Overcoming the Dangers of Insular Communities

This excerpt from a guest post on Marc Lynch's blog caught my eye. Brian Katulis writes:

There are several must-read blogs out there - the COIN nerds have some interesting insights, but let's face it, their musings tend to be a bit blinkered by self-referential navel gazing with an overemphasis on the U.S. military and what U.S. boots on the ground do. That's a limited perspective and doesn't lend itself to a complete analysis of the political, social, and economic trends happening out in the real world.

Speaking as a fan of and participant in that community, I've been thinking the same thoughts for a while now. My love affair with the COIN community began when the dissidents took over the Iraq war, and I realized they actually knew what they were doing. After years of growing disillusionment with some of my leaders, I finally found a community of competent, intelligent military professionals I could trust. I can't overstate how important that was to me personally. Over the past year I've been drawn deeper and deeper into the COIN community. I follow its blogs, read its recommended books, and study the debates among of its members. The contributions of this community are extraordinary and I am constantly learning from it.

However, I've become attuned to some insidious dangers in my participation. First, my reading has become much too specialized. Over the past few months I've found myself reading the exact same thing as every other member of the COIN community. I read multiple reports on Iraq and Af-Pak each day, but have a stack of issues of The Economist and Foreign Affairs that I've never opened. In the past couple months I've read books like Fiasco, The Gamble, The Unforgiving Minute, This Man's Army and Dereliction of Duty (all excellent books) but I haven't touched much philosophy, literature, or economics. Second, I've devoted much of my intellectual energy to a specialized set of problems--the same problems the rest of the COIN community is working on. Innovative, out-of-the-box thinking requires seeing past the immediate situation in front of you and seeing what's not there: unrealized threats, untried possibilities, alternative ways of solving problems. This kind of thinking requires imagination, creativity, and a broad cross-disciplinary education. Granted, we want our best strategic minds figuring out how to win the wars we're in, but we also want creative independent thinkers who can see down the road and look where nobody else is looking. The problem with the Army's emergent intellectual community isn't with what it's saying; the problem is what it's not saying. Its gurus are focusing on only one subset of world affairs, through one specific lens. That's fine, as long as we recognize it and adapt.

Over the course of history, knowledge has become more and more compartmentalized. This parallels the division of labor in economic activity. This has its advantages, but it also has its dangers. Thinkers tend to form insular communities with their own assumptions, frameworks, and ideas. Bringing different communities together can be a challenge, and it is rare to find individuals who are comfortable participating in multiple communities at one time. Our information age exacerbates this problem, because the Internet allows a more perfect division of intellect. People self-organize into like-minded, self-reinforcing communities and infrequently interact with others. The blogosphere is probably the ultimate example, and the COINosphere is no exception.

So what should we do? First, we need to recognize the potential dangers of a homogeneous community and create an atmosphere that encourages dissent and cross-pollination with other communities. Second, we need to teach people how to think, and not what to think. Third, we need to emphasize broad education. Individuals should deliberately seek knowledge outside of the community. Sharp soldiers shouldn't just study military history (although that is important). They should also study economics, psychology, environmental science, literature, computer science, regional affairs, or any of a thousand other fields. And let's not forget firsthand life experience. A soldier who wants to learn about the world should travel, volunteer to work with young people in an inner city, visit a mosque, go to a human rights film festival, attend a technology expo, visit an anthropology exhibit at the local museum, or do a thousand other things. He should deliberately seek experiences outside his race, economic class, religion, academic field, and profession. His news should come from multiple sources with different biases. Fourth, the military should institutionalize ways of drawing on the expertise of other communities: exchange programs between military officers and other agencies (both governmental and nongovernmental), conferences with non-military organizations, interagency wargaming, etc.

All of this should sound familiar to the members of the COINosphere, because most of them have been arguing the same thing in the face of an intellectually stagnant military culture. For the most part they have triumphed. Now they must be careful not to become the thing they fought against.

UPDATE: Abu Muqawama responds to the above "COIN Nerd" quote here.

Free DLI Curriculum: An Update

I recently suggested that the Defense Language Institute should put all its curriculum online for free. My Military Language Instructor at DLI thought it was a fantastic idea, so I wrote a polished paper and have begun circulating it. People like the idea, but immediately cite numerous reasons it won't work. Even though DLI does not have a profit motive with its curriculum, the US government does. Putting DLI curriculum online for free would require untangling a giant knot involving copyright law, US government rights, and multimillion dollar deals with civilian contractors. I don't fully understand the current arrangement, or know if it's possible to change it, but I will keep fighting for the idea.

The Air Force Blocks TroopTube

What is the Air Force thinking? Its Internet restrictions have always been draconian, but firewalling the military's own video site is a bridge too far. I've been thinking about writing a short story set a decade or so in the future, when government/military network access becomes so useless and so far behind modern technology that soldiers in the field begin independently operating on an open source network designed by teenage hackers, accessed via hacked cell phones. Until I write my own story, military IT professionals are advised to clean all the white papers out of their briefcases to make room for Science Fiction author Cory Doctorow.

Busy Studying

My apologies for my inattention to this blog. I am heading for Jordan very soon and am studying for the Arabic Defense Language Proficiency Test. Most students at DLI take the test after 63 weeks of study. I am in an accelerated 50-week course, and on top of that, I am leaving the course for Jordan ten weeks early. Since I will be testing at a significant disadvantage, I am studying harder than ever--in addition to preparing for my move. Hopefully this blog will get more interesting once I arrive in Jordan, and actually have a day-to-day life interesting enough to write about. In the meantime, I have a couple short topics to post on today.

A Recommendation

I read a lot of good books and don't usually make special recommendations on this blog, but I have to make an exception for Craig Mullaney's The Unforgiving Minute. Mullaney's book is all over the military blogs right now, so it probably needs no introduction to many of my readers. I'll just say this: the book is good. It is a gripping memoir of a soldier's education in peace and war, and a thoughtful and literate reflection on military leadership.

Thanks to Mullaney, this particular Air Force officer gained a lot of insight into what US Army infantry is all about.

What We Don't Know About Iraq

In my last two entries, I suggested that Americans--and the American military in particular--may not know as much about foreign cultures as we think. Because most of our knowledge of foreign cultures comes by way of American intermediaries, we seldom make genuine cross-cultural contact.

In an op-ed running tomorrow in the Washington Post, Philip Bennett argues something very similar. Referring to recent histories of the Iraq War, Bennett writes, "Iraqis' stories have been overshadowed by the towering drama of our own experience." Our failure to understand Iraqi perspectives on their own country poses a real problem now that American forces are beginning to withdraw. Bennett writes:

With U.S. forces set to withdraw from Iraq over the next 18 months, does it matter that we know so little about how Iraqis have understood and lived through the war? The invisible connection between the overlapping experiences of Americans and Iraqis -- and the blame, estrangement and hatred that has choked the air between them -- impairs our ability to see what will happen next. It also means that as U.S. officials apply the lessons of the Iraq war to strategy in Afghanistan, they risk missing a central part of the story.

Foreign Cultures: In a Mirror Dimly Part II

My wife might be among the most cross-culturally competent people to ever set foot on Incirlik AB, Turkey. One summer, when she had time off from her job, she flew commercially from the US to join me on a squadron deployment. I spent six of the best weeks of my life flying combat missions into Iraq and hanging out with my wife.

Turkey is a beautiful country, rich in history and culture. Its people are warm, hospitable, and take great pride in showing off their country. Unfortunately few Americans who pass through Incirlik AB ever really see it. Most never make it out of "The Alley", a commercial purgatory between the base and downtown where hundreds of American airmen haggle for carpets or drink beer and play pool in bars sporting American flags and military memorabilia. The Alley is fun, but it's hardly an authentic cultural experience. It's a carnival for American servicemen, lubricated by US dollars. More daring airmen can sign up for trips at the ITT office; they can pile aboard a tour bus with thirty other Americans and spend a day or two visiting sites like Tarsus or "Castle by the Sea."

My wife, who served in the US Peace Corps, wanted more. She wanted to escape the American bubble and really see the culture. Unfortunately, every trip outside the alley required O-6 approval, a detailed itinerary, and a force protection brief. This was a hassle, but we became masters of the process. The next step was getting to downtown Adana, the city neighboring Incirlik. Most Americans who visit downtown Adana hire a taxi. My wife decided we should use the local bus service. The first time we piled into the crowded minibus, we had no idea what we were doing. We followed the lead of the Turkish passengers in front of us and passed up coins to the driver, but still managed to get ripped off. After a couple tries we had the process down. We eventually learned our way around Adana. We became familiar with the spectacular Sabanci Mosque--and the proper etiquette to observe when visiting. We learned where to hire guides who would take us around town, and where an ancient Christian church was located. My wife learned some of the language. Word of her cross-cultural skills spread quickly, and she became the go-to person for my squadron. While I was flying missions, she helped others plan their trips, gave tips on riding Turkish buses, or even played the role of tour guide for my colleagues. She took a couple ITT trips, but she and I also went to Castle by the Sea one day by riding the Turkish bus system--a four hour trip each way that required multiple bus changes, at stations where nobody spoke a word of English. If the Colonel knew what he was signing off on, there's no way he would have said yes. My wife concluded her "deployment" to Incirlik with a 4-day solo trip to Istanbul, where she made friends with a Turkish businessman who does business with Japan and an Indian South African woman who'd spent several years living in Saudi Arabia.

My wife was so successful at penetrating the Turkish culture because she violated all the norms of the US military. Overseas bases are generally designed to insulate American servicemembers from the surrounding culture (and vice versa). Bases are bubbles of American culture, and wider exploration of the host country is generally funneled through ITT trips. Even in countries where servicemembers are free to travel, like Japan or Germany, it takes real effort to escape the American influence that bleeds into the area. The strip joints and pawn shops outside Yakota AB, Japan could have been transplanted from Fayetteville. My wife fought as hard as she could to break out of this system--while I rushed to keep up.

Even when American servicemembers are motivated to travel and learn about another culture, they face serious bureaucratic hurdles from the US government. A civilian who wants to travel just needs a passport and a visa. Depending on the country, a military officer might need country clearance from the US embassy in the country or even theater clearance from the controlling combatant command. They must comply with a heavyweight document called the Foreign Clearance Guide, which has detailed regulations for each country that govern both personal and professional travel. When I visited Jordan last spring, I needed country clearance from the embassy and theater clearance from CENTCOM. Military servicemembers are forbidden to enter Jordan on personal leave. I had to stretch the system to its limits by requesting a "permissive TDY" to justify my presence. In a military culture dominated by OPSEC and force protection concerns, foreign cultures are viewed as threats. Vast regions are marked off as off-limits to US military. Want to visit somewhere exotic like Khartoum or Beirut? Forget it.

What do these trends mean for the US military? Although the US military has global commitments and a worldwide presence, many of its members never develop strong cross-cultural awareness or skills. The more strategic the region, the harder it is for an American servicemember to learn about the culture. The first time many soldiers will really encounter a foreign culture is when their boots hit the ground.

I have flown hundreds of missions in the Middle East, but in my official Air Force travels, I have only spoken to an Arab face-to-face a couple times. A fellow C-17 pilot told me about a trip he flew to Israel in 2003. His crew was terrified to set foot outside their hotel because of terrorism concerns. An Air Force colleague had a chance to visit Turkey while in ROTC, but his commander actively discouraged him from going. Force protection is a serious concern, but what is the long-term cost when the system breeds this much fear and insulation from the regions and cultures that matter most to our national security? What does it mean when a pot-smoking college-aged backpacker has more freedom to travel the world than a Lieutenant Colonel?

Next time: recommendations on ways to close the gap in our cross-cultural competency.

Foreign Cultures: In a Mirror Dimly

Last week, my wife gave me this intriguing article titled "McCulture" by Aviya Kushner, a writer who is equally comfortable working in English and Hebrew. Kushner acknowledges that Americans have developed a sincere thirst to know and understand foreign cultures, but she makes a subtle observation from the literary world. While America's literary landscape now features stories from all over the world ( a third of Granta's 2007 Best Young American Novelists list English as a second language ), Americans read an embarrassingly low number of translations. "It’s not that Americans aren’t interested in the world at all," Kushner writes. "It’s just that we seem to want someone else to do the ­heavy ­lifting required to make a cultural connection." We want guides and interpreters. We want our encounters with the foreign to be firmly rooted in our own experience. Kushner writes, "We prefer to read of a Bosnian immigrant in New York instead of a Bosnian man in Sarajevo, written by a Bosnian. This way, at least we can recognize New ­York." If Kushner is right, it raises vital questions. Do we know half as much about the world as we think we do? Can we really understand foreign cultures when our understanding is distilled through Western guides?

To illustrate her point, Kushner takes a jab at the thousands of American college students who flock to Europe each year. These students tote guidebooks like Let's Go!, spend two or three days in a country at a time, and stay in youth hostels where they mostly interact with other students like themselves. Kushner is exactly right. After my graduation from the Air Force Academy, I spent five weeks doing exactly what Kushner describes. Hostellers have their own distinct culture. They have a sincere desire to know and understand foreign cultures, and a self-righteous condescension for rich Westerners tourists, but they're blind to their own hypocrisies. They spend the vast majority of their time in the hostel subculture and build relationships mostly with other hostellers. That was true of me during my backpacking adventure.

Our academic efforts to cross cultures are equally biased towards the familiar and the Western. When Americans want to learn about Arabic and Islamic culture, they read books by Bernard Lewis or Raphael Patai's The Arabic Mind--books that hardly represent how Arabs view and understand themselves. Meanwhile, how many us have heard of the Iraqi scholar Ali al-Wardi? I hadn't until last year, when I read Ali Allawi's book The Occupation of Iraq: Winning the War, Losing the Peace. Allawi argues that if American policymakers had put down Bernard Lewis and read more from al-Wardi, who has an intimate understanding the sectarianism in his own country, they might have embarked on a saner foreign policy trajectory.

We are also most comfortable analyzing history when led by Western guides. I have read two histories of the 2003 Iraq war: Tom Ricks' Fiasco and Ali Allawai's The Occupation of Iraq. Both are fantastic books. One is written by a leading journalist for the Washington Post and the other by an Iraqi who worked post-invasion as Iraq's Minister of Defense and Minister of Finance. I probably don't need to tell you which one was a #1 New York Times bestseller. The content of the books is markedly different, although they cover many of the same events. The cast of Fiasco is almost entirely American. Ricks is a fantastic journalist and I'm a big fan (I drove two hours to a book signing a couple weeks ago), but Allawi presents an Iraqi perspective that no American author can hope to match. The tensions between American authorities and Iraqi politicians dominate every page of Allawi's book; they scarcely register in Ricks'.

These concerns are not merely philosophical or academic. They have profound implications for our foreign policy. In an article posted on Small Wars Journal today, Judah Grunstein writes, "One of the cornerstones of the new COIN doctrine is the need to understand the culture within which the operation is unfolding. Translated into a broad policy directive, that can only have a positive effect on strategic decision-making." This recognition has fueled ambitious language and culture programs across the DoD. But what if we're not learning nearly as much as we think? If Kushner is right, our lectures on the Middle East by American PME instructors, our culture briefings by American intelligence officers, and our readings about the Middle East by Western authors are all missing something crucial: genuine cultural understanding. Western interpretations of other cultures certainly play an important role, but to really understanding foreign cultures, we must also let those cultures speak for themselves.

Cultural understanding requires contact. As long as we rely solely on Western intermediaries, that key ingredient will always be missing.

I have more to say on the subject, but will save it for another post. Next time: what does it mean for our cross-cultural competency when many deployed military personnel never speak with a native of that country, when an officer at Incirlik AB, Turkey requires O-6 permission to visit downtown, and when an Olmsted scholar requires CENTCOM theater approval to visit Jordan--and only for the purpose of official business?

The Crowd's Role in Defending Against Swarms

A couple weeks ago John Arquilla wrote an op-ed at the New York Times titled The Coming Swarm. "The basic concept," he writes about swarm attacks, "is that hitting several targets at once, even with just a few fighters at each site, can cause fits for elite counterterrorist forces that are often manpower-heavy, far away and organized to deal with only one crisis at a time." As examples he cites the Mumbai attacks and attacks on three government ministries in Kabul in the space of a week by just eight terrorists. The prominence of these attacks means "suggests that Americans should brace for a coming swarm."

How do you deal with swarm attacks? Arquilla writes, "The simplest way is to create many more units able to respond to simultaneous, small-scale attacks and spread them around the country. This means jettisoning the idea of overwhelming force in favor of small units that are not “elite” but rather “good enough” to tangle with terrorist teams. In dealing with swarms, economizing on force is essential."

That sounds good to me. The core response to terror attacks must always come from trained professionals. But I'd like to raise a question: can the "crowd" play any meaningful role in a response to swarm attacks? Or any attack, for that matter?. We live in an age when the means of large-scale violence are readily available to everybody. In a day when any sixteen year-old with a grudge can shoot up a school, potential threats are everywhere. Limited numbers of police may not be able to respond to every threat in a timely manner. Can we give average citizens some role in their own defense?

I think yes and no. You certainly can't (and shouldn't) try to crowdsource everything, particularly in the realm of security. But we may be able to identify some particular functions that the crowd is uniquely suited to play.

My first suggestion is that the crowd is uniquely suited to get itself out of harm's way. When an attack is in progress, authorities need fast, effective ways to communicate the threat to citizens who may be in danger and communicate instructions. Survivors of the September 11th WTC attacks said, "they felt emergency communications could have been more helpful during the evacuation of the towers. Specific knowledge about the location of fires and aircraft impact damage was only occasionally communicated to occupants who requested the information. Those communications were apparently uncoordinated." Some announcements in WTC 2 even instructed employees to return to their offices just prior the second aircraft impact. Likewise, lives could have been saved in several of the high-profile school shootings if students knew an attack was in progress. If you communicate the threat and clear instructions, crowds could self-organize to get clear of the threat. This kind of resilience--minimizing the effects of attacks--is vital to a comprehensive defense against terrorism.

How do you communicate to the right crowd? My money is on cell phones. Everybody has one, usually on their person. In the wake of the Virgina Tech massacre, hundreds of universities have implemented text alert systems. The problem is that these systems are opt-in and have low enrollment rates. The plans are also not broad or flexible enough for use outside a specific university.

Could this idea be enlarged? Cellphone locations can be identified within a 25-100m radius by triangulation and many cell phones have GPS receivers. Google has actually created a service called Google Latitude that lets friends and family track your position using these technologies. Theoretically, it should be possible to build a flexible emergency-response system that lets authorities send alerts to every phone in a given geographic region. Shooting spree in progress at the local mall? Authorities could send a text alert to every cell phone entering a one mile radius. This strikes me as a far more relevant system in today's world than our outdated Emergency Alert System--which transmits over TV, radio, and cable.

I imagine the main obstacles would be legal and ethical. Is this a violation of privacy? Do we want to let Big Brother communicate with our cell phones? Does the government have authority to demand phone location information from cell phone companies? Should such a system be opt-in, opt-out, or mandated? Could hackers hijack the system for nefarious purposes? I don't have the answers, but I suggest this is a conversation worth having.

The crowd could also feed valuable intelligence back to authorities. Only a limited number of police officers will respond to an attack, but they could take advantage of hundreds of eyes and ears at the scene. Perhaps the same text alerting system described above could include callback numbers for sharing information. Imagine the school shooting scenario again. Students trapped inside a school building could potentially report the locations of the attacker or of victims, or even provide cell phone photos or live video. If this intelligence could be quickly sifted and collated into one geo-tagged product, authorities could rapidly develop a detailed, continuously updated "battlespace" picture.

Such a system would have extraordinary challenges. Attackers could exploit the freely available information about their own attack (as the Mumbai attackers did) or could transmit disinformation over the emergency network. Authorities would need gatekeepers to monitor the exchange of information and separate the wheat from the chaff. But on balance, I believe the benefits of a more open, networked emergency response system would outweigh the costs.

Is such a system feasible? I don't know. I'm just brainstorming here. What do you think?

What is the Impact of New Media in the US Military?

Over at Small Wars Journal, Dave Dilegge asked that question to a number of prominent military bloggers and posted their responses. It's a good discussion for those interested in the "New Media" and its impact.