The General & the President

In his 1953 short story, “Disappearing Act”, the great science fiction writer Alfred Bester once wrote:

There are fighting generals (vital to an army), political generals (vital to an administration), and public relations generals (vital to a war).

Perhaps there are generals that can be a bit of all three, but Stanley McChrystal is not one of them. No question he was a battle general par excellence, but his political and PR instincts were terrible. (Steve Metz, a professor at the Army War College said all of this with greater erudition for The New Republic.) It is not likely that McChrystal’s Rolling Stone interview crossed the line into forbidden political activity. But it did demonstrate abject stupidity – people at his level ought to know to exercise some discretion around journalists. His big mouth about his colleagues demonstrated that he is no political general either, who can play nice with other agencies and governments.


Presidential Authority
I’ve come late to this pundit party, so I’ll just make a few quick comments (besides quoting Alfie Bester.) My first thought was about the President’s actions (I have a whole blog devoted to this issue.) In his landmark Presidential Power, Richard Neustadt established that presidents have only limited powers of command. In general they share their powers with other branches of government and other actors inside and outside of government. To get anything done, they need to persuade. Even where presidents have clear powers to command, they must exercise them judiciously so that they do not provoke other powers in the government to align themselves against the president. In making this argument, Neustadt begins by discussing three cases in which presidents had clear command powers and how they were circumspect in using them. One of these cases was Truman decision to fire MacArthur.

There was something satisfying in seeing a President exercise his authority in an unambiguous manner. The past few months President Obama has been dealing with the Gulf Oil spill – where he needs to appear concerned, but has very little influence over the outcome. Sometimes it is good for the commander-in-chief to command.

As it happens, I was chatting with a Thai acquaintance who noted that in his homeland, a political leader’s attempt to fire a general would probably result in a coup. The United States does not run this risk. We have an interesting hybrid system where in many situations authority is unclear – but on certain crucial issues (such as the Supreme Court’s power to interpret the constitution) authority is unquestioned.

Strategic Implications
My friend Ilan Berman had a smart piece in the Washington Times stating that the Rolling Stone article highlighted the strategic incoherence of the administration’s Afghanistan policy.

In this case personnel is policy. Besides the fact the (as Steve Metz notes in the post I link to above) Petraeus probably has better skills for the mission – his personal credibility is also important. Petraeus demonstrated that he could play nice with the other kids – forging a good working relationship with Ambassador Crocker and charming Congress. He might also be able to amend the deadlines that threaten to crush the Afghanistan mission. If Pretraeus can credibly report progress he might be given the leeway to maintain troop levels past the withdrawal deadline so that progress can be maintained.

in that light, losing McChrystal may be the best thing that can happen to Afghanistan.

Memorial Day Movies: Heroes Past and Future

Taking advantage of the long weekend, I took my long-suffering wife to the movies. We watched Harry Brown, which stars Michael Caine as an aged pensioner and former Royal Marine living in a crime-ridden housing project. When his best friend, who is regularly intimidated by the local thugs, is killed Caine’s Harry Brown remembers his training and wreaks havoc. It is similar to Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino. As an action movie and police drama Harry Brown is more exciting and Michael Caine is always a pleasure to watch – his visage shifting between formidable killer and tired old man. As a movie about people, Gran Torino is by far the better movie as we see Eastwood’s character grow and change.

Two movies hardly constitute a cultural trend, but the fantasy of old men stepping up and restoring order to a world gone mad has a deep appeal. Do we just like seeing unruly youngsters getting smacked down by their elders or is it something more? The era of our grandfathers, of WWII and the Greatest Generation has passed and we hunger both for their clear view of right and wrong and their ability to do something about it. Perhaps we feel we have lost both the sense and the capability and we yearn for our grandfathers to return and set things aright.

There was a sense of that in John McCain’s candidacy. Anne Applebaum wrote about this in The Washington Post, describing McCain as the candidate of clarity and Obama as the candidate of nuance. According to Applebaum (I can’t find the column online) we want to live in McCain’s world, but the world we actually inhabit is Obama’s. (UPDATE: There was a reason I could find the column online. It was actually by Sally Quinn - thanks Soccer Dad for the heads up.)

Two thoughts struck me about this hunger for heroic grandfathers. If we are seeking the moral clarity of past times, we are mistaken. The past is only clear when viewed in hindsight through a broken lens. As Willie Stark, prodding his old college history textbook, told Jack Burden in Robert Penn Warren’s classic All the King’s Men:

And the fellow that wrote it didn’t know a God-damned thing. About how things were. He didn’t know a thing. I bet things were just like they are now. A lot of folks wrassling around.

But my Memorial Day thought is that if we miss the heroes of yesteryear, we aren’t looking very hard. I honor the great sacrifices and achievements of past generations – but the current one is more than holding its own. I am thinking of the kids I went to high school and college with who chose to become soldiers and marines while my friends and I tried to find ourselves, of the servicemen I meet professionally, or of the recipients of JINSA’s Grateful Nation Award. They have done great things in terrible circumstance – all the while demonstrating their prudence, compassion, and bravery. They can hold their heads high and take their place beside the great heroes of American history.

And they are just getting started.

We should all be grateful for their service. I know that I get to write – because they fight.

Aaron Mannes in Defense News: Info Systems Must 'Connect Dots' on Terrorism

Defense News just posted an article by Jim Hendler and me about the need for the intelligence community to embrace cutting edge information technology that can help analysts process the enormous quantities of information collected and connect the dots.

Jim has been working on this stuff for over a decade and when I worked with him at UMIACS where we built an online portal to highlight this potential.


Info Systems Must 'Connect Dots' on Terrorism
By AARON MANNES and JAMES HENDLER
Published: 19 April 2010

The near success of the Christmas Day bomber on a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit has been characterized as a failure to "connect the dots." Now, additional teams of specialists are being formed to run down clues.

Throwing resources at a problem is an understandable knee-jerk reaction, but human capacity to absorb and process enormous quantities of information quickly is limited. Connecting the dots requires cutting-edge information technologies that augment human capabilities. Without revamping the information systems used in the intelligence community, more eyeballs will, at best, yield diminishing returns and, at worst, exacerbate problems and increase stovepiping.

The American intelligence community has invested heavily in building unparalleled tools for collecting information - generating dots - while slighting tools to connect them. The most commonly reported weakness in the information systems used in the intelligence community is that analysts have to search multiple databases to access all available information and that they cannot integrate the data they find from their searches.

Although technologies to amalgamate databases exist, they have not been widely deployed within the intelligence community. Giving intelligence analysts the same search capabilities that are commonplace for most Web surfers is necessary, but on its own will not help "connect the dots."

Since 9/11, intelligence-sharing has improved, but the data deluge caused by increased collection capabilities has negated these gains. Data is now measured in the petabyte, 1 million gigabytes, roughly equivalent to 20 million four-drawer filing cabinets filled with text.

A public search engine might process many petabytes of data daily, and presumably the intelligence community collects data on a comparable scale. Without knowing what to look for, searching these enormous quantities of data will only increase information inundation. An effective system not only helps analysts find information, it helps them make connections.

A search on variants of the Christmas bomber's name, Umar Farouk Adbulmutallab of Nigeria, would have resulted in hundreds or thousands of responses. One person could not examine this volume of material in a timely manner. Even if a team of analysts exam-ined the material in a reasonable time frame, without knowing what to search for in advance, team members might focus on different issues and not connect the dots.

Information systems that can draw basic conclusions, such as indicating probable links, would help overwhelmed analysts identify critical information. This is not the stuff of science fiction. Businesses are investing in the Semantic Web, in which information is given some context by facilitating smart or semantic searches. This approach is just starting to be embraced by industry, with some search engines, such as Microsoft's bing.com, starting to link searches together.

An information system with these capabilities might understand Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab not only as a string of characters but as a person who possesses certain inherent characteristics, such as parents and a last known location. Nigeria and Yemen can be understood as places where a person might be present at a given time. With this context, the info system could automatically identify disparate warning signs as potentially relating to the same person.

Despite the tremendous efforts of intelligence-community analysts, the current ways of doing business have proved inadequate. While there is no guarantee that better information technology would have allowed U.S. intelligence to act before Abdulmutallab boarded the plane, increasing personnel represents more of the same. Adopting revolutionary IT could be a much-needed game-changer.

Ironically, many of the technologies underpinning these revolutions in information systems were funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and were motivated by the need to enhance data-sharing in the intel community. Now, the Semantic Web is used by governments to increase the public's access to data and by businesses to connect the dots. But efforts to deploy this technology within the national security system have moved more slowly.

There are understandable reasons why adopting new information systems have not been prioritized. The infrastructure for building and launching an intelligence-collection satellite is proven and the additional data gathered is easily measured. But it can be difficult to quantify the impact of a new information system and its implementation is an enormous technical and bureaucratic challenge.

But without better information systems, the intelligence community will be hamstrung in its efforts to transform information into intelligence while America's enemies continue to systematically identify and exploit these blind spots. To connect the dots and prevent the next incident before it happens, the intelligence community needs to implement technologies that were specifically developed to address these challenges.

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Aaron Mannes is a researcher at the University of Maryland's Laboratory for Computational Cultural Dynamics. James Hendler is a professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic University, N.Y., and a former chief scientist for information systems at the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

Puerto Rico's Future and America's

The Washington Times is one of the few major media outlets that pays much attention to the question of Puerto Rican statehood. Today’s editorial catches their general slant as opposing it – although they have run commentaries in the past arguing for new policies towards the island colony.

This particular piece argues that the plurality, but not the majority, of Puerto Ricans prefer the current commonwealth status but that the process being put in place will slant the decision-making towards statehood.

The surface explanation for this editorial is that Puerto Rico will be a strong Democratic state, adding a pair on the Democratic side of the aisle in the Senate and it certainly no secret that the Washington Times slants right. The editorial also notes that as a bi-lingual territory Puerto Rico as a state would force the issue in the U.S. and bilingual nationhood is not a good direction for the U.S. to take – our language should unite us.

The merit of that argument aside, there is another aspect to this problem. The tiny also-ran in Puerto Rican politics are the independentistas. It has been a strong enough sentiment to inspire some serious terrorism including a failed assassination attempt against President Truman and bombings in NYC. (The U.S. government has done some violence to the Puerto Ricans as well.) Now, the Puerto Rican independence movements have been infiltrated and are pretty marginal. But there is a certain gut appeal for independence among many Puerto Ricans. As one Puerto Rican journalist I met put it, “On Saturday night at the bar everyone is for independence. But when they wake up Sunday morning they come to the senses.”

Puerto Rico is a poor island with high unemployment and deficient social services. It is either the wealthiest country in Latin America or the poorest state in the union. Statehood has been the Holy Grail for an important faction of Puerto Rican politics. But will statehood reduce the island’s structural problems? Currently, in exchange for not having representation in Washington, Puerto Ricans are exempt from federal taxes (no taxation without representation.)

Whatever federal benefits their representatives in Washington can obtain – they will probably not be sufficient to counterbalance having to now pay federal taxes.

Is it inconceivable that, once Statehood is reached, the independentistas will be able to shout “I told you so!” as the island’s fundamental problems remain? In those circumstances, could a new secessionist movement gain traction?

This may seem far-fetched. Perhaps Puerto Rico’s sentiments for independence are not that great and will not gain much favor. But the United States fought a long, bloody war over whether or not states can leave the union – the issue is like Pandora’s Box and is best left closed.

That being said, Puerto Rico’s situation is unfair. But in life and politics perfect justice is rarely obtainable. The Puerto Ricans do not wish for independence and statehood isn’t in the cards. But there is some compensation. The tax freedom is a good example as is Puerto Rico’s Olympic Committee. Under the current status Puerto Rico can enjoy the fun part of nationhood, while avoiding the less pleasant aspects. There are worse situations.

Visiting The Republic

As a PhD student at the University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy, I have to take a comprehensive exam on normative issues. The first books on the reading list are selections from the classics, which I studied at St. John’s – Plato, Aristotle, Locke, Hobbes and Rousseau. While most of the moral and political philosophy we are required to read is “modern” (i.e. written in the last two centuries and thus not of interest to Johnnies) I am thrilled to be spending time with some old friends.

Beastly to the Books
When I studied The Republic at St. John’s College there was a guy in the class who always sought to tear down the books – trying to pick them apart and expose them as unserious. This was not the St. John’s way, and I feuded a bit with him. I took to calling him Thrasymachus after a character in The Republic who assails Socrates “like a wild beast” insisting that injustice is the true justice in book 1. (Things really get rolling in book 2 when Glaucon makes the same argument more calmly asking in effect if justice is a virtue or is it just fear of getting caught and that the truly great men are those who don’t get caught. The question of how to instill a love for justice is fundamental to all societies and at the core of this most profound book.)

I regret deeply that my in-class frustration with Thrasymachus led to a frayed relationship out of class. I should have taken to heart the words of a wiser classmate who observed that Thrasymachus was so passionate because he wanted so deeply to understand truth and justice. If you are out there and recognize yourself and happen to stumble on this shoot me a note. Mea culpa.

A Kiss is but a Kiss
Socrates explains that in his perfect city (which is a thought experiment not a political action plan) after the army wins a battle the returning soldiers will be free to kiss anyone in the city.

Thrasymachus (in our class not in the book) saw a loose thread to pull on and observed, “Is that a euphemism or what?”

There were times when I deftly responded to this sort of statement. This was not one of them, because almost everyone in class sort of agreed that this was the case and none of us had any particular thoughts on dealing with it. What I wished I had said was this:

Your interpretation is the obvious one and I don’t have a response, only this thought. If someone says aloud “World War II” a pair of images leap into my mind: the marines raising the flag at Iwo Jima and the sailor kissing the nurse in Times Square on V-J day. That makes me think something else is going on here. I don’t know what, but I give Plato the benefit of the doubt - he doesn’t deal in cheap euphemisms.

As Time Goes By
Now, years later, I think I have some idea what Plato was talking about – maybe. Since studying Middle Eastern politics I have become interested in the overwhelming importance of clans in the region’s societies. One feature of many clan societies (and particularly those of the Middle East) are the restrictions on the movements and behavior of women. Clans are based on patrilineal heritage and any question that a man’s male ancestor is in doubt can undermine the web of loyalties underpinning this system – the family honor. Hence, the requirements that women always be in the company of male relatives in public.

Ancient Greece also had some elements of this system, laws varied by the movement of women was frequently restricted. In his proposal, perhaps Socrates was attempting to reinforce loyalty to the polis as opposed to clan-lineage loyalties and build the ethos of the polis as a voluntary community.

As it happens, this explanation (which seems plausible but requires more research) would not have flown in seminar. At St. John’s we tried to focus exclusively on the books themselves and not their historical context.

Setback in Baghdad: Counter-Forensics and Counter-Terror

Counter-forensics has long been part of the terrorist playbook, so today’s attack on the central forensics lab in Baghdad is by no means unprecedented in the annals of terrorism.


CSI Belfast
According to Tony Geraghty’s fascinating The Irish War: The Hidden Conflict Between the IRA and British Intelligence the IRA was obsessed with preventing evidence from falling into the hands of British authorities. The developed extensive internal research and development capabilities to counter British forensic science and wrote manuals to train their members how not to leave evidence. The manuals get very detailed, including instructions about the dangers of incriminating particles and fibers in the hair and clothes of operatives.

The IRA had good reason to be concerned. British authorities found clothes and hair to be forensic bingo and actually ran an undercover operation operation disguised as a mobile valet service to gather forensic evidence.

The IRA found that a good offense was the best defense and ambushed the mobile valet unit in October 1972. They also bombed the Northern Ireland Forensic Laboratory – twice. The first time they faked and accident so that a car with a bomb planted inside would be taken into the forensics lab, where it detonated and destroyed substantial quantities of forensic evidence. Later, in September 1992, the IRA set off a 3,000 lb on the lab’s perimeter.

CSI Baghdad
In many cases the most sensitive nodes are people – killing key leaders or specialists can disable a movement or organization. At least some of the victims of the bombing were investigators and they will not be easy to replace. The specialized equipment will also be difficult to replace. But, if the IRA’s history is any example, the accumulated physical evidence could be the greatest loss for Iraq’s counter-terror efforts. In almost any kind of research quality data is everything.

Terrorists in Iraq are clearly ramping up activities, having carried out two terrible deadly attacks in as many days. Breaking clandestine networks requires the careful sifting of evidence, seeking clues and patterns. But now, the evidence is gone and the investigators are back to square one.

Today’s attack was a strategic one, reducing the government’s ability to defeat its enemies both in the short and long-term.

Cited by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists

A recent column in the highly regarded Bulletin of Atomic Scientists cites (favorably) an op-ed I co-authored with Jim Hendler in The Washington Times discussing realistic scenarios for cyber-war.

The column, by Joshua Pollack, a contributor to Arms Control Wonk - which also inspired the name of this blog - is titled Is the cyber threat a weapon of mass destruction?

The article discusses China's recent attack on Google, observing that placing aggressive cyber activity on a par with WMD is inaccurate. Overall China's activity is more akin to spying then to warfare. However, the article states:

The damage to goodwill has been considerable. It isn't shocking that one major power spies on another, or necessarily even intolerable. As the saying goes, "It's all in the game." But the game has never been friendly, and there's something breathtakingly crude about how it's being played today. The attempt to capture as many computers as possible is aggressive and indiscriminate, reaching into the lives of private citizens in the United States and beyond. In a particularly insidious turn, the spies have been known to take advantage of professional contacts between Americans and Chinese in order to assemble convincingly spoofed messages and to mine e-mail address books for targets.