US-Oriented, Excellent Starting Point, Six Key Methods,
October 20, 2005
Robert B. Cialdini
I disagree with the complaints about this being a repeat of earlier versions. “4th Edition” is quite clear. This is an updated easy to read version of a highly-regarded seminal work whose value has been proven over time.
While intended for students of psychology and for practitioners of the black art of marketing (selling over-priced unnecessary “stuff” to the unwitting), I regard this text as a very helpful reference for the new warriors, the practitoners of Information Operations and within that larger discipline, Strategic Communication & Public Diplomacy.
The six “principles” of influence, reciprocation, consistency, social proof (e.g. canned laughter), liking, authority, and scarcity, each receive their own chapter with annedotes and study questions.
Most interesting to me would be an international variation of this book, one that discussed the nuances of influence in other cultures, inclusive of family ties and prevalent sterotypes.
This book is applicable to business, evangelism, foreign affairs, defense, homeland security, and just about any field where interaction with humans is called for, and the mission demands the elicitation of collaborative behavior from others.
Good index, notes, and illustrations. Well-presented.
This is the best snap-shot of the ugly baby called US Science, a baby that is on the one hand coddled and spoiled by a politicized program, and on the other straight-jacketed and abused by those same political hand-cuffs.
Of the four books I have reviewed on this important topic, this is the one that is the most compelling on the perversions of the extremist Republicans (I am a moderate Republican). It does not, however, provide a complete picture. Three other books are helpful:
Science, Money, and Politics: Political Triumph and Ethical Erosion by Daniel Greenberg is the best over-all review, has a strong ethical component, and shows how the competition for money, rather than scientific progress, is diverting scarce resources and frustrating needed advances.
Frontiers of Illusion: Science, Technology, and the Politics of Progress by Daniel Sarewitz is a very useful antidote to the many books (Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near, comes to mind) that claim science will solve all problems and provide authoritative cost-effective solutions to century-old human problems.
Finally, Investing in Innovation: Creating a Research and Innovation Policy That Works, edited by Lewis Bramscomb and James Keller, brings together a range of views crossing the environment within which scientific research takes place, evaluationg specific programs and policy tools, and making recommendations (all of which have been ignored by the current Bush Administration).
I take four bottom lines from these four books together:
1) We are spending too much on military science & research.
2) Neither Congress nor the Executive have a serious strategy for prioritizing problems, finding private sector partners, and providing seed money for innovative solutions.
3) Both Congress and the Executive, as well as the public and the media, are incredibly ignorant about what science can and cannot do, and where all the money is going to generally poor effect.
4) This is all so important that Science, like Intelligence, needs its own Supreme Court. I am persuaded we need a new form of hybid public agency that is fully independent of the Executive, receiving a percentage of the total disposable budget (say 3%) and hence not subject to Congressional pork-barreling and lobbying-financed pressures.
This book by Chris Mooney is the place to start if you want to be angry, or the place to end if you want to see the other three books end on the ugliest note possible–the destruction of reasonable science by unreasonable ideologues.
Historical Evaluation of Money, Religion, State Power, and Evil,
October 19, 2005
James Reston Jr.
There are no doubt many histories that will enlighten us as to the relationship between the rise of the State, its need for money, its use of the Inquisition to rob Jews and raise money, the role of religious intolerance of heresy, and the manner in which evil accompanies conquest. For myself, this book is more than enough, and it provides an elegant easy to read overview of the larger context in which Columbus discovered America.
I am reminded by this book of the arrogance of Spain (where my roots go to Catalan in the 17th century on my mother's side), as Columbus was sent with edicts in Spanish, and it was assumed that any natives that could not understand the Spanish edicts, read in Spanish, were consequently heathen and fair game for enslavement. So did Columbus bring to America not just slavery, but genocide as well.
The author excels at showing the human side of history, the manner in which craven banal human weaknesses wreak havoc on civilizations, tribes, and nations. There is one point in which I am reminded of the power of courtiers, and another in which the same courtier uses homosexuality as a means of subduing a king–both are all too close to reality today. In short, this book has lessons for us today, both in seeing how dangerous our fundamentalist religious extremists are in waging armed crusades lacking in contextual balance, how dangerous courtiers with too much power can be; how vulnerable nominally powerful rulers can be when they suffer from deep and unresolved inner conflicts (e.g alcoholism and nascient homosexuality), and how deeply the historical antipathies might lie within Islam against the West.
The relationship between evil, intolerant religion, weak kings and powerful courtiers, and suffering peoples of all faiths, is compelling depicted in this book–history is brought forward in a truly excellent manner. We learn, or we repeat.
Can anyone justify the Inquisition or the Crusades? Is it possible to denounce individual terrorists while embracing 44 dictators, many of them practicing genocide, others supporting the looting of their entire commonwealths? Could we not have spent the last trillion of our common wealth more wisely?
I put this book down thinking to myself, like Old Man River in Porgey and Bess, life and history move on, while the powerful continue to hold sway over the fortunes of their peoples. It is somewhat depressing to realize how little humanity has learned about relations among peoples since the 1500's.
5.0 out of 5 starsExtraordinary, Compelling, Urgently Applicable to All
October 19, 2005
Dan Korem
I am utterly astonished to not see this book at the top of the charts and being absorbed by every school principal, every small town mayor, every police chief, and every counter-terrorism expert. This book is extraordinary, it is compelling, and it is utterly and urgently applicable to every single person who wishes to “defuse” potentially deadly “random actors.”
Although it is a thick book packed with details, you do not have the read the whole thing to extract value. Suffice to say that armed with this book, communities and organizations will have all they need to know to achieve early warning of potentially threatening “random actors.”
This is not a book full of psycho-babble. If anything, it is solidly grounded in practical case studies going back twenty years, and I for one, as a 30-year veteran intelligence professional, including clandestine service with constant exposure to bad boys and girls, find the book credible, useful, and easy to understand.
The bottom line, without seeking to simplify the book, is avoid de-personalization, prevent bullying, open up to individuals and empower them, and above all, be alert for any sense that they see teachers or other authority figures as “CONTROLLING” and rules as “INAPPLICABLE.”
The author's finding that terrorism is a rich kid's game, and that most US-based random actors will come from upper middle class families in small towns, are consistent with my own research and practical experience with revolutionaries.
Sadly, the underlying theme across the book is that of societal collapse. The major institutions, from school to church to sports to social clubs are all degenerating and failing to provide the inclusiveness and alternatives to boredom and alienation that they once represented. The threat of “random actors” imposing catastrophic fatal acts on their communities is very real.
This book is an important reference work, and one that I would recommend be bought in bulk, and discussed in a structured manner by every school staff and every local police department…and of course by parents!
Been a Spy, Done Japan, This is a Great Tax Write Off,
October 11, 2005
Barry Eisler
I've been a spy, out from under cover for a long time, and I would not normally have touched this, but my spouse suggested it on a rainy afternoon, and I have to give it four stars because it held my attention and I finished it.
On balance, I would put this between a 3 and a 4, but I gave it a four for coherence. Still, this author is not John Le Carre at his best (George Smiley series).
What I found most interesting, as I read through the book and found connections with both my past and with Japan, was the manner in which the author appears to have found a formula for connecting what he has done in his own past, what he has read about, and what he is presumably writing off on his taxes–comprehensive travel.
I put the book down, not disappointed–I certainly recommend this book to anyone who has not been a spy–but thinking to myself, WOW, this is what I can do when I retire–travel all over the world, write a spy novel with details about each place I visit, and presto, it is all a grand tax write-off.
Professionally speaking the book is way too facile. Planting an audio device is very very tough. The need for line of sight from the transmitter to the receiver kills most applications. Generally speaking, you have to listen for four hours to get five minutes worth of useful stuff. Killer technologies certainly abound, but as CIA found when it tried to kill Castro with exploding cigars, infected dive suits, beard killers, and the bomb-dropping pigeons, generally technology is not the answer.
3 for former spies, 5 for the general public, 4 on balance. Absolutely recommended for a rainy afternoon.
I've witnessed the phenomenon of bright people falling for propaganda, hook, line, and sinker, on numerous occasions. I'm sure I'm taken in by much of it as well, but even I can't be fooled all the time.
Still, the answer is not to simply give up. On a few topics, I actually am well enough informed so that (while I still may be susceptible to propaganda myself) I can recognize the symptoms of others falling for it. And this is definitely a phenomenon one ought to look for in others if one wants to cure oneself! I do think we ought to try to become so informed about at least a few topics that we can recognize nonsense. On these topics, we ought to listen, but we also ought to be unafraid to state facts and make judgments. On other topics, we ought to be much more careful.
Perhaps the most dramatic examples for me have been some truly amazing statements about the Arab war on Israel made by some rather well-educated and generally skeptical people. It makes me wonder why those who are ready to challenge all sorts of claims in so many other areas accept some extremely dubious, afactual, and illogical nonsense about this topic without question, and repeat it to me. Are they unaware that they are making statements that may well be false? Are they unable to discuss this issue without making very controversial comments as if they were not only accepted and indisputable facts, but relevant facts as well?
On one occasion, when I suggested to a colleague that I happened to know quite a bit about the Arab war against Israel, hoping to politely give him a way to defer to me, temporarily, on a couple of facts, I merely got an outraged reply. Was I not aware that my colleague was a highly intelligent and well-informed person? What made me think that I knew something he didn't? I was more than a little surprised by such a reaction: normally if a person claims to know something better than we do, we listen, even if we disagree.
This book, written over four decades ago, helps explain a little of what is going on. It shows how intellectuals can be so horribly susceptible to propaganda. As both the book and Konrad Kellen's preface to it state, intellectuals absorb a great deal of second-hand and unverifiable information. They often feel a need to have an opinion about such information. In addition, they consider themselves so smart that they can “judge for themselves.” And they seriously underestimate their susceptibility to propaganda given that they can see mere idiots reject some of it with ease.
The truth, as Ellul explains, is that high intelligence, a broad culture, constant use of critical faculties, and access to and use of sources of information are indeed the best weapons against propaganda. They simply aren't used often enough.
Ellul shows how propaganda can have a powerful effect if one is saturated with it. It is useful, he explains, to have someone from one's own frame of reference come up with it. The German National Socialists were careful to put Englishmen on their radio. Anti-Zionists, by the way, are very proud to have Jews state their case, although we should all know that there is no objective reason to trust every Jew, any more than there is to trust every person.
We readers see how propaganda is most useful when it reinforces earlier biases and misconceptions. And how it becomes extremely powerful once a person makes an active commitment to a cause: that person finds it very tough to recant.
The book also shows how propaganda gets one to come up with strange ideas about what is relevant material to support one's arguments. That has the effect of precluding dialog with those who disagree with you. That's why my colleague “knew” better than to take anything I said seriously or reply to it coherently. And it is why careful and cautious statements on my part sounded not merely like admissions that truth was fiction, and vice-versa, but evidence that I was hopelessly biased, impervious to reason, and hooked on rather wild propaganda myself.
This book is fascinating. It made me realize that propaganda is indeed more effective than most of us might realize. And that it is dangerous. Ellul implies that propaganda may well be the most serious threat we humans face. And I think we ought to treat it as such.
Admiring of Grunts, Deep Between the Lines Slam on Washington,
October 3, 2005
Robert D. Kaplan
Most important in this book is Kaplan's documentation of the fact that transformation of the U.S. military is NOT taking place–Washington is still enamored of multiple layers of rank heavy bureaucracy, the insertion of very large cumbersome task forces in to every clime and place; an over-emphasis on technology; and a lack of appreciation for the urgency of providing security, food, water, and electricity IMMEDIATELY so as to start the cycle of counter-insurgency information collection from volunteers. The author is brutal in his indictment of the bureaucracy for failing to provide the linguistic skills, four years after 9/11, that are far more important to transformation than any weapons system. He is also brutal on the delays in approving operations in the field that are associated with layered bureaucracies that come with joint task forces, and completely detrimental to fast moving tactical success at the A Team level.
Key here is the conclusion that American power can only be exercised in a sustained way through discreet relationships at every level from neighborhood and village on up to provinces and tribes. The emphasis here is on discreet, humanitarian, tangible goods and services including security. When America introduces major forces, it spikes resistance and delays the achievement of its very objective. What jumps out is the need to change how the US achieves its presence around the world. The author recommends a change in the State Department model of embassies focused on countries–State tends to be co-opted country by country and loses sight–if it ever had it–of regional or tribal nuances. The author also recommends a sustained peaceful presence at the provincial and village level around the world, through a combination of modern civil affairs and humanitarian assistance cadres and retired military given leave to choose a place they get to know and stay there to finish out their careers and then be “on tap” for retired reserve plus up.
A third theme in this book, one that Ralph Peters also makes in “NEW GLORY,” is that a lot of these countries are NOT countries and should not be countries. Many borders imposed by colonialism are simply lunatic when taking into account historical and geographic and related ethnic realities. It *makes sense* to have regional summits that re-locate borders in a manner that respects historical, geographical and cultural realities, and to do so with a massive Berlin Airlift/Marshall Plan application of the benefits of peace. Ceding southernmost Thailand and the insurgent southern part of the Philippines to Malaysia, and establishing an Indonesian-Malaysian Muslim Crescent, makes sense. Similarly, in Africa and in the Middle East, there is good that could come of a deliberate recalculation of borders.
A fourth theme, and I share his admiring view of Special Operations and the Marine Corps, is that of the separation of the military ethos of service and dedication to mission, from that of the Nation at large, where Tom Friedman in “The World is Flat” declares that we are suffering from a new generation that is, in a word, apathetic. We need to return to universal service, with options for serving in the Peace Corps or the local constabulary at home. America has lost its civic integrity.
A fifth theme, one that corrected a misimpression I have shared, was of the rather special nature of the National Guard elements of the U.S. Special Forces and the Army civil affairs teams. They come out in this book as being among the best of the best.
Sixth, I found the author's field appreciation of citizen militia in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Philippines, and elsewhere to be quite illuminating. Washington is wrong to rush the transition to a centralized Army in places where tribes and militia still hold sway and can be used to provide provincial stability. We ignore the possibilities of unconventional indigenous forces at our peril.
Seventh, as on page 230, the author highlight those occasions when our unconventional warriors point out that Toyotas are better than Humvees, commercial cell phones are better than military communications alternatives. Across the book, a few good men and women with independent authority and cash resources to do instant compensation and instant aid authorization come across as vastly superior to Washington-style contracting and major joint force insertions.
Eighth, throughout the book, force protection mania is killing us and gutting our counter-insurgency potential. This comes out especially strongly in Colombia, where A Teams are forbidden to go tactical with the forces they are training, and are limited to training within safe encampments only. Force protection is a modern variation of the Soldier's Load-we are so nuts about force protection and heavying up that we are shackling our troops and our small unit leaders and completely avoiding the military value of “fast and furious.”
Ninth, national and military intelligence are not meeting needs of front-line grunts. Bottom-up intelligence collection, including passive collection from observant civil affairs teams and foot patrols, is what is really working. We appear to need a whole new concept of operations and a whole new doctrine for field intelligence, one that floods areas with non-official cover and overt personnel, one that puts analyst and translators heavy-up into the front lines.
Sidenotes include great admiration for SOUTHCOM, accustomed as it is to getting along with the short end of the stick; and derision for PACOM, “twenty years behind the times, afraid of messy little wars and of a transparent humanitarian role for SF.” The author regards the Global War on Terror (GWOT) as a convenient “set up” for a future war with China, not something I agree with but evidently a perception within the military that has specific outcomes from day to day. Other side notes include a brutal indictment throughout of “Big Army” and also of the US Air Force which is obsessing on more super-bombers and unwilling to fund what really works well, long-haul transports, AC-130 gunships (Puff the Magic Dragon), and more air controllers in the field with the grunts.
Super book! NOTE: I have the sense that some in the SF community have taken an intense dislike to Kaplan, and vote against the review as a way of voting against Kaplan. Fair enough, but for what it's worth, the review is a good summary intended to be helpful to all in appreciating what I take to be some pretty useful themes.
