Views of a Modern World

Everything else Rick writes

Shifting objectives shifts outcomes

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I recently finished the first draft for my book on the nine principles of war, reformulated and recast as they should be applied to business. My friend Tom read the draft to provide some initial comments, and we ended up talking about whether to add a discussion on the seeming inapplication of strategy to the long-running wars against terrorism in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Then, as if on cue, an article by Mark Kukis appeared on whether wars can be “won” today at all.

The research is extremely helpful on this question, and there is no real arguing with the facts. But let’s take apart this paragraph:

In these internal, fragmented conflicts, victory is elusive for any party involved. From 1946 to 1989, for instance, there were 141 internal conflicts worldwide. Of those, 82 ended when one party achieved victory. From 1990 to 2005, there were 147 internal conflicts. Of those, only 20 ended with one faction legitimately claiming victory. Put another way, since 1990, less than 14 per cent of internal conflicts produced a clear winner. About 20 per cent produced a ceasefire. And about 50 per cent simply persisted. Statistically, the odds of the US coming up a winner in a modern war are perhaps as low as one in seven.

The last sentence, with US odds of “winning” as low as 1/7, is a great bit of writing, but entirely misleading. Yes, those are the numbers overall, but they aren’t the number of conflicts in which the US participated. So that’s issue number one.

But the real question is tied to the sotto voce thesis of the article: we can’t win wars the old way because we’ve chosen not to fight them the old way.

Here’s a later line that connects this “problem” with the principle of Objective:

No significant debate arose about what victory might mean.

Objective: direct all efforts towards a clearly defined, decisive, and obtainable goal.

As a former Army infantry officer, we prefer missions that meet this standard. What we knew then is something I practice daily as a lawyer: being forced to define success in a clear manner is valuable not just because of the outcome, but because the process requires someone to actually think about what success looks like. That Eisenhower-like approach leads to better outcomes.

The recent conflicts described in the article are different from the older wars for one basic reason: we decided not to conduct wars in the same way. We decided that killing vast numbers of otherwise innocent civilians was no longer acceptable to us. This theme is recognized briefly but then ignored for most of the article.

We made war harder because we imposed humanitarian or moral or practical limits on ourselves. No longer would we choose to engage in actions like the fire-bombing of Dresden, the aerial bombardment of London, or the bombing of Hanoi. We have chosen to try to conduct operations around civilians rather than against them.

Because we respect the fundamental human rights of the people who live in, under, and near the regimes or bad actors we are fighting (whether Saddam Hussein, Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, or ISIS), we have created a new set of rules. They make things much harder for us. Like a grandmaster who plays a novice and starts out by taking off two rooks and agreeing not to attack any pawns, the chances of “victory” go down.

Add to that the distinction between traditional military objectives: the destruction of people or materiel and the occupation of territory, and the nation’s goals in these new conflicts are certainly fuzzier than what might have guided us in the past.

To me, the notion of “no victory” is really about two things: (1) our decision not to kill seemingly innocent civilians and (2) goals for the end state of the conflict that do not match up with traditional military objectives. You want stuff blown up? The Air Force does that better than anyone on the planet. You want to go build a nation? You send the Special Forces, but it takes a really long time and there aren’t enough of those hard-charging heroes to remake a whole country. A village or tribe? Of course. A region? Probably. All of Afghanistan? Probably not.

And finally, a post-script: another thing that has changed about our approach from WWII is that we have greater respect for self-determination. We might be keen on an interim level of control to smooth over the transition, but we’d be loathe to instill the equivalent of a modern-day MacArthur to rule over post-Imperial Japan. Inherent in that value judgment is the recognition that some of those people will choose systems that are not only not controlled by us (cf. 1970s Philippines) but not necessarily even favorable toward us. That’s really okay though: “If you love something, set it free.”

General under investigation in Afghanistan

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I know Bill Caldwell. Worked for him. He convinced me, unintentionally I’m sure, to leave the Army. I know nothing about what he did, didn’t, should, or shouldn’t have done with all this stuff in the paper. But my personal opinion, FWIW, is that he’s not above suspicion and should not get the benefit of the doubt.

Shit, Rick, I do illegal searches all the time.

I debated on posting this, but there are people I know who are solidly upstanding, courageous men, full of character and good hearts. They have been in actual harm’s way for longer than I was even in the peacetime Army. Those men deserve our support and gratitude every day.

At the 3-star general level, maybe it’s no longer about moral courage, character, and choosing the hard right over the easy wrong; maybe it’s about politics just like it is when a congressman posts on Craigslist: you screw up and get caught, you’re out.

I hope you didn’t step over the line, sir.

Some women DO belong in Ranger School

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Sometimes the WSJ depresses me. I read it for sensible, no BS news and financial analysis, and then their opinion page goes off the deep end with this sort of crap.

I almost don’t want to link to this — it’s that embarrassing to the author in my opinion, but some guy whose Army time criss-crossed mine wrote an opinion piece saying that there should be no women in Ranger School.

Well, I’ve always thought this view was dead-ass wrong. He collapses a whole lot of assumptions inside his argument — that physical standards will go down, for example — and makes other arguments that have nothing to do with the real issue for him or for female soldiers. If standards go down, that’s the problem, not the women. There certainly are people who think that the standards went down between the time many of my peers went, early 90s, and me in 1993 — there was no live fire in Utah in my class. Since then, of course, Ranger School has dropped a phase, and might even be shorter in terms of days. I don’t really know — and it doesn’t matter because that’s not the point. The point is that there is someone making decisions about the course whose job it is to improve the training and selection of young leaders. It’s that person’s job (and the RI’s) to maintain the standards, not those people talking about the golden age of Ranger School.

My Army was a meritorious one. We tried really damn hard to focus on whether a solder could do the job, not the color of his skin, the personal equipment hidden inside her underwear, the language he spoke at home, or even, frankly, the passport she carried.

Some soldiers belong in Ranger School. Others don’t. The criteria we use are not in any way automatically linked to having a penis, even if strength is typically correlated with the testosterone that accompanies having a willy. There’s a world of difference in quality among the males in Ranger School, too, let’s not forget. Can you compare a bat boy E-3 to an O-3 Navy seal? Those guys are worlds apart in skill, will, and future promise. But both were part of my platoon and worked their asses off. Can you compare a white warrant officer helicopter pilot with a black infantry lieutenant with an asian commo officer? No, even then we knew that was a distinction without a difference. Two made it, one didn’t — that’s the only difference anyone should care about.

There are women I knew in the Army, and certainly some I’ve met since, who absolutely have the physical stamina to survive Ranger School (yes, an Ironman is only 17 hours, but there’s a whole lot of training and dedication that can’t really be separated from the race itself). Mental stamina? I don’t think anyone can argue that out of all the women who’ve already decided to join the Army, there’s no chance that any of them could tough it out.

This article embarrasses me — it’s one more stupid-ass stereotype that I have to fight as a former soldier, Infantry officer, and proud recipient of MY Ranger Tab, Class 9-93.

Fuck this guy. If I ended up in battle, hell yeah, I’d want someone wearing a tab next to me. I’d look there long before I tried to peek in someone’s underpants.

Unclutterer discovers the dummy cord

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In this brief post, Unclutterer describes a little elastic band, cord, and sticky piece that helps keep the lens cap of an SLR camera from disappearing.

In the Army, this rope or lanyard used for the technique of “physically securing loss-prone objects” is called a dummy cord.

In some units or places, notably Ranger School, it’s common to attach a motherlode of dummy cords to your gear. Basically, everything that is expensive, small, easy to lose, or important gets attached, meaning tied with a rope, to you or your gear. Skilled soldiers often use a D-ring or carabiner to collect dummy cords that are pre-tied with a useful knot, like an end-of-the-rope bowline (IIRC), that leaves a standard bight (that’s technical lingo for a loop) that stays in the rope.

Another way to think of a dummy cord or related system is like a key ring for your gear. I recall tying canteens to my LBE and the caps to the canteens. I bought my boys steel sports bottles with a carabiner so they could just attach to a backpack. (Nathan likes that they say “Nathan” on them.)

I find the comments on the original post amusing, saying that the author should just remember to put the lens cap in a pocket. Of course, if we all always remembered those things, or weren’t so tired we would talk to a yucca plant about our favorite foods, then simple habits would always suffice. And we would probably never need to-do lists or grocery lists or yellow lights on our gas gauges. But we’re all human and remembering lots of modestly important items is often not worth the effort. Am I off base? How big of a business is Getting Things Done? How big is that ecosystem?

Are there items that you dummy cord when you travel or on a regular basis?

Happy Veterans’ Day

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Today is a day I treat much like Memorial Day, with the difference that I’m not uncomfortable about receiving greetings today. (Memorial Day is for fallen servicemembers; I’m not in that category nor have I been in harm’s way. Many others have; think of them today.

Followup: costs of poor sleep

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A recent National Geographic article explored sleep and some of the problems associated with lack of sleep.

Lack of sleep can be dangerous:

… Harvard’s Charles Czeisler. He notes that going without sleep for 24 hours or getting only five hours of sleep a night for a week is the equivalent of a blood alcohol level of 0.1 percent. Yet modern business ethic celebrates such feats. “We would never say, ‘This person is a great worker! He’s drunk all the time!’ ” Czeisler wrote in a 2006 Harvard Business Review article.

This finding matches up with what we’ve discussed about doctors. The problem gets hidden inside the data in the business world because the harsh measurements of death is absent; no one knows what would have happened to the Murphy account if the saleswoman had more rest. Plus, we don’t like to think about how lack of sleep impairs us.

The story I tell about lack of sleep is, of course, one from Ranger School. I think it was the last patrol in Florida phase, and I was the squad leader for a nighttime linear ambush. One of my team leaders was trying to tell me something, and he was literally falling asleep standing up, while he was talking to me. He’d drift off, stumble forward a step, catch himself, wake up, and keep talking. Amazingly I remember being wide awake at the time, and asking the RI about what you might do in just this situation. He basically said “you have to do whatever you can, because sleeping means dying.” Okay, he didn’t say the last couple words, but that lesson doesn’t have to be learned in today’s Army, not since Vietnam.

How might we put these ideas into practice? For one, if leaders delegated more fully to teams, then each team could function independently with the same task, conditions, and standards as the others (three sales teams covering the same region, for example). Let each team leader decide how to manage and lead her people. If the results are what matter, then let the results speak. Senior people shouldn’t get hung up on optics, particularly if the only reason is because it’s easier to count hours in the office than measure sales effectiveness or adjust for the quality of the leads.

So give your teams intentions-based guidance. Let the lowest-level leader decide how they’ll operate (in terms of schedule, responsiveness, mindset), and let the results speak for themselves once you gather enough data to smoke out the externalities that tough working conditions can create.

What is your number one fallback technique for taking care of your subordinates?

Claiming false medals is demeaning

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A recent NYT article discussed the rash of false medals/military honors since the long war on terror has greatly increased the number of “everyday” people with some plausible wartime service.

(For example, I recently met an in-house attorney with JetBlue who was in the Army National Guard during law school and then deployed to Iraq. That’s not easy either.)

I found this language to be odd:

Some First Amendment scholars worry that laws regulating the use of symbols are similar to those against flag burning, which the Supreme Court has said are unconstitutional limitations on free speech. Others have also questioned whether overzealous activists risk slanderously and erroneously accusing people of fraud because of missing or misprinted military documents.

I agree completely with the “wearing a medal” issue, even more vehemently if it’s protected speech criticizing the military and the government. We protect the Constitution so that we can keep these rights; I’m one of the only former military folks I know who doesn’t have a problem with flag-burning. I believe that it’s great for other people to take out their frustration and anger on a US flag rather than on a citizen or soldier, sailor, airman, or marine.

But to accuse someone? That would take some serious self-righteousness and some serious proof. I doubt that anyone who actually held any of these medals would take it on themselves to throw stones at someone else without being absolutely convinced; the idea of denigrating a soldier who was deservedly decorated would seem to me to be the type of conduct that these folks would find outrageous. I, for one, have no problem detailing the extent of my “action” in the Army: the unit I was to join went to Panama in 1989 but I was waiting for OCS and never joined the unit; I was in OCS during Desert Storm, and all of Ft. Benning was worried about thousands of casualties; at OCS we openly talked about the School’s prominence in turning out 2LTs, many of whom went to Vietnam and promptly died; but we stayed home and the war was over; I was in Hawai’i during Bosnia, and my old boss went to Somalia. I didn’t do any of those things. All I did was stand ready to do whatever was asked of me, and that’s enough. I know people with actual medals, who’ve actually fought. I can’t imagine demeaning them by pretending I did something I hadn’t. I don’t know who would.

This quote is both heartening and disturbing:

Special Agent Mike Sanborn, who since 2007 has led the unit in the F.B.I.’s Washington office that handles stolen valor cases, said that while the bureau did not keep statistics on the crime, the biggest increase came after 2006 with the passage of the Stolen Valor Act, which made it a federal crime to falsely claim, verbally or in writing, that a person had been awarded a medal. Previously, the law only prohibited wearing a medal that a person did not earn.

I know of someone who apparently (and I won’t name him or how I know; he knows the truth; his name certainly doesn’t appear on this list) noted the award of a Silver Star to his resume at one point early in his career. It hasn’t appeared in a recent bio (he recently held an admittedly high-profile government job) and I didn’t see the resume with my own eyes. I guess he certainly won’t be punished for violating this law (ex post facto rears its ugly head), but he knows if he should be.

That’s the end of it. Even knowing that I don’t believe him, I’m humble enough in the face of thousands who did vastly more than I did to give him the slightest benefit of the doubt by letting the world sort it out. It’s not my place to pretend that I’m protecting the honor of the heroes I know by challenging one misguided fellow; I honor them by displaying the character traits they taught: courage, competence, character, commitment; by living up to the motto many of them lived and fought by; and by raising my children to be honorable themselves.