War & Face of Battle – Page 26 – Public Intelligence Blog

2002/12/152009/12/04

Review: Boyd–The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War

5 Star, Biography & Memoirs, Complexity & Resilience, Decision-Making & Decision-Support, Games, Models, & Simulations, Information Operations, Military & Pentagon Power, War & Face of Battle

Brilliant Theory, Ugly Corruption, Sad Personal Decay,

December 15, 2002

Robert Coram

In forty years of adult reading, thousands of books, hundreds of biographies, I have not in my lifetime found a better integration of subject, sources, and scholarship. This book will make anyone laugh, cry, and think. There is a deep spirit in this book, and knowing a little about all of this, I was quite simply stunned by the labor of love this book represents. The author's skill and devotion to “getting it right” is breathtakingly evident across the book. His sources, both those close to the subject and those more distant, have been exhaustively interviewed and the quality of this book is a direct reflection of some of the most serious “homework” I have ever been privileged to read.On the theory of war, on the original contributions of John Boyd, the book renders a huge service to all military professionals by dramatically expanding what can be known and understood about the Energy-Maneuverability Theory and the nuances of the OODA Loop (Observe-Orient-Decide-Act–for the real Tigers, Observe-od-Act–a faster loop). Two things stuck out, apart from the heroic manner in which Boyd pursued the intellectual side of combat aviation: first, Boyd consistently had his priorities right: people first, ideas second, hardware last–this is the opposite of the existing Pentagon priorities; and second, truth matters–the book has some extraordinary examples of how both the Air Force and the Army falsified numbers, with disastrous results, while also selecting numbers (e.g. choosing to list an aircraft's weight without fuel or missiles, rather than fully loaded, a distortion that will kill aviators later when the aircraft fails under stress).

On the practical side, the insights into Pentagon (and specifically Air Force) careerism and corruption, as well as contractor corruption and cheating of the government, are detailed and disturbing. There have been other books on this topic, but in the context of Boyd's heroic endeavors as an individual, this book can be regarded as an excellent case study of the pathology of bureaucracy–the Air Force regarding the Navy, for example, as a greater threat to its survival than the Russians. Especially troubling–but clearly truthful and vital to an understanding of why the taxpayer is being cheated by the government bureaucracy, were all the details on the mediocrity and mendacity of Wright-Patterson laboratories and organizations nominally responsible for designing the best possible aircraft. The same thing happens in other bureaucracies (e.g. the Navy architects refusing to endorse the landing craft ideas of Andrew Higgins, who ultimately helped win World War II), but in this instance, the author excels at documenting the horrible–really really horrible–manner in which the Pentagon's obsession with building monstrous systems that increase budgets has in fact resulted in fewer less capable aircraft. The book is a case study in corrupt and ill-considered (mindless) gold-plating and mission betrayal.

As a tiny but extremely interesting sidenote, the book provides helpful insights into the failure of the $2.5 billion “McNamara Line,” a whiz-kid lay-down of sensors in Viet-Nam that Boyd finally ended up terminating.

On a personal level, the author treats Boyd's family life, and his neglect of his family, in objective but considerate terms; the author is also quite effective in identifying and addressing those instances in Boyd's professional life when his fighter-pilot embellishments might be construed by lesser mortals to be falsehoods. There are three sets of heroes in this book, apart from the subject: the ranking officers, including a number of generals, who protected Boyd against the corrupt careerists–there *are* good officers at the top; the enlisted and officer personnel that carried on in the face of poor leadership, mediocre aircraft, and daunting external challenges; and finally, the “Acolytes,” the six specific individuals (Tom Christie, Pierre Sprey, Ray Leopold, Chuck Spinney, Jim Burton, and Mike Wyly), each of whom endured what they call “the pain” to nurture John Boyd and his ideas. I found the author's dissection and articulation of the personal relationships and sacrifices to be quite good and a most important part of the larger story.

Finally, a few tributes en passant. The author does a great job of showing how Boyd ultimately was adopted by the U.S. Marine Corps rather than the U.S. Air Force, and how his ideas have spawned the 4th Generation and Asymmetric Warfare theories, for which the Pentagon does not yet have an adequate appreciation. The mentions in passing of two of my own personal heroes, Mr. Bill Lind and Col G. I. Wilson of the U.S. Marine Corps, and the due regard to the roles played by Dr. Grant Hammond of the Air War College and Mr. James Fallows of the Atlantic Monthly, add grace and completion to the story.

This book is moving–if you care about America, the military, and keeping our children safe into the future, it *will* move you to tears of both laughter and pain.

2002/12/012009/12/04

Review: The Fifty Year Wound–The True Price of America’s Cold War Victory

6 Star Top 10%, Atrocities & Genocide, Complexity & Catastrophe, Congress (Failure, Reform), Crime (Government), Diplomacy, Environment (Problems), Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Force Structure (Military), History, Intelligence (Government/Secret), Military & Pentagon Power, Misinformation & Propaganda, Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy, Security (Including Immigration), True Cost & Toxicity, Truth & Reconciliation, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized), War & Face of Battle, Water, Energy, Oil, Scarcity

A Breath of Sanity–Hard Look at Cost of Cold War,

December 1, 2002

Derek Leebaert

This is an extraordinary book, in part because it forces us to confront the “hangover” effects of the Cold War as we begin an uncertain path into the post 9-11 future. It begins by emphasizing that the Cold War glorified certain types of institutions, personalities, and attitudes, and ends by pointing out that we paid a very heavy cost–much as General and President Eisenhower tried to warn us–in permitting our society to be bound by weaponry, ideology, and secrecy.Two quotes, one from the beginning, one from the end, capture all that lies in between, well-documented and I would add–contrary to some opinions–coherent and understandable.

“For the United States, the price of victory goes far beyond the dollars spend on warheads, foreign aid, soldiers, propaganda, and intelligence. It includes, for instance, time wasted, talent misdirected, secrecy imposed, and confidence impaired. Particular costs were imposed on industry, science, and the universities. Trade was distorted and growth impeded.” (page xi)

“CIA world-order men whose intrigues more often than not started at the incompetent and went down from there, White House claims of ‘national security' to conceal deceit, and the creation of huge special interests in archaic spending all too easily occurred because most Americans were not preoccupied with the struggle.” (page 643)

Although the author did not consult the most recent intelligence reform books (e.g. Berkowitz, Johnson, Treverton, inter alia), he is consistently detailed and scathing in his review of intelligence blunders and the costs of secrecy–in this he appears to very ably collaborate the findings of Daniel Ellsberg's more narrowly focused book on “SECRETS: A Memoire of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers.” He points out, among many many examples, that despite Andropov's having been head of the KGB for fifteen years, at the end of it CIA still did not know if Andropov has a wife or spoke English. He also has a lovely contrast between how little was learned using very expensive national technical means (secret satellites) and open sources: “So much failure could have been avoided if CIA has done more careful homework during the 1950s in the run-up to Sputnik; during the 1960s, when Sovieet marshals were openly publishing their thoughts on nuclear strategy; or during the 1970s and 1980s, when stagnation could be chronicled in the unclassified gray pages of Soviet print. Most expensively, the CIA hardly ever learned anything from its mistakes, largely because it would not admit them.” (pages 567-568).

The author's biographic information does not include any reference to military service, but footnote 110 suggests that he was at least in Officer Candidate School with the U.S. Marine Corps during the Vietnam era. The biography, limited to the inside back jacket flap, also avoids discussing the author's considerable experience with information technology. Given the importance of this critique of all that most Republicans and most 50-70 year olds hold very sacred, we need to more about the man goring the ox. Future editions should have a much expanded biography.

Bottom line: America muddled through the Cold War, made many costly mistakes, and developed a policy-making process that is, to this day, largely uninformed due to a lack of a comprehensive global intelligence capability, or a sufficient means of consulting diverse experts (as opposed to the in-town intellectual harlots). If ever we needed a clean-sheet look at how we make policy and how we provide decision-support to that policy process, this is the time. The “fifty-year wound” is still open, and the author warns us it will not heal without a reappraisal of how we do the business of national security.

2002/11/112009/12/04

Review: Bravo Two Zero (Fiction)

3 Star, Biography & Memoirs, War & Face of Battle

Self-Serving, Distortions, But Worth Buying in Paper,

November 11, 2002

Andy McNab

As a former Marine Corps infantry officer I was among those who praised this book when it first came out, and I thought it quite spectacular. Years later, last week actually, I picked up Michael Asher's book, “The Real Bravo Two Zero,” and was stunned by how a quality investigative journalist and former SAS'r fluent in Arabic, with three years under his belt living with the Bedouins, could actually trace back the exact paths outlined in the original book, only to reveal massive deceptions and fabrications. I actually recommend buying McNab's book, because it has a lot of useful detail and the protagonists are heroes simply for surviving–but if you want to take your experience up an order of magnitude, and be just plain flat out amazed, buy both this book and Asher's paperback, and see just how he reconstructed the truth deep within Iraq, talking to Bedouin's (three of whom actually were the “hoards of Iraqi's with tanks and personnel carriers” during the fateful battle that broke the mission apart) and actually walking the ground and finding all the traces.

2002/11/022009/12/04

Review: Secrets–A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers

6 Star Top 10%, Censorship & Denial of Access, Crime (Government), Culture, Research, Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Impeachment & Treason, Information Operations, Intelligence (Government/Secret), Justice (Failure, Reform), Military & Pentagon Power, Misinformation & Propaganda, Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy, Strategy, Threats (Emerging & Perennial), True Cost & Toxicity, Truth & Reconciliation, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized), War & Face of Battle

History Matters, Secrecy Permits War Crimes by Presidents,

November 2, 2002

Daniel Ellsberg

This extraordinary work comes at the perfect time, as an Administration is seeking to create new forms of secret operations invisible to Congress and the public, in pursuit of its war on Iraq and-one speculates-other targets of ideological but not public priority. The book covers seven areas I categorize as Background, History, Information Strategy, Pathology of Secrecy, Ethics, War Crimes, and Administrative.By way of background, the book establishes that the author was not a peacenik per se, as some might perceive him, but rather a warrior, both in terms of Cold War ideology and from actual experience as a USMC infantry company commander and an on-the-ground observer traveling across Viet-Nam by jeep instead of helicopter, generally in the company of the top U.S. ground expert in Viet-Nam, John Paul Vann. The book establishes-as George Allen has also told us in NONE SO BLIND, that intelligence did not fail in Viet-Nam, that Presidents do get good advice from good men, but that the position of President, combined with executive secrecy as an enabling condition, permits very irrational and ineffective policies, conceived in private without public debate, to go forward at taxpayer expense and without Congressional oversight. The author is timely in emphasizing that the “spell of unanimity” is very dangerous and provides a very false image to the public-the stifling of dissent and debate at all levels leads to bad policy.

The author does an effective job of bringing forward the lessons of history, not only from Truman and Eisenhower forward, but from the Japanese and French occupations of Indochina. We failed to learn from history, and even our own experts, such as Lansdale showing McNamara the rough equipment that the Vietnamese would defeat us with because of their “will to win,” were sidelined.

As a public administration and public policy text this book offers real value as a primary source. The author provides valuable insights into how quickly “ground truth” can be established; on how the U.S. Government is not structured to learn; on how the best answers emerge when there is not a lead agency and multiple inputs are solicited simultaneously; and most importantly, on how private truths spoken in secrecy are not effective within any Administration. The author stresses that Americans must understand what Presidents are doing in their name, and not be accomplices to war crimes or other misdeeds. He does a brilliant job of demonstrating why we cannot let the Executive Branch dictate what we need to know.

Interwoven with the author's balanced discussion of how to get ground truth right is his searing and intimate discussion of the pathology of secrecy as an enabler for bad and sometimes criminal foreign policy, carried out without public debate or Congressional oversight. The author adds new insights, beyond those in Morton Halperin's superb primer on Bureaucracy and Foreign Policy, regarding the multiple levels of understanding created by multiple levels of classification; the falseness of many written records in an environment where truth may often only be spoken verbally, without witnesses; the fact that the Department of Defense created false records to conceal its illegal bombings in Laos and Cambodia, at the same time that the White House created false secret cables, used Acting Director of the FBI Patrick Gray to destroy evidence, and sought to bribe a judge with the offer of the FBI directorship. The author presents a compelling portrait of an Executive Branch-regardless of incumbent party-likely to make major foreign policy miscalculations because of the pathology of secret compartmentation, while also being able to conceal those miscalculations, and the cost to the public, because of Executive secrecy. He is especially strong on the weakness of secret information. As he lectured to Kissinger: “The danger is, you'll become like a moron. You'll become incapable of learning from most people in the world, no matter how much experience they have in their particular areas that may be much greater than yours” [because of your blind faith in the value of your narrow and often incorrect secret information. P. 236]

On such a foundation, the author discusses the ethics of Presidential leadership. He is especially strong-and relevant today-in discussing how Presidential appointees regard loyalty to the President as a mandate for lying to Congress and the media and the public. The author excels at bringing forward how our corruption in permitting corruption is easily recognized and interpreted by indigenous personnel-just as how whom we support is quick evidence of how little we know about local politics.

From here the author segues into the ethics of collateral damage and the liability of the American people for war crimes and naked aggression against the Vietnamese because of our deliberate violation of the Geneva accords and our support for a corrupt series of dictatorships in South Viet-Nam. Much of what we did in Viet-Nam would appear to qualify for prosecution under the International Tribunal, and it may be that our bi-partisan history of war crimes in Viet-Nam is what keeps us from acknowledging the inherent wisdom of accepting the jurisdiction of the International Tribunal in future wars. Tellingly, at one point his wife reads the Pentagon Papers and her tearful reaction is: “this is the language of torturers.”

Administratively we are reminded that the Pentagon Papers were 7,000 pages in total; that Neil Sheehan from The New York Times actually stole a set of the papers from Ellsberg before being given a set; that character assassination by the U.S. Government is a routine tactic in dealing with informed dissent; and that it is not illegal to leak classified information-only administrative sanctions apply, outside a narrow set of Congressionally-mandated exceptions.

This book is a “must read” for any American that thinks and votes.

2002/09/212009/12/04

Review: Afghan Guerrilla Warfare–In the Words of the Mujahideen Fighters

4 Star, Biography & Memoirs, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized), War & Face of Battle

Great Raw Material, Helpful Commentary, Missing Closure,

September 21, 2002

Ali Ahmad Jalali

It may not be obvious to the hurried shopper, so it is worth emphasizing up front that this book not only has the full support of the Foreign Military Studies Office of the U.S. Army, but is provided courtesy of the United States Marine Corps Studies and Analysis Division.The selection of stories may have been done by the Soviets from whom the work is borrowed, but in any event is quite good–16 vignettes on ambushes, 10 on raids, 2 on shelling attacks, 6 on attacking strong points, 2 on mine warfare, 6 on blocking enemy lines of communication, 2 on siege warfare, 4 on defending against raids, 3 on fighting heliborne insertions, 5 on defending against cordon and search, 14 on defending base camps, 6 on counterambushes, 3 on fighting an encirclement, and 14 on urban combat. One wonders if those responsible for inserting our forces into Afghanistan in the failed effort to capture the Taliban and Al Qaeda leadership intact, ever read this book. It is quite good.

Although it provides very professional U.S. commentary after each vignette, commenting on both Soviet and Mujahideen behavior in the combat situations, it fails on two counts: the index is terrible (mostly an index of names, rather than combat lessons), and the final chapter is a whimper rather than a sonic boom–this book should be re-issued immediately with a proper index and a concluding chapter that pulls together the concise troop leading “bullets” for each of the 14 combat situations depicted by the vignettes ennumerated above.

One final note: the availability of this book via Amazon.com deserves special commendation. I have been trying for years to get the U.S. Army's Strategic Studies Institute to get all of its very superior and valuable publications made available via Amazon.com so that its taxpayer-funded knowledge would be more widely available, and have simply not been able to get them off the dime. As 9-11 demonstrates, knowledge that is not shared can ultimately exact a great price–what our war colleges produce, at taxpayer expense, needs to be given broader dissemination, and Amazon.com is “the” portal for monograph and book form knowledge.

2002/08/292009/12/04

Review: Supreme Command–Soldiers, Statesmen, and Leadership in Wartime

4 Star, Biography & Memoirs, Decision-Making & Decision-Support, Leadership, War & Face of Battle

Isolates Leadership from Intelligence,

August 29, 2002

Eliot Cohen

Edit of 18 May to add links, images, and comment for the war college students.

This is a first-class book and everything that it offers is laudable. Unfortunately, it completely isolates the civilian political to military professional relationship from ethics, intelligence, or the public.

This is not to suggest that leadership cannot take place in the absence of intelligence–indeed, Churchill was at his greatest when he formed his private informal intelligence network to replace the static and myopic official intelligence channels that muddled along in the pre-war years.

However, to discuss Viet-Nam, for example, and not acknowledge what George Allen has documented so well in None So Blind: A Personal Account of the Intelligence Failure in Vietnam, or Michael Hiam in Who the Hell Are We Fighting?: The Story of Sam Adams and the Vietnam Intelligence Wars, to wit, the consistent manner in which policy-makers in Washington refused to listen to accurate intelligence estimates, while their Generals and Ambassadors in Saigon steadfastly “cooked the books,” leaves the reader with a distorted understanding of how the policy-military-intelligence triad actually fails, more often than not, on the policy side rather than on the intelligence side. The manipulation of truth from the Saigon end, and the refusal to listen to truth on the Washington end, resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, Vietnamese, Laotian, Cambodian, and American, as well as allied nationalities.

Ethics–and intelligence–matter, and no treatment of Supreme Command should fail to address how these two should be but often are not the foundation for the civilian-military relationship. Let me be blunt: until complete transparency is achieved in how we plan, program, and budget for national security, the military officer corps, not the elected politicians or the secret bureaucrats, are going to be the truth-tellers.

Eight other books (all with my Cliff Note reviews) that I recommend as context:

Modern Strategy: Time is the one strategic variable that cannot be bought nor replaced.

Hope Is Not a Strategy: The 6 Keys to Winning the Complex Sale Neither is ideological fantasy and flag officers that forget their Oath and confuse loyalty with integrity.

Security Studies for the 21st Century Policy makers are seriously stupid about reality, and all too prone to believe classified crap or make up their own (see next two books)

Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers See my review on Ellsberg lecturing Kissinger how he would become like a moron in shutting out ground truth in favor of codeword.

The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People Reality 101, not taught in most war colleges

The Fifty-Year Wound: How America's Cold War Victory Has Shaped Our World General and President Ike Eisenhower warned us–we let it happen anyway.

Breaking the Real Axis of Evil: How to Oust the World's Last Dictators by 2025. Strategic Communications is seriously stupid and ineffective if we continue to support 42 of the 44 dictators, and allow Guantanamo and Abu Grahib to dominate how others see us

A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility–Report of the Secretary-General's High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change Reality 102. LtGen Dr. Brent Scowcroft was the US member of this panel on high level threats, challenges and change. Here they are, in priority order:

01 Poverty
02 Infectious Disease
03 Environmental Degradation
04 Inter-State Conflict
05 Civil War
06 Genocide
07 Other Atrocities
08 Proliferation
09 Terrorism
10 Transnational Crime

See my many lists on emerging threats, intelligence support to acquisition, etcetera. See comment for the free weekly report on Global Challenges: The Week in Review, and the Marine Corps Expeditionary Analysis Model.

TAKE-AWAYS:

01) $60 billion a year for secret intelligence that can be ignored and only touches 4% of the relevant information in 183 languages we do not speak is institutionalized lunacy.

02) Spending $1.3 trillion a year on war when peace and prosperity for all can be bought for under $250 billion a year is institutionalized lunacy.

03) You are responsible for keeping policy makers honest–that is a core Constitutional, moral, and command responsibility…you owe your troops, and the average American, this discipline of mind and heart.

04) The collective intelligence of the public is vastly more aware, more conscious, more moral, and more relevant to national security that the idiot ideas that come from loosely-educated policy makers who got their jobs by blowing smoke up someone's butt (or academics who lie to Congress when Service leaders are not willing to kick them down the steps of Capitol Hill and put their stars on the table).

05) The Chinese brought Dick Cheney's plane over Singapore. Why have you not been told this? Search for the Memorandum <Chinese Irregular Warfare oss.net>. Waging Peace (Irregular Warfare) is the ONLY win-win.

06) DoD, for all its faults including an inability to pass an audit and $2.3 trillion “missing and unaccounted for,” works better than the rest of the government. DoD needs to become the inter-agency and coalition hub for global action.

07) Foundations, corporations, other governments, and international organizations spend close to $1 trillion a year in charitable giving and planned assistance. Wrap your heads around this: a Multinational Decision Support Center in Tampa, taking over the CCC building that is being vacated, could create and promulgate an annual Global Range of Gifts Table to guide, on an opt-in basis, how they spent that money, while using Civil Affairs Brigade as the hub for regional multinational Civil Affairs Brigades who help connect the one billion rich with the five billion poor at a household level of granularity, with needs from $1 to $10,000 being covered by individuals that will not give to foundations.

The world has changed. Most of what is in this book is history, and completely out of touch with how the Services must motivate and lead Digital Natives, the Web 2.0 generation, and how the Services must become brain-housing groups–thinkers as well as shooters–able to deliver Peace from the Sea, Peace from Above, and Peace one cell call at a time.

I welcome invitations to speak informally after hours on a not to interfere basis. You folks at the next generation of leaders–you will need to learn most of what you will use outside the normal curriculum. Amazon is a great place to start.

2002/05/282011/09/05

Review: Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace – How We Got to Be So Hated

5 Star, America (Founders, Current Situation), Asymmetric, Cyber, Hacking, Odd War, Atrocities & Genocide, Complexity & Catastrophe, Congress (Failure, Reform), Crime (Corporate), Crime (Government), Culture, Research, Economics, Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Force Structure (Military), Impeachment & Treason, Intelligence (Government/Secret), Military & Pentagon Power, Misinformation & Propaganda, Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Philosophy, Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Priorities, Public Administration, Religion & Politics of Religion, Science & Politics of Science, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy, Security (Including Immigration), Strategy, Terrorism & Jihad, Threats (Emerging & Perennial), True Cost & Toxicity, War & Face of Battle, Water, Energy, Oil, Scarcity

Gore Vidal

5.0 out of 5 stars You Get the Government You Deserve…., May 28, 2002

This book should be read in conjunction with Greg Palast's The Best Democracy Money Can Buy Vidal's book should be subtitled “you get the government you deserve.”

I cannot think of a book that has depressed me more. There are three underlying issues that make this book vitally important to anyone who cares to claim the title of “citizen:”

1) Citizens need to understand what their government is doing in the name of America, to the rest of the world. “Ignorance is not an excuse.” All of the other books I have reviewed (“see more about me” should really say “see my other reviews”) are designed to help citizens evaluate and then vote wisely in relation to how our elected representatives are handling national security affairs–really, really badly.

Continue reading “Review: Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace – How We Got to Be So Hated”