Strategy and the Operational Art, a question for the readership.

This month's issue of The Journal of Military Operations has an article by Aaron Jackson of the Australian Defence Force discussing his assessment of one of the things that our contributor seydlitz often mentions; that many Western nations (and the United States in particular) seems to have a) lost the abolity to think and plan "strategically" and b) substituted, at best, the operational level of military planning for the classical concept of strategy.

Jackson is responding to an earlier article covering the subject, Alien: How Operational Art Devoured Strategy, by Justin Kelly and Mike Brennan in the September, 2009 issue of the U.S. Army War College Strategic Studies Institute.

The two articles are essentially making the same argument, that "(t)he subsequent expansion of the newly delineated operational level within the doctrine of English-speaking militaries led to it encompassing campaign planning. This led in turn to it ‘reducing the political leadership to the role of ‘strategic sponsors’, [which] quite specifically widened the gap between politics and warfare’ (Kelly & Brennan, 2009)."

Jackson (2014) says that:

"The core of Kelly’s and Brennan’s argument is that this expanded role for the operational level of war and operational art has not only dislocated military operations from strategy, but also from the original context in which Soviet theorists were writing about operational art. ‘The result’, they argue, ‘has been a well-demonstrated ability to win battles that have not always contributed to strategic success’. To remedy this, they suggest returning to the conceptual roots of operational art as limited to the sequencing of tactical actions. Campaign planning should be returned to the remit of strategic leadership and involve input from political as well as military strategic leaders."

Jackson's contribution to this debate is to claim that Kelly & Brennan (2009) has it backwards. The military leadership didn't expand operational planning to swallow traditional "strategy"; it was the political elites of the Western nations that wanted to separate politics and warmaking.

"...the prevailing Western cultural norm of civil-military relations, in which the separation of politics from military conduct is seen as both normal and desirable. According to this norm, civilian political leaders should stay away from the military aspects of campaign planning, and military leaders should steer clear of political issues, including those that relate directly to the establishment of national strategy. It is this norm, not the development of an operational ‘level of war’, that has driven a wedge between strategy and tactics. Something more than tactics is certainly required of military officers, but in the current system discussing the most fundamental elements of national strategy remains all but off limits." (Jackson, 2014)

Jackson (2014) then goes on to expand on this...a little. He says:

"This reason is the prevailing cultural norm of civil-military relations in Western democracies. The nature of this norm was famously laid out by Samuel Huntington in The Soldier and the State; however the more recent writing of Eliot Cohen offers a better summary. Describing ‘a simplified secondhand version’ of Huntington’s model as ‘the ‘normal’ theory of civil-military relations’, Cohen determined that this model calls for a sharp distinction between statesmen and military professionals. In line with this distinction, the former ought to be responsible for political matters, including the setting of the desired strategic end state, while the latter ought to be responsible for the execution of all military activities necessary to achieve this end state. Although Cohen offers an excellent critique of the normal theory, ultimately proving both that it does not function in practice and that it is undesirable that it should, he also concludes that it remains the system of civil-military relations that many Western political and military leaders strive towards achieving."

I would tend to agree with the statement that there seems to be a significant, and to a large degree dysfunctional, disconnect between the political processes in Western nations and the military adventures that proceed from them.

But that, in turn, leads me only to a blank wall, and a question.

Which is, simply, why would any political leader(s) want that?

Since presumably military force is still intended to "solve" political issues confronting political leadership (and I will add here that this presumption is not neccessarily a physical fact but, rather, the intellectual conceit of the leader(s) that some issues are both amenable to and require the use of force) then the natural corrolary would be that these leaders wish that force to be effective and economical; Sun Tzu's warning about prolonged war is no less valid now than when he (or someone, anyway) wrote it.

I can understand a polity dominated by the military to produce politicians wary of a "man on horseback"...but it has been generations since such a possibility presented itself to the Western polities.

So...regardless of how the Western way of war became, in effect, a glorified exercise in tactics...why wouldn't a perceptive leader or leaders recognize the futility of this and strive to re-integrate the military and political aspects of geopolitics and national strategy?

I know seydlitz has some theories on this, but anyone else willing to venture an idea or three?

Hauptverwaltungsoffizier!

Interesting study here regarding the persistence and quality of the long-gone Habsburg bureaucracy in the governance of eastern and modern southeastern Europe.The present-day U.S. has developed a curious loathing for the notion that a well-run state is important to civil society. The people of mittelEuropa, fought over and beaten up by foreign invaders and local bullies alike, have no such delusion. And it seems that the crucial element inspiring local good government involves the probity and competence of the local chief administrative officer;

"Comparing individuals left and right of the long-gone Habsburg border, people living in locations that used to be territory of the Habsburg Empire have higher trust in courts and police. These trust differentials also transform into “real” differences in the extent to which bribes have to be paid for these local public services."

An unsurprising conclusion, one would think, but one that seems to be lost amid the current U.S. enthusiasm for replacing well-paid professional staffs at every level from the town council to the federal government with contract workers and minimum-wage temps.Whilst I suspect that no one has enjoyed bureaucracy since the first Australopithecene home builder was fined a basket of warra nuts and two monkey tails for failing to meet code standards for her wickiup, the honest and efficient regulation of the conduct of human business is both art and science. I think perhaps we've had it so good for so long in so much of the U.S. that we've forgotten that much of those places that didn't - like the ex-Ottoman and ex-Imperial Russian parts of eastern Europe - are a nasty welter of bribery, bullying, and personal politics.

While that makes for a delightfully colorful story, it makes for a tetchy and difficult way to live, and we Americans would do well to remember that.

Parliment of Whores

Insurance, it seems to me, is a pretty simple thing.

The rationale for insurance is similar to the rationale for government; it's a way of using the strength of people as a group to help us do things we couldn't do as individuals.

So you get a bunch of people together and everybody kicks in a little. That little ends up being pretty big, because you've got a lot of people kicking in. And when one of the people has a problem: gets sick or hurt, house catches fire...or maybe gets a great idea, like buying another cow or expanding the widget plant...the group "kitty" kicks out a little money or a little extra help, so that the person can get back to being a productive citizen again, or make a little more and thus contribute a little more to the group.

People have been doing this since Sumer.

Now since then we've learned that for most of the truly "critical" parts of our lives, we've actually gone to the extent of bringing the actual government to do the insuring.

For example: we wouldn't trust the companies building airplanes and running airlines to verify their own safety inspections, or trust airports to coordinate their air traffic control with other airports and other private companies. So we have a Federal Aviation Administration that does all this.

We wouldn't trust private owners to build and maintain our roads and bridges, so we have state DOT's and the Federal Highway Administration to build them, inspect them and maintain them.

We've learned from experience that private for-profit companies have one duty; to make profits. This is not a bad thing - profits help these companies make better products, more cheaply, and get them into our hands in a timely way.

But profits can also be made by making shoddy, dangerous products, selling them as quickly as possible and then skipping town. Or lawyering up and beating the lawsuits. Or declaring bankruptcy. We've learned this the hard way, through potholed roads, failed bridges, burned toddlers, limbless workers. So where our health and safety is concerned, we usually take the approach "trust, but verify".

Insurance, whether it's auto, health, fire, or life, is an unusual sort of "business". An insurance company has no real capital investment; it has no "product line", no physical plant it cannot rent, no real assets other than the people that work for it and the records of those it insures. So when an insurance company makes a profit there is no chance that profit will be spend researching a better life insurance policy, designing a safer health insurance policy, or retooling the car insurance plant. That profit is, in fact, PURE profit, and can be used to pay the insurance company's owners, investors or workers, or used for some sort of financial transaction (like buying other companies...).

And an insurance company can only make money if it takes in more in premiums then it lays out in coverage. So if you take an insurance company and tell it to make more profit, it can do this only three ways:

1. It can charge more for its policies
2. It can pay less to its policyholders, or
3. It can keep the same receivable-payable balance and try and invest existing profits more shrewdly.

#1 is risky, since theoretically in a "free market" pricing too far above the mean will drive your customers to your competetors, and

#3 is difficult to manage - even the cleverest stock/bond brokers seldom make profits of the sort of scale possible if you work exceptionally hard at

#2: the real payoff for a smart company is figuring out how to chisel away at the payouts. It's a trick any smart carnie knows. You make the game just attractive enough to keep the rubes coming in...but hard enough so that they never get ahead of the House.

So insurance companies can - and many have - figure out how to make more money in the same ethical sense as the construction company taking a contract and then shorting the mix on the asphalt so that the pavement falls apart in a year instead of fifteen, or the garment outfit skimping on the fire-resistant material so that the kiddies' PJs go up like flash paper.

Many developed nations have figured this out.

And they've ALSO figured out that medical insurance is different from other forms of insurance. You can wear your seatbelt and drive defensively...you can put up smoke detectors and fireproof your house...but you can't change your genes to keep out cancer. You can't armor your tibia to prevent fracture.

Medical insurance is, by definition, the chanciest, most liable to fear, panic and irrational need of all the insurance varieties.

Medicine, too, is very vulnerable to the kind of profit-mining schemes that are attractive to insurance companies. When you're in pain, afraid, sick, you're not in a good position to make rational judgements. Especially now, with medicine increasingly complex and the workings of diagnosis and treatment opaque to the layman. The $40 dollar aspirin and the unneeded CAT scan are unlikely to be questioned by the battered character in the bed.

This is why almost all these other nations have taken steps to ensure that medical costs are controlled, and that insurance profits are limited. It's not "socialism" or some sort of strange, Euro-fashion need to put government in control. It's as simple as this:

Medicine and money are limited. Therefore there will ALWAYS be someone "standing between" you and all the medical care you want.

This person can be a third party, an agent of some government, whose primary interest is that you can be made sound as quickly and efficiently as possible so you can go back to paying taxes, or

It can be a private party whose profit depends on spending as little on you as possible, so unless you can be made sound for less than you've paid him you might as well die so he can write you off soonest.


Everyone seems to get this except the Democrats in the U.S. Congress and that entire portion of the U.S. public associated with the GOP.

The GOP has an excuse: they are morally and intellectually bankrupt, and utterly owned by the individual and corporate malefactors of great wealth whose sole purpose it is to keep the groundlings befuddled as they continue to reap largesse from the public purse.

But the Democrats..?

The rationale of the Democratic Party since the 1960's defection of the Slavery Wing to the GOP has supposedly been the welfare of the Little Guy; to look out for the weal of those of us NOT in a two-yacht family. And yet in the Senate yesterday the D's couldn't even keep their own party together to defend the central idea that insurance should be there to help people who are sick or injured and not enrich the healthy and wealthy.

To be middle-class - let alone poor - in the U.S. has always been to be relatively powerless, to have your fate determined by the powerful and the well-to-do. The genius of America has always been to convince these poor slobs that they're NOT just peasants, to keep them "inside the tent", and to prevent the fracturing of the nation on social or regional lines. Think about it - the entire New Deal wasn't a softhearted FDR wanting to cuddle to poor widdle urchins - it was the hardheaded dealmaking of an old patrician takig the elites that had just driven the U.S. economy into a ditch (sound familiar?) by the throat and pointing to flaming Red Russia and inquiring like a snarling Columbian cartel lord whether they wanted plombo o plata - lead from the angry mob or silver to keep the mob quiet?

The existence of a "liberal" wing of the more "liberal" of the two parties has kept a happy face on American poverty and a sexy veil on the impotence of the middle class for the hundred years since the Gilded Age, when Men were Men and poor people ate their own dead (screw 'em, if they weren't worthless why were they poor, then?).

The existence of that wing - or, at least, the ability of that wing to influence actual policy - seems increasingly fictional.

So my question is: what happens to a republic based on a powerfully representative parliment when that parliment demonstrates that it is packed with idiots and whores?

"...he IS a corrupt idiot."

Slavoj Žižek has an interesting article up at the London Review of Books discussing the hollowing out of Western democracy. I'd opine that his case is arguable - it rests on Italian democracy, never the strongest of reeds. But he makes several worthwhile points:

"It is democracy’s authentic potential that is losing ground with the rise of authoritarian capitalism, whose tentacles are coming closer and closer to the West. The change always takes place in accordance with a country’s values: Putin’s capitalism with ‘Russian values’ (the brutal display of power), Berlusconi’s capitalism with ‘Italian values’ (comical posturing). Both Putin and Berlusconi rule in democracies which are gradually being reduced to an empty shell, and, in spite of the rapidly worsening economic situation, they both enjoy popular support (more than two-thirds of the electorate)."

He has a great deal to say about the recent political crisis in Iran, and discusses European democracy in detail, but some of what he discusses touches on our present political condition:

"With Ronald Reagan (and Carlos Menem in Argentina), a different figure entered the stage, a ‘Teflon’ president no longer expected to stick to his electoral programme, and therefore impervious to factual criticism (remember how Reagan’s popularity went up after every public appearance, as journalists enumerated his mistakes). This new presidential type mixes ‘spontaneous’ outbursts with ruthless manipulation."

Worth a read.

Canary, meet Coal Mine.

Somewhat lost in the federal health care/war funding/global warming/wise Latina raree show was the sad little, noxious little budget deal worked out in California this Monday.It has to say something about who we Americans are and what we're becoming that the best idea that the Golden State's best and brightest (okay, we'll exempt Da Governator from that, but, still, We the People of California elected his Austrian ass) could come up with to "balance" the state budget was to rob their own counties and municipalites blind, to kick the poor and sick in the crotch, and to cut nonessentials like teachers, garbagemen, cops, paramedics and highway maintenence workers (in the state that practically invented Car Culture, no less...).

You can read all about it in the linked LA Times editorial, but even that supposedly liberal news organ seems to have developed collective amnesia about a couple of salient points.

1. The "we're broke, we just don't have any money, we HAVE to cut your food stamps (AFDC, Head Start, fill-in-the-blank...) or die, you silly Negroes..." meme goes all the way back to the toxic little property tax time-bomb the California GOP wired up in 1978, Proposition 13. We here in Oregon then devised our own little suicide pact, Measure 5, clearly on the conviction that if California was going to be Tom Fool and lead the best plan for us was to be Jack Fool and follow.

The direct result of this was to save Ma and Pa Goober a couple of hundred dollars a year on their rancho deluxe out there near McMinnville while giving Pacific Gas and Electric, Flav-R-Pac, and Megacorp Development an immense windfall of untaxable largesse, which, of course, they immediately rushed out to donate to the widows, orphans, disabled, and mentally ill that the now-tax-strapped state government had to chuck off the welfare rolls and out of the state institutions, colleges and job training programs they could no longer fund, so that the poor devils didn't have to beg for change at the top of the on-ramps of the roads the state could no longer maintain.

Not.

2. California compounded their own stupidity by then crafting a 2/3rds supermajority rule for passing legislative revenue measures, which has effectively prevented the state from passing any NEW revenue measures since 1996.

I love this little cartoon because of what it says about the mindset of the people who are fond of this situation. The cartoonist wants us to see that the Republican elephant is a simple but wise old soul, doing his math like a good householder and making his expenditures meet his income, and the Democratic donkey is a maddened policy wonk, all goofy for taxing everything moving to fund kooky-spooky crunchy granola frills.

But the cute little exercise fails when you realize that Jumbo's "a = b" is a logical fallacy. "a" isn't "a", it's "x", and "b" is "y". The animals in the legislature can - unlike the prudent household - change their income and outlays to meet their needs. So, in a sense, it's the donkey's frantic figuring that represents what a real government has to do: try and figure out what it needs versus what it wants, and then what it can take in versus what it would like to take in. The elephant isn't being simply honest; he's being simpleminded, he's using an axe to craft a budget rather than a woodcarving tool. Which explains a LOT about how Republican "governance" has gotten us here.

And so, here we are.

Imagine a nation in which a small handful of wealthy people live a First World lifestyle.

Their homes are nicely maintained, their roads well paved, their neighborhoods patrolled by polite, competent, professional police officers. They and their neighbors get First World medical care in daintily appointed medical clinics, shop at the best locations, dine, party, work and generally live as well as any human society in the 21st Century can arrange.

Then imagine that the bulk of the nation lives in precarious, decaying cities, towns and countrysides, prey to the collapsing, badly maintained public roads, buildings and utilities around them. Their lives are made more random by the capricious nature of their public "servants": seldom present and, when appearing, typically bribeable or even worse, merely indifferent. A fraying middle class lives squeezed between the wealthy, who despise them and the poor, who envy and hate them. Their political power is notional, their involvement in their own government negligible, they are useful only as fodder for the wealthy.

But you don't have to imagine this. All you have to do is travel south, east or west, to find dozens of impoverished Third World nations where this condition is the standard. Every craptacular little dictatorship or oligarchy the U.S. Army helped me vacation in, from Panama to Egypt and points between, featured this vast disparity between the rulers and the ruled. This wasn't a bug; it was a feature.Democracy cannot exist in a feudal society. It dies, or is killed, by the desperation, foolishness and ignorance of the peasants and the greed, venality and indifference of the nobles.

California has now chosen, rather than to even mildly discommode the wealthy, to disadvantage the disadvantaged. Rather than even attempt to close the gap between the rulers and the ruled, it chooses to allow the public weal to fall victim to private wealth.

There is a name for this sort of system.

But "republican", it's not.

Ever since the Elevation of Saint Ronnie, our public discourse has been dominated by the idea that "taxes are bad". In this sense, the conservatives that lost the Battle of Watergate won the larger war. They wanted to concentrate power in the nation's elite, and, largely, they have. They wanted to move the nation's laws - if they could not move the nation's people - to the right and, largely, they have.Well, California has reached the conservative state of grace; the state, and those in the care of the state, now exist to serve the needs of the wealthy. We shall see if the result is beneficial for the state and her people as a whole. We shall see.

Who IS that standing there?

I was doing something domestic the other morning while my bride was skimming channels and caught her pause on one of the network morning shows as someone (presumably a GOP talking head) was ranting: "If Obama gets what he wants you will find a government bureaucrat standing between you and your doctor!!"

I had kid lunches to find and breakfast to make, but I still had time to think,

"You smug, self-satisfied son-of-a-bitch, have you ever had a job shitty enough to have had lousy insurance? Because if you had, which I doubt, you insurance-company-donation-fattened hyena, you'd know perfectly well that there already IS a bureaucrat standing between me, and about 89% of the rest of Americans and their doctors. And it's a bureacrat even less objective, less reasonable, and less helpful than one from my government; its the one from my goddam insurance company."

I'm not sure why Obama's people haven't figured out that one of the few things less popular to the average Yank than our government bureaucracy are the meeching, grasping, parsimonious scriveners at our HMOs and insurance companies.

But there's a drum there, and I'm not sure why they don't beat it.

Update 6/23: Maggie Jochild over at Group News Blog gets it:

"They (the GOP and Congressional Dems shilling for the insurance companies) also claim it means a government worker will decide what kind of treatment you get. Well, currently those decisions are being made by cubicle drones for private insurance companies who receive bonuses for denying you care. Your disability and death have no impact on their bottom line. But a "government worker" will have no such incentive to keep you away from necessary treatment, and in the big picture, having more citizens alive and productive is better for the government's bottom line. You tell me which one looks more attractive."

Word.