On Violence

(To check out other “On V Updates to Old Ideas”, please click here.)

As always, more On V updates...

An Update to Sexual Assault in the Military

Unlike the last couple years, we haven’t written about this year’s Oscar contenders yet, which is insane. Between Argo, Zero Dark Thirty, Lincoln and Quentin Tarantino’s The Slavery Revenge Blaxploitation Feature, we’ve got more than enough war and violence to write about.

Every year the documentary category tends to have one war-related pic (though they never win) and this year was no different. The Invisible War covered an issue Eric C has followed closely since we launched this blog: sexual assault in the military. A trendy upset pick in the category of Best Full Length Documentary, The Invisible War made waves around D.C., including a viewing by then-Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta.

Sexual assault in the military was also featured in a cover story in Rolling Stone a few months back, and an NPR news story last month. (We could probably do an “On V Update on War and Rape” every other month.)

Unfortunately, the updates keep coming. Just yesterday the Air Force’s sexual assault prevention chief was arrested for sexual assault. And a report released today by the Pentagon today shows that:

"Sexual assaults in the military are a growing epidemic across the services and thousands of victims are still unwilling to come forward despite a slew of new oversight and assistance programs...Troubling new numbers estimate that up to 26,000 military members may have been sexually assaulted last year..."

Growing Beards in the Muslim World Redux

Last December, and again a few weeks back, we questioned the widespread growth of deployment beards by Special Forces soldiers. One commenter pointed out how SF beards tended to be unkempt, whereas locals took immaculate care of their own. Francis Conliffe, an armour officer from Canada, forwarded us this article, pointing out that “It will hardly make anyone an expert, but the main point is that how you wear the beard is even more important than having one at all--a point that may be lost on some of the men in your photo collection.”

Doing other research, we also found possibly the greatest SF beard yet.

This guy knows how to build rapport.

Two More Innocent Criminals Released

I hate it when innocent people go to prison for crimes they didn’t commit. On the one hand, I understand that no criminal justice system can get it right 100% of the time. On the other, why are the innocent people always poor, often minorities, and never represented adequately in court? In recent months, both Radiolab and 60 Minutes showed how confirmation bias encouraged wrongful prosecutions. (I’m also taking Organizational Behavior right now, so confirmation bias is on my mind.) Worse, these articles both show how our justice system refuses to admit mistakes when it makes them.

Check out our series “Intelligence is Evidence” to understand why this is a problem for law enforcement...and the intelligence community. Intelligence folks at Langley should heed the warnings from our criminal justice system, but they have no incentive to do so.

An Amazing Link Drop for the Military’s Culture

Peter J. Munson on his blog (and cross-posted on SWJ) pulled together some thoughts for a panel with the Chief of Staff of the Army’s Strategic Studies Group, creating a pretty exhaustive list of articles about the need to think about our military’s culture, and its implications. On the way, he cites our series, “Our Communist Military”; we appreciate the shout out.

Our Communist Military’s Gun Control/Defense Rhetorical Inconsistency

When we write about guns--which we explained here won’t be for a while--we’ll be on the lookout for sneaky inconsistencies...like those from “Our Communist Military”.

For instance, as Dominic Tierney absolutely throws down, Republicans are crazy hypocritical on this issue. Republicans believe gun control will hamper a citizen’s right to stop tyranny; they also want a giant military--the same military that would enforce that tyranny. Tierney writes:

“In the current debate over gun control, the pro-gun lobby has an ace card up its sleeve: We need weapons to prevent government tyranny, they say. These self-styled champions of liberty see guns as the ultimate insurance policy to protect the Constitution. The problem is that most of those making this argument also strongly support a massive U.S. military -- exactly the behemoth we must be armed against...

“When conservatives take up armed resistance against D.C. despotism, they'll really regret some of the toys they gave the government. Rubio and Palin want the populace to be able to arm itself with assault rifles. But they want the government armed with F-35s -- a $100 million-plus stealth plane with a top speed of Mach 1.6. When President Obama discovers his inner tyrant, it won't be a fair fight...

“Conservatives say that a weaponized citizenry is a necessary shield against dictatorship. I'll take the argument more seriously if conservatives stop arming this tyrant to the teeth.”

We couldn’t have said it better, except maybe to add...

The ACLU on Our More Militarized Police

The ACLU recently launched an investigation into America’s increasingly militarized police forces. We have to imagine that conservatives will be right there with them---we have to stop tyranny. What’s more tyrannical than a police force armed with military grade weapons and body armor?

Finally, a Shout Out to the Center for Army Lessons Learned...

...who, we just found out, linked to Michael C’s article “Influencing the Population: Using Interpreters, Conducting KLEs, and Executing IO in Afghanistan” in November of 2012 about cultural analysis and Afghanistan.

Four years ago to the day, without much fanfare, we launched On Violence. Over the last four-tenths of a decade, we've written about numerous topics, received countless compliments (and criticisms) and reached more people than we thought possible. Thank you to all the people who have made this possible, they know who they are.

(If you want to see the best posts of the last four years, please look at the sidebar for our centennial recaps.)

This post, the one you’re reading right now, is our 600th post. As we like to do every hundred posts, we’re sharing our best/favorite posts from the last 100. We’ve divided them into our best series and our best individual posts. (To read more “Best of On V” collections, check out the sidebar or click here.)

Series:

Four large series dominated our last 100 posts. First, Michael C tried to offer solutions to the situation with Iran (we don’t like the words conflict or war). Our favorites from that series include “Which Country Do You Prefer? Putting Iran's "Evil" In Context”, “My Solution to the Iran Problem” and “The Best Comment On Violence Has Ever Received”

Meanwhile, we finally wrote about HBO’s seminal war mini-series, Band of Brothers, where we wrote a post (or two) on each episode of the series. Eric C’s two favorite posts were from the last two episodes, “Band of Brothers' "Why We Fight" or: No, That's Not Why We Fought” and “The Myth of the Good War: Band of Brothers ‘Points’” Michael C wrote the excellent post, “The Feeling You Might Live Through It: Band of Brothers' "The Last Patrol".

We also continued our trend of igniting small “Twitter wars” with Eric C’s post “The Sobel Problem: Band of Brothers "Currahee" where he argued that officers weren’t just equal to enlisted men, but better. We defended the idea here, but noticed that a lot of the arguments (“Everyone is equal, regardless of rank!”) were...

Communist.

Oh yes, if you want to piss people off, call the military communist, even if you’re just using the phrase rhetorically. Our favorite posts from the “Our Communist Military” series were “The Most Greatest Institution in Human History...Our Communist Military!”, “Our Politically Correct Communist Milblogs” (which upset the usually imperturbable Jonn Lilyea) and the pro-market “Our Command Economy Communist Military”, “Our Pro-Veteran Communist Criminal Justice System” and asked, “Is Toys for Tots...Communist?”

Finally, Eric C finally learned how to spell “Petraeus” when we wrote our 2013 “Most Intriguing Event of the Year” about Benghazi and the General Petraeus sex scandal.

Posts

Way back, we wrote two art posts that we especially love, “War is War is Film Part I” and “War is War is Film Part II”, where we found quotes from movie characters that espouse “war is war” philosophy. Eric C’s favorite line:

“I expected to find mostly bad ass action heroes like John Rambo or “Dirty” Harry Callahan. Instead, I mostly found super villains. And comparing “war is war”-iors to Grand Moff Tarkin or General Jack D. Ripper is like comparing them to Hitler...   

“Or it might just be that if super villains espouse your military theory, you may be on the wrong side of history.”

Eric C wrote up an art post, “I’d Buy That Police Station for a Dollar!: RoboCop and America’s Awesomely Privatized Future”, on how one of the greatest action films of all time predicted America’s militarized-police future. Michael C read it and asked, “Is that all you got?”. He wrote, “The Enforcement Droid is Programmed for Urban Pacification!”

Of course, our still-too-small stable of guest posters contributed some great work. Matty P wrote one of Eric’s favorite posts of last year, “Guest Post: You Think You Know Pain?” Matthew Bradley absolutely threw down academically with “Guest Post: Opportunistic Scavengers in the Sahel”. And finally, an anonymous author sent us “Guest Post: When Saying, “Thanks for Your Service” Doesn’t Cut It”. Thanks for the great work guys.   

Though it didn’t get as large a response as we wanted, Michael C’s “The Military’s Gay Shower Fiasco...and 5 Other Anti-DADT Predictions that Never Came True” is also one of our favorite posts from last year.

Hey, want to stop insurgencies? Michael C explained what we’re doing wrong in, “Hearts, Minds and Gatorade Bottles Filled With Urine” and then offered solutions in “Don't Burn Korans, Kill Children, or Drop Bomblets That Look Like Candy: An Incomplete List of Counter-Insurgency Do’s and Don’ts”.

Eric C wrote two posts that got long standing ideas off his chest, first asking how “The Best Trained, Most Professional Military...Just Lost Two Wars?” and detailing the “The World War I Problem”

Michael C, on the other hand, just wanted to break the internet. With that in mind, he wrote, “A New Game: Spot the Navy SEAL!” to (rightfully) piss off special operators. He followed that up with “Growing Deployment Beards Works! So Do These 8 Ideas”. Oh, and Clausewitz happened.

Finally, Michael C’s favorite post from the last year was “Queer Eye for the Straight Navy: An Argument to Paint Aircraft Carriers Rainbow Colors”, offering a suggestion for how the Navy should paint its ships. Unfortunately, he dashed cold water on himself two days later in “A Flock of Seagoing Easter Eggs: Four Reasons Why It Won't Happen”.

(To check out other “On V Updates to Old Ideas”, please click here.)

Update to Drone Strikes

In our series, “Intelligence is Evidence” we expressed plenty of skepticism about America’s ability to accurately and justly target suspected terrorists with drones. Fortunately, President Obama--probably in reaction to the chance he could have lost the election; probably not due to continuing skeptical press coverage like here, or here, or here, or here--has decided to roll out a new “rulebook” for its so-called “kill list”.

Better late than never, though it still isn’t enough.

Update to the World is Less Dangerous

Inspired by John Horgan and Stephen Pinker, Eric C and I track the statistic of global violence. Whether on terrorism or deaths by war, we have concluded--based on the mountains of data supporting our position--that the world is getting less dangerous. The last few months have provided more supporting evidence. The numbers--again quantitative data not emotional arguments--also indicate that the biggest threat to Americans is gun violence, not terrorism.

- This National Journal article shows how little money the U.S. spends on preventing gun violence compared to terrorism (though gun violence kills far more people). Similarly, this article in New York Magazine lays out the shocking frequency of shooting sprees as opposed to terror attacks.   

- The National Counter Terrorism Center found that only 17 Americans died of terrorism [pdf] in 2011.

- The State Department released a similar report. It found similar low double digit deaths of Americans by terrorism.

- On the anniversary of 9/11, John Horgan reviewed the exaggeration of the terrorist threat.

- Stephen Walt--who we have relied on before in this field--again muses that we have inflated the risks of terrorism for funding purposes.

- And finally, in a shocking moment for Eric C, On Violence agrees with George Will. On ABC’s This Week a while back, he said that, “The world's always dangerous and all that, but the chance of dying on this planet from organized state violence is lower than it has been since the 1920s.” As he notes, there are protests all over the Middle East, but protests “beat the heck out of war.”

Update to Iraq War Repercussions

Though the national debate remains focused on Afghanistan, violence continues to plague Iraq. One of our favorite blogs, Musings on Iraq, hasn’t forgotten about that conflict. Check out the posts, “Iraq’s Insurgents Have Grown Deadlier Since U.S. Withdrawal” and “Iraq Remains A Deadlier Place Than Afghanistan” to read about continued violence.

Update to Both the Green Revolution’s Neda and the Whistleblower Protection Act

If you haven’t had a chance, check out last week’s On The Media episode, which covers both the woman who the media mistakenly thought was Neda Soltan and the new Whistleblower Protection Act. Expect more on the issue of “chasing the news” during next month’s “On V’s Most Thought Provoking Foreign Affair Event of 2012”.

The Feds Just Can’t Do Anything Right...Except Overseas!

As we’re exploring in “Our Communist Military”, conservatives cannot decide whether or not government is effective. For instance, during the 2012 campaign, Mitt Romney criticized the Obama administration’s handling of the Arab spring (lump this into the both-sides-of-the-aisle-use-foreign-affairs-to-score-cheap-political-points category). He then campaigned on a small government platform, claiming that the federal government can’t do anything right. As Andrew Sullivan wrote:

“It's more evidence of Republican incoherence: the government can't be trusted to intervene in Texas because it is too far away and the feds are incompetent. But Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya? Why don't we control them directly from Washington?”

Or from Greg Scolete:

“But this leads to the absurd assumption implicit in the criticism of the administration: that the U.S. federal government can deftly finesse the direction of Middle East politics in the 21st century. Particularly for those who profess a love of "limited government" it seems rather farcical to claim that the same incompetent government that can't be trusted to balance the budget can reach across the ocean and create a Middle East more to its liking.”

Update to Hypocrisy of SEALs Continued

Since we first wrote about how special operators have run rampant with self-publicity and the corresponding OPSEC violations, the Navy SEALs as a group have decided to 100% avoid needless self-promotion. Oh, except for this video game.

The self-promotion is so rampant the Daily Beast’s Daniel Klaidman wrote an entire article about Hollywood’s allure for special operators and how this might damage the force in the long run.

Update to How The Ain’t Hell responds to Criticism

First off, check out this great post, “The Rank Hypocrisy of Veterans on OPSEC”, by Jason Fritz at Ink Spots. It echoes our thoughts on SEALs criticizing the Obama administration’s leaks but ignoring their own OPSEC violation.

But what’s more interesting is how John Lilyea of This Ain’t Hell fame responded.

When we wrote the post, “Our Politically Correct Communist Milblogs”, Lilyea didn’t like what we had to say. “Obviously with a title like “Our Politically Correct Communist Milblogs” the author was just trolling for us to link to him. It’s a great tactic, since apparently no one reads the thing anyway, and he’s achieved his goal. Bravo!” At some point, Lilyea complained that he only found out about our post because someone emailed it to him.

When Jason Fritz criticized This Ain’t Hell in “The Rank Hypocrisy of Veterans on OPSEC”, Lilyea again took offense. “Do you want to discuss this with me? Or is it better that you just take shots at me behind my back? You send the link to other milbloggers, but not me? Welcome to obscurity.”

He followed that with, “Well, I never heard of your little blog before someone sent me a link today, so how would I know you were writing about me? You took the time to send a link to another milblogger, but you neglected to include me in the discussion. This is a blatant attempt to garner traffic and it failed...You took the whole post out of context so you could call me names hoping that I would send my hordes.”

So if you disagree with This Ain’t Hell’s John Lilyea: 1. You’re doing it to get traffic. 2. You should really email Jonn Lilyea. 3. John Lilyea doesn’t read your blog anyways and neither does anyone else.

(To check out other “On V Updates to Old Ideas”, click here.)

The “Have You Been There Argument” Hits Rosa Brooks

After writing a thoughtful article questioning who the military recruits, Rosa Brooks received quite a bit of a blowback. So she responded. The first point she rebutted is fairly familiar to us at On V, “You’ve never been in combat so you have no right to comment.” Yep, the “have you been there argument”. As we said then, every voting age American has the right, nee obligation, to comment on the military that fights in their name, whether or not they have served.

Fortunately, we don’t live in a Heinlein-esque dystopia where only the military votes quite yet.

Update to Quotes Behaving Badly

Through this post on Inkspots, we found this amazing website for researching “quotes behaving badly”, called Quote Investigator. He has one entry on the often misquoted Napoleon. We have sent a couple of quotes to him, so hopefully he can help debunk some of the more egregious military “quotes behaving badly”.

Someone Else Says, “Not the Greatest Fighting Force in History”

As Eric C wrote in “The Best Trained, Most Professional Military...Just Lost Two Wars?” our military may not live up to all its hype. Winslow Wheeler makes a similar case in his article for Foreign Policy, “Not All That It Can Be”. We’d put particular emphasis on how much America spends, and how little it gets back--in terms of superiority--for all that cash.
   
Orwellian Language Update

Since On Violence loves dissecting language (in this post, this post, or this post), we have to give a shout out to this Columbia Journalism Review article, “Fighting Words” by Judith Matloff. Militaries the world over have perfected the art of obfuscating the costs of war. It’s a shame journalists let them. Money quote:

“To soldiers and conflict-zone residents, war is bloody and devastating, and it’s hard for news consumers to realize this when the stories they read are stuffed with bloodless clichés.”

And no word obscures meaning like the word “hero”. A few weeks back, in a very controversial post, we described how “Our Politically Correct Communist Milblogs” label every soldier a hero no matter what. We didn’t have space in that post, but we wanted to mention that regular On V guest post-er Matty P wrote on a related topic, “Every Firefighter a Hero” a few years back. Also, we couldn’t fit in this very logical/analytical take on the entire debate, “Different Norms for Valorizing Soldiers”.

Update to Memoirs Behaving Badly

Apparently, deceptions in memoir writing (like Greg Mortenson, who we devoted an entire week to a year ago) are nothing new. This Economist profile of Ryszard Kapuscinski reveal a famous man who told fantastic stories, many of which might not be true.
   
Update to Senior Officers Avoiding Responsibility

In “We Can’t Handle the Truth”, Eric C wrote that “Our military punishes enlisted soldiers, and excuses officers.”

He’s absolutely right. To continue to prove him right, the military did not strip Colonel Johnson, former commander of the 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team, of all his rank and privileges and send him to prison. Johnson was “convicted of fraud, bigamy, and conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman” after he stole hundreds of thousands of dollars. The Army didn’t even expel him. Instead, he has to pay a $300,000 fine and receive a reprimand.
   
The Navy did the same thing with Holly Graf, who was relieved of duty for abusing subordinates. The Navy let her retire with full rank and benefits and an honorable discharge. Both are reminiscent of Allen West’s retirement with full benefits after (allegedly?) torturing an Iraqi prisoner.

There might be some other generals in the news for misbehavior, but we haven’t really been following that story. Our favorite general in trouble is General Kip Ward, who lost a star but is still retiring with an honorable discharge.

(To check out other “On V Updates to Old Ideas”, click here.)

Once again, we troll through the interwebs to find updates to On V ideas. (Some of these are particularly old, (like May) but we still want to highlight them.) Without further ado...

Update to the Pentagon Wasting Taxpayers Dollars

As long as we’re complaining about “Our Communist Military”--which hates government spending, but never mentions defense spending--we might as well keep updating you on massive military waste. (Again, some of these examples are a few months old, but consider all of them exhibits in this ongoing argument.)

- The F-22 may never work right. 60 Minutes had a story last spring about how it makes its pilots sick. Even though the Air Force has resumed flying them, concerns linger on, as the Air Force admits.

- While China may or may not be preparing to field two stealth jets...

...the Air Force is behind schedule on the F-35.

- Last May, Mark Thompson, for Time's "Battleland", listed a series of examples where House budget committees protect money flowing into their districts for Pentagon programs, whether or not they believe in fiscal discipline, or whether or not the programs work.

- The Army finally deploys a communication network...after the wars are mostly over.

So DADT Wasn’t a Problem...

As we covered in our post, “The Military’s Gay Shower Fiasco...and 5 Other Anti-DADT Predictions that Never Came True” many conservative’s breathless predictions about DADT never came true. But don’t take our word for it. A study from UCLA concluded that “ending the policy ‘has had no negative impact on overall military readiness or its component parts: unit cohesion, recruitment, retention, assaults, harassment or morale.’”

Read an article by the study’s author on Slate for more.

More on OPSEC Leaks and Obama

To avoid cluttering our post, “The Loudest “Quiet Professionals”: Why We Disagree with the “Special Operations OPSEC Education Fund”, we left out a key point about OPSEC: most violations don’t result in dead U.S. soldiers. They don’t even result in failed missions. When comparing OPSEC leaks versus the massive over-classification of U.S. intelligence and military information, the far bigger problem is the over-classification which hides corruption, bureaucratic incompetence, illegality, and intelligence failures.

And somehow, in our last update on this topic, we failed to mention this article by Glenn Greenwald in Salon going over all the evidence showing that the Obama administration leaked classified information. To be clear, we oppose the leaking of classified information; we just think the government should classify much, much less, and release much, much more in a coherent, legal process that doesn’t just shield the government from oversight when it crosses the line.

Since we don’t have that rational system in place, we support protections for whistleblowers.

Update to Intelligence is Evidence: CSI Edition

Michael C based much of his series “Intelligence is Evidence” directly on Frontline’s reporting into two specific topics: the U.S. war on terror/counter-insurgencies and travesties of the U.S. judicial system. When justice goes wrong, either in a war zone or in a courtroom, it feels the same to us. Well, Frontline has kept up the great reporting with an investigation into the “science” behind crime scene forensic analysis.

In short, prosecutors, detectives and forensic analysts hoping to score convictions sent innocent people to prison, and murderers remained on the loose.

On Leslie Stahl’s Softball Interview: Torture and 60 Minutes

Sorry for the tardiness of this response, but last spring, 60 Minutes’ Leslie Stahl interviewed one of the CIA masterminds behind their torture program, Jose Rodriguez. Despite numerous accounts challenging the effectiveness of torture, Rodriguez stuck by his claims and Stahl barely challenged him. Worse, Rodriguez destroyed any and all evidence of interrogations, not only ruining the legal process but preventing historians and journalists from ever knowing what the CIA did.

(On Violence is against torture.)

Update to Time Travel

Way back in time, Jessica Scott wrote an amazing post called, “Welcome Back 90s Army” bemoaning the coming uniform crack downs. As we’ve written about before, plenty of officers want to return to the standards of the 90s army, including increased reliance on physical fitness, uniform standards and “garrison leadership”. As Jessica mentions, the OEF/OIF Army didn’t need the silly garrison standards of the 90s Army to excel in combat, so why bring them back?

(To check out other “On V Updates to Old Ideas”, click here.)

As usual, here is how our ideas have fared--good or ill--over the last few months:

Update to Last Week’s “Why We Hate ASU’s” Post

Just last Thursday, as part of our Band of Brothers series, Eric C bemoaned the Army Service Uniform, describing it as, “objectively not a good uniform”.

Then, on Monday, the US Army opened up a survey to get feedback on the ASU. So if you want to sound off, head here.

Modeling Emotion in Warfare

Some readers criticized our post, “Getting Rid of the Chicago School of Counter-Insurgency”, saying that models of human behavior utterly fail when it comes to emotions. As a result, our military tends to treat every person in an insurgency as a rational actor simply pursuing self-optimizing goals. (“Self-optimizing” being the economics term for it, not mine.)

This Economist article says, “Hogwash!” New models for insurgent behavior can factor in different variables from location to religion to Twitter. My favorite section describes the SCARE program, which found that, “Kin and co-religionists are the most reliable allies in wars where different guerrilla groups may not always see eye to eye about objectives, beyond the immediate one of driving out foreign troops.” Yep, self-optimizing with a huge dollop of emotional bias.

Update to “One Nation Under Contract”

According to a recent Government Accountability Office report, the Pentagon spent “204 billion” with a B on “service contracts” in 2010. That same year, the Pentagon spent 367 billion dollars on contracts, meaning the Pentagon pays more for services than it does for goods, weapons or equipment. Very likely, our military could not fight a contemporary war without these contractors.

(H/T to "Battleland")

Update to Leaks about the Osama bin Laden Raid

Here at On Violence, we don’t “chase the news”--for example, we won’t be discussing last week’s violence in north Africa for a while--because we loathe “premature opinionation”.
   
For example, last week, a Navy SEAL came out with his account, No Easy Day, of the Osama bin Laden raid. Its details clashed with several prior accounts. “The Atlantic Wire” has a round-up describing many details that have changed since the operation was first revealed. It also shows just how much leaking was going on, from the President to the SEALs themselves. Speaking of which...

By refusing to condemn or even mention the release of No Easy Day on their website, the “Special Operations OSPEC Fund” has shown it is a patently partisan organization. Go to their website now and you will find countless articles on President Obama’s failings, and none calling out their fellow Special Operators.

Just shameful.

The Most Effective Al Qaeda Franchise Strikes Again

Last January, I wrote about how, far and away, most terrorists are at best enticed and at worst entrapped by the FBI. In all, America doesn’t have a terrorism problem, and it might not have a single foreign terrorist on its soil. For an amazing, heartbreaking and eye-opening account into how “Al Qaeda FBI Branch” works, check out this hour of radio by This American Life partnered with documentary filmmaker Sam Black.

Update to “Which Country Do You Prefer?”

As Iran’s nuclear situation dominates the news, accusations of Iran’s intolerable Shia theocratic extremism always seem to pop up. I say, “Good.” We should always take the time to consider the human rights policies of our allies and enemies.

Let’s start with Saudi Arabia, a Sunni monarchy that tramples all over human rights to enforce a Wahhabi interpretation of Islam on its people, including subordination of women to men, as this Daily Beast article “Women Rise Up in Saudi Arabia” reminds us. Remember, 15 of the 19 hijackers came from Saudi Arabia.
   
The New Yorker article, “Modern Mecca”, about one reporter’s pilgrimage to Mecca, details yet another form of Wahhabi extremism: destruction of history. Hardliner religious conservatives in Saudi Arabia believe that worshipping (or venerating) holy buildings is a form of blasphemy, so they’ve been systematically destroying and replacing historic buildings in Saudi Arabia and, more specifically, Mecca. One analyst compares this destruction to the destruction of Buddhist monuments in Afghanistan by the Taliban. (Ironically, Shiite Iranians embrace these buildings.)

The Obama Doctrine

Unfortunately for American history, every President it seems will now have a “doctrine” with their last name plopped in front of it. I’m as guilty as other pundits. Last January, in my “Solutions to Intelligence versus Evidence”, I proposed an “Obama Doctrine” that would create a new “International Criminal Court for Terrorists, Pirates and Trans-National Criminals”. In this article from Foreign Policy’s “War Issue”, David Rohde argues that Obama already has a doctrine based around lethal killings via drone strikes. This doctrine inhibits our counter-terrorism strategy, and helps extremists recruit.

Sadly, I agree.
   
Update to "My Solution to the Iran Problem"

Stephen Walt argues that,

“...instead of spending all our time trying to scare the bejeezus out of countries like Iran (which merely reinforces their interest in getting some sort of deterrent), we ought to be reminding them over and over that we have a lot to offer and are open to better relations...If nothing else, adopting a less confrontational posture is bound to complicate their own calculations.”

Good words to leave off with.

(To check out other “On V Updates to Old Ideas”, click here.)

Just like yesterday, we’re clearing our inbox of updates. Enjoy!

Update to Marketing and Afghanistan

At the height of the surge of troops to Afghanistan in 2009, men from Colonel Henry Tunnell’s 5th Stryker Brigade (as described in an excerpt on Slate from Rajiv Candrasekaran’s new book) drove through an insurgent’s funeral in Afghanistan with loudspeakers declaring, “This is what happens when you fight us.”

As we wrote a few months back, the Army can learn plenty from business marketing about what will and won’t change people’s mind. Quick hypothetical: if Osama bin Laden sent trucks driving around New York after 9/11 blaring this message, “America, this is what happens when you defy us,” would that have sent Americans cowering? Would it have discouraged any Americans from fighting back?

Exactly.

Update to Management versus Leadership

Tom Ricks quotes James McDonough’s memoir about his time in Vietnam, Platoon Leader:

For us, violence was killing; there was no management involved. People were either dead, or they     were not. I could not 'manage' my platoon up a hill. I had to lead them up there.

I wonder if this was the beginning of the idea within the Army that management need not apply in the Pentagon. Probably not, but the “leadership trumps management” meme is now widespread.

Update to the Ethics of Leadership

While I disagree with the start to the McDonough quote above, I love its conclusion that emphasizes the importance of officers as the moral compass of their units:

I had to do more than keep them alive. I had to preserve their human dignity. I was making them     kill, forcing them to commit the most uncivilized of acts, but at the same time I had to keep them civilized. That was my duty as their leader. . . War gives the appearance of condoning almost everything, but men must live with their actions for a long time afterward. A leader has to help them understand that there are lines they must not cross. He is their link to normalcy, to order, to humanity. If the leader loses his own sense of propriety or shrinks from his duty, anything will be allowed.    

. . . War is, at its very core, the absence of order; and the absence of order leads very easily     to the absence of morality, unless the leader can preserve each of them in its place.   

Unfortunately, few battalion, brigade and division commanders have been held truly responsible for the conduct of their men. In most cases, the men of the highest rank get the lightest punishment when it comes to the moral or legal transgressions of their units.

Update to Intelligence is Evidence

60 Minutes steps into Frontline’s shoes to tell another shocking tale of prosecutors stacking the deck against innocent men. This time, an innocent man named Michael Morton was exonerated 25 years after detectives and prosecutors immediately assumed he had brutally beaten his wife to death. Most shockingly, prosecutors withheld the testimony of their son who witnessed the murder...which completely exonerated Morton.

Yesterday, I quoted David Ignatius praising JSOC’s effectiveness on the international battlefield. I would love to ask him this: if the U.S. judicial system can repeatedly come close to executing innocent people (and possibly has), and if that system has ten times the safeguards of the military/CIA targeting program, how can he or the government really believe that system is always accurate? Or even mostly accurate?

Why My Solution to Intelligence is Evidence Won’t Happen

I tend to be proud of my simple solutions to drastically complex problems. Iran? Let’s just become friends with them. Afghanistan? Population-centric counter-insurgency. Global instability? More foreign aid from wealthy nations applied well. (Of course, effective diplomacy, population-centric counter-insurgency, and effective foreign aid/democracy movements aren’t really that simple or easy to do, but you get my point.)

And terrorism? Let’s just create a International Criminal Court for Pirates, Terrorists and Trans-national Criminals. This article, in the New York Review of Books, about international law captures the internal contradictions of America’s support for such laws, but our refusal to let international laws apply to us. Which is why my simple solution won’t happen.

Update to A Conundrum: Shaken Baby Syndrome Edition

A year ago, we wrote about a tragedy unfolding across the nation in the form of overzealous prosecutions of “shaken baby syndrome”. In one of the key cases, California convicted grandmother Shirley Ree Smith of killing her grandson with less than compelling medical evidence. Last Good Friday, Jerry Brown officially pardoned her for the crime.

The Economist Keeps the Behavioral Research Coming

Actually, The Economist and Charles Duhigg writing about the subconscious power of habits keep the behavioral research coming. This article--along with this excellent podcast on the HBR Ideacast podcast from a few years ago--just say to me that in a counter-insurgency, our Army cannot rely on a model of human behavior that treats the enemy or population as strictly-rational-cost-benefit-calculating automatons. And we can’t use “fear” as our primary motivator either.

Oh, We Weren’t Done with Thomas Drake Yesterday

In anticipation of our “On V Update to Old Ideas, Round Nine”, The Daily Show’s Jason Jones unveiled a hilarious segment pointing out the inanities behind the Thomas Drake affair in “License to Spill”:

Enjoy.