The Committee of Public Safety

What is war?

A reformulation of the last post’s definition:

War is a strategy to make the enemy do what we want them to do when it is contrary to what they would do if they had the freedom to choose and sufficient knowledge about our true intentions.

A slightly narrower definition:

War is a strategy intended to make the enemy do what we want them to do conform to our political desires when it is contrary to what they would do if they had the freedom to choose and sufficient knowledge about our true intentions political desires.

This definition captures several aspects of war worth keeping in mind:

• War is a strategy. Strategy is always an instrument of politics. As such, its goals should be subordinate to political goals.
• The intention of war is to make the enemy as subordinate to our political desires as our strategy is: at the end of a war they should be yet another tool in our hands.
• War is intended to bring about a desired political end state. There is no guarantee, however, that what is intended will significantly correspond to what actually happens.
• The enemy may have knowledge about our true intentions but they may be powerless to resist our political goals.
• The enemy may be free to resist fulfillment of our true political desires but they don’t because they don’t know what those desires are (then again, maybe we don’t either). They may voluntarily acquiesce to our initiatives because they think we are motivated by something else. If they knew our true motives, they might resist achieving our goals.
• Politics is the division of power between competing desires. Therefore, as Carl von Clausewitz remarked, to secure our desires “we must render the enemy powerless” to resist our achieving them.

The two most important characteristics of the strategic power used in war are:

• Visibility: how easy it is for the enemy to perceive our strategic configuration of power and the political motive behind its use.
• Energy: how easy it is for us to make the enemy do what we want them to do, especially when they don’t want to do what we want them to do.

There seems to be a trade off between visibility and energy. The greater the energy potential of an operational method, the more visible to the enemy it’s likely to be. The less visible an operational method, the less energy potential that method is likely to have. It’s hard to hide an atom bomb. It’s easier but still hard to kill with a word.

There are two strategic methods involved in war, one following visibility and the other following energy:

• Knowledge shaping: the manipulation of the enemy’s knowledge of you and your political desires (deception is only a subset of knowledge shaping).
• Physical violence: the use of physical force to deny the enemy freedom.

All activities “generally designated as war” can be lumped into these two blobs. War itself is an amorphous blob that is constantly shifting between these two methods and, in practice, war is usually a mixture of the two. War will never, despite the cries of the fainthearted, be able to subdue the enemy with just knowledge shaping and without physical violence. The mind game alone will not win. Likewise, physical violence will be unable to win a lasting victory in war without knowledge shaping. The clenched fist alone will not win. These two form two ends of a spectrum, knowledge shaping being characterized low visibility and energy and physical violence by high visibility and high energy.

The Indian strategist Kautilya provides the broadest insights into the full reach of war in his Arthashastra. In it he identifies four forms of war:

• war by counsel: waging war through visible but mostly non-violent diplomatic means.
• silent war: seeking to make the enemy do our will through invisible and occasionally violent covert means.
• secret war: seeking to make the enemy do our will through semi-visible and violent irregular military means.
• open war: seeking to make the enemy do our will through visible and violent means.

While Kautilya is the broadest categorizer of war, Clausewitz is the deepest thinker, though he restricts his analysis to open war and some aspects of secret war. While Kautilya implicitly documents the subordination of war (and, to a certain degree, everything else) to the dictates of politics, Clausewitz details the subordination of strategy and war to politics in a deeper, more methodical analysis. (Clausewitz could achieve the broadness of Kautilya if his disciples expanded and redacted On War like Kautilya’s disciples did. The Arthashastra was added to and re-edited over 900 years. On War is the product of Clausewitz, his wife, his brother in law, and “Major O’Etzel”.). Sun Tzu, in his Art of War, covered secret and open war and hinted at silent war. The other six books that make up the seven classics of ancient China extend further into the realm of silent war.  Thucydides and Machiavelli also provide useful illumination of the full range of war. Thucydides, for example, used Brasidas as an excellant example of mixing war by counsel, secret war, and open war. Colonels Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui provide an up to date version for the 21st century in Unrestricted Warfare.

To prepare for the full range of possible war, you have to be organized to fight across the full spectrum of power:

Spectrum of Power

If your competitors use a broader spectrum of war than you have, chances are that a concentration on that part of your defenses could allow a decisive breakthrough that would leave you powerless at their feet. The worst part of it may be that:

1. You didn’t know you were at war.
2. You didn’t see what hit you.
3. You never knew there was a chance for victory.
4. You never knew that you’d lost.
5. You don’t believe in any of the above.

You don’t need the metaphysical fluff of 5GW to broaden war beyond open war and its overt use of physical violence. The concepts behind war by counsel, silent war, and secret war are grounded in historical reality and the best strategic thought.

What is war?

My definition is an expansion of one of Buonaparte’s military maxims:

Maxim XVI: It is an approved maxim in war, never to do what the enemy wishes you to do, for this reason alone, that he desires it.

War is a strategy that seeks to make the enemy conform to our political desires when it is contrary to what they would do if they had the political freedom to choose and sufficient knowledge about our true motives.

This definition is broader than Carl von Clausewitz’s definition of war in Book I Chapter I of On War:

War is nothing but a duel on a large scale. Countless duels go to make up war, but a picture of the whole can be formed by imagining a pair of wrestlers. Each tries through physical force to compel the other to do his will; his immediate aim is to throw his opponent in order to make him incapable of further resistance.

War is thus an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will.

Force, to counter opposing force, equips itself with the inventions of art and science…Force – that is physical force, for moral force has no existence save as expressed in the state and the law-is thus the means of war; to impose our will on the enemy is its object. To secure that object we must render the enemy powerless; and that, in theory, is the true aim of warfare.

The means of war in Clausewitz’s definition is physical violence – the use of physical force and the threat thereof to deny freedom. Clausewitz repeatedly reinforces his point that “[t]here is only one means in war: combat”:

Essentially war is fighting, for fighting is the only effective principle in the manifold activities generally designated as war. Fighting, in turn, is a trial of moral and physical forces through the medium of the latter. Naturally moral strength must not be excluded, for psychological forces exert a decisive influence on the elements involved in war.

The means must be physical violence for the “activities generally designated as war” to be war but that violence must be subject to the dictates of politics:

War…is an act of policy. Were it a complete, untrammeled, absolute manifestation of violence…war would of its own independent will usurp the place of policy the moment policy had brought it into being; it would then drive policy out of office and rule by the laws of its own nature, very much like a mine that can explode only in the manner or direction predetermined by the setting…War is a pulsation of violence, variable in strength and therefore variable in the speed with which it explodes and discharges its energy. War moves on its goal with varying speeds; but it always lasts long enough for influence to be exerted on the goal and for its own course to be changed in one way or another—long enough…to remain subject to the action of a superior intelligence.

Kautilya accepts Clausewitz’s subordination of war to a political object but broadens his definition of the means of war beyond physical violence. If Clausewitz’s spectrum of war can have “all degrees of importance and intensity, ranging from a war of extermination down to simple armed observation”, Kautilya’s spectrum of war is much broader:

1. war by counsel: waging war through diplomatic means
2. open war: waging war through conventional military means
3. secret war: waging war through irregular military means
4. silent war: waging a war through covert military means

Roger Boesche, author of The First Great Political Realist: Kautilya and his Arthashastra, describes the more “peaceful” war by counsel:

Kautilya assumed that he lived in a world of foreign relations in which one either conquered or suffered conquest…Diplomacy was just another weapon used in the prolonged warfare that was always either occurring or being planned for…Kautilya argued that diplomacy is really a subtle act of war, a series of actions taken to weaken an enemy and gain advantages for oneself, all with an eye toward eventual conquest. A nation’s foreign policy should always consist of preliminary movements toward war…In Kautilya’s foreign policy, even during a time of diplomacy and negotiated peace, a king should still be “striking again and again” in secrecy.

Open war is the form of war Clausewitz described, though he also described elements of secret war, one of two forms of war (the other being silent war) that Kautilya describes that involve little or none of the physical violence Clausewitz argued was indispensable. Boesch sums up these three, emphasizing silent war:

[S]ilent war is a kind of fighting that no other thinker I know of has discussed. Silent war is a kind of warfare with another kingdom in which the king and his ministers—and unknowingly, the people—all act publicly as if they were at peace with the opposing kingdom, but all the while secret agents and spies are assassinating important leaders in the other kingdom, creating divisions among key ministers and classes, and spreading propaganda and disinformation. According to Kautilya, “Open war is fighting at the place and time indicated; creating fright, sudden assault, striking when there is error or a calamity, giving way and striking in one place, are types of concealed warfare; that which concerns secret practices and instigations through secret agents is the mark of silent war.” In silent warfare, secrecy is paramount, and, from a passage quoted earlier, the king can prevail only by “maintaining secrecy when striking again and again.” This entire concept of [silent] war was apparently original with Kautilya.

The fundamental problem with using a narrower definition of the means of war like that used by Clausewitz is that the enemy who you want to “do your will” may attack you with means of war that you not only can’t see but, even worse, don’t believe in. This makes war an arms race in definitions.

(Read part I here.)

Lexington Green comments on Waging the Deep War I:

Why is Christianizing Europe any kind of “war”?

It is proselytizing a religion. That is a category all its own, with its own empirically observed patterns and its own history.

What is gained by lumping it into “war”?

War is where one group uses force or the threat of force to compel another group to do its will. That is a huge part of human life and history. The presence of violence or the threat of violence is a distinguishing characteristic that brings into play all kinds of aspects and patterns: cultural, physiological, emotional, etc.

Distinguishing the categories seems more likely to lend itself to useful analysis than lumping them together.

Lexington Green’s comment touches on a similar quandary raised in this interview with former Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs (and author of Dow 36,000, a volume value investors treasure) James K. Glassman (props MountainRunner):

Q: You’ve mentioned the ‘war of ideas’ and that it’s a very high priority at the moment…you have previously noted that the largest misconception we are dealing with is that the United States is waging war on Islam. Has there been any concern that the phrase “war of ideas” may contribute to the perpetuation of that misconception?

A: Sure…But, we firmly believe that we are engaged in a very important contest around the world and, by the way, it’s not only Muslim societies. This contest involves something much more important in many of these areas than bullets and bombs. It’s ideas. And, I think this is a belief that’s held throughout the government. Secretary [of Defense Robert] Gates has said we’re not going to win this battle with bullets alone—I’m paraphrasing. So we think that it has been a deficiency, since the fall of the Berlin Wall until very recently, that there hasn’t been enough concentration on this. But the idea that it’s going to be too much, I don’t think we have to worry about that. We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.

The second part, about the terminology: we don’t like the term war of ideas, quite frankly. And I’ve said that many times. But we just haven’t come across anything better. And so the way that I usually talk about it is to juxtapose it with actual war, the part where people get killed. What we’re talking about is engaging at the level of ideas rather than at the level of gunpowder. But there is the implication of ‘us’ against ‘them’, which we’re trying to get away from, frankly. We think our enemies have this maniacal view of the world where there are just two sides. And our view of the world is, in fact, quite different. What we’re saying is that there is one pursuit that we are adamantly opposed to and that involves using violence to impose your will on other people, and killing civilians in the process. Whereas the rest of it, the other alternatives, are manifold and glorious. We think that individuals have lots and lots of choices and it should be left to their imagination and free societies to make those choices. They don’t have to be like little Americans; we don’t want them to be. They should be free to make those choices themselves. So we really don’t think it’s ‘us’ against ‘them’.

The problem is, war of ideas is something that people pretty much tend to understand—at least in English—pretty much what it means. And so it’s a convenience more than anything else. But we’re trying to get away from it, and are open to others phrases if we could come up with something else. And let me tell you, people in the government have come up with a bunch of different things. For a while there was a vogue for “global ideological engagement” and we do call our little center the Global Strategic Engagement Center. But when you start using words like that you know, Congress and the public that pays any attention to this don’t know what you’re talking about.

What is war? The easiest answer is what Potter Stewart wrote in Jacobellis v. Ohio:

I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it.

What can be labeled (using the Indian strategist Kautilya’s term) open war makes itself easy to see. It’s trademark property damage, mass destruction, and general carnage is an unmistakable calling card. However, I’ve always had the feeling that with war there was more to see than I know. Right after high school, I tried to write a how-to pocket manual for war I titled Elements of War (after Strunk and White’s Elements of Style). My first stab at defining war were feeble:

1.   War is all action by an individual or group against another believed to result in advantage.

[...]

3. Advantage is all that is believed to be of a positive nature to an individual or group…

My exposition on my definition was even more ridiculously expansive:

Most of humanity considers war a secondary activity of mankind, not worth their  attentions, and treat it as such. This is tragic. This has produced more suffering than any other in all of history.  History is a constant reminder of man’s inability to learn from past mistakes and this is the greatest. It disregards the great truth about life and war.

Life is war.

[...]

What is peace? Peace is a less forceful form of war. Peace is a breather between more active conflicts. Peace is considered the opposite of war. This perception is incorrect. Peace is the continuation of war by other means.

My ambition, in retrospect, was to be the second coming of Jomini, only more prescriptive and pedantic. My next stab came in a slideshow I did for a class on computer security in college:

The closest I’ve come to a more recent formulation was in a recent post on strategy:

Strategy falls under the sway of politics but its twists and turns as it seeks reconciliation can generate effects that shape politics. War, for example, since it’s a strategy, is a continuation of politics under the domination of a “remarkable trinity“:

1. primordial violence, hatred, and enmity, which are to be regarded as a blind natural force;
2. the play of chance and probability, within which the creative spirit is free to roam; and
3. its element of subordination, as an instrument of policy, which makes it subject to pure reason.

The nature of the power used in war (the power of violence) can release raw passions of hatred and enmity in both violator and violated.

Violence and how its defined is the key issue in defining war.

(Read part II here.)

How do you wage a deep war?

Deep war is an attack on the very deepest cultural underpinnings of a human community.

Deep Culture Swim

No other form of war is waged with such ambition. Few historical figures summon this ambition and even fewer succeed in fulfilling it. Many of the greatest practitioners of deep war were not aware of their success, failure, or even that they were waging deep war within their lifetimes. Many of the deepest foundations of a culture are unconscious within it and outside observers bring their own biases to play and may miss critical organs of the culture their observing. Oft times outside observers use their observations about other cultures more as a weapon to be used to resolve conflicts within their own culture than as a weapon used against other cultures.

The task of waging a deep cultural war is akin to draining an ocean of one source of water and replacing it with a new flow from another source of water. If you could take every child from another culture at birth and raise them so that they never had contact with other members of their parent culture and only had contact with members of their adoptive culture, than the problem of deep war is solved. It’s the swimming of a young mind within the ocean of its own culture that transmits culture across generations. It’s more than the transmission of culture from parent to child: it’s the transmission of culture from great-grandparent to grandparent to parent to child and on down the generations. The means of cultural reproduction and its carriers are a complex mesh network of interacting nodes. While the family is usually the strongest influence, especially at the beginning of life, peers, friends, neighbors, and even strangers also have an impact on a developing human mind. Media, which can transmit culture across great gulfs of space and time, can be a powerful reproduction and transmission multiplier for any given culture.

Memes, a concept introduced by witty raconteur Richard Dawkins and developed to a higher stage by Howard Bloom, are a useful metaphor for culture wars on any level. Memes are units of culture that seek to reproduce themselves by spreading from mind to mind. Successful memes that adapt to the unfolding environment spread over a wider area. The less successful memes retreat into stasis or even die out. The most successful of all memes sink into the deepest reaches of the human mind and become the foundation of all other means. As has been said elsewhere, the greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist. That trick is also pulled by deep cultural memes. Their work is so deep, so imperceptible, so subtle, that their carriers don’t notice that they’re carrying the meme. They’re the elephant in the room that everyone somehow fails to notice.

Deep war may be the longest war. It may have to be waged over centuries. Short, sharp attacks are possible but some are only won by continuous pressure over centuries. Very few memes or their means of reproduction have demonstrated that much staying power. Organizing for the longue duree is not something found in Western textbooks.

The Catholic Church is one organization set up for waging deep war, though in Christianizing Europe they sometimes embraced and extended pre-Christian religion rather than rooting it out. Confucian officialdom was able to sinify wave after wave of barbarians from the steppe; they even had some concept of using women, strong carriers of deep culture, and cultural artifices. The Confucian ideal held that the gentleman (shih) should combine expertise in wen (the civil order and culture) with expertise in wu (military order and force). Confucius may not have waged deep war or, possibly, he waged a subtle deep war. In codifying the Chinese deep culture of the Spring and Autumn period, he may have given it a greater institutional coherence than it might have otherwise had and made it easier to explicitly transmit from generation to generation. He may have turned it to deeper purposes than the culture by itself would have thought of. Building deep cultural organizations like the Bene Gesserit of Frank Herbert’s Dune series may be beyond the reach of conventional planning.

Here’s two spectra for categorizing operational methods. The most straightforward is the spectrum of power:

Spectrum of Power

Operational methods along this spectrum are categorized by the concentration of coercive power they involve. Methods that utilize a low concentration are found towards the left end of the spectrum, culminating in passive observation of the opponent. Methods that feature higher concentrations of coercive power are found to the right, culminating in the total annihilation of the opponent.

The other spectrum is the spectrum of visibility. In this spectrum, operational methods are categorized by how visible or open they are to an outside observer. The point on the spectrum of visibility a method falls upon is murky. Annihilation, for example, can happen in the open or in concealment. It’s position on the spectrum is at best an average between its possible openness and its possible concealment.

Along the spectrum of power, modern struggles for power shrink from annihilation, at least on the great power level, and seek to achieve victory with lower concentrations of coercive power. Modern great power war may be easier to classify with the spectrum of visibility. An expanded version of the spectrum of visibility can be derived from the Arthashastra of Kautilya:

Spectrum of Visibility + Kautilyan Secret Sauce

This is a spectrum of strategies and operations. The Arthashastra refers to three types of strategy along the spectrum of visibility:

1. open war: war where the war, combatants, and the power it is fought with are visible.
2. concealed war: war where the war is visible but the combatants and the power it is fought with are obscured.
3. silent war: war where the war, combatants, and the power it is fought with are obscured.

The retreat from open forms of war to concealed and silent war has led to war being fought in dark and hidden places using all of the secret forces that a contender for power can summon:

Systems in Conflict

For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.

- Ephesians 6:12

More useful excerpts from the Financial Modeler’s Manifesto, a useful warning about believing that reality can always be exactly modeled by the application of math and numbers:

Physics, because of its astonishing success at predicting the future behavior of material objects from their present state, has inspired most financial modeling. Physicists study the world by repeating the same experiments over and over again to discover forces and their almost magical mathematical laws. Galileo dropped balls off the leaning tower, giant teams in Geneva collide protons on protons, over and over again. If a law is proposed and its predictions contradict experiments, it’s back to the drawing board. The method works. The laws of atomic physics are accurate to more than ten decimal places.

It’s a different story with finance and economics, which are concerned with the mental world of monetary value. Financial theory has tried hard to emulate the style and elegance of physics in order to discover its own laws. But markets are made of people, who are influenced by events, by their ephemeral feelings about events and by their expectations of other people’s feelings. The truth is that there are no fundamental laws in finance. And even if there were, there is no way to run repeatable experiments to verify them.

You can hardly find a better example of confusedly elegant modeling than models of CDOs. The CDO research papers apply abstract probability theory to the price co-movements of thousands of mortgages. The relationships between so many mortgages can be vastly complex. The modelers, having built up their fantastical theory, need to make it useable; they resort to sweeping under the model’s rug all unknown dynamics; with the dirt ignored, all that’s left is a single number, called the default correlation. From the sublime to the elegantly ridiculous: all uncertainty is reduced to a single parameter that, when entered into the model by a trader, produces a CDO value. This over-reliance on probability and statistics is a severe limitation. Statistics is shallow description, quite unlike the deeper cause and effect of physics, and can’t easily capture the complex dynamics of default.

Models are at bottom tools for approximate thinking; they serve to transform your intuition about the future into a price for a security today.

Our experience in the financial arena has taught us to be very humble in applying mathematics to markets, and to be extremely wary of ambitious theories, which are in the end trying to model human behavior. We like simplicity, but we like to remember that it is our models that are simple, not the world.

Unfortunately, the teachers of finance haven’t learned these lessons. You have only to glance at business school textbooks on finance to discover stilts of mathematical axioms supporting a house of numbered theorems, lemmas and results. Who would think that the textbook is at bottom dealing with people and money? It should be obvious to anyone with common sense that every financial axiom is wrong, and that finance can never in its wildest dreams be Euclid. Different endeavors, as Aristotle wrote, require different degrees of precision. Finance is not one of the natural sciences, and its invisible worm is its dark secret love of mathematical elegance and too much exactitude.

We do need models and mathematics – you cannot think about finance and economics without them – but one must never forget that models are not the world. Whenever we make a model of something involving human beings, we are trying to force the ugly stepsister’s foot into Cinderella’s pretty glass slipper. It doesn’t fit without cutting off some essential parts. And in cutting off parts for the sake of beauty and precision, models inevitably mask the true risk rather than exposing it. The most important question about any financial model is how wrong it is likely to be, and how useful it is despite its assumptions. You must start with models and then overlay them with common sense and experience.

Many academics imagine that one beautiful day we will find the ‘right’ model. But there is no right model, because the world changes in response to the ones we use. Progress in financial modeling is fleeting and temporary. Markets change and newer models become necessary. Simple clear models with explicit assumptions about small numbers of variables are therefore the best way to leverage your intuition without deluding yourself.

All models sweep dirt under the rug. A good model makes the absence of the dirt visible…

Building financial models is challenging and worthwhile: you need to combine the qualitative and the quantitative, imagination and observation, art and science, all in the service of finding approximate patterns in the behavior of markets and securities. The greatest danger is the age-old sin of idolatry. Financial markets are alive but a model, however beautiful, is an artifice. No matter how hard you try, you will not be able to breathe life into it. To confuse the model with the world is to embrace a future disaster driven by the belief that humans obey mathematical rules.

While some of us while away our time on abstract theorizing on national strategy, the Practioners such as Matt Armstrong of MountainRunner and Galrahn at Information Dissemination crank out blogging that actually has some impact on the here and now. Matt Armstrong has been doing stellar work in getting U.S, public diplomacy back on the map and pulling its weight as a tool in the national security toolbox. He was recently part of a conference at the White Oak conference center in Florida that released the following recommendations for improving U.S. public diplomacy:

THE WHITE OAK RECOMMENDATIONS

Stakeholders: Holistic Approach: Public diplomacy is relevant to a broad array of strategic interests and has multiple stakeholders:  military and non-military, Executive and Congressional, public and private sector. We need to identify the needs and strengths of each stakeholder and determine together how to best play to (support, staff and fund) the strengths of each.

Outreach:  Holistic Approach: Effective public diplomacy is strategic. It engages publics globally and is not limited to specific geographic regions, religions or ethnic groups.

Structure. Re-fighting old battles over the consolidation of public diplomacy is neither feasible nor productive at this time.  However, internal organizational structure must support the external credibility public diplomacy practitioners need with those with whom they engage.  At minimum, within the current
State Department structure, the Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs should have operational control of public diplomacy field operations, budgets and personnel.

Personnel: Public diplomacy is not an “anyone-can-do-it” profession. New geopolitical realities and communications tools reinforce rather than diminish the continuing need for a professional public diplomacy corps.  Fixing now-chronic professional and structural personnel problems must be a top priority in restoring
and revitalizing public diplomacy.  We need to recruit and retain a new generation of skilled and qualified public diplomacy practitioners, who are willing either to commit to a long-term career or to a short-term reserve corps for given periods of time.  Most potential candidates now think working for the government is a waste of time, offering little or no meaningful input, career potential or satisfaction.  Small changes can make a big difference.  They must be made and soon.

Technology/Communication: We must better integrate the new tools of communication with the current “human contact” programs and relationship-development efforts that have long been the backbone of public diplomacy.  In doing so, we cannot assume that “one-Internet-size-fits-all”.  Within the new “Global Electronic Village” in which we now operate, we need to understand the Internet in itself is not a panacea.  We must focus on which new communications tools work best where, based on geography and target audience.  That includes broadcasting, which remains an essential tool to communicate to both broad
publics and opinion leaders.  Broadcasting decisions need to be made within the parameters of the new communications environment, and need to be based on credibility, trust and authenticity – the standards by which foreign audiences judge what they hear.

International Exchanges. Civilian and military exchanges –  cultural, academic, media, professional, community, artistic, leadership development and training — are the quiet but effective foundations of building long-term relationships based on trust, credibility and mutual understanding.  Increasing resources to expand such exchange programs as Fulbright, International Visitor and IMET is a direct contribution to America’s long-term national security interests.  So is simplifying and facilitating DHS border entry procedures and addressing current visa scope and allotment problems.

Citizen Diplomacy:  The number of private sector/NGO actors and stakeholders involved in citizen diplomacy has increased significantly over the past decade, primarily but not entirely due to the “democratization of communications” with the advent of the Internet.  Government must recognize the role and increased importance of private sector actors in public diplomacy activities. Citizen diplomacy offers channels and opportunities to add international components for citizens eager to engage in national service. We support the proposed President’s Call to Action for Global Citizen Diplomacy launched by the U.S. Center for Citizen Diplomacy, to highlight these opportunities and encourage Americans to become more involved in ongoing community-based citizen-to-citizen international engagement activities, including such areas as education, environmental protection and climate change, health care, business and economic development, gender discrimination, poverty alleviation and the arts.

Funding: Increasing financial resources for public diplomacy programs – whether diplomatic or military – in the current environment is a zero-sum game.   Before we talk about new money, we need to talk about allocating current money more effectively.  Funding coordination, particularly between State and Defense and
with the active participation of Congress, is essential to reach consensus on how to allot funds.

Congress:  Congress must play a pro-active role, working with – and not just reacting to – Administration entities in designing and funding the structural, staffing and resource allocation changes recommended above.

Leadership and Coordination: Public diplomacy needs a “quarterback” with the knowledge and authority to reach across government and into the private sector to quickly address mission, structure, staffing and resource issues.  Effective leadership will require that we identify the needs and strengths of each public diplomacy stakeholder and determine how best to play the strengths of each.

If a new Undersecretary of Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs is unable to take on this task in addition to his or her daily responsibilities, we should consider a new Senior Director position at the National Security Council – either short-term or permanent – to coordinate these discussions and facilitate these changes.

Epigrams. Remarkably concise for a Perl cultural artifact.

Paul Volker on financial innovation:

[Volker= scoffed at the notion that those entities must be free to innovate -- stating that financial "innovations" like asset backed securities and credit default swaps have brought few benefits. The most important "innovation" in banking for most people in the last 20 or 30 years, he maintained, is the automatic teller machine.

Yves Smith over at Naked Capitalism links to a Financial Times article (login required) on Richard Koo’s critique of Japan’s Lost Decade. The Committee covered this earlier in Koo d’etat. It’s worth repeating here:

A healthy economy has a healthy mix of supply and demand. However, in a recession following an expansion of credit-fueled excess, demand falls due to economic contraction. If you give money to a bank or a consumer in an attempt to recreate demand, instead of spending it on consumption, thereby creating new demand, they will pay down the excessive debt they incurred during the expansion. This is logical and beneficial for an individual or firm. It will place them on a sounder financial footing. However, when a large number of people do this, it’s economic suicide. Someone, somewhere has to spend money or an economy will grind to a halt.

Koo argues that the solution is massive government spending. This directly injects capital into the economy, artificially keeping it alive until normal business activity resumes. It bypasses intermediaries like banks who, in a fit of logical individual self-interest, would pay down their debt instead of spending it. Koo points out that the Japanese economy picked up when the Japanese government consistently spent money but it went back into severe recession when the Japanese government tried to do something fiscally responsible like cut their deficit. He also points out that during the Great Depression, when the Roosevelt Administration tried to balance the budget in 1937, it pushed the economy back into severe recession, a downturn that didn’t end until the massive arms buildup for World War II.

Koo suggests that the American government push down the gas pedal on spending and keep it down for the foreseeable future. The target of spending is irrelevant. Infrastructure, whatever. Koo mentions that, curiously enough, military spending is a good target. Military spending in the late thirties moved Nazi Germany, Imperial Britain, Republican France, and Isolationist America out of the depression. It has the advantage of being spent on useful weaponry and employing large numbers of people. The US needs to replace all of the equipment it’s worn out in the last 10 years. Who knows? It might work.

Any such process, of course, is helped along if you nationalize the banks.