Are Your Elected Officials Smarter Than a 5th Grader?

In earlier posts, I've strongly advocated universal legal equality and the government's obligation to ensure the common good of its citizenry.  These principles aren't particularly controversial, but there is room for significant debate as to how exactly to ensure the common good is pursued, and pursued in a manner commensurate with the preservation of legal equality and the freedoms demanded by the social contract between a people and its government.  The most successful approach to preserving these valuable, valuable things has been the implementation of representative democracy, in which we, the people, elect people who presumably are qualified to manage the affairs of state.  


The problem with popular elections is that most people aren't very smart.  Polybius noted that democracies tended to devolve into mob rule, which in turn devolved into a tyranny (Nazi Germany being perhaps the preeminent example of this principle).  All kinds of terrible ideas have garnered popular support (the world is flat, National Socialism, the death penalty for apostate Muslims in a number of countries, the stoning of adulterers in the same countries, the Crusades, McDonald's, American Idol, objectivism, neoconservatism, the Tea Party, communism, McCarthyism, protectionism, et cetera ad infinitum).  


Notably, popular elections have led to Senators who think that islands can capsize and Congresswomen  who think the founding fathers abolished slavery.  While there are doubtless many registered voters who would make the same mistake, those voters are not responsible for decisions regarding the development of infrastructure, the economic well-being of the largest economy in the world, health care, the continued solvency of the Federal Government, global climate change, the strategic posture of America's military, or international relations with the other nations of the world.  Whatever your particular stance on any of those issues may be, I think that we all can agree that decisions surrounding them will be difficult to come by, and require a great deal of thought and expertise.  


Significantly more expertise, I would say, than is demonstrated by people who don't understand how island work (they're like mountains, but an ocean covers all but the top of them) or the fundamentals of American history.  


It might be time to make the criteria for holding public office a little bit stricter, to encourage people who know things about science, economics, international relations, engineering, to start determining national policy, and to keep out the sort of riff raff who think islands float.  

Dulce et Decorum est pro Patria More

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/03/01/AR2011030106938.html

One of the lieutenants that they talk about in this article, a guy who lost a leg to an IED, was my roommate for a while.  

Fuck Pakistan

Somehow, Pakistan has found itself an ally of the United States in our war on terror.  This has always struck me as a little odd, given that all of the reasons used to justify the invasion of Iraq (WMDs, links to Al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations, to keep innocent people from being unnecessarily killed) are actually true of Pakistan.  Absolutely, intelligence-agencies-skewing-the-evidence-to-justify-an-invasion-proof true.  It has nuclear weapons.  In fact, it proliferated nuclear technology to place like Iran, Libya, and North Korea.  One of its scientists, who was partially responsible for the development of Pakistan's nuclear weapons, knows Osama bin Laden!  He tried to help Al Qaeda get nuclear weapons (unsuccessfully).  Pakistan has a long history of supporting terrorist organizations, including the Taliban.  They supported the Taliban so much, as a matter of fact, they while we were invading Afghanistan, the Pakistani government was airlifting members of the Taliban (and likely Al Qaeda leadership) out of harm's way.  


Lately, our relationship with Pakistan has been a little strained.  It's strained because we continue to kill Islamic militants in Pakistan with drone strikes, and because the CIA has apparently been conducting clandestine operations inside Pakistan without Pakistan's permission.  Never mind the fact that its army and intelligence services consistently demure when asked to target certain militant organizations, like the Haqqani network.  Never mind that we have given Pakistan billions of dollars in aid.  


Here is the crux of the matter.  Pakistan's government, and particularly the ISI and the army, have a worldview that is predicated by two principles:  India is Pakistan's most significant threat, and violence is the best way to do deal with the threat.  In terms of conventional military technology, this led to the development of nuclear weapons and the continued pursuit of effective delivery systems for those weapons.  This, in and of itself, is enough to dissuade India from any invasion plans that it might have had in the past.  


In terms of military force of a more limited scale, Pakistan views Afghanistan as a minor fiefdom upon which to fall back in case of invasion (unnecessary, given the mutually assured destruction provided by nukes).  It also views Afghanistan, the Northwest Frontier Provinces, and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas as valid training grounds for its favored weapon of choice, terrorism.  Pakistan became an ally in the fight against the Russians to defend Afghanistan as a means of defense in depth.  It favored particular mujahideen organizations, backed a weak Afghan government after the departure of the Soviets, supported the Taliban, and funded al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations' training camps in Afghanistan as a means of pursuing the terrorist option.  


In practical terms, this has meant supporting the proliferation of fundamentalist madrassas that serve as the primary means of education because they provide an ideological framework for militant extremism, and separating terrorists into "good" and "bad" terrorists.  


For example, during the first few years of our occupation of Afghanistan, the Taliban was viewed as a defunct organization that had been crippled during the invasion, whereas Al Qaeda was viewed as the primary threat.  Accordingly, the Taliban was sheltered from Pakistani security forces and largely left alone to regroup and rebuild itself, while members of al Qaeda were killed, captured, or escaped the country by bribing corrupt officials.  While Pakistan has begun to put more pressure on other extremist organizations, the effort is in no way universal.  The Haqqani network, for example, is largely tolerated despite the fact that it absolutely undermines the American war effort in Afghanistan and undermines the stability of the Afghan government itself (and the Afghan government could, frankly, use all the help that it can get).  


It should be noted that the Pakistani military has no problem crushing insurgents in Baluchistan, who are primarily demanding a more equitable piece of Baluchistan's economic pie.  


For a while, the compromise was that we would increase the number of drone strikes and Pakistan would officially condemn our actions but privately approve of them.  It seems that a combination of the Raymond Davis incident making it impossible for Pakistan to hide its complicity in America's attacks against Islamic militants and drone strikes increasingly targeting militants that Pakistan deems strategic assets has rendered the current compromise untenable.  


And so, finding ourselves renegotiating our relationship with Pakistan, it seems prudent to ask, "Is it worth it?"  


My answer is a resounding "No."  


The benefits of continued partnership with Pakistan are we retain a reluctant ally in the fight against violent extremism and we retain the use of Karachi as an important logistics hub to support our ground forces.  The first benefit is negligible, inasmuch as the only insurgents that Pakistan is doing a good job of killing are the ones who threaten the economic interests of Pakistan's elite.  


Karachi as a logistics hub, however, is very, very important to our war effort.  It is tempting to say that it single-handedly justifies continued alliance with Pakistan, whatever the terms may be.  


As matters currently stand, continued alliance with Pakistan will at best make attempts to build a stable and secure Afghanistan more difficult, while indirectly funding terrorism and fostering the extremism that is currently destabilizing Pakistan to the point that governors and cabinet members are being assassinated.  After our departure, Pakistan will doubtless blunt the efficacy of the Afghan departure to pursue its own aims.  At worst, it Pakistan's failings will render Afghanistan a failed state and the thronging terrorist organizations in Pakistan will overthrow its government, and find themselves not only militant extremists, but a nuclear power as well.  


Neither of these options seem a worthwhile use of our blood and treasure.  It is not worth a continued relationship on those terms, and we should stop treating Pakistan like they hold all the cards in the relationship because we might be able to squeak by with a mediocre result by maintaining the status quo.  Without Pakistan, we have to get out of Afghanistan or route our logistics through more cooperative countries.  Without us, Pakistan is a country without a friend in the world except a tentative China, sans billions in foreign aid and responsible once more for billions in development debt, and we can provide a glut of military support to India.  We have all the power in the relationship, and it's time that we start making Pakistan call us "Big Poppa" and actually work for our mutual strategic benefit.  


The carrot of aid should be conditional on the efficacy with which Pakistan is killing actual insurgents of all shapes and sizes.  The aid that we give them should have a much higher ratio of domestic development (especially for education, to replace the madrassas that will generate generations of future terrorists to come with secular institutions that will generate doctors, engineers, and businessmen) to military aid (which they use to repress their own population and fund terrorists).  The stick, in addition to a distinct lack of aid money, should be increased military aid to India.  


Because fuck Pakistan.  If they don't want to cooperate, we can find somebody who will.  

The United States Army (Or at Least Its Lesser Units)

To return to a point that I made earlier about the cultural differences between the Army and the Marine Corps, I direct your attention to this.  It's an article from the Army Times about 1st Battalion, 17th Infantry Regiment, 5th Stryker brigade's deployment to Afghanistan and what appears to be a poor showing on their part in theater.  This battalion has suffered 21 KIA soldiers for a return of only 50 insurgents.  Compare this to 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines' deployment to Sangin, who suffered 29 KIA and hundreds wounded, who Secretary of Defense Gates described as having killed or captured most of the Taliban leadership in the area, and to whom hundreds hundreds of enemy dead are attributed.  And this, in the most hostile area of Afghanistan, with a history of poor security and high casualties.  

Several things struck me about 1-17's poor performance.  They were initially scheduled to deploy to Iraq, and there was a last minute change that sent them to Afghanistan.  Not an ideal circumstance, to be sure.  But why were they doing pre-deployment work-ups focusing on kinetic urban ops when they were heading to Iraq?  Presumably, since the article is from 2009, the predeployment phase occurred in 2007-2008 timeframe, during which counterinsurgency was paramount and kinetic operations in Iraq had died down.  Frankly, the serious kinetic operations in Iraq occurred primarily in 2004-2005, in the Sunni Triangle, and to a more limited extent in Southern Iraq against Sadrists.  Why the emphasis on kinetic ops, then?  

Second of all, if "the principles are the same," as one soldier admitted, what does it matter if "the details are night and day different?"  3/5's deployment to Sangin featured a density of improvised explosive devices that was unprecedented in Iraq and Afghanistan, and they figured it out and devised new techniques, tactics and procedures over the first couple months to deal with the problem.  Do soldiers really expect training to prepare them for every possible detail of their deployment?  Because that's simply not possible.  Things change constantly, and flexibility, adaptability, and improvisation are important skills for a warfighter to have in his or her toolbelt.  

Why are they whining about a lack of good intelligence prior to deploying?  They had google at their fingertips while CONUS, their leadership doubtless had peers who were already deployed to Afghanistan who could give them the scoop, and there are plenty of unclassified news sources and books that could flesh out their knowledge of Afghanistan and Northern Helmand Province.  Does the Army really expect for things to be handed to them on a silver platter?  

How can it possibly have been a surprise that there IEDs in Afghanistan?  I, a person other than grunt, was aware of the fact that the incredible number of Soviet-era landmines and ordnance in Afghanistan were being turned into crude IEDs due to the cross-pollination of insurgents between Iraq and Afghanistan.  Do they not read the news in the Army?  Even if you didn't know, why would you accept intelligence reports saying that there were no IEDs on face-value?  After Iraq, everyone in the military should have good policy regarding IEDs.  Why wouldn't you continue to use that policy?  

Regarding the use of dismounted patrols rather than vehicle mounted patrols, this is counterinsurgency 101.  Being dismounted gives you better visibility of your terrain, it gives you the opportunity to interact with the locals and distinguish friend from foe.  Even more basically, having figured out that there are IEDs around, why would you use vehicles that are limited to the poorly developed Afghan road system?  Why would you let the terrain canalize you due to your insistence on using vehicles?  When you do that, you're basically saying, "Hey, insurgents, I'm only going to be patrolling a few predictable places, so you should plant bombs there to kill me."  You are making yourself an obvious target.  This seems to be a common failing of the Army's mechanized units.  It's strange to me that the Marines in Sangin were literally blasting holes through walls to create new paths to travel to avoid IEDs and the Army couldn't be bothered to get their fat asses out of their Strykers to walk around.  

The cherry on top of the whole clusterfuck is when senior leadership talks about using an outdated counterguerrilla manual that's "complimentary" to the counterinsurgency manual that has superseded it.  

To be fair to the Army, there are absolutely Army units that are doing an outstanding job fighting our nation's enemies who have effectively adopted and implemented counterinsurgency in Afghanistan.  The difference, however, between the Army and Marine Corps, lies in consistency and attitude.  Marine units that are bad at counterinsurgency relative to other Marine units are still much, much better at counterinsurgency than most infantry forces, whereas Army units that are bad at counterinsurgency seem to be stumbling incompetently in the dark, incapable of being effective without being given explicit, detailed instructions on what they need to do.  

Soldiers were also whining to reporters to an extent that I can't imagine Marines doing and about things that I can't imagine Marines whining about, officially or unofficially.  The article gave me the impression that Army officers consistently failed to take the initiative to find out what exactly it was that they were getting into, failed to adapt quickly and effectively to changing circumstances, and failed at the basic leadership and mentorship necessary to make junior leaders who took initiative and applied the fundamentals of war to an unexpected situation.  

As a junior officer, I can't ever imagine saying something like "What we didn’t understand is really where the enemy was making his push against Kandahar city.  We did expect more of an open desert fight."  That statement is a leadership failure.  Of course the unexpected happened.  I can imagine saying, "This is what the enemy is doing, this is what we're doing to kill him, these are some ways that I expect him to adapt, these are the plans that we have for those adaptations."  Expectations are like "hope" and "luck."  You're allowed to have them, but you need to understand that they are always subordinate to the actual situation, and that the actual situation is probably much different than what you're expecting.  

We need to stop giving the Army so many nice things and force them to scrape, scrounge, adapt, improvise, and accomplish things through sheer force of will so that they become tough-minded, adaptive, problem solvers instead of whiners who expect to conduct military operations in a fantasy land that will never, ever conform to real life.  

Individual Responsibility

Some time ago I was reading Karl Jaspers talking about the incident involving forbidden fruit in the Bible.  It was Jaspers' argument that eating the fruit of the Tree of the the Knowledge of Good and Evil, rather than being a cause with the divinely mandated of effect of toiling in the fields and painful childbirth, etc., was in fact the moment at which humanity gained the ability to consciously and thoughtfully analyze circumstances and ascribe to them the label "good" or "evil."  By gaining the knowledge of good and evil, all perception was evaluated through the lens of good and evil, or perception was bounded by moral walls and, in the same way that consciousness is bounded by space and time, judgment is bounded by good and evil.  

I prefer this interpretation of the story in Genesis to the more traditional interpretation that Adam and Eve were bad so God put humankind on time-out for the rest of its days, inasmuch as it transforms a prehistoric story of sin and judgment into a story with continued dynamic meaning in everyday life.  It transforms the story of the fall of humanity from paradise from a static event cemented to the distant past that lends itself to legalism and binary morality into an obligation to thoughtfully define for ourselves the morality of our actions on a daily basis.  

It is this sense of individual thoughtfulness and self-definition that I find most appealing.  The Latin and Greek roots for the words "morals" and "ethics"  are, respectively:  mores, which means the same as the English word "mores," or customs; and ethos, or habit.  Accordingly, both morality and ethics are judgments of good and evil, right and wrong, that have been chosen by group consensus.  The former is an individual's more specific interpretation of collective values, the latter a more codified and concrete expression of nebulous popular mores.  In both instances, because they are values that are created by consensus, individual action and interpretation has the ability to allow them to stagnate, unchanging, push them to a higher state of development, or let them revert to tolerance for the nastier tendencies of human nature.  

Kierkegaard, in Fear and Trembling, wrote about the "ethical act of faith," or an action in response to singular instances that violates of transcends a static ethical code but is still an ethical action.  Kierkegaard was describing a divinely mandated act which violated codified divine law.  

In our current, more flexible sense of the moral and ethical, an ethical act of faith is one which transcends of violates popular ethics, undertaken in good conscience under the presupposition that it is an action that if widely accepted, will better the collective conscience of humanity as a whole.  It is a thesis arguing, through action, for a redefinition of good, evil, justice, and similar moral/ethical abstractions.  It is my contention that, having gained the ability to situate actions and circumstance in a moral framework, we have the individual responsibility to define that moral framework through our actions.  

There are some who will doubtless argue that the Bible is the WORD OF GOD that contains TRUTH and we should follow it blindly, to the letter.  This argument is oversimple to the point of gross negligence and general wrongness.  First, it is an underhanded attempt to shift power dynamics in the favor of one group by virtue of acceptance of an immutable TRUTH that is fundamentally defined by that self-same group.  This tendency necessarily lends it to legalism and the condemnation of other parties.  I'll refute this sense of being righteous judges by quoting Romans 2.1:  "Therefore you have no excuse, whoever you are, when you judge others;for in passing judgment on another you condemn yourself, because you, the judge, are doing the very same things."  

The other, and largest, fallacy of this WORD OF GOD IS THE TRUTH tendency is that it fails to recognize that its own interpretation of scripture as TRUTH is nothing more than an exaggerated version of the general social fabric.   A prime example of this is the "God hates fags," tendency of some of the more rabid varieties of Christianity.  The scriptural basis that the cite from Romans comes from 1.24-27:  

Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the degrading of their bodies among themselves because they exhanged the truth about God for a lie and worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen.  For this reasons God gave them up to degrading passions.  Their women gave exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural, and in the same way also the men, giving up natural intercourse with women, were consumed with passion for one another.  Men committed shameless acts with men and received in their own persons the due penalty for their error.  

It is worth noting that the bit about not judging others is in fact a direct response to this and the following five verses about the general iniquity of nonbelievers.  It is also worth noting that Paul appears to imply that having a dick in your ass is enough punishment for homosexuality.   Further, in 1 Corinthians 11.5 Paul writes "...any woman who prays of prophesies with her head unveiled it disgraces her head..."  


How is it that homosexuality is a so disgraceful that largely due to popular morality and religiosity the Defense of Marriage Act was passed, a few crazies are picketing funerals because the downfall of America will come due our tolerance for homosexuals, and a significant segment of the population is opposed to homosexuality, but no one cares at all that women are running around with their heads uncovered?  


It's because even the BIBLE IS THE WORD OF GOD AND THE TRUTH folks are acting upon a morality that is grounded in mores rather than immutable TRUTH.  As it stands in Christian theology, divine judgment is built on a foundation of omniscience.  People, on the other hand, are not omniscient.  Accordingly, every act of moral or ethical judgment is, for the religious, the hope that their judgment, through faith, is in accordance with divine judgment. 
For the nonreligious, it is an act of faith that their decision is for the common good.  


In both cases, however, the wellspring from which the judgment flows is the social fabric of commonly held values.  


To this point, the discussion of morals/ethics has been descriptive and to a limited extent analytical, but the question must be asked:  why does it matter that each individual moral and ethical act is based upon commonly held values and has the power to change or redirect the consensus?  


My answer to this question rests upon the value of thought.  Arendt noted that she was struck during the war crimes tribunal for Eichmann by "the banality of evil" and particularly by the thoughtlessness that pervaded ever aspect of Eichmann's life.  It was not a thoughtlessness due to stupidity or ignorance, but rather due to a simple lack of thought.  He simply did not make the effort to think beyond the level of thought necessary to accomplish his daily tasks.  


My point is this:  There is a tendency to subsume ourselves in our daily routine, the need to work, eat, sleep, pay bills, run errands, take care of our family, pursue our hobbies.  These activities can be accomplished with a relatively low level of thought, with limited need for abstraction, and for little need to think of our place in the order of things, or to spend a while contemplating abstractions or ideals.  Lonergan described this as the bias towards common sense, to that level of thought best suited for the accomplishment of limited and practical tasks.  


We are not, however, merely the technicians of our own lives, trying to make all the little cogs fit nicely with each other so that our life becomes a smoothly operating machine taking us somewhere.  We have an obligation to think about where that machine is taking us.  We are human beings, little pinpricks of existence that compose the mass of humanity, and inconsequential though we may seem given the vast scope of humanity, each of our actions define the character of humanity.  It is our responsibility to create out of our life a microcosm of the humanity that we would like to exist.  


These are my thoughts on Easter Sunday.  

 

Apparently Human Rights Don't Exist

I used to be, and to a certain extent still am, very much a fan of Malcolm X.  One of the things that I found particularly refreshing in high school was the manner in which he reframed the conversation about the civil rights.  He pointed out that what his contemporaries and history thus far have called civil rights and were actually human rights.  

I've lately revised my opinion about this civil/human rights dichotomy.  I was, yet again reading  Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism (which is very good) when I changed my mind.  She made an excellent argument that the inalienable rights of the Declaration of Independence and all similar such endeavors have largely listed rights that are in no way fundamental to the human condition, are entirely alienable, and generally speaking must be protected in some way through collective action.  

This theory dovetails nicely with the bit of polemic in Heinlein's Starship Troopers about how a man drowning in the sea doesn't have the right to life and a man living in a dictatorship doesn't have a right to freedom.  Heinlein concedes that perhaps the pursuit of happiness is inalienable, although I suspect that he and I would both have doubts about how effective that pursuit can possibly be for people who are dying of starvation.  Arendt notes that even in benevolent democracies, the inalienable right to life is frequently taken from soldiers in time of war.  

In From Beirut to Jerusalem, Thomas Friedman notes that rather than reverting to a nasty, brutish, solitary, and short life as Hobbes might have expected, the people of Lebanon handled rising chaos by organizing neighborhood militias and becoming increasingly close knit because only through collective action could they defend their interests and ensure their well-being.  Organization into a limited political community was the means by which they prevented their alienation from their inalienable rights.  Aristotle noted that man is a political animal, and any realistic examination of human history and pre-history must note that humankind's success as a species, and the success of its myriad subdivisions, are only possible because of collective action.  

Thus we return again to the concept of the state as something that ensures the well-being of its citizens to the maximum extent possible without infringing upon the freedoms that they hold dear.  Our inalienable rights are only inalienable when collectively agreed upon and defended by a political entity that prosecutes murderers, guarantees our freedoms through the equitable application of law, and wages war against our nation's alleged enemies at the worst of times and discouraging people from getting on our bad side by keeping a lot of guns, missiles, bombs, et cetera on hand.  

In other words, our government is the means by which we preserve our freedoms, and by extension our civility and humanity.  

The flip side of this coin is that because we are citizens in a democracy, we are all equally culpable for the actions of our government.  We have a responsibility to it and to each other to be thoughtful, well-informed, and compassionate advocates of the humanity of our nation.   

This seems like something worth remembering at a time in which the public clamors against a Ground Zero mosque out of bigotry and fear, in which states are stripping their public servants of the right to collectively bargain for the benefit of all, and in which certain segments of Congress seem determined to cut as many holes as possible in the social safety net for our tired, hungry, and downtrodden.  

We must be constant advocates for our human rights. We must beware what Foucault called "the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us."  Rather than political rhetoric that implies a deeply speciated humanity, we should remember that we're all in this mess called life together, and advocate practical solutions grounded in sympathy and respect for our fellow citizens.  

Figure It Out

If you're looking for something interesting to read, I recommend  this.  I realize that when you open the link, it looks like 85 or more pages of thesis-driven literature, but it has lots of pages between spaces, lots of pages that are just endnotes, and lots of graphs and charts, and a couple word collages that break it up quite nicely.  I read the entire thing in about an hour and a half while at work, while being interrupted at ten minute intervals to actually do my job.  


So don't be intimidated.  


As far as the actual content goes, I was surprised by three things:


1) How heavily the promotion and evaluation system weighed on the Army's junior officers.  I'm planning on getting out of the Marines at the end of my contract, and the promotion system was never one of the variables that led to the decision.  


2) That promotion to the rank of captain is a time-in-grade promotion for the Army, rather than a promotion that is evaluated by a promotion board.  To me, if you're going to promote someone to a rank that potentially involves them leading hundreds of people into combat, you should probably sit down, look at their accomplishments, look at their performance evaluations, look at the quality of their subordinates, and get a feel for the unofficial reputation within their occupational specialty to make sure that you're not entrusting the lives of America's soldiers to some window-licker who can't find his way out of a paper bag.  


3) That there is an impression in the Army that there is a single career path for officers in an occupational specialty, and that if that career path is not followed, the officer is in some way tainted.  


To me, this illustrates a fundamental cultural difference between the Army and the Marine Corps.  With regards to the first point, the only time that I've heard anyone discuss deciding between voluntarily staying in and getting out was a major who had not been promoted to lieutenant colonel, who was consequently planning to retire.  But even if he had been selected for lieutenant colonel, he would still have been seriously considering the decision to retire because his major determining factor was his wife's poor health.  


As far as company grade officers go, it seems like the decision to leave is predicated on one of two factors.  Either the Marine Corps isn't a good fit for them as a career for whatever reason, or they were not career designated.  In the former instance, the reasons vary, but they typically have to do with how well an individual's personality and personal ambitions fit into the Marine Corps.  In the latter instance, the Marine Corps has told them that they do not meet the criteria for retention.  In essence, they have been told that they are unwanted.  


The second point, that Army captains are promoted for time in grade rather than on a merit based system, is inexplicable.  The third point is the most interesting to me.  There's a certain extent to which the Marine Corps is not immune to this tendency, but it is largely mitigated by the fact the Marine officers are expected to be generalists who can step into any billet and excel based sheerly on leadership and force of will.  The emphasis is on striking a balance between proficiency and credibility within your occupational specialty on the one hand, and filling demanding billets outside of your occupational specialty to prove that you are well-rounded on the other.  


Typically, the checklist mentality falls mostly into occupational proficiency, and takes the form of formal schools or demanding billets such as operations officer.  But even when given less desirable billets, the advice that is given is "Bloom where you're planted."  


Ultimately, the Marine Corps measures the quality of its officers when they are thrown haphazardly into billets for which they have no technical expertise and are mostly unprepared.  It is at times like these that the unofficial motto of the Marine Corps, "Figure it out," shows its face.  "Figure it out" lurks nefariously behind tasks like "I want a supertracker by Friday, and it better be fucking perfect," with no further explanation.  It is behind the decision to have a helicopter pilot run the logistics of an aircraft group, and behind the fact that no one in the Marine Corps is formally trained on the system used to contract purchases of more than $3,000.  It is the explanation for the fact that I, a supply officer, received six months of training in infantry operations and only three months of training in supply.  


Any jackass can perform a specific set of duties well if they are extensively trained in those duties.  It takes a higher breed of individual to excel at unfamiliar tasks.  Ultimately, if you force an individual to perform at a high level while doing unfamiliar tasks with little or no guidance while under a great deal of stress, repeatedly over several years, you end up creating an individual who can do anything.  It's kind of a terrible experience while it's happening to you, but you end up very generally competent and with a great deal of equanimity.  


This, apparently, is what we call mentorship and career development.  It seems like it works.  

American Exceptionalism

The entire concept of American exceptionalism is asinine.  I came across another quotable moment in The Origins of Totalitarianism, which reminded me of how ridiculous the idea is:

"Whenever peoples have been separated from action and achievements, when these natural ties with the common world have broken or do not exist for one reason or another, they have been inclined to turn upon themselves in their naked natural givenness and to claim divinity and a mission to redeem the whole world."

Claims to excellence that are divorced from actual accomplishments are always useless, and hubris in the best of times.  The quote is an excerpt from a discussion of Pan-Germanism and Pan-Slavism as foundations for totalitarianism in Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, which gives you an idea of the consequences of exceptionalist claims in the worst of times.  


I doubt very much that America is on the verge of spiraling into totalitarianism, but it is by no means in a position to rest upon its laurels.  Its middle class is eroding with the increasingly rapid departure of manufacturing jobs, its infrastructure has seen better days, the public education system is patchy at best, public discourse is increasingly polarized, investment in sustainable infrastructure and green technology is sorely lacking, and dependence on fossil fuels is still unacceptably high.  


Consider the trend in our human development index.  In 1980, we had the highest human development index in the world.  In 2010, the fourth highest.  We are ranked 65th in HDI improvement, vice China's second place ranking.  Our HDI in 1990 was 105.8% of our HDI in 1980.  our HDI in 2000 was 104.2% of our HDI in 1990.  Our HDI in 2010 was 101.6% of our HDI in 2000.  Our rate of improvement is slowing rapidly in an index that evaluates life expectancy, educational achievement, and income.  We are blunting our competitive edge on our own self-congratulation.  


And this is occurring at an important transitional time in America's history.  Having emerged from WWII as an unabashed superpower, having pumped our military might full of steroids for the Cold War, and having emerged from the Cold War successfully, we find ourself in a world in which the use of conventional military force against another great power is unlikely due to economic interdependence, in which developing countries like China, India, and Brazil have become international powers in their own right.  The greatest threat to our security is asymmetrical warfare and terrorism by ideologues in failed or failing states, the reactionary restlessness of unemployed and hopeless youth, and the violent narrow-mindedness of the undereducated.  


The real tragedy of American exceptionalism lies in the decision to praise our own real or fictitious merits instead of taking the preventative measures against poverty, ignorance, and violence in the world at large that are in our best interests, both as political actors in a realpolitik sense and as ethical actors in a human sense.  

The Common Good

Lately I've been reading, and one of the things that I read was this.  It's a position paper written by a Marine Corps colonel and a Navy captain arguing in favor of the intensive development of things like infrastructure, education, and healthcare as integral parts of our national defense strategy.  They further argue that a strong State Department, proactive diplomatic efforts, and comprehensive aid programs are necessary for the United States to retain its position of preeminence in the world.  

In short, they sound like they are advocating the Democratic party line as the method of our assured success.  Consider the Republicans' budget cut suggestions, on the other hand.  It's basically a list of infrastructure, education, healthcare, international aid, and diplomatic programs that they would like to cut.  It is tempting to argue that they are making the tough choices necessary to balance the budget.  And then you read that a Nobel prize winning economist described Paul Ryan's budget as "a strange combination of cruelty and insanely wishful thinking."  And then you read the Congressional Budget Office's recommendations and realize that they kind of make the Republican suggestions look like a partisan attempt to destroy social programs.  

How is it that we've come to a place in our government in which high-ranking military officers and the Secretary of Defense (the people who are trained to kill people and blow shit up) are advocating developing our domestic infrastructure and diplomacy? Why are our politicians deliberately disordering our commonwealth while using the power of the purse to shape the structures of America's foreign power in such a way that only the use of force is acceptable?  Why are the people who are supposed to be building the strength of the nation so bent on developing violence, which should be the last recourse, as the favored option for American foreign policy?  

The answer has to do with the opposition between a communal mindset on the one hand and an individualistic mindset on the other.  The military of the United States is essentially an authoritarian socialist organization that has been domesticated by the representative democracy that is our civilian government.  Everything that it does relies on teamwork and a sense of obligation to a larger community that necessarily leads to a frame of mind in which fostering the common good is a prized attribute.  Politicians, on the other hand, exist in a system in which their primary goal is a selfish one:  reelection.  This necessarily fosters a certain amount of selfishness, or phrased more kindly, individualism.  It also fosters a tendency to spout popular rhetoric while acting in such a manner as to ensure future campaign contributions from special interests.  

Accordingly, a certain breed of politician (and political camp followers such as pundits and policy-oriented academics) will inevitably prey upon the baser whims of more narrowly focused demographics.  Thus we see unionized teachers, policemen, firefighters, and civil servants becoming the scapegoats for wasteful government spending, nevermind the fact that they provide valuable services for the common good of all citizens of the state.  Nevermind the fact that in arguing that public employees earn more than their private sector counterparts, no one bothered to ask why private institutions weren't paying teachers the same paltry wage as public institutions.  

When the fundamental statements of political discourse are "They are making more money than you," and "The government is wasting your money," political discourse has devolved into pedagogy and rabble-rousing.  The existence of the state is fundamentally a compromise between the entirely selfish aspirations of its composite citizens and those same citizens' desire to be sheltered from the unfettered predation of their fellow citizen.  It then follows that the purpose of the state is to promote the common good of its citizens to the greatest extent possible while infringing upon their freedoms to the least acceptable extent.  

The freedoms that must not be infringed upon begin with the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and are continued in the Bill of Rights and the entire corpus of legislative and judiciary elaborations thereon.  The purpose of the state, then is to promote every common good that does not infringe upon these freedoms.  This assembly of the freedoms of all citizens as protected equally under the law and the effort on the part of the government to promote the common good can, in shorthand, be referred to as our values.  

As the military advocates of the development of the common good note:

"Our values define our national character, and they are our source of credibility and legitimacy in everything we do. Our values provide the bounds within which we pursue our enduring national interests. When these values are no longer sustainable, we have failed as a nation, because without our values, America has no credibility."

While there is admittedly merit to the pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps school of thought that argues against a social safety net and for an individual's ability to enjoy the fruits of his or her own labor, the individualist argument is ill-suited for the preservation of the commonwealth.  America's greatness lies in its aspirations as a just state in which all people are granted a minimum standard of opportunity that is equitably enforced by law.  When the poor have to choose between crippling debt and adequate healthcare, when their children cannot receive a good education, and when public transportation infrastructure is inadequate to take them to and from work, this minimum standard of opportunity has not been met.  The sacrifice of infrastructure development, quality public education, and universal healthcare is a betrayal of our aspirations toward humanity and civilization universally guaranteed by law, and the sacrifice of diplomacy and humanitarian aid is the sacrifice of our means of conveying our values to the world.  

Sometimes Blowing Shit Up is a Bad Idea

This may seem self-evident, but apparently members of the Tea Party are having trouble understanding this basic truth.  The TLDR of the link is that Paul Ryan, who is under the impression that he's some sort of budgetary wunderkind, wrote a budget that eviscerates funding for the State Department and international aid programs, while minimally cutting the Department of Defense's budget.  

Now, I'm in the military, and accordingly very enthusiastic about killing people and blowing shit up, but our recent adventures in invading countries has demonstrated that killing people and blowing shit up only gets you so far.  The epitome of this principle is Afghanistan.  


For those of you who haven't been paying attention to current events for the last decade, the story in Afghanistan goes something like this:  We bomb the living Christ out of it, refuse to put troops on the ground, Osama bin Laden gets away, warlords with the help of US airpower drive the Taliban to Pakistan, Hamid Karzai is crowned President, we don't build Afghanistan's infrastructure, we don't reign in the warlords, we don't convince Pakistan to stop funding Islamic militants, the Taliban watches us fuck up consistently for FIVE YEARS, the Taliban invades Afghanistan a second time, they garner support because the populace is tired of how corrupt the government is, and we find ourselves in a miserable quagmire that may or may not end in an Afghanistan that doesn't harbor and train violent terrorists.  


If you look closely at the events recounted above, you'll notice that the parts that involved killing people and blowing shit up actually went pretty well.  The parts that involved, say building roads and canals that would facilitate Afghanistan developing an economy that is based on something other than the sale of opium, or reigning in Pakistan's support of Islamic extremism, or building an Afghan government that isn't awfully corrupt-in short, the parts that would involve the State Department and international aid-not nearly as successful.  


This is because the US military is in fact the best funded military in the entire world, by a significant margin.  If it wasn't good at killing people and blowing shit up, the American people would have a right to be upset.  The downside of using the military to do things, however, is that there are wide swaths of foreign policy in which killing people and blowing shit up is counterproductive.  These swaths are where things like "diplomacy" and "building a national infrastructure" are really useful.  And guess who does all the things that the military doesn't do!  The State Department and international aid programs!  


If the Bush administration had actually cared about aid programs and diplomacy those FIVE YEARS that the Taliban waited before returning to Afghanistan, it's safe to say that the Taliban would have been significantly less popular upon returning.  Hell, they might have just stayed in Pakistan.  Hell, they might have all abandoned their extremist ways or been killed or captured already.  


While I'm playing pretend, if we had provided international aid to build secular schools in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (where the Taliban is from), they might have all become engineers or astrophysicists instead of AK-47 wielding, murderous zealots who were educated in madrassas.  


This last exercise in fantasy leads to the most important part of why it's a good idea to fund the State Department and international aid programs.  Diplomacy and humanitarian efforts help prevent wars by doing things like "talking things out" and "educating the populace so that they don't become semiliterate terrorists who were educated in the more militant Deobandi madrassas."  


Also, talking and education are relatively cheap, as opposed to wars, which do things like take your budget surplus and turn it into a staggering budget deficit overnight.  


Paul Ryan would probably know all of this, but apparently he's been too busy reading Ayn Rand to pay attention to the conduct of America's wars, despite being a Congressman.  


PS:  I feel like this second post might not live up to the aspirations of the first post.  Oh well.  

Hello.

I've recently been working my way through Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism, and while reading about a wave of antisemitism that rampaged through France, stumbled across the following gem, written by Clemenceau:  


"With the open consent of the people, they have proclaimed before the world the failure of their 'democracy.' Through them a sovereign people shows itself thrust from its throne of justice, shorn of its infallible majesty. For there is no denying that this evil has befallen us with the full complicity of the people itself...The people is not God. Anyone could have foreseen that this new divinity would some day topple to his fall. A collective tyrant, spread over the length and breadth of the land, is no more acceptable than a single tyrant ensconced upon his throne."


It struck me for a number of reasons, but foremost among them was my suspicion that few if any politicians currently in office could have written something as thoughtful, lasting, and eloquent.  The quote refers to the Dreyfus affair, in which a Jewish officer of the French intelligence staff was wrongly convicted of treason, and his trial with the inevitable accompanying public circus sparked a wave of anti-Semitism, violence, and similar such rabble-based nonsense.  


Clemenceau and others opposed the trial as a brutal miscarriage of justice.  Their motivation was a belief that the republic in which they lived existed to preserve  human dignity by treating every citizen as equal before the rule of law (this is another trait that I feel today's politicians generally lack, as demonstrated by our recent policy regarding extraordinary renditions, and the minimal outcry that it generated).  


Eventually, Clemenceau and his fellow Dreyfusards forced a compromise in which Dreyfus was acquitted, somewhat illegitimately, in a hardscrabble compromise that seems to be equivalent to a current Pakistani politician somehow managing to rewrite Pakistan's blasphemy laws to require a higher standard of proof for conviction.  


The second reason that the quote struck me, and the one that has led to me writing this blog, is that I have this sensation that we're living in a time in which the toppled popular god (in the form of masses who vote for an amorphous "change" that will be panacea to all their misfortunes, who panic and beg for Congress to legislate away and economic crisis and then complain about government spending, who vote for the Tea Party in reaction to expensive stimulus legislation that was mandated by their own panic, who blame unions of teachers and police and firefighters for bankrupting the state instead of thanking them for teaching their children, guarding their streets, and saving their lives, et cetera ad nauseum), that this vulgar mass of simmering discontent is masochistically destroying all that is good and beautiful about America.  


And that is a shame, because America has a lot of potential.  


In theory, our government, by means of its civilian leadership, would form a bulwark against that sort of nonsense. They would disregard fickle, self-destructive demands and inspire the people so that they cease to be a bleating mob and return to their rightful state, as citizens of a nation.  


This has proven not to be the case.  Rather, the government, particularly Congress, has shown itself to be a gaggle of bickering children who would rather natter on about partisan politics than actually accomplish something, lead the nation, fix problems, help the needy, or any number of other things.  


And I figure one (hopefully) thoughtful blog about politics, economics, art, literature, history, philosophy, or wherever else my fancy may take me can only be a step in a more thoughtful, productive direction.  


In any case, it probably won't hurt anything.