25 September 2017
So, you want to be a senior strategic advisor to the
Secretary of Defense or the President of the United States of America? Wouldn’t
it be useful and interesting to know what you might be getting into ahead of
time? Read on…
Context: An unpopular President, controversy swirling around
their foreign and domestic policies; tensions between the White House and the
Department of Justice, eventually culminating in the resignations or firing of
Attorneys General; all during the country’s longest, most unpopular, and
failing war of choice in which the other side is winning.
The following is a confession of a Dept. of Defense (DOD)
Strategic Advisor with the diplomatic rank of Lt General (3 stars), who has
worked alongside all the top generals, civilian leaders, counterinsurgency
experts (COIN), diplomats, National Security Council (NSC) leaders, academics
and allied partners. This advisor is no armchair observer; he started his
career as a Marine Infantry Rifle Company Commander, earned a Master’s degree
and PhD in Economics at Harvard specializing in decision making. Thereafter,
think-tank work and various consultancies led him to the E-ring of the Pentagon
where he became special assistant to a 4 star leader. Hand-picked by the
country’s top COIN expert, the advisor deployed on a two-year tour of
observation and analysis wearing a helmet and carrying his AR-15, going deep
behind enemy lines to observe the challenges facing American ground forces at
forward operating bases (FOBs) and among the people.
Author of an NSC review midway through this very long war,
he asks the United States Government to provide department-by-department
assessments of the progress of the war and prognosis for the best courses of
action to win the war. The government is split down the middle. The optimists,
including the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JOS), the Combatant Command in charge of
the region, and sometimes the relevant Bureau inside State; face off against
CIA, OSD, INR (State’s intel arm), and the majority of government and think
tank analysts, who see no end in sight and no way to win in any meaningful
sense of the term. Even the optimists are not enthusiastic, the Combatant
Command assesses:
Three fourths of battles are at the
enemy’s choice of time, place, type, and duration. ..Less than one percent of
nearly two million allied small unit operations in the last two years resulted
in contact with the enemy. The enemy basically controls both sides’ casualty
rates. (p. 240)
That TOP SECRET assessment merely served to illustrate the
many problems America was facing fighting a war on the other side of the world
with a weak local partner and an adversary with a fanatic will to win. Suicide
attacks, women and children as human shields, threatening local towns and
villages to support the insurgency at the risk of beheadings, stolen crops, and
violent intimidation; low tech solutions to counter the high tech war mounted
by Washington that was running the coffers dry and stirring resentment at home;
this reality prompted the following insight:
“What I saw as the major lesson [of
the war] was the impact on policy failures of internal practices of lying to
superiors, tacitly encouraged by those superiors, but resulting in a cognitive
failure at the presidential level to recognize realities. This was part of a
broader cognitive failure of the bureaucracy I had come to suspect. There were
situations in which the US government, starting ignorant, did not, would not,
learn…” There “[were] institutional ‘anti-learning’ mechanisms working to
preserve and guarantee un-adaptive and unsuccessful behavior. There was the
fast turn-over in personnel [fighting a 1 year war 7 times]. Lack of
institutional memory at any level… A general failure to study history or to
analyze or even record operational experiences, especially mistakes. Above all,
effective pressures for optimistically false reporting at every level for
describing ‘progress’ rather than problems or failure, concealed the very need
for change in approach or for learning. (pp. 185-6)
On his return to Washington after 2 years downrange, the
advisor returns as a consultant to the NSC, hired by the National Security
Advisor himself, to conduct the aforementioned TS assessment.
The war? Vietnam. But it just as easily could have been Iraq
or Afghanistan. That should be something that concerns strategic thinkers. The
strategic analyst? Daniel Ellsberg. Reading Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and
the Pentagon Papers (2002), an important book that somehow evaded MI’s desk
until recently, has been a fascinating experience. Ellsberg is not some fringe
recalcitrant who was seeking publicity by spilling secrets. Whatever one makes
of his decision to release the Pentagon Papers – he will always be a traitor to
some and a freedom fighter to others – that’s the inevitable outcome of
whistleblowing on this scale – Ellsberg can’t be dismissed as a beatnik
professor. Far from it. Secrets is exceptionally well-written,
insightful, balanced (yes, really), written by someone who was a product of
what today might be fashionably referred to as the ‘deep state’.
Ellsberg’s PhD
advisors included Thomas Schelling; he worked for and often directly engaged
Robert McNamara; he regularly engaged Bill Bundy (State), Walt Rostow (NSC),
Averell Harriman (Ambassador at Large since FDR), and Clark Clifford (advisor
to president from FDR onwards); and was hired by Henry Kissinger to produce the
incoming Nixon administration’s scene-setting NSSM-1 (National Security Study
Memoranda #1). That was the first if
hundreds of studies commissioned by Kissinger to help him control the organs of
state. Indeed, Ellsberg and Kissinger had crossed paths surprisingly
frequently, starting back in 1959 when Kissinger invited Ellsberg to deliver a
lecture series to his graduate students on “The Art of Coercion”, which
included classes on “Theory and Practice of Blackmail” and the “Political Uses
of Madness”, both based on Hitler’s techniques in dealing with Austria and
Czechoslovakia in 1937/8. At a lunch attended by Kissinger, Alexander Haig, and
Ellsberg at President Nixon’s home in San Clemente in August of 1970, Kissinger praises Ellsberg to Haig as the
source of the strategic thinking behind the Cambodia invasion – Namely Nixon’s
intent to be unpredictable as a means to get the Vietnamese to the negation
table. The parallels to Trump’s statements on North Korea are straight out of
the same playbook. Readers can judge which President was effective using this
strategy, laid out to Kissinger’s class by Ellsberg in 1959.
During the Cuban missile crisis, President Kennedy relied on
the EXCOM or Executive Committee formed specially to manage the crisis.
Ellsberg’s first major break in DC comes with his appointment to the EXCOM
staff due to his research record on nuclear issues and decision making.
His first experience with the divergence between official
and public information occurred when the fall 1961 National Intelligence
Estimate (NIE) revealed the missile gap was completely wrong. Prior NIEs on the
subject of Soviet capabilities estimated that they had 120 missiles (June
1961), while Strategic Air Command’s estimate was 1000. The reality was the
United States in fact had a 10:1 superiority of missiles to the Soviets, the
Fall 61 NIE counted 40 Atlas and Titans in the US arsenal, compared to just 4
Soviet ss-6 ICBMs. Leading Ellsberg to observe:
Each side had grossly misunderstood
the other, wrongly estimated its behavior, failed to understand the actions of
the other as responses to interpretations od the combination of their own words
and actions. There had been ‘failures of communication’ of the sort risking the
most dangerous of consequences. (pp. 33-34)
Following the crisis, Walt Rostow, Policy Planning Chair at
State, convened an inter-agency panel of deputies to sponsor a study of past
crises to assist the President in enhancing his control over the bureaucracy
and the machinery of government’s interactions with Soviet counterparts to
reduce the likelihood of disaster. The study’s lead was Daniel Ellsberg.
From there Ellsberg
is hired as the senior advisor to John T McNaughton, the Assistant Secretary of
Defense for International Security affairs, Ellsberg’s portfolio was restricted
to one topic alone: the war in Vietnam. The book provides a fly-on-the-wall
account of what it was like to be at the top of OSD. Indeed, his very first day at work was
consumed by FLASH traffic from a US Navy destroyer off the coast of North
Vietnam that reported it was under torpedo attack. Messages continued to stream
in from the USS MADDOX as the play-by-play of the attack unfolded. Ellsberg’s
role was to filter the traffic upwards for Secretary McNamara via McNaughton.
Toward the end of a long and confusing engagement the ship’s CO recommends
restraint before jumping to conclusions. The CO was starting to have doubts
about what had really happened during the nighttime action in the South China
Sea. It turns out his creeping caution was justified, the multiple torpedo
attacks that were passing right by the hull of the MADDOX appeared in hindsight
as the result of a very excited sonar man listening to the MADDOX’s own screws
churning up the black waters, While some large caliber machine gun fire had
made it’s mark on the superstructure, it soon appeared to inside experts that
the whole thing was blown out if proportion, as often happens with initial
reports of action at moments of high tension.
Ellsberg explains how he soon after discovered that the
action, such as it was, by the North Vietnamese was not unprovoked aggression,
but a response to a US covert operation (34A OPS) that had earlier shelled a
North Vietnamese island. That was on top od regular ‘Desoto’ patrols inside the
12 mile limit designed to provoke the North to illuminate its costal radar for
signature collection.
So the origin if the Gulf of Tonkin ‘incident’ and
subsequent Resolution by Congress was all a big misunderstanding. Ellsberg does
not rail at this act of falling backwards into war as a big lie or conspiracy,
even writing decades later. Indeed, his assessment at the time was full of
empathy for decision makers. He gives an example that on just one busy day in
the office, China tested its first nukes; Khrushchev was ousted from power; and
there was a change of government in London. He wondered, “Can men even as
brilliant and adroit as these – for sheer brainpower and energy, the Kennedy
crew… could not be bettered – manage safely and wisely so many challenges at
once, with so little time to acquire more than a shallow understanding of any
one? Can you really run the world this way?” (p. 47) MI has often had cause
based on recent observations to wonder the same question.
Reflecting his long incremental intellectual journey,
Ellsberg recounts his thinking and reactions during his service in the
Pentagon. He was struck, for example, by the fact that both he and his boss
seemed to share the same growing reservations about the war and its trajectory.
Both wanted out of Vietnam yet “there is scarcely a hint of any of these
attitudes in any piece of paper he drafted or signed from 1964 to 1967”… This view was shared by almost all those with
whom he interacted just under the top level if government “but not by any of
their bosses” (p. 57).
He was not aware at the time of the various highly
classified critiques of the war, such as the Ball memo of 1 July 1965 or the Clifford
Camp David briefing to Johnson and McNamara, both of which accurately predict
the outcome of continued involvement. “To have read even one of these critiques
in June 65 would have punctured…the spell of apparent unanimity of support by
insiders for what seemed a crazy but consensual policy”. He later came to
realize these views were restricted in their circulation in order to protect
the President, should the war turn sour, lest critics point to ignored advice
as a massive failure of judgement (p. 83).
Ellsberg applies the decision-making scholar’s gaze to
events as they unfold and discerns a cognitive dissonance that he tries to
explain to himself over the course of his life and, in turn, this book. He goes
from trying to understand official decision making to eventually trying to
understand his own. This journey of discovery is the core of this book. His
principle conundrum extends from his first official work on Kennedy’s EXCOM and
builds from there. The curiosity that eventually becomes a torment surrounds
example after example, like the aforementioned missile gap ‘data’ and road to
war narrative, where official insiders’ understanding of what’s really going on
differs so markedly from presidential statements and actions.
Why would every single President from Eisenhower onwards
allow the United States to get slowly sucked into involvement in a war that
most if not all of their top advisors warn in
advance will result in utter failure and ruin for the US? The defense
scholar simply cannot understand why rational actors, who are thus forewarned
by their smartest and most experienced advisors, would continually choose a
path that the best advice relentlessly warns is not just high risk, but almost
certainly a path to disaster. General of the Army and later President
Eisenhower is no strategic fool. Ellsberg’s faith in the system and in its
leaders is so complete, at the outset, that by the time he finally puts the
pieces of the puzzle together, it feels like a great betrayal.
The Vietnamese had fought the Chinese for centuries, then,
more recently, the Japanese and the French. Kennedy himself had visited Vietnam
in 1951 on a CODEL. He spent most of his day with French Général Jean de Lattre
de Tassigny, who assured Kennedy of victory.
What else would a commanding general of a theatre of war say to a
prominent allied lawmaker? Yet that same evening on the roof top deck if the
Caravelle Hotel in Saigon, as artillery sounded softly in the distance, JFK had
a few quiet drinks with US diplomat Edmund Gullion, who the Senator asked for
an assessment. Gullion replied without missing a beat:
In twenty years there will be no
more colonies. We’re going nowhere out here. The French have lost. If we come
in here and do the same thing, we will lose, too, for the same reason. There’s
no will or support for this kind of war back in Paris. The home front is lost.
The same thing would happen to us. (p. 197)
Ellsberg observes, “Ask the right person the right question
and you could get the picture pretty fast.’ The challenge at the time of making
a decision is knowing who the right person is to ask, and what to ask them.
It’s all obvious in hindsight bit the role of the analyst is to understand and
contextualize all the competing pressures and viewpoints as they present at the
time. They bulk of the book shows that Ellsberg gets this all too well. What he
was trying to convey is that leaders should have given more weight to not only
advice of this kind, but also the track record of the Vietnamese against
outsiders.
Ironically enough, Ellsberg’s blind spot, as far as MI can
discern, is his faith that the system will act on evidence and realistic
advice; he seems to be genuinely shocked that great leaders like Kennedy and
Johnson could be swayed by non-rational considerations, by ideological and
emotional considerations. Ellsberg’s field is economics, where game theory and
mathematics explain behavior – until they don’t. He lacks the historian’s eye
for human frailty.
In strategic terms, America in the 1950s was a hormonal
teenager newly emerged from Isolation into a cruel world. It had new-found
strength in the form of nuclear weapons, wealth, vast natural resources,
scientific and technological advantage, radically new industrial processes, and
unprecedented moral license found in the lofty ideals of the Declaration and
Constitution. For two centuries, Europe had squandered its advantage in wars of
conquest that resulted in bankruptcy, financial and moral. America was about to
find out what the Great Powers had long known – the compromise required to
maintain power, and even more so, control, over a diverse human landscape that
was increasingly able to reject that control thanks to changes in technology
wrought by war, and to international norms forced on the world by Woodrow
Wilson and later FDR (19 points and Atlantic Charter respectively).
Self determination, the international extension of the
American Revolution to the world was glorious in principle, until America was a
superpower locked in a global struggle with a competing economic, military and
‘moral’ system that in every detail was anathema to the American ideal. Thus
reframed, the context of global competition for dominance got caught up in vast
complexities, corner cutting, and expediency, where winning mattered more than
principle. The exigencies of global leadership forced a Pandora’s Box of
non-linear demands on American power. Nor the need to show resolve to Western European allies, by not ‘cutting
and running’ from a trivial small war in the third world that had no strategic
value to the US, became a matter of great importance ti American statecraft.
Rational cost-benefit analysis alone is insufficient to
understand international relations. Statecraft is the continual negotiation
between fear, honor, and interests, in the pursuit of comparative advantage in
the international system. Try to do that rationally, without contradiction,
across all of the pressing global issues a Great Power must control. It’s
impossible. This is not to say that abandoning moral principle is necessary in
statecraft nor is it an endorsement of US Policy towards Vietnam across the
decades from 1948 to 1975. It is merely MI’s attempt to explain why Ellsberg
feels unease and later betrayal. He is a gifted strategic thinker. His
commitment to understand the cognitive dissonance he was experiencing led him
to volunteer for a two-year tour in Vietnam when he could have just as easily
become a radical critic from the comfort of his armchair. As one strategic
analyst trying to understand another’s personal and professional journey, this
seems to be the best explanation for what Ellsberg missed.
In Vietnam, Ellsberg’s growing reputation at the highest
levels of government continues with the extraordinary opportunity to work
directly for legends in the US COIN world. Ed Lansdale, a retired general and
CIA officer, personally insisted on Ellsberg’s participation. The latter went
into the field for long stretches at a time, by road, not air, through VC
territory, with another legend, John Paul Vann. Luckily for history, Ellsberg
recounts directly from his contemporary notes what he learned from Vann as they
toured US and SVN outposts. Those who found value in the “Fixing Intel” report
by Mike Flynn and his team in Afghanistan will see echoes in Ellsberg’s
reporting. The importance of getting outside the wire, knowing the language and
people or being with those who do, being able to sort out the people from the
enemy and understanding their concerns, needs and interests. Being able to
assess how and why policy or operations fit US objectives or accidentally
assist the enemy. The list goes on. Reading these chapters in Ellsberg and
comparing them to contemporary accounts of war in Afghanistan, in particular,
there is a dreaded sense that really nothing has changed. MI has a theory about
why this is and it can be summarized in the bumper sticker “Metrics over
Meaning”, a theory MI will expand upon at a later date.
On the plane ride back to DC from Saigon after this
incredible insight into the war he never wanted the US to engage in, he is
called to the back of the plane and joins another COIN legend Robert Komer and
SECDEF McNamara in their debate over the progress of the war. McNamara is
arguing that the US is in fact going
backwards “we’ve put more than a hundred thousand troops in… and there’s been
no improvement… that means the underlying situation is really worse.” Yet an
hour later as they land at Andrews AFB McNamara steps off the plane to a set of
microphones and says, “I’ve just come back from Vietnam and I’m glad to be able
to tell you that we are showing great progress in every dimension of our effort.” (p.142)
That tension between reality and salesmanship drives
Ellsberg to eventually understand that not only is the war lost, but that
someone has to tell the public.
Yet even then he does not rush to leak classified
information. He returns to Rand and writes assessments. He rallies colleagues
at Rand to publicly present a critique, which is a morally courageous thing to
do given their funding is almost all from DOD contracts. He then speaks at
public debates. At one, he re-connects with a fellow speaker, Robert Kennedy,
who invites Ellsberg to join him in his limo ride back to the Senate. This culminates in RFK asking Ellsberg to be
his Vietnam advisor for the coming election, an opportunity Ellsberg resists so
that he can inform all candidates and not be perceived as anyone’s ‘man’. Their
exchanges are interesting reading in their own right, RFK insists that JFK
would not have escalated or put ground troops into Vietnam. Ellsberg visits
RFKs hotel and finds him wandering the halls in a bathrobe before anyone else
had awoken for the day and wonders id his security is lacking… it’s just one if
the many snippets of this book that shows that Daniel Ellsberg is not some
outsider intent on bringing the country down. He genuinely tries all sorts of
pathways to power to get his message across. One can only speculate that had
RFK lived, how much different things might have been; or, on the contrary, how
frustrated Ellsberg might have become as RFK got drawn into the same escalation
spiral that consumed all the others before and after him.
His first leak is to RFK who used the information passed him
to challenge the conduct of the war. He also shares information with a range of
others in Congress. Senator Fulbright later says that had he known the Tonkin
evidence at the time he would not have authored the resolution. Ellsberg is
hired by Kissinger to author and run the NSSM-1 study after Nixon’s
inauguration. He continues to have meetings with Nixon Administration
heavyweights including Kissinger, but does not break through.
To his closest friends, he predicts that Nixon will escalate
in order to try and find some space to get the North to the negotiation table.
Nixon’s “secret plan” was an election trick (which has contemporary echoes in Trump’s claim about a secret plan for ISIS
and claims he knew more than the generals, etc.), and eventually Ellsberg
decides that the president is the problem.
The fallout of the release of the Pentagon Papers and the
connection of that and Ellsberg to Watergate is a subject in its own right and
will be treated as such in a coming installment. The parallels with the
challenges besetting the Trump Administration are truly remarkable and demand
separate treatment.
Daniel Ellsberg’s book is not a hindsight self justification
diatribe. It’s and honest portrayal of an ultimate insider at the highest level
of government as they struggle with the contradictions and contrivances at the
intersection between American ideals and extant global and domestic political
exigencies of the day. Two thirds of the book provides readers with an
excellent snapshot of what it’s like to be in the room among senior
decision-makers when major events happen. Likewise, it also provides an excellent
assessment from the ground up of tactical, operational, and strategic mistakes
in the war. A former Marine Company Commander, Ellsberg knows what he’s doing
as he travels around the country. Veterans of America’s recent wars will no
doubt be surprised by the echoes within his pages. In the end, the strategic
advisor does want to do all his professional life. Going outside imposed many
costs on him, but his conscience allowed him no alternative path. The judgement
as to whether it was worth it is up to the reader.
The question of the most effective way to advise a senior
leader permeates this fascinating account of American strategic decision
making. There are really two choices: provide a consensus viewpoint, or outline
both pros and cons. Does the leader want to be given a solution or are they
more comfortable engaging in dialectic: thesis, counter thesis, synthesis? It
all depends on the leader. Readers might be thinking just about now that any
decision-making process that merely provides a solution is deeply flawed, but
that would be to forget the sheer volume if decisions senior leaders have to
make and the finite time available. Ask any leader in government or the private
sector (of a comparable size to a department of state), their most precious resource
is not money. It’s not even people. It’s time. When President Obama was
presented with the traditional bureaucratic solution of three Courses of Action
(COAs), where two were essentially implausible, he hit the roof and demanded
that SECDEF Robert Gates and his team go back to the drawing board to develop 3
genuine COAs for Afghanistan. That this shocked an old hand like Gates is
telling, given he has served multiple presidents in various capacities since
Reagan.
MI’s view is that the only responsible way to advise a
senior leader is to engage in dialectic. Most importantly, it has to be via long-form
narrative memoranda. PowerPoint is incapable of providing complex rich
arguments on highly contested topics of national importance. It was not designed
for that purpose, but it has been used for that purpose. PowerPoint is great to illustrate a simple
idea, operational design, a map or picture or video, the stock in trade of
modern intelligence systems. But decision making about war and the competitive
positioning of a superpower in a world teaming with complicated relationships,
challenges, and limited resources requires that effort is made to explain
assumptions, present evidence, contrast ideas, develop theories for obtaining
the objective (indeed defining exactly what that is can be the hardest part)
and exploring all the possible challenges to pathways to success, in order to
properly see what’s at stake and assess the level of risk that one is willing
to take to achieve the objective. Strategy has to be brutally honest and admit
when an objective is out of reach.
Strategy takes time and effort. For each COA, a responsible
strategist should lay out to the decision maker a series of “branches and
sequels” along the pathway. Donald Rumsfeld was roundly criticized for many
things, not the least of which was his comment regarding strategic planning.
But it was an insightful observation, namely that known unknowns and unknown
unknowns vastly complicate thinking through each COAs branch and sequels. [Branch
and sequels refers to the choice of a certain COA and what might be expected to
happen along that pathway as the war unfolds. It is a very useful technique to
thinking through the action-reaction cycle of battle or the larger war. It’s
imperfect but it must be attempted in order to better grasp the risks involved
in every action so that the strategy selected maximizes opportunity and
minimizes risk, while trying to anticipate the same calculus of the other side.
MI wonders how often this traditional form of strategic assessment is practiced
in DC today. It’s hard, takes time, and a lot of thought. It’s highly
contentious. Which means it’s thought-provoking – it’s the opposite of
consensus reporting].
The strategist’s job is to anticipate known unknowns and be
adaptable enough to accommodate the unknown when it inevitably happens. This is
why strategy is an art. It is an art that uses science – correct information is
foundational to developing a sound strategy – but as a human endeavor, war
requires judgement based in well-reasoned analysis, and that us beyond the
simple collection of metrics (which is what science means on the modern
battlefield). Metrics without context is a sure fire way to lose a war. For
example, what is more important: the number of hours Baghdad has electricity or
the perception among the Iraqi people that their liberation has turned into an
occupation?
Alert readers will see the correlation between the basic
systems of analysis taught at any good university (the dialectic) and how to do
strategic intelligence and planning. The 9/11 Commission Report’s top finding
was the failure if imagination – this cannot be repeated enough – it remains
the core problem today. Yet after that failure, the Report focused on the dire
need for better analysis. In management speak, it called for the use of “Red
Teaming” and alternative analysis. This has always struck MI as a failure to
understand what dialectic is and how it must be used. Thus, by definition,
alternatives and branches and sequels, and even unknown unknowns, get compared
and contrasted in the strategy making process. MI knows from professional
experience in Red Teams within DoD and the IC (the vast majority of which have
been killed off or have simply withered) are unpopular because they often
confuse their task with merely being contrary or are seen by decision makers as
such. If strategic questions before the US are seen as being binary either orthodox
or unorthodox… then something very wrong is going on.
The hard work of assembling facts, building a hypothesis,
testing it and presenting the findings of that assessment in developing a
series of COAs, each with it’s own branches and sequels that attempts to
anticipate (as best as imagination allows) what the opponent might do, and thus
force the US to do in response, is absolutely vital to doing sound strategic
analysis.
Secrets should be read by national security
strategists for its insights into decision making within OSD. Written by the
ultimate insider, connected professionally to both ground truth (COIN experts)
and the highest decision making office in the land – the NSC.
Secrets should be read by anyone interested in
undertaking strategic analysis at the highest level in the United States
government. The parallels to contemporary challenges is one of the most notable
features of this insightful book. The passage of time and a series of reviews
(e.g. 911 Commission Report) for how to improve strategic assessments have not
resulted in stark improvements in strategic analysis and high level government
decision making.
The burden of choosing to be the indispensable nation forces
unpleasant choices on leaders that often result in contradictions and
expediency that flies in the face of American values as enshrined in
foundational documents. Our opponents revel in provoking us to undertake
actions that appear hypocritical. Whether for pragmatic or moral reasons, this
must be guarded against. The contemporary world is one in which symbolism is
meaning – control the narrative and you control the war. Weak states and
non-state actors encourage American momentum in directions suited to their
objectives, and step aside as America’s sheer size and velocity propels the
country down un-advantageous pathways. Dexterous and agile America is not,
except in very niche, special capabilities that all too often the USG prefers
not to use for fear of exposing an advantage that a thinking enemy may quickly
emulate.
The only way to avoid such traps is to creatively outthink
the other side. We have the technology. We have very smart people. What we seem
to be missing is the creative space vital in open systems to conduct rigorous
dialectical analysis that anticipates enemy COAs and tricks them into unforced
errors. They are fanatical suicidal neck cutting monsters and we are struggling
to win the narrative. That’s a strategic disaster of the first order.
Equally, Russia is a failed state, its sole resource is in
the doldrums, and its dictatorship is in reality holding on against a rising
awareness among the young that might result in open challenge. Yet it has just
bought an American election for pennies on the dollar, using troll armies
manned mostly by kids. Reading interviews
with these master manipulators of social media there is a clear sense that they
never believed that Americans would be dumb enough to actually take their crazy
social media postings seriously. Love her or hate her, who in their right minds
would honestly think the leader of a major American political party would be
running a child sex ring out of a pizzeria? Turns out, quite a lot of people.
Including at least one who followed his leader’s suggestion and sought out a
way to exercise his second amendment rights to save the nonexistent children.
America is a superpower. It’s behaving like a tin pot
dictatorship. It should be mastering social media, the vast bulk of which is
American owned, to discredit the insane and desperate antics of terrorists and
kleptocrats. Universal human rights reflect ideals enshrined in the
constitution and Bill of Rights for a reason. America still has a powerful tool
to attract supporters all around the world. Yet our actions repel possible
friends and partners. Clear, creative, strategic thinking will not change our
position in the world overnight but it will act as a long term guide to the
changes we need to make. We are losing multiple narratives to what should be
easy marks. We won the Cold War against a global enemy, armed with thousands of
nuclear warheads, through patience and often smart choices. Today a bunch of
fanatics roaming the world with AK-47s seem powerful. This is ludicrous.
