The Committee of Public Safety

Lexington Green comments:

There are also the further questions of Who is America? And who is having and making and executing a strategy? The US Gov is a congeries of interests and actors that even with good intentions do not all know each other or have the same ends. Beyond that, the whole billion footed beast has its own undisentanglable web of strategies. Walter Russell Mead put it well. He said that the American people have a lot of different foreign policies going on all the time, and the government may or may not know about them or agree or approve of them. So it is not just some “I” looking out at the shelf of spaghetti sauce options. The shelf of jars is looking back at a kaleidoscope of disparate faces, all deciding thinking and even plotting against each other.

This is a great summary of Moskowitz’s first strategic insight:

1. There are different types of mustard for different types of people.

Both Lex and I are fans of David Hackett Fischer’s masterwork Albion’s Seed and a work it heavily influenced, Walter Russell Mead’s Special Providence. Fischer argued that American culture was a story of the interaction of four English folkways:

1. The Puritans of New England who originated in East Anglia.
2. The Cavaliers of Chesapeake Bay who originated in Southwest England.
3. The Quakers of Pennsylvania who originated in the North Midlands.
4. The Border folk of the Appalachian backcountry who originated in the Scottish Border Country.

Mead aligns this with four schools of American foreign policy:

1. The Puritans are associated with the Hamiltonian school (Alexander Hamilton).
2. The Cavaliers are associated with the Jeffersonian school (Thomas Jefferson).
3. The Quakers are associated with the Wilsonian school (Thomas Woodrow Wilson).
4. The Border folk are associated with the Jacksonian school (Andrew Jackson).

These represent the American equivalent of plain (Wilsonian), spicy (Hamiltonian), extra chunky (Jacksonian), and cheesy (Jeffersonian) spaghetti sauce. Within these flavors there are myriad other varieties. John Quincy Adams famously declared that America didn’t go abroad in search of monsters to destroy. However, while the United States government may not currently be searching for overseas monsters, Americans in the various schools, as individuals, and as organizations often launch their own, potentially discordant, searches abroad. These efforts often have little to do with the official agenda of the US government. That is, until their consequences create ripples in the world for America as a whole. For good or evil, the government of the United States is the return address for the actions of individual Americans.

The structure of the United States government as currently constituted means it has limited bandwidth. It lacks the resources to completely engage every cultural thread that could impact foreign policy within the United States. This is the dilemma that leads to politics. Power is finite. Desire is infinite. Politics is the process of distributing power between cultural desires. This means that politics comes down to  picking winners and losers. Those that attract power win while those who deflect power lose.

Strategy is the instrument that a political participant uses to attract power towards their chosen desires and deflect power from conflicting desires. Strategy plays the role of mediator. On the one hand, you have a wide variety of cultural desires loosly coupled to political power coming down to strategy. On the other hand, stimuli from the outside environment are boiling up from the operational and tactical levels that are close to or in direct contact with the outside world. Strategy has to reconcile the internal downward pressure of culture and politics with the upward pressure of operational and tactical conditions. It primarily deals with the reconciliation of the quality/quantity of cultural desire with the quality/quantity of political power but it also has to take the outside world into account.

Strategy plays the role of compressor. It compresses the current correlation of culture to politics for handing down to operations and tactics and it compresses the outside world and its impact on operations and tactics and passes it up to politics and culture. This makes strategy a critical bottleneck in the process of shaping the world according to internal demand and adapting to the world according to external demand. Given the many streams flowing down from politics and coming up from operations, this bottleneck faces bandwidth issues with our current framework of global engagement. This creates the need for a strategic aggregator.

A strategic aggregator pulls the many streams of culture, politics, operational art, tactics, and the outside world and brings them together in a single digestable lump. An interesting example of a strategic aggregator comes from this Pritzker Military Library podcast by Tom Wheeler on his book Mr. Lincoln’s T-Mails: The Untold Story of How Abraham Lincoln Used the Telegraph to Win the Civil War. Abraham Lincoln, Wheeler argues, was the first president to master the potential of telegraphy and exploit it in the pursuit of national strategy. The Railsplitter would walk around, visiting the various government offices in order to keep his finger on the pulse of the Great War of the Rebellion. However, he usually ended up at the telegraph office for the War Department. This is where Lincoln became a strategic aggregator.

Lincoln would start by opening the drawer with all of the telegrams received that day by the War Department and read through them all irrespective of whom it was addressed to. This gave him an a sense of what the military was doing on a day to day basis. He learned to observe many, many data points, orient them through a quick process of digestion, decide on a course of action, and act. Then he would give succinct orders and suggestions to officers that weren’t even expecting a missive from the president. Lincoln, it was once said, was the only man (other than Ulysses S. Grant) that could carry the whole war in his head. He served the crucial function of taking the cultural desires and political power that he gathered from the local Washington scene and distilling it down into a form his commanders could operationalize and taking the needs of the field that he gathered from reading his generals’s telegrams and turned it in such a way that it was usable in the ongoing political and cultural processes.

Ronald Coase’s theory of the firm is useful here:

[T]raditional economic theory of the time suggested that, because the market is “efficient” (that is, those who are best at providing each good or service most cheaply are already doing so), it should always be cheaper to contract out than to hire.

Coase noted, however, that there are a number of transaction costs to using the market; the cost of obtaining a good or service via the market is actually more than just the price of the good. Other costs, including search and information costs, bargaining costs, keeping trade secrets, and policing and enforcement costs, can all potentially add to the cost of procuring something with a firm. This suggests that firms will arise when they can arrange to produce what they need internally and somehow avoid these costs.

There is a natural limit to what can be produced internally, however. Coase notices a “decreasing returns to the entrepreneur function”, including increasing overhead costs and increasing propensity for an overwhelmed manager to make mistakes in resource allocation. This is a countervailing cost to the use of the firm.

Coase argues that the size of a firm (as measured by how many contractual relations are “internal” to the firm and how many “external”) is a result of finding an optimal balance between the competing tendencies of the costs outlined above. In general, making the firm larger will initially be advantageous, but the decreasing returns indicated above will eventually kick in, preventing the firm from growing indefinitely.

It may be that a compact strategic aggregator like Lincoln is more efficient than a networked strategic aggregator in a relatively information sparse scenario where the adaptiveness of a single human brain is more efficient at reconciling desire, power, and the Other than a loose coupling of many brains. However, once the amount of data reaches a certain threshold, the networked strategic aggregator takes over even though the transaction costs are higher. This networked strategic aggregator may have a few important nodes that do the bulk of the information processing following Pareto’s 80/2o rule with 20 percent of the individuals in a strategic aggregation network doing 80 percent of the quality processing but it still remains a many minds to one relationship. It may be that the right networked strategic aggregator will enable a single human mind to operate as if it was in a more spartan information landscape.

We’re in the midst of a great experiment to find out.