Promised Land, Crusader State

I’m a big fan of historian Walter McDougall. In my opinion, McDougall is in the midst of writing the best series of histories about these United States. The two volumes he has completed thus far are Freedom Just Around the Corner : A New American History: 1585-1828 and Throes of Democracy: The American Civil War Era, 1829-1877. Since he is a generalist dipping into many far-flung domains, devotees of a particular area of focus may be appalled by his conclusions within their chosen bailiwick. As a Mormon, for example, I’d quibble with his portrayal of Joseph Smith, the founder of my faith. However, his treatment is more nuanced than other portraits I’ve encountered. In balance, his judgments are usually sound and balanced, and he’s not afraid to offer them.

Another McDougall book that throws some interesting light onto recent discussions in the stratesphere over American grand strategy is Promised Land, Crusader State: The American Encounter with the World Since 1776, published back in 1997 but still relevant. Following an approach that reminded me of Walter Russell Mead’s Special Providence, McDougall identifies two main themes in United States’s relationship with the outside world. Both are referenced in the title of his book: the Promised Land and the Crusader State. The Promised Land theme refers to the earliest tradition in American foreign policy that focused on preserving American liberty from threats abroad, especially those which, by the domestic response they triggered, could lead to internal corruption, despotism, and division at home. The Crusader State theme covers a later foreign policy tradition where America went abroad in search of monsters to destroy. The first tradition was the dominant influence for most of the nineteenth century and the second dominated the twentieth and into the twenty-first. McDougall refines these two themes into further subdivisions, identifying four sub-themes under the Promised Land theme and four under the Crusader State theme.

McDougall, with a strong awareness of the impact of religion on American history that shows up in this and many of his other works, relabels the two traditions as the “Old Testament” and “New Testament” of American foreign policy:

Our Old Testament:

1. Liberty, or Exceptionalism (so called)
2. Unilateralism, or Isolationism (so called)
3. The American System, or Monroe Doctrine (so called)
4. Expansionism, or Manifest Destiny (so called)

Our New Testament:

1. Progressive Imperialism
2. Wilsonianism, or Liberal Internationalism (so called)
3. Containment
4. Global Meliorism

More later…

Pull Out a Gat and Fetch My Fukuyama Bat

If Francis Fukuyama didn’t exist and hadn’t ever written The End of History and the Last Man, the Department of Defense would have had to create a RoboFukuyama deep in the bowels of Area 51 and set it free to liberate pontificators on the post-Cold War era. If you couldn’t reach into the bag of lazy journalistic flourishes and pull out your Fukuyama Bat to rhetorically beat dear Francis once more, you’d never get this:

In the summer of 1989, American political economist Francis Fukuyama foresaw the “End of History” in a landmark essay, meaning that no credible alternative had survived to political and economic liberty as practiced in the U.S. and Western Europe. All that remained, he argued, was for other countries to catch up.

Today, history is back, according to writers such as Israeli military historian Azar Gat. In his new book, “Victorious and Vulnerable,” he says that although democracy is the most benign system in history, it will have to demonstrate its advantages all over again in the face of its latest rival: authoritarian capitalism, as practiced by self-confident powers such as China and Russia.

We’ve noted Azar Gat’s central thesis before in a Committee report. Gat also wrote about it in the closing chapters of War In Human Civilization and The Return of the Authoritarian Great Powers. Gat’s argument is that:

Today’s global liberal democratic order faces two challenges. The first is radical Islam — and it is the lesser of the two challenges…The second, and more significant, challenge emanates from the rise of nondemocratic great powers: the West’s old Cold War rivals China and Russia, now operating under authoritarian capitalist, rather than communist, regimes. Authoritarian capitalist great powers played a leading role in the international system up until 1945. They have been absent since then. But today, they seem poised for a comeback.

Gat has argued that the victory of liberal democracy over the “authoritarian capitalist” powers in WWI and WWII was more contingent than most inhalers of free air would think:

Liberal democracy’s supposedly inherent economic advantage is also far less clear than is often assumed. All of the belligerents in the twentieth century’s great struggles proved highly effective in producing for war. During World War I, semiautocratic Germany committed its resources as effectively as its democratic rivals did. After early victories in World War II, Nazi Germany’s economic mobilization and military production proved lax during the critical years 1940-42. Well positioned at the time to fundamentally alter the global balance of power by destroying the Soviet Union and straddling all of continental Europe, Germany failed because its armed forces were meagerly supplied for the task [...] All the same, from 1942 onward (by which time is was too late), Germany greatly intensified its economic mobilization and caught up with and even surpassed the liberal democracies in terms of the share of GDP devoted to the war (although its production volume remained much lower than that of the massive U.S. economy). Likewise, levels of economic mobilization in imperial Japan and the Soviet Union exceeded those of the United States and the United Kingdom thanks to ruthless efforts.

Reading Adam Tooze’s The Wages of Destruction, you get a better case for Gat’s argument than Gat argues above. Tooze demonstrates, contrary to the widely shared belief that Gat refers to, that the German economy more mobilized, even in 1940-1942, than the Western powers. The advantage of the Western powers was overwhelmingly quantitative instead of qualitative. Indeed, according to Tooze, the democracies overwhelming economic advantage was not only the crucial ingredient in their victories in both world wars, it was the primary cause of both world wars. In both wars, Germany went to war because its leaders thought that whatever advantage it currently possessed was transient in the face of rapidly growth in the power of the West, projected through the East. Hitler in particular was fixated on the need to acquire a vast eastern hinterland in order to even begin to challenge the British Empire and the United States with their vast internal markets. In Hitler’s mind, Germany had to achieve similar economies of scale to compete with the (purportedly) Jewish run democracies and escape the trap that defeated Imperial Germany in World War I.

The looming power of America was always the shadow looming over Hitler’s future Aryan paradise. Fixated on the overwhelming power of America, threatening to swamp Germany and all of old Europe, the Nazi’s optimized Germany’s economy to make the Wehrmacht punch above its weight and, as a result, won more results than Germany’s paltry resources justified on their own. If it had merely been based on material resources, Germany would have lost. Those in the German government who could evaluate the material disparity were desperate for peace. But Hitler gambled and, in one of the most miraculous victories in history, defeated France in 1940 and drove the British off the Continent. However, even with the combined resources of a subjugated Western Europe at his command, Hitler was still outclassed by America. He believed that American power would only grow with time and that his only hope was seizing Russian resources. The German high command believed that Russia was a paper tiger and not the threat that America was. It could easily be disposed of before America strangled Germany. The road to Washington led through Moscow.

Germany, however, found Nemesis. The Americans cleverly fed the Soviets resources to keep the Germans tied down, trading money, weapons, and Russian lives by the million for the lives of American boys and killing thousands of Germans in the process. The Red Army digested the Wehrmacht deep in western Russia and Hitler’s longshot gamble came to its most probable and predictable end.

While the Nazis and Japanese had to exhort their soldiers and populations on to greater displays of spirit to close their material gap, the new “authoritarian capitalist” powers like Russia, China, and the other SCO members, Gat proposes, have the advantage of huge resource bases and vast spaces. If Germany and Japan, perhaps driven by a relative poverty of national resources, have been driven to heights of population mobilization rarely achieved elsewhere, Russia and China have a poor record of maximizing their populations in the most efficient way possible. Russia and China are both examples of how you can punch above your weight military through economics driven by pure coercion but are poor examples of extracting maximal productivity from their populations through economics based on the mix positive and negative incentives offered by capitalism. The authoritarian capitalist revolution was pioneered by Lee Kwan Yew in Singapore offered them a way out. Deng Xiaoping picked it up from there:

China’s ruling Communists, who had bloodily suppressed their own street protests around Tiananmen Square in June 1989, were transfixed by the revolutions sweeping Eastern Europe that summer and fall. Their first reaction was to freeze economic and political change. But “paramount leader” Deng Xiaoping took the view that the Soviet bloc had failed because of its economic stagnation.

In early 1992, weeks after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Deng toured China’s south to promote a strategy of rapid economic change, coupled with tight political control.

“Deng’s approach was something new,” says Michael Yahuda, a leading historian of China. “In the previous reform period, from 1979 to 1989, there was much discussion of political reform too. Thereafter, there was no mention of political change,” he says.

The question of which arrangement of government and economy is best is still in flux. Gat explicitly and Tooze implicitly argue that it may not be the intrinsic superiority of the democracies that beat out the original authoritarian capitalists. It was their superior resources, much of which were won and developed at a period in the democracies’ past when they were less democratic, that was the critical determinant. The past 70 years have demonstrated that some form of capitalism is superior to a pure form of command economy. But it has yet to demonstrate what the best admixture of positive incentive and negative incentive is in an economy. It has yet to demonstrate which mixture of motivation through command and coercion and motivation through interest and voluntarism is bets. Most importantly, it has yet to demonstrate which mixture of politics and economics is optimal.

The crucial weakness of authoritarianism is leader selection and rotation. While diktat by one man may yield efficiencies in some circumstances, it definitely creates negative situations in others. Rotating an authoritarian in when their on fire and out when they’ve cooled off is a problem authoritarian government have solved only sporadically and over limited periods of time. Capitalism involves a certain degree of personal autonomy that authoritarian regimes have a hard time restraining themselves from violating. Capitalism involves rotations of classes and elites which practically beg incumbents to use coercion to stop. The modern authoritarian capitalist regimes that Gat fears have shown some progress in those areas but have yet to demonstrate that they have conclusively solved them. However it may turn out that economic liberty is essential to creating a powerful state, possibly leavened by a dose of personal liberty here and there, but that political liberty as generally understood in the Anglosphere is not.

The battle is joined.

Armstrongs

Armstrong Coat of Arms

Tom Moss made this (otherwise buried) comment on my Steven Pressfield inspired post Kill the Tribes in relation to one of my distant ancestors:

Johnnie Armstrong of Gilnockie was indeed a notorious reiver of the early 16th century. It is said that he exacted blackmail from Gilnockie to Newcastle, a distance of over fifty miles, but always on the English side of the Border. In 1530 James V of Scotland was 17 years old. He did not subdue the Scottish Reivers by his callous act at Carlenrig when he hanged Armstrong and twenty-two of his followers. He achieved the reverse! From that year the Armstrongs of Liddesdale would have no truck with that impetuous monarch. In 1542 he got his come-uppance when a large Scottish army was routed by a much smaller English force at the Battle of Solway Moss. James was not present at the debacle which saw his army picked off as they tried to cross the river Esk at Longtown, Cumbria. He opted instead to wait at Lochmaben Castle. It is said that when he heard the news of the defeat he retired north and died of the humiliation but not before receiving the news that he had a baby daughter of but eight days old. She would become Mary, Queen of Scots.

Moss has written a fictional account of another notable incident involving Clan Armstrong called Deadlock and Deliverance (you can contact the author here if you are interested in purchasing a copy). This is the rescue of William Armstrong of Kinmont AKA “Kinmont Willie” from the hands of the evil English. Moss writes on his website:

Kinmont Willie was captured by the English following a ‘Day of Truce’ at the Dayholme of Kershope. The ‘Day of Truce’, purportedly held at monthly intervals was a time when those reivers who had transgressed the Border Law were brought to the very Border Line to answer for their crimes…

Kinmont had been taken against the ‘Assurance’ of the Truce. His capture by the English was illegal and, even though they sought to hold on to him against all the odds, they would suffer a miserable humiliation for their rash effrontery.

Kinmont was freed following a daring raid on Carlisle castle by a small party of clansmen from the Scottish Border valleys aided and abetted by members of some of the more prominent Cumbrian families. The most notable of the English reiving clans, the Grahams, also played a major part.

The rescue led to a war of words between the monarchs, Elizabeth I of England and James Vl of Scotland. Their relationship reached its lowest ebb over the affair with warnings that the two countries had been at war before for reasons of less magnitude.

My late grandmother was quite fond of her Scottish heritage. She probably even though the replacement of the Stuarts by the Hanoverians was a tragedy even though her own ancestors loathed the House of Stuart. In my mind, any blow offered against Stuart tyranny is a blow for truth, justice, and the right of a man to earn his keep by stealing his neighbor’s cattle. I don’t cry for Bonnie Prince Charlie and I don’t cry for the king over the sea. Mencius Moldberg, whose usually wrong but wrong in an interesting, loses me when he argues for a Stuart restoration under Franz, Duke of Bavaria (by descent the Stuart pretender to the English and Scottish thrones). I see the Royal Stuart Society and can only imagine Jacobite and Jesuit machinations against my English liberties and plotting an Anschluss of Scotland, England, Ireland, Bavaria, and Liechtenstein into a Greater Liechtenstein under Hereditary Prince Alois. May it never be. The Border Folk, usually called the Scots-Irish in the US, are one of the last bulwarks against Stuart tyranny. I can think of no better conclusion than the Ballad of Kinmont Willie:

O hae ye no heard o’ the fause Sakelde?
O hae ye no heard o’ the keen Lord Scroope?
How they hae ta’en bauld Kinmont Willie,
On Haribee to hang him up?

Had Willie had but twenty men,
But twenty men as stout as he,
Fause Sakelde would never the Kinmont ta’en,
Wi’ eight score in his company.

They band his legs beneath the steed,
They tied his hands behind his back.
They guarded him, fivesome on either side,
And they led him through the Liddel-rack.

They led him through the Liddel-rack,
And also through the Carlisle sands;
They took him tae Carlisle Castle,
To be at my Lord Scroope’s commands.

“My hands are tied, but my tongue is free,
And whae will dare this deed avow?
Or answer by the Border law?
Or answer tae the bauld Buccleuch?”

“Now haud thy tongue, thou rank reiver.
There’s never a Scot shall set thee free:
Before ye cross my castle gate,
I trow ye shall take farewell of me.”

Now word has gane tae the bauld keeper,
In Branksome Ha’, where that he lay,
That Lord Scroope has ta’en the Kinmont Willie,
Between the hours of night and day.

And here detained him, Kinmont Willie,
Against the truce of Border tide.
And forgotten that the bauld Buccleuch
Is keeper on the Scottish side?

“Had there been war between the lands,
As well I wot that there is nane,
I would slight Carlisle Castle high,
Though it were built of marble stane.”

“I would set that castle in a lowe,
And sloken it wi’ English blood.
There’s never a man in Cumberland,
What kent where Carlisle castle stood.”

“But since nae war’s between the lands,
And here is peace, and peace should be;
I will neither harm English lad or lass,
And yet the Kinmont shall be free.”

And as we crossed the Debatable land,
And tae the English side we held,
The first of men that we met wi’,
Whae should it be but fause Sakelde?

“Where ye be gaun, ye broken men?”
Quo’ fause Sakelde; “Come tell to me?”
Now Dickie o’ Dryhope led that band,
And there never a word of lear has he.

And as we left the Staneshaw-bank,
The wind began full loud tae blaw;
But ’twas wind and weet, and fire and sleet,
When we came beneath the castle wa’.

They thought King James and a’ his men
Had won the house wi’ bow and spear;
It was but twenty Scots and ten,
That put a thousand in sic a steir!

And as we reached the lower prison,
Where Kinmont Willie he did lie,
“O sleep ye, wake ye, Kinmont Willie,
Upon the morn that thou’s to die?”

Then shoulder high, with shout and cry,
We bore him doon the ladder lang;
At every stride Red Rowan made,
I wot the Kinmont’s airns play’d clang!

He turn’d him on the other side,
And at Lord Scroope his glove flung he.
“If ye na like my visit in merry England,
In fair Scotland come and visit me!”

All sair astonished stood Lord Scroope,
He stood as still as rock of stane;
He scarcely dared tae trew his eyes,
When through the water they had gane.

“He is either himsel’ a devil frae hell,
Or else his mother a witch maun be;
I wadna hae ridden that wan water,
For a’ the gowd in Christendie.”

For Whom the Bell Dengs, It Dengs for Lee

Charlie Rose interviewed the former Prime Minister of Singapore Lee Kuan Yew the other night. Rose asked Lee who, out of all the world leaders he had met, he most admired. Lee answered that he admired Deng Xiaoping for his adaptability. Lee related an anecdote about Deng’s first visit to Singapore in 1978. Deng was surprised by Singapore’s prosperity, which his brief had not adequately covered. Deng asked Lee how he had made Singapore so prosperous. Lee replied that they had attracted foreign direct investment due to Singapore’s cheap (at that time) labor costs. They then became subcontractors then contractors then competitors, learning as they went. Deng observed that Lee had created an egalitarian society using capitalism, an observation Lee seconded. Deng then went back to China and, Lee implies, applied the Singapore model to China with the side effects the world has experienced since.

If this implied influence on Deng is accurate, it makes Lee one of the most influential figures of the twentieth century, all from a little dot south of the Malay peninsula. Lee is often times considered the most effective authoritarian of the late twentieth century, the sort of man that, if they could be produced on demand, would doom democracy.

Interestingly, Lee insisted that senior government and civil service officials be paid at a level on par with the highest paid figures in the public sector. Whether this produces better senior politicians and officials is an open question, though Singapore seems to have better governance that a lot of other countries in the region. Makes you wonder if you get what you pay for in your politicians.

The Battle John Brown’s Body Burning School

An interesting line of historical development from one great song of liberation to another, starting with the most influential terrorist in American history. Says Wikipedia:

In 1890, George Kimball wrote the story of how the 2nd Infantry Battalion of the Massachusetts militia, known as the “Tiger” Battalion, collectively worked out the lyrics to “John Brown’s Body”. Kimball wrote:

We had a jovial Scotchman in the battalion, named John Brown…and as he happened to bear the identical name of the old hero of Harper’s Ferry, he became at once the butt of his comrades. If he made his appearance a few minutes late among the working squad, or was a little tardy in falling into the company line, he was sure to be greeted with such expressions as “Come, old fellow, you ought to be at it if you are going to help us free the slaves”; or, “This can’t be John Brown–why, John Brown is dead.” And then some wag would add, in a solemn, drawling tone, as if it were his purpose to give particular emphasis to the fact that John Brown was really, actually dead: “Yes, yes, poor old John Brown is dead; his body lies mouldering in the grave.”

According to Kimball, these sayings became by-words among the soldiers and, in a communal effort–similar in many ways to the spontaneous composition of camp meeting songs described above–were gradually put to the tune of “Say, Brothers”:

Finally ditties composed of the most nonsensical, doggerel rhymes, setting for the fact that John Brown was dead and that his body was undergoing the process of dissolution, began to be sung to the music of the hymn above given. These ditties underwent various ramifications, until eventually the lines were reached,–

“John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave,

His soul’s marching on.”

And,–

“He’s gone to be a soldier in the army of the Lord,

His soul’s marching on.”

These lines seemed to give general satisfaction, the idea that Brown’s soul was “marching on” receiving recognition at once as having a germ of inspiration in it. They were sung over and over again with a great deal of gusto, the “Glory hallelujah” chorus being always added.

However these earthy lyrics offended the finer set:

Bishop’s battalion was dispatched to Washington, D.C. early in the Civil War, and Julia Ward Howe heard this song during a public review of the troops in Washington. Rufus R. Dawes, then in command of Company “K” of the Sixth Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry, stated in his memoirs that the man who started the singing was Sergeant John Ticknor of his company. By this time the association with the diminutive Scotsman John Brown was forgotten or unknown to most listeners, who heard only a rough and somewhat oddly-phrased marching song about John Brown the abolitionist. Howe’s companion at the review, the Reverend James Clarke, suggested to Howe that she write new words for the fighting men’s song. Staying at the Willard Hotel in Washington on the night of November 18, 1861, Howe awoke with the words of the song in her mind and in near darkness wrote the verses to the “Battle Hymn of the Republic”. Of the writing of the lyrics, Howe remembers, “I went to bed that night as usual, and slept, according to my wont, quite soundly. I awoke in the gray of the morning twilight; and as I lay waiting for the dawn, the long lines of the desired poem began to twine themselves in my mind. Having thought out all the stanzas, I said to myself, ‘I must get up and write these verses down, lest I fall asleep again and forget them.’ So, with a sudden effort, I sprang out of bed, and found in the dimness an old stump of a pen which I remembered to have used the day before. I scrawled the verses almost without looking at the paper.”

Many of the troops that marched deep into Dixie marched into battle singing one of these two songs. Many of the children of my generation sang a song of liberation set to the same music:

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the burning of the school
We have tortured all the teachers – we have broken every rule
We went marching down the hall just to hang the principal
Our troops go marching on!

Glory, glory, hallelujah
Teacher hit me with a ruler
Met her in the dark with a man eating shark
Our troops go marching on!

Those were variations we used when I was a freedom fighter. Wikipedia has documented other variations:

Glory, Glory halleljah,
My teacher hit me with a ruler,
I hide behind the door with an AK-44
And that was the end of my teacher.
My dad was mad, My mom was sad
Me and my brother were laughing like mad.

We have tortured all the teachers – we have broken every rule

We have even drowned the principal in the local swimming pool

And we’ll go marching on!

We have tortured all the teachers – we have broken every rule

When the principal tried to stop us we just flushed ‘em down the stool

Our truth is marching on!

We have ruptured all the teachers and we’ve broken all the rules,

And we’ll go marching on!

We have sliced the English teachers and have drowned them in their blood

And we’ll go marching on!

We have tortured every teacher, we have broken every rule

We have barbecued the principal and hung the janitor

Our school is burnin down!!

I went to her funeral and I went to her grave,

instead of throwing flowers I threw a handgrenade

We have tortured every teacher, we have broken every rule

We have plans to hang the principal tomorrow after school!

We have forgotten our multiplication tables, eaten our teachers and their families,

And we’ll go marching on!

We have shot the secretary and we hung the principal

Us brats keep marching on.

We have smashed up all the blackboards, we have thrown out all the books

The school is burning down.

We have wandered down the halls writing cuss words on the walls

The school is burning down.

We have bound and gagged the principal and tossed him in the pool

The school is burning down.

We have barbecued the principal, destroyed the PTA,

Our school keeps burning on.

They sent us to the office, so we hung the principal,

Our troops are marching on!

We are killing all the teachers, we are breaking all the rules

We broke into his office and we murdered the principal

Our troops go marching on!

We broke into his office and we tickled the principal

We have tortured every teacher and we’ve hung the principal.

We have broken every piece of chalk as well as every rule.

They have taken all the teachers out and broken every rule.

They have painted all the toilets black and all the lockers white.

There won’t be school no more!

We have tortured all the teachers, we have broken all the rules.

We’re marching down the hallway for to kill the principal.

We have tortured every teacher. We have broken every rule.

We have spit in every corner of the dirty, rotten school.

We have shot the secretary and destroyed the PTA!

Us kids are marching on!

We have tortured all the teachers, we have broken every rule

We have even spanked the principal and kept him after school

Examples of variations of the chorus:

Met her at the store with a loaded .44…

So I hit him in the bean with a rotten tangerine…

I hit her in the butt with a rotten coconut…

I hit her in the bean with a rotten tangerine…

Met her in the attic with a semi-automatic…

Met her at the gate with a loaded .38…

I hid behind the door with a big ole’ two-by-four

I stood behind the door with a loaded .44…

I bopped her up the bean with an atomic submarine…

Shot her up to heaven with an AK47…

Shot her in the bean with an M-16…

Shot her out the door with a Magnum .44…

Shot her in the head and the teacher dropped dead…

Met her at the bank with a loaded German tank…

Reform school here I come!

And there ain’t no teacher no more

Now the teacher is no more

And she ran right out the door!

Met her at the door with my trusty .44

and she’s not my teacher anymore!

Advice on Afghanistan From an Expert

• Know when to hold them.
• Know when to fold them.
• Know when to walk away.
• Know when to run.
• Never count your money when you’re sitting at the table. There will be time enough for counting when the dealings done.
• The secret to surviving is knowing what to throw away and knowing what to keep. Because every hand’s a winner and every hand’s a loser and the best that you can hope for is to die in your sleep.

Roasted Chicken is a Quagmire Anyway

Invading the Wicked Problem

Horst Rittel, in inventing the “wicked problem“, described it as having ten characteristics:

1. There is no definitive formulation of a wicked problem.
2. Wicked problems have no stopping rule.
3. Solutions to wicked problems are not true-or-false, but better or worse.
4. There is no immediate and no ultimate test of a solution to a wicked problem.
5. Every solution to a wicked problem is a “one-shot operation”; because there is no opportunity to learn by trial-and-error, every attempt counts significantly.
6. Wicked problems do not have an enumerable (or an exhaustively describable) set of potential solutions, nor is there a well-described set of permissible operations that may be incorporated into the plan.
7. Every wicked problem is essentially unique.
8. Every wicked problem can be considered to be a symptom of another problem.
9. The existence of a discrepancy representing a wicked problem can be explained in numerous ways. The choice of explanation determines the nature of the problem’s resolution.
10. The planner has no right to be wrong (planners are liable for the consequences of the actions they generate).

The explanation offered by the TRADOC pamphlet Commander’s Appreciation and Campaign Design is in the spirit of Herr Rittel but passes it through the cold, clammy grip of the color sucking vampires of DoD terminology (e.g. the rather colorful and memorable phrase “wicked problem” becomes the rather limp “ill-structured problem”):

1. There is no definitive way to formulate an ill-structured problem.
2. We cannot understand an ill-structured problem without proposing a solution.
3. Every ill-structured problem is essentially unique and novel.
4. Ill-structured problems have no fixed set of potential solutions.
5. Solutions to ill-structured problems are better-or-worse, not right-or-wrong.
6. Ill-structured problems are interactively complex.
7. Every solution to an ill-structured problem is a ‘one-shot operation.’
8. There is no immediate and no ultimate test of a solution to an ill-structured problem.
9. Ill-structured problems have no ‘stopping rule’.
10. Every ill-structured problem is a symptom of another problem.
11. The problem-solver has no right to be wrong.

Jeff Conklin narrowed this down to six characteristics:

1. The problem is not understood until after the formulation of a solution.
2. Wicked problems have no stopping rule.
3. Solutions to wicked problems are not right or wrong.
4. Every wicked problem is essentially novel and unique.
5. Every solution to a wicked problem is a ‘one shot operation’
6. Wicked problems have no given alternative solutions.

CACD provides this helpful breakdown on how dealing with the wicked problem differs from more righteous problems:

Well-Structured “Puzzle”

• Problem Structuring: The problem is self- evident. Structuring is trivial.
• Solution Development: There is only one right solution. It may be difficult to find.
• Execution of Solution: Success requires learning to perfect technique.
• Adaptive Iteration: No adaptive iteration required.

Medium-Structured “Structurally Complex Problem”

• Problem Structuring: Professionals easily agree on its structure.
• Solution Development: There may be more than one “right” answer. Professionals may disagree on the best solution. Desired end state can be agreed.
• Execution of Solution: Success requires learning to perfect technique and adjust solution.
• Adaptive Iteration: Adaptive iteration is required to find the best solution.

Ill-Structured “Wicked Problem”

• Problem Structuring: Professionals will have difficulty agreeing on problem structure and will have to agree on a shared starting hypothesis.
• Solution Development: Professionals will disagree on:
  • How the problem can be solved.
  • The most desirable end state.
  • Whether it can be attained.
• Execution of Solution: Success requires learning to perfect technique, adjust solution, and refine problem framing.
• Adaptive Iteration: Adaptive iteration is required both to refine problem structure and to find the best solution.

Conventional human problem solving breaks down when confronted by the wicked problem. Humans usually throw two problem solving approaches at problems. One uses the Automatic System and the other uses the Reflective System. Thaler and Sunstein comment in Nudge:

The Automatic System is rapid and is or feels instinctive, and it does not involve what we usually associate with the word thinking. When you duck because a ball is thrown at you unexpectedly, or get nervous when your airplane hits turbulence, or smile when you see a cute puppy, you are using your Automatic System. Brain scientists are able to say that the activities of the Automatic System are associated with the oldest parts of the brain, the parts we share with lizards (as well as puppies).

The Reflective System is more deliberate and self-conscious. We use the Reflective System when we are asked, “How much is 411 times 37?” Most people are also likely to use the Reflective System when deciding which route to take for a trip and whether to go to law school or business school. When we are writing this book we are (mostly) using our Reflective Systems, but sometimes ideas pop into our heads when we are in the shower or taking a walk and not thinking at all about the book, and these probably are coming from our Automatic Systems.

The Automatic System is what we in software engineering call legacy software. It’s the results of solutions to obvious problems that were so obvious that evolution hardwired them into our brains over eons. Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s illustration of a “well-structured” problem is what happens when you see a leopard. Your Automatic System has arrived at the one clear solution: run away as fast as possible (a good option if, as this guy postulates, early humans could run as fast as 37 mph). The Automatic System is fast while the Reflective System is somewhat slower. The Reflective System is geared to the CACD’s Medium Structured “Structurally Complex Problem”. It’s good at problems where the desired endstate is clear but there’s more than one way to get there. Wicked problems, however, are too complex for Automatic responses and strain Reflective responses. A good working definition for a wicked problem is any problem that falls into the gap between evolved and Automatic responses that Reflective calculations haven’t filled.

It seems that wicked problems will only succumb to distributed problem solving where many heads are knocked together and thrown at the problem. This creates multiple lines of approach that crush the wicked problem between converging columns of adaption. Some would identify this happenstance with the phenomenon known as crowdsourcing but that’s a misreading. Most of the great paradigm shifts come from a few aggregating minds but as much of 90% of the upfront processing will be done by lesser minds with varying degrees of ability and effort. At the end, a few super aggregators will step in and finish the final formulation. At that the multitudes can look back and see that they had been whittling away at a giant problem that they didn’t even known was there. The solution to wicked problems is culture, a form of Lamarckian natural selection where attributes acquired in life can be passed on to others without transfer through direct biological interface (though that’s a matter of choice).

The question that we face is how best to conduct the concentric cultural attacks on the looming wicked problems we confront on personal, group, national, and world levels. Any such detached question is complicated by the problem that any solution to a wicked problem has political implications, meaning that it will shift power from one party to others. The airy detachment of pure intellectual debate will inevitably be befouled by appeals to the Automatic System since triggering Automatic responses is a cheap, powerful, and time-tested method for achieving power. However, political infighting, whether expressed as logrolling, politicking, or outright war, may only tangentially contribute towards solving the wicked problem in the most tangential way: by creating an even worse wicked problem than the existing wicked problem. Techniques of dialogue have changed little since the dawn of time. If rhetoric and precision guided munitions have more conversational impact than war cries and spears, it’s more of a change in quantity than quality. Violence and sophistry are part of the wicked problem’s definition and its eventual solution. However, their underbrush must be cleared to get at the wicked problem, especially if, as I’d argue, solving the wicked problem is primarily a distributed effort. As a communication problem, noise imposed by sender, recipient, and medium must be minimized as much as possible to enable clarity.

Rittel’s own solution to defeating the wicked problem was IBIS, the Issue-Based Information System. IBIS involves at minimum four elements:

• Questions
• Ideas
• Pros
• Cons

An IBIS map starts with a root question:

Root Question

A question can only be responded to with another question or with an idea. An idea is best seen as first a potential answer to the question and secondly a chance to evolve into further questions:

Questions and Answers

Pros and cons can only respond to ideas. Further questions can also respond to ideas:

Questions, Answers, Pros, and Cons

Following those few principles, Rittel argued, even wicked problems could be mapped. A shared map would be capable of establishing a shared understanding, enabling distributed problem solving to begin. Actually doing the IBIS mapping requires skill; as the old Othello commercial said, it takes a minute to learn and a lifetime to master. There’s several approaches to utilizing IBIS for creating shared understanding. Rittel’s original version used pencil and paper, relics of the 1970s. Nowadays you can use Compendium, a free open source (LGPL) IBIS mapping tool in conjunction with techniques like dialogue mapping or argument mapping. Less structured approaches can be taken with techniques like mindmapping using free tools like Freemind or XMind or concept mapping using tools like Cmap or VUE. More structured approaches also exist but too much representational granularity leads inevitably to uses of words like ontology. IBIS is a nice balance between too little structure and too much.

How do you extend such an approach over a sufficient distribution space to generate solutions for wicked problems? That’s a question for another time.

Mercy to the Guilty is Cruelty to the Innocent

(via Isegoria) Porphyrogenitus had this interesting post On Asymmetric Warfare: The Sources of Insurgent Power:

If war is diplomacy by other means, asymmetric warfare is politics by other means. We’re told that the Western Alliance is in danger of losing in Afghanistan, an alliance that represents the most advanced states of the world, consisting of three quarters of a billion people and over half of global GDP, fighting in a country of 25 million people. While reliable data is hard to come by, I believe that at least a plurality of that country’s population would prefer to see the Alliance’s foe, the Taliban/insurgents defeated, rather than see them return to power.

Why is this absurdity, the possibility of the alliance’s defeat, not only considered possible, but actually likely? If we assume that the leaders of the Taliban are rational actors, why have they always held the belief in their ultimate victory?

Let me first assert that, as it is commonly understood, “Asymmetric Warfare” is a fallacy. If you have two forces, and the one whose power appears insignificant compared to that of its opponent, and yet is considered the likely victor, then you are only seeing a fraction of its real power. Like an iceberg, you see only the tip, but the rest is invisible under the veil of the sea.

Only when this Camouflage is drained away, and the whole is visible, can you see why the apparently weaker party not only has a chance of defeating the materially stronger, but is considered the likely winner among those who shape conventional wisdom even in the homelands of its opponents (in this case, the Western Alliance). The ostensible power of the Western Alliance’s military forces is obvious, because it is primarily material and direct. The power of the insurgents are primarily political/propagandistic and indirect, consisting largely of the ability to manipulate mindsets, rather than battlefield outcomes.

To examine how this works I’ll make another unoriginal observation, but one at odds with conventional wisdom. The drafters of Geneva Conventions a century ago and those who described international law during that same time were decent men (they were all men) who wanted to make an inherently inhumane activity, warfare, more humane, less brutal and bloody. The fact that the century of warfare that followed was the bloodiest in human history is not their fault. They were indeed intelligent men, no less intelligent than the men and women responsible for interpreting the Geneva Conventions and “international law” today. The gentlemen of a century ago knew that mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent.

Therefore, in order to de-incentivize certain forms of warfare, they did not extend the protections of international law given to lawful combatants to insurgents, terrorists, and the like. The Geneva Conventions did not cover those who did not themselves follow them. In that era, it was accepted as a given that it was necessary to give such persons less protection, to deter people from engaging in activities that would make conflict less clear, and thus more destructive and more prolonged. Thus the Geneva Conventions, for example, declared that such combatants could be shot when captured.

It’s not controversial, but simply factual, to observe that today insurgents are extended more rights than lawful, uniformed enemy soldiers would be, and that the argument is whether or not to extend them even more. Most of the Alliance’s members send small forces to Afghanistan and compel them to operate under such restrictive rules of engagement that they are militarily useless, and indeed would be hostile to fortune if deployed in a combat zone, so they are kept out of harms way. Even those members whose forces are used in combat (primarily Anglosphere nations and the Netherlands) operate under rules so increasingly constrained as to nearly, but not quite, tie their hands with an ever-tightening cobra. The enemy’s propaganda complaints of collateral damage are listened to, and thus they are encouraged to use that as one of their main weapons in the conflict to thwart the Alliance.

We are told we need to accept these constraints, less we lose the “hearts and minds” of the local population. But the enemy quite clearly does not have to operate this way. The intimidation tactics and outright brutality which insurgents use to cow the population is also one of their weapons. Why? Because the “hearts and minds” strategy concentrates mainly on the hearts of those sympathetic to the enemy, their collaborators, and not on the minds of those who oppose them or are otherwise innocent, simply wanting a better life than the Taliban offers, but afraid they’ll be left to die or otherwise suffer when we pack up and abandon the area, after concluding that our efforts are futile or even counter-productively “alienating people”. This mindset involves listening primarily to the complaints of those sympathetic to the insurgents, rather than those who would be our natural allies. Again, mercy to the guilty becoming cruelty to the innocent.

Highly constrained rules of engagement that limit the effectiveness of the Alliances armed forces also serve to prove the point of those who shape conventional wisdom, who always assert that military force is not effective. This is not to say we should be bloody-minded and be indiscriminate. Indeed, the Armed Forces of the West are the most discriminate forces in human history. But warfare is warfare. A deranged mind might conclude therefore that these rules exist to prove the point of those shaping conventional wisdom, who are also the ones prodding for ever more restraint, making it a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The conventional wisdom suggests that an insurgency cannot be militarily defeated, and yet the historical facts belie this. Insurgencies have been defeated militarily: The Philippines, the Malay Insurgency, among others. Even Vietnam: It’s no longer even controversial, outside of direct discussions of insurgent warfare in the arena of conventional wisdom, to acknowledge that, after Tet, the Viet Cong ceased to be a viable force, and that the North conquered the south in a classic armored offensive of tank columns and regular troops, rather than any sort of indigenous insurgency in the South. But the converse view is still prevalent in the conventional wisdom on the subject of guerrilla warfare, not because of its historical accuracy, but because of its political utility in present-day policy controversies in the West.

Defeating insurgents requires a combination of strictness, firm rules on the enemy and their sympathizers, not just our own forces, and employment of local troops under western officers, something done in a coy way during the Anbar Awakening (when we paid local militias, thus gaining some influence) as a means of discipline. “Advisor” programs, where Western soldiers mentor local counterparts, are another way of reproducing this in a coy way.

Why it is in the interest of the Western Alliance to enact policies that have the practice not only of tying the hands of their own armed forces, making them less effective, but in practice making warfare less humane on the whole by incentivizing a pattern of warfare by its opponents based on practices that the original drafters of the Geneva Conventions and international law did their best to deincentivize, because of its bloody results, becomes a key question. But a controversial one indeed.

This has to do with conflicts internal to the West itself, as one faction uses its own ability to manipulate procedural outcomes and guide conventional wisdom in order to defeat their domestic political opponents. This has the side-effect of providing the primary power of the insurgents themselves, which is, as mentioned above, primarily political and indirect.

Xenophon Roundtable: Politics in a Bottle

Carl von Clausewitz famously asserted that war is the continuation of political intercourse with the addition of other means. The Anabasis of Cyrus puts this assertion to the test, reducing the phenomenon of war to a single petri dish filled with Ten Thousand wayward Greeks. The Ten Thousand descend into Mesopotamia for a purely political purpose: Cyrus the Younger wants his brother’s throne. Cyrus calculates that a quick strike into the political heartland of the Persian empire will allow him to catch his brother at a disadvantage. The initial descent is calculated to roll from Asia Minor down to Babylon with such momentum that Artaxerxes II’s political decision loop would be overwhelmed. Most of the political impact that Cyrus’s military strategy is calculated to produce will be produced by strategic shock alone.

This strategy, fed by what seems to be a decided tilt in Cyrus’s character towards rashness, nearly works. Cyrus’s seemingly rash attack mano a mano against Artaxerxes early in the Battle of Cunaxa could be charitably interpreted as a political act as well. By committing the ultimate political atrocity of lese majeste himself, Cyrus is asserting his superior claim as ruler by physically and therefore politically invading Artaxerxes’s sacred space, that splendid apartness that elevates a divine monarch in the eyes of mere mortals. Cyrus seeks to knock Artaxerxes off his pedestal, revealing him as an ordinary, physically vulnerable, and, hopefully, dead human being. Through the myth created by dispatching Artaxerxes through his own prowess, Cyrus will take on a new aura as the biggest man in Persia not only symbolically but physically as well.

Cyrus, as shown by the spectacles that he repeatedly puts on as motivation exercises for his reluctant mercenaries during the descent to Babylon, is a showman. Many citizens of modern liberal democracies miss the subtlety of manufacturing consent in a traditional hereditary monarchy. Monarchy relies on spectacle as much or in fact more so than a liberal democracy. Masters of the form, whether continent spanning tyrants like Louis XIV or petty princelings of the Holy Roman Empire, rely on symbol, spectacle, and sacralizing as much as the naked violence to which they often resorted. Traditional state violence, whether it be an execution, a military campaign, or jousting, served a theatrical, educational, and propagandizing purpose on top of its pure manifestation of brute force. Cyrus was putting on a performance intended to symbolically and morally knife Artaxerxes almost as much as he was seeking to literally shove eight inches of wrought iron into his own brother’s chest. That Cyrus signally failed in his attempt is no argument against the fundamentally political nature of his warfare. Failure is as much a part of politics as success. If Cyrus failed in his aspiration to become a potent symbol of political success in life, through the freshly rendered pieces of Cyrus meat conspicuously displayed by his brother, Cyrus became a potent symbol of political failure in death.

The remainder of the Anabasis is devoted to a political community whose war is waged for that most naked of political motives: survival. As Victor David Hanson pointed out in one of his more lucid moments, in the Anabasis we are presented with another species of political spectacle from the monarchial pomp and circumstance that Cyrus greets us with at the beginning of Book I. The Ten Thousand are a movable polis, the raw incarnation of Plato’s political animal. Artaxerxes and his minions attempt a decapitation strike on the Ten Thousand, expecting the loss of such high quality individuals as Proxenus, Menon, and Clearchus to reduce the Ten Thousand to the milling peasant rabble. In an Oriental context this strategy made sense: most Asiatic armies were composed of impressed peasants who would eagerly flee the scene of battle if their kings and lords were slain. But the Greeks of this time, before the Persian virus of autocracy transferred through the medium of Macedon hegemony rendered free Greece into slavish Byzantium, were different. Being a distributed command of more or less free men, they selected new leaders including the silver tongued Xenophon, debated their options, and retreated into the mountains of the Kurds and Armenians.

The entire ascent of the Ten Thousand is marked by the intensely political nature of its organizational structure. Leaders such as Xenophon go to great lengths, summoning all of the power of the century old art of sophistry, created just for such occasions of political deliberations by bodies of citizens, to keep the troops together. Discipline seems in many cases to be only imposed when the Ten Thousand want it. Xenophon, for example, is notably called to account for striking a soldier, something the soldiers found appalling. Much of the discipline imposed on the march up to the Euxine is imposed by the pressure of marching through hostile territory but much of it is imposed because the troops have heard the various options, discussed them openly, voted on them, and agreed that that vote is binding upon all. Those that deviate from the agreed consensus are not only scorned by the officers leading them but by their fellow soldiers. The Greeks practiced majoritarian tyranny in its purest form in a state where political questions were at their most stark: one road survival, one road death. Convinced that deviation from the general consensus physically threatened the survival of all, slackers were dealt with harshly.

After the Greeks reach the sea, Xenophon’s strategy has a clear political purpose: the Ten Thousand must acquit themselves in such a way that they can be easily reintegrated into the contemporary Greek world. Not only that, but they had to be able to be reintegrated into a contemporary Greek world ruled by Sparta. This meant the Ten Thousand had to conduct themselves in a manner that fit Greek norms and accommodated Spartan interests. This meant that if they pillaged other Greeks they would draw the hatred of the entire Hellenosphere and if they got on the wrong side of the surly Spartans, they not only couldn’t go home but they might be attacked by the Spartans. In accommodation there was the possibility of pay and provisions. In crossing the Spartans, there was the possibility of poverty and starvation, the common lot of the ancient world. Relations with barbarians were less important but the Ten Thousand politically exploited local disputes to win themselves provisions and passage as they hacked, slashed, sailed, and marched their way across northern Asia Minor. Even when Xenophon plays with the notion of founding a city he clearly is expecting to found a city that would be well integrated with the Greek world. Military operations contrary to that goal of integration are contrary to the political end that Xenophon consistently seeks.

The denouement of the Anabasis with its petty squabbles with the Spartans and Thracian warlords can sometimes seem anticlimactic after the drama of the initial descent and the retreat up to the sea. However, in micro, they present the close intertwining of politics and its servant war. Watch the fun of Xenophon seeking to gain leverage with the Spartans by keeping the Ten Thousand together even if it means slumming with the Thracians. Witness the Thracians maneuvering for political advantage even while they are fighting in the field. See Seuthes try and cozy up to the Spartans while attacking the reputation of the Ten Thousand. In the end the Spartans accommodate the Ten Thousand for their own political purpose: they want to loose them upon the Persians. The Ten Thousand march off to fight in another hazy war under yet another Spartan general.

Politics is nothing if not circular.

Oops

I guess I haven’t posted in a week or so. I’ve been pressed by several projects but I hope to make a few posts this weekend.