'Each man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world'
-- Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms

'Artists are tricky fellows sir, forever shaping the world according to some design of their own'
-- Jonathan Strange, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

Sunday 31 July 2011

The Wisdom of Crowds. Review of "Defence Reform: An independent report into the structure and managment of the Ministry of Defence"

"Reconcile ambition with reality."

In August 2010, Lord Levene was employed by Liam Fox, as Defence Secretary, to commission a report as chair of the Defence Reform Steering Group.The deadline was July 2011. The report was published on June 27, 2011. Operating in tandem with the "quinquennial" SDSR, ("the Defence Secretary’s view was that the SDSR alone would not be enough to resolve the problems facing Defence. His assessment was that the existing departmental management structure was demonstrably not working well, and had contributed to the Department’s financial crisis") the report seeks to streamline the corpulent entity that is the MOD, bloated by middle managers and massive overexpenditure. Put simply, when it's the taxpayers' money you're spending and not you're own, the emphasis on efficiency isn't a priority.

This report examines the operating structure as a whole, a project which arguably hasn't been undertaken since The Central Organisation for Defence White Paper of 1984, and the New Management Strategy. Which is quite staggering in its ineptitude and myopia since the end of the Cold War and the reorientation of strategic necessities in the early 1990s.

There's little new here in the Levene report (which is probably why it took less than the time he was given to complete it, and I can almost envisage the accompanying PowerPoint presentation), but it does serve to lessen public anger, as details consistently emerge of massive waste and incompetence within the MOD. Streamlining the MOD whilst coagulating the three branches under a Joint Services command is logical. Continued successful integration of civilian and military personnel within the ministry is a further goal. The NHS has a similar problem with those engaged at the chalk face (to take a teacher's term) and the administrators.

The composition of the review board is interesting and merits examination simply for their lack of knowledge of the MOD or any other ministries of defence, for their lack of knowledge of UK military strategies or current and future threats and how this might impact organizational structure. None of the personnel have, as far as i can see, experience in the military-industrial complex. The privatisation of warfighting is a pressing issue that we need to understand and how this effects the MOD structure. 
The personnel are:
Lord Levene: Career in business and banking with roles in defence procurement under Michael Heseltine.
Baroness Noakes: A chartered accountant by training who has worked in financial streamlining of the NHS in the late 1980s and early 1990s. That didn't work well then.
Dr David Allen: His doctorate is in chemistry and had a successful career at BP
Raymond McKeeve: Corporate finance partner at Berwin Leighton Paisner, involved in restructuring and acquisitions.
Björn Conway: Head of Aerospace, Defence, Security and Resilience at...Ernst and Young.
George Iacobescu: Known as the "bankers' landlord" he is the chariman of the Canary Wharf Group.
Gerry Grimstone: A privatisation "guru" to UK governments
General Sir Nick Houghton: Vice-chief of the Defence Staff
Ursula Brennan: Replaced by Jon Day after being made 2nd PUS (Permanent Under Secretary) in February 2011
My observations of the report are these, but below them are the recent media reports of Dempsey's confirmation hearing in the US, which I feel are much more important.
  • The shadow of the tottering global economy hangs over the report.
  • The report recommends manking, "the Head Office smaller and more strategic, to make high level balance of investment decisions, set strategic direction and a strong corporate framework, and hold to account." This is in keeping with a desire to streamline, but also to realign the MOD, set it to a coherent direction. We want everyone at the MOD to be singing from the same hymn sheet, and for everyone to know the words to the hymn.The creation of a Defence Board is suggested, based around the Defence Secretary. The Board would comprise: Defence Secretary (Chair);
    • An additional Minister;
    • Permanent Secretary;
    • Chief of the Defence Staff;
    • Director General Finance - reflecting his role as the principal financial adviser;
    • Chief of Defence Materiel - reflecting his responsibility for a major part of the
    Department’s business, and the immediate priority of ensuring that the equipment
    and support programme is affordable and deliverable; and,
    • Three Non-Executive Directors (NED), one of whom would act as the lead NED (as
    defined in Cabinet Office guidance), one of whom would chair the departmental
    Audit Committee under the Board and a third who would chair the Appointments
    Committee.
  • Centralised or delegated? The DoD is having this very discussion about how forces should function in kinetic operations. The Levene report fudges the issue: "We do not advocate such a choice. The model we propose involves a strong Head Office to provide strategic direction, make the major balance of investment decisions, set a clear control framework and hold its delivery units to account, and delivery units which have the levers they need to run their business in line with that strategic direction and their budgets. Within that overarching corporate framework, some decisions are best made centrally and others should be devolved, some services are best provided corporately, others are best performed in the delivery units. Each needs to be worked through on its own merits, and this is what we have done."
  • When someone else is paying you can really go for it. The Daily Telegraph reported in July that senior managers over the past four years had spent over £986 000 000 of taxypayers' money on MOD credit cards and a time when the management "is grappling with a multi-billion pound black hole in its finances". Another investigation showed that the top ten managers at the MOD earned £1.7 million between them in 2010. The Levene report, in acknowledging public concerns, stressed that it was concerned with building a cost-effective model for a functioning MOD.
  • The report sees that "tackling problems in Defence acquisition must be a high priority, we regard Bernard Gray’s appointment as the Chief of Defence Materiel (CDM) as key to reforming this area. We have focussed on the responsibilities, authorities and accountabilities of the Head Office, military users and Defence Equipment and Support (DE&S) - including the CDM himself - in the Department’s model for delivering military capability and managing its finances, but we have not sought to duplicate the work Bernard Gray has set in hand on the future functions, structure and size of DE&S, and its relationship with industry. We understand that he will report to Ministers later in the year." Gray produced a report for the MOD on defence acquisition in 2009.
  • Revolution in Military Affairs predominates, being the acquisition of technology for technology's sake. In this regard, we are pressured by the United States, who are engaged in the ultimate RMA, and fear that if we don't keep up, interoperability issues will burgeon. We're hanging on to the coat tails of a management doctrine that will take us into financial armagedon. The MOD is in an unenviable position (similar to the NHS) that emerging technologies make their industry more expensive to run, rather than less expensive. The NHS has this problem with diagnostics and treatment, the MOD has this problem with weaponry. This problem has been known for a generation. Notably, Norman Augustine, when chairman of Lockheed Martin postulated one of his many Augustine's Laws regarding the DoD's ability to purchase fighter planes. The trajectory of cost of a fighter and the trajectory of DoD budgets meant that by 2054, the entire U.S. defense budget will purchase one aircraft.  It will be shared by the Air Force and the Navy 3 1/2 days each week, except in leap years, when it will be made available to the Marines for the extra day.
  •  
  • MOD as management, "brings transparency, standardisation and professionalisation to enabling processes, both to enable efficiency and to move towards filling posts with the right individuals, with the right skills, for the right length of time."
  • Levene was conscious of the history that preceded his own attempts to solve the problem, adding that no cure, as such, has been foundm that in the UK, the questions he asked also lay "behind the formation of a Committee of Imperial Defence in 1904 to organise Britain’s defence and military preparations. They have vexed Government ever since, through the Churchill reforms after the Second World War, the Mountbatten and Ismay / Jacob proposals that led to the creation of the unified MOD in 1964, the Heseltine reforms of the mid 1980s and the New Management Strategy that followed, and
    the various reforms of the 1990s and 2000s."
  • The report employs the principle of Occam's Razor, though Levene may not know it as such. He has tended towards simplicity over complexity, to aid transparency. Parsimony of approach is very well from the outside looking but when is so far up the Americans' asses that one is in front of them, and when the Americans waded into Iraq and Afghanistan, then parsimony becomes difficult.  
  • The Fog of War hangs over this report. Levene is as much in the dark as how the forces should be realigned to meet strategic threats in the 21st century as anyone else. When Levene identifies the major priorities of Defence as being to "Direct - understand the strategic context, make Defence policy and strategy, define and resource the necessary military capability and strategically direct operations
    and Defence Diplomacy, to Generate and Develop – generate force elements to meet current operations and potential military tasks and develop the future force; a key enabler of which is to: Acquire – procure and support the equipment, systems and commodities needed in the short and long term" he highlights the major problem facing the MOD - nobody really knows the strategy needed. Will we need to fight small wars or large ones? Long wars or short wars? Will we fight asymmetrically or as centres of mass against similar opponents. How will our nuclear deterrence work against the non-state actors and the mezzanine actors that operate autonomously in multiple states?
  • Working in conjunction with the already created National Security Council. 
"Those who had less experience [of the MOD] were often able to bring new ideas to the task from which we benefitted considerably"

Across the Atlantic they're having the same soul searching. Much was made in the US press of the concern levelled at Martin Dempsey at his confirmation hearing as the chairman of the JCS in late July amid mounting concerns about how adequately prepared the US is to combat cyberattacks. Regarding overspending, Dempsey was quizzed by Senator McCain.

"A group chartered by the secretary of the Army to look into how the Army procures major weapons systems found that every year since 1996, the Army has spent more than $1 billion annually on programs that were ultimately canceled. Since 2004, $3.3 billion to $3.8 billion per year of Army developmental testing and evaluation funding has been lost to canceled programs, including the now-canceled future combat system program.

As we know, the cost of the F-35 has lurched completely out of control. The few short months after the awarding of the contract to Boeing for the new tanker is now another additional $1 billion in cost. And the list goes on and on.

What -- what's the level of your concern and what do you think we ought to be doing about it?

DEMPSEY:
Well, Senator, as we discussed when I was here a few months ago, I -- I would never sit here and try to justify. It would be impossible to sit here and justify the current process, given that it has not delivered the capabilities we've required within the resources available to do so.

And so, I think that we're at a point where we absolutely have to seek acquisition reform."
Later, Senator Portman adds, "But I hear just as often blame attributed to the way the department develops requirements. I'm involved, again, on this contracting issue on a broader scale in looking at, you know, the Joint Strike Fighter, for instance, where now we're looking at a projected cost overrun of $150 billion, roughly. Unbelievable."

Here's the full confirmation hearing.

Here's Dempsey, earlier at TRADOC speaking about "leader development". By the end, I'm none the wiser about the DoD intends to develop leaders in the 21st century.

Sunday 17 July 2011

Pakistani motorcyclists and military aid



27th January 2011: Two men pull up on a motorcycle alongside the vehicle of Raymond Davis a CIA contractor, in Lahore. Davis pulls a weapon and shoots one dead, pursues the other and kills him, too. It is reported that Davis is released after the US pays $10 million to the victims' families and promises green cards.


2nd May 2011: According to Reuters, after the death of Osama Bin Laden, the first person to be made aware of American operations was General Kayani, phoned by Mike Mullen at 3 am.


16th May 2011: Karachi, Hassan al-Khatani is driving from the Saudi consulate, a motorcycle with two men on pulls up alongside his vehicle. He is gunned down, police say with a 9mm pistol


10th July 2011: The US suspends approximately a third of its military aid to Pakistan, approximately $800 million, citing 'difficulties'. Since, the ISI have been playing a dangerous game, telling media that the US is going to restore aid and promise to respect Pakistani sovereignty. 

Of all the ups and downs that have happened in the recent past months and that have led to this suspension of part of the military aid package, the two motorcycle incidents sum up the international nature of the displeasure and, even though there's no evidence, suggest the ISI is dispensing its own justice. 


It was probably the Saudis applying at least some pressure to the US through backchannels that added weight to suspend some of the aid package and that the motorcycle incidents are tips of a larger iceberg of espionage retaliation that is going on after the bin Laden affair. 


Bear in mind, it isn't just the Americans that are angry - the Saudis have borne some of the fall-out and Pakistan is playing a very dangerous game: it's siding with its militant proxies.

Monday 11 July 2011

What the Warrior Reads

I was interested in the theme of Josef Ansorge's 'Spirits of War: A Field Manual' (2010, International Political Sociology) which suggested that field manuals represent the (only) method through which military doctrine is 'disseminated and communicated'. Field manuals have been a central debate to military doctrine since the release (December 15, 2006) of FM 3-24. The manual had "1.5 million downloads in the first month", now represents a central COIN work and arouses controversy as a piece of anthropology (the Ansorge piece chronicles the debate well and has excellent sources, but see also here and here). 

But I was also interested in the general literature that 'warfighters' read. In a number of my interviews with serving military personnel, field manuals represent the 'classroom texts' whilst outside of the lesson, these soldiers have a number of favoured books that seem to amply represent their concerns. Thus below is just a very few 'favourite' reads of some 'warfighters'. I'd welcome more.

Attempting to gain a new perspective on the literature, G. W. Bush reads it upside down

In his preface to Book of a Mujahideen, Basayev notes that he obtained the Brazilian self-help guru and spiritualist Paulo Coehlo's 'Warrior the Light: A Manual' to derive benefits for his mujahideen. 

From the blurb:
Who is the Warrior of Light? Any of us, reaching out to be the fullest person we can be, not afraid to have doubts and fears and to make mistakes and to learn from them. "That is why he is a warrior of light, because he has been through all this and yet has never lost hope of being better than he is." It is a path of tolerance: "In order to have faith in his own path, he does not need to prove that someone else's path is wrong." It is a path of intuition: "the warrior knows that intuition is God's alphabet and he continues listening to the wind and talking to the stars." If we are met with the same problems and situations over and over again, instead of becoming depressed we should learn: "Yes, you have been through all this before," replies his heart. "But you have never been beyond it." Then the warrior realises that these repeated experiences have but one aim: to teach him what he does not want to learn.
Collected from Coelho's newspaper columns in the mid-90s, these short passages are not always easy or comfortable; but maybe that's because life isn't either. This is a book for dipping into for spiritual refreshment and sustenance.

Israeli Military Strategists
Engaged the 'tool-box' of abstract philosophy, in particular Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus (ATP). Below is the elegant comment of "Elinor" to a 2006 piece on why the Israel employs the tools of ATP:

"This article misses the point of the IDF’s engagement with Deleuze and Guattari: the problem is that the IDF takes on the role of the war machine as well as that of the state. On one level, Israeli state forces relentlessly striate Palestinian space, imposing a system of controls that severely limit population movement and behaviour. With their roadblocks, checkpoints, Israeli-only roads, curfews, control of water sources and closure of borders, the Israeli state tries to limit Palestinian movement to zero. (ICHAD is very good on this and provides a number of detailed maps). At the same time, the IDF has learned from Thousand Plateaus the value of smooth space; the IDF becomes a war machine. Deleuze and Guattari say “make the world Swiss cheese,” and the IDF moves through a city by blowing holes in walls. They do not move down the roads, they create a new route through buildings: the war machine erupts into a Palestinian living room. Deleuze and Guattari acknowledged that this could happen: an insurgent inhabits smooth space, but so does globalised capital and all the violent apparatuses in its service."

Abu Mu'sab al-Suri
Catapulted into the popular Western domain by Brinjar Lia's 'Architect of Global Jihad', and by the $5 million bounty placed on his head by President Bush (before he was captured by Pakistani security agents in Quetta in October 2005 and handed over to the CIA - his whereabouts, in US custody, are currently unknown). Al-Suri has been variously described as being being 'the Francis Fukuyama of al-Qaida' (Newsweek) and the 'most dangerous terrorist you've never heard of' (CNN). He is 'provocatively at home with infidel sources, more likely to quote Mao than Mohammed' and well known for giving lectures on Robert Taber's 1965 classic study of guerrilla movements, The War of the Flea (once a favourite of the IRA). He is the author of the 1600-page 'The Global Islamic Resistance Call'.

Abu Sayyaf Group 
Utilised Carlos Marighella's MiniManual of the Urban Guerrilla turning it into the MiniManual of the Urban Mujahideen by replacing Marxist words with Islamic words ( cited in Porter, 2009, Military Orientalism)

Tillman was rapidly ascending to an iconic status within the American post-9.11 landscape, having given up his multi million dollar contract with the Arizona Cardinals to enlist as an Army Ranger. Tillman was killed in Afghanistan in 2004, in an incident which is now believed to have been a blue-on-blue event after a firefight with Taliban. In a Sports Illustrated article from 2006, "who else," writes Smith in the article, "in the NFL or the U.S. Army took a book everywhere, even on 10-minute errands, read The Communist Manifesto, Mein Kampf, the Bible and the Koran, so he could carve out his own convictions ... then bought you the book and picked a philosophical fight just to flush out some viewpoint that might push him to revise his, push him to evolve?"

Abu Walid al-Masri
You can't have fun in between the fighting? His now infamous email exchange with Leah Farrall was a masterclass.

Abu Bakr Naji 
Writer of 'The Management of Savagery', and disciple of Abu 'Ubayd al-Qurashi (who has relentlessly argued that media not military success is key, that the media is 'the undefended front'), has quoted from Paul Kennedy's theory of imperial overstretch in asserting that, 'If America expands the use of its military power and strategically extends more than necessary, this will lead to its downfall.' But of course - Kennedy's theory fails in its inability to define 'necessary' - what is necessary for a NeoCon is not the same necessity as for a dove...

Discoveries in Taliban/al-Qaeda safehouses
Sun Tzu wrote that it is imperative to, 'know the enemy, know thyself...' Which goes some way to explaining the fascination with the reading material that is discovered in the insurgent strongholds. The other reason may be that as Barkawi noted, military history has been an almost entirely Western enterprise (2004, 'Globalization and War'). 

The Taliban and Pakistani Taliban have very different strategic perspectives (regional) from the global jihad that al-Qaeda purports to wage, but the groups tend to get lumped together when evaluating their texts found in Afghanistan/NWFP houses.

William Lind's 1989 4GW article was unfashionable within American military doctrinal thought until an Arabic translation was posted to a militant website with ensuing discussion (see Thomas X. Hammes, "Fourth Generation Warfare Evolves, Fifth Emerges", Military Review, 2007).  

Clausewitz, with his 'centre of mass' and apparently statist trinitarian warfare had gone out of fashion in the 4GW world (Thomas X. Hammes has lamented the overeliance on Clausewitz and Jomini), although nobody told al-Qaeda. Indeed, Johnson and Mason (2007, Orbis, 'Understanding the Taliban', pp.71-89) suggest that disruption of the Clausewitzian 'centre of gravity' that is the enemy's 'main source of strength' is at the heart of the 'long war' of global jihad. In late 2001, a journalist found a copy of Clausewitz' On War in an al-Qaeda safe house, with passages highlighted on 'courage' (National Security Archives, DIA, Cable IIR/Veteran Traveller's Analysis of Al Qaeda and Taliban exploitable Weaknesses' cited in Porter, 2009, Military Orientalism) 

Leftist Revolutionary Manuals predominate in the training camps, which augments Olivier Roy's claim that al-Qaeda is the heir to Marxist revolutionaries. Porter notes (2009, Military Orientalism) that Winds of War has been found in at least one training camp, and insurgents are fond of quoting Mao's 'three stage' concept of guerrilla struggle. Which may explain where al-Qaeda are going wrong, because a global jihad survives by assistance from outside, not among the people.

G. W. Bush 
Purported to have had Eliot Cohen's 'Supreme Command' as one of his vacation reads in the run up the Iraq invasion of 2003. John Keegan wrote this of the book review in 2002:
"During the Cuban Missile Crisis, President Kennedy read Barbara Tuchman's "August 1914". As President George W. Bush prepares for a second Gulf war, he apparently is reading Eliot Cohen's Supreme Command.
Kennedy would have had more fun. Tuchman is a better read than Cohen. She also advances what proved in the circumstances to be important advice: leave the subordinates to deal with the telegrams while the boss keeps a clear head to decide for peace or war. Curiously, the episode itself produced a book still eminently valuable to a statesman in crisis, Robert Kennedy's Thirteen Days. It tells how Bobby, as chairman of the Executive Committee, spared his brother Jack the confusions that helped to drive Europe into the first world war."

Barack Obama
Photographed in 2010 carrying a copy of Fareed Zakari's 'Post-American World' about the myriad threats to American hegemony. From the blurb: 

"This is not a book about the decline of America, but rather about the rise of everyone else." So begins Fareed Zakaria's important new work on the era we are now entering. Following on the success of his best-selling The Future of Freedom, Zakaria describes with equal prescience a world in which the United States will no longer dominate the global economy, orchestrate geopolitics, or overwhelm cultures. He sees the "rise of the rest"—the growth of countries like China, India, Brazil, Russia, and many others—as the great story of our time, and one that will reshape the world."

See also Joseph Nye's new work, "The Future of Power" about relative and absolute decline of American in the 21st century and his great conceptual model, Soft Power. 

Interviews with "Boots-on-the-ground" British Military Personnel 
Suggest this is currently doing the rounds: Bomb Hunters: In Afghanistan With Britain's Elite Bomb Disposal Unit. The blurb notes, 'Bomb Hunters are up against the Improvised Explosive Device – the IED – the deadly homemade bombs planted by the Taliban. Hard to detect and easy to trigger, an estimated 10 bombs for every one of the 10,000 British troops have been planted in the region. IEDs are now the main killer of British troops in Afghanistan and the ultimate psychological weapon.'

In 2003, a scheme was implemented to make British families and the serving member of the family read the same book so that it would form a 'bridge' of shared experience and ease deployment stress.

U.S Military Strategists
It's probably not hyperbole to say that the US military is in something of a spirito-strategic quagmire, vainly clawing out for holy grails that would show how to reorient its forces effectively to face this post-Cold War landscape in which it has proved so ineffective. Of the many debates that have surface, the one about Greg Mortenson's 2006 book "Three Cups of Tea" is surely one of the more bizarre. The book is not martial in context, relating the author's account of his failed ascent of K2 and his subsequent work in the nearby Pakistani villages and his building of schools there. But his intimate knowledge of the 'human terrain' there made him a celebrity expert amongst US counterinsurgency experts and propogated the COIN 'tea culture'. Recently, the vast majority of the book's veracity has bbeen called into question, suggesting a desparation amongst the highest eschelons of US military for a Moses type figure to lead them to the promised land (further here and here).

"It's the economy, stupid."
Finally, the power of a well-placed recommendation can work wonders for sales. When Buffett suggested to a Dutch financier the 'obscure' book on the Weimar Republic by Adam Fergusson, one time advisor to the Tory minister Lord Howe, published in 1975, sales hit the roof, copies changing hands for as much as £1600. The book, 'When Money Dies: The Nightmare of the Weimer Hyper-Inflation' has since been reprinted. Another book of note is Adam Tooze's 'The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy'.

Any other warrior reading comments, most welcome.