (i.e. the prevalence of dot-com millionaires in the ‘90s). But the persistent unscalable activity occasionally rocks the establishment with disruptive, unexpected events. These events are called Black Swans.

Tassim Nicholas Taleb introduced “black swans” in his 2006 book aptly titled The Black Swan. These black swans have three characteristics: they are completely unexpected, make a disproportionate impact, and will cause “experts” to try to fully explain their occurrence after the fact.

To clarify, these are not outliers. Outliers are unexpected – sometimes extremely so – but they do not make a disproportionate impact. If a product off a manufacturing line is in the 3d sigma to either side of the mean, then it is an outlier, but it does not impact the rest of the products, the manufacturing line itself, or the employees. It is merely assessed for the nature and genesis of the error and promptly discarded.

Black swans, on the other hand, are like nuclear sucker punches. They come out of the blue and knock you on your ass. And while you’re sitting there counting stars or little birdies, people gather and talk about from where that nuclear sucker punch may have come.

There are two distinct types of black swans: productive and destructive. Productive black swans take years to develop. Google and the internet are examples of the productive type. Destructive black swans take mere moments: 9/11 and Black Friday. As the axiom tells us: it is always easier to destroy than to create. I add that it is always quicker to destroy than to create. It takes about 15 years to raise a child. It takes the squeezing of a trigger to extinguish that life. The critical thing to remember about both types of Black Swans is that they are both disruptive.

So how must the military confront black swans? First, they must realize that black swans exist and that they cause many global conflicts and areas of instability. Remember, black swans can only exist in a world of scalability. If Iran was unscalable – meaning the only way they could wage war was to amass a land force and march on the U.S. – we wouldn’t fear them at all. But Iran is scalable. One motivated leader with a penchant for chaos and a hankering for a seat at the nuclear poker table makes Iran a threat to those outside the reach of a standard land force. Couple that with Ahmadinejad’s access to global media, and he’s a bonafide hero to millions…maybe even billions.

There is no current method for soothsaying the occurrence of black swans with any accuracy. Black swans will occur. They are on par with death and taxes. Knowledge can mitigate their occurrence, and greater amounts of knowledge can mitigate them to a lesser degree…but not to a scalably lesser degree. Why does Bill Gates say that his greatest fear isn’t Google or Apple but the guy in the garage tinkering at 3 a.m.? Because Mr. Gates can imagine, plan, and strategize for a tete-a-tete with Google and Apple. But the dude in the garage is an unknown. No one knows what that guy is making, and by being unknown, he instills fear in others.

So how does the military predict black swans? They don’t. The only way to avoid the impact of a black swan is to be prepared for the impact of the black swan, not the black swan itself. In 2004, the governor of Indiana started a painful process to turn a $400+ million deficit into a $1.6 billion surplus. That allowed Indiana to weather the storm of the recession which began in 2008. Indiana didn’t avoid the black swan, but they mitigated its impact.

The military must understand where its own weaknesses are and strengthen them. But this defensive posture is not enough. The military must take its knowledge (intel) and disrupt the potential origins of black swans. The military may not prevent them all, but it doesn’t take many black swans to cause a whole lot of hate and discontent.

Then how is this different from what the military is doing right now? It’s not. Not really. The military must continue its efforts around the world to mitigate the occurrences of black swans and their impacts, but the military must realize that they can’t get them all. There is a freedom that comes from acknowledging the extent to ones knowledge or awareness, but it can never become a cause for inaction, especially for our military.

Republicans like wars fought by the military. Backing wars like these butches up even the gay Republicans. Democrats like social wars. This makes them feel better about their natural penchant for stealing money from those of us who produce. The tactics used to fight wars are usually the same: throw a lot of money at it; hire contractors to help senior officials strategize; and have political leadership promise utopian results.
What bakes my noodle is that politicians use that tactic for their pet project war, but they harangue other politicians for using that same tactic for wars that are not one of their pet projects. Namely, Democrat Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana (a mentor to President Obama no Foreign Policy) has complained that both the military and civilian missions were “proceeding without a clear definition of success.” Moreover, that “We could make progress for decades on security, on employment, good governance, women’s rights,” he said, without ever reaching “a satisfying conclusion.”
But has that stopped Congress from pulling the plug of the War on Poverty or AIDS or drugs or the Homeless or Racism or Sexism or Ageism or bloated wind bags who populate Capitol Hill? Nope. These folks just want to keep spending. But how much are they spending on these wars-with-no-end?
The War on Poverty started with a $1 Billion chunk of cash…in 1964. They got $2 Billion the next year. Since that time, the U.S. government has spent $9 Trillion (yep, that’s a T) on the War on Poverty. Why are there still thousands of people standing in line at the soup kitchen each night?
The War on AIDS has cost the U.S. about $2 billion a year (on average) for the past 25 years. That’s $50 billion, and I still have to hear about AIDS babies on TV hospital dramas as if they are as prevalent as ever. It just ain’t so.
The War on Drugs, first declared by Nixon, then championed by Reagan (one of his very few faults), is a money drain. Between all three levels of government, we spend over $50 billion A YEAR on the War on Drugs. That’s about $20 billion a year (on average) for the past, oh, 35 years, for a grand total of $700 Billion. I still have pot-smoking slackers who live next door to me, and the cops don’t do anything about it.
I won’t detail each of these wars, mostly because I don’t want to do the research, but let’s just take these three: Poverty, AIDS, and Drugs. They have cost the US Taxpayer just under $10 Trillion (yep, that’s still a T) over the past 45 years. That’s over $222B a year so that I can watch TV shows with AIDS babies that only exist on TV (except for a few backwards countries in Africa), see lines at the soup kitchen all year round, and have stoners living next door. At least for the $1 Trillion we’ve spent on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (at a yearly cost of $100B a year – less than half of the three social wars detailed), I got 9 years of no planes being flown into buildings and a ton of new military gadgetry that will last for years.
So why is Senator Lugar so upset about not being able to reach a “satisfying conclusion” to the wars overseas when he would rather just keep throwing good money after bad for his social wars that are equally without “satisfying conclusion?”