Memory, Identity, and War

In the novel Tigana, Guy Gavriel Kay--one of the most talented and underappreciated fantasy authors writing today--tells the tale of the Palm, a land living under occupation by two sorcerers. The province of Tigana led the resistance against the sorcerer Brandin, and in a crucial battle Brandin's son was killed. In retribution Brandin unleashed a devastating form of magic. "Not only did he conquer it and destroy every material vestige of [Tigana's] culture and history, but he placed a monstrous curse upon it to remove all memory of it and even its name from human knowledge. Only those born in Tigana can hear its name and know how great their loss is: no one else, except sorcerers and wizards on whom the curse has no effect, can even remember that Tigana once existed."

War against Tigana was not enough. Brandin's vengenace was not complete until he erased even the memory of its existence. The novel follows a band of rebels struggling to keep the memory of their beloved homeland alive.

The novel is fantasy, but the themes are not. "The Hijacking and Recovery of Memory"--to quote a chapter title from Chris Hedgs' book War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning--is a central part of wartime narratives. When nations or peoples go to war, they craft narratives that exalt their own cause and dehumanize their enemies. They do not merely try to dominate the enemy on the battlefield; they try to dominate him in memory and history. Hedges opens his chapter by relating a visit with Hagob H. Asadourian, an Armenian who has written fourteen books in a "battle to preserve memory." Asadourian's haunting quest parallels the fantasy tale Guy Gavriel Kay constructed. Asadourian laments, "Who still speaks of the extermination of the Armenians?" Turkey still vigorously denies the murder of more than one million Armenians. Violence against the Armenian people was not enough; the final act of violence was obliterating their very memory and the memory of their extermination. Hedges writes:

The globe is dotted with such anonymous burial pits. They are physical reminders of justice denied. Yet they have a startling power to plague the murderers decades after the event. These atrocities--denied by the perpetrators and sanctified by the victims--leave huge chasms between peoples. They serve to create two distinct and antagonistic histories. It is only with an historical consensus that there can be reconciliation.

In my last post, I condemned Holocaust denial as an inexcusable form of antisemitism. Why single out that crime? Because it is an attempt to erase memory. It is the ultimate act of dehumanization against Jews and Israelis; it strikes to the very heart of their identity, denying the traumatic event that has shaped and defined them. If the Holocaust goes away--worse, if it is a conspiracy actively propagated by malicious Jews--then the underpinnings of the Jewish narrative crumble. Holocaust denial robs Jews and Israelis of their history, their memory, and ultimately their humanity.

In the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, there is a corollary that I find equally despicable because of the violence it does against memory. President Obama was right to draw this parallel in his Cairo speech. After denouncing holocaust denial, he said:

On the other hand, it is also undeniable that the Palestinian people -- Muslims and Christians -- have suffered in pursuit of a homeland. For more than 60 years they've endured the pain of dislocation. Many wait in refugee camps in the West Bank, Gaza, and neighboring lands for a life of peace and security that they have never been able to lead. They endure the daily humiliations -- large and small -- that come with occupation. So let there be no doubt: The situation for the Palestinian people is intolerable. And America will not turn our backs on the legitimate Palestinian aspiration for dignity, opportunity, and a state of their own.

If Israel's enemies do violence against memory by denying the Holocaust, the enemies of Palestinians do the same by denying the reality of Palestinian suffering--or by denying that the Palestinian people even exist. These claims are still commonplace (for example, the "history lesson" I highlighted from the Christian Zionist Epicenter conference). According to this narrative, Jewish immigrants settled in a wasteland populated only by scattered Bedouin tribes. No native peoples were driven from their homes during Israel's creation; the Palestinians living in refugee camps for the last 50 years left the region voluntarily or were told to leave by Arab governments. Adherents of these beliefs are also likely to paint a rosy picture of life under Occupation and deny the possibility of abuse or injustice. The historical picture that emerges from recent Israeli scholarship is far less flattering. Recent polls show that Israeli attitudes are changing, acknowledging Israel had a hand in driving out Palestinians. And of course, there are countless tales from Palestinians themselves of brutality, coercion, and exile. Israel does not share all the blame for the suffering of Palestinians, but it certainly shares much of it. If the Holocaust has shaped the identity of Jews, Al Nakba--the catastrophe--has shaped the identity of Palestinians. Denying the violent dislocation of Palestinians and their subsequent suffering, like Holocaust Denial, is an attempt to dehumanize the "other" by erasing his history and his identity. Some carry this even further by denying that a people called the Palestinians even exist. While it's true that the concept of Palestinian national identity is a relatively recent development, identity is malleable and it's indisputable that Palestinians have an identity now.

I will leave it to others to hammer out the details of Palestinian and Israeli historical narratives. That's a battle I don't want to get sucked into, but the fact that Israeli and Palestinian supporters are constantly waging this battle--and that they frequently reaches back to Biblical times to legitimize their side and delegitimize the other--shows how powerful and essential this process is. In any conflict, rival peoples seek to control history, to shape memory, and to annihilate rival narratives.

If the destruction of memory is an essential component of war, the recovery of memory is also an essential component of post-conflict peace. In many post-conflict situations, justice is no longer possible. The crimes are too great, the damage is irreparable, and peace is often contingent on settling with the worst offenders. But truth-telling and the recovery of memory is still possible. Hedges writes:

The effort to give a name to the victims and killers begins a collective act of repentance, a national catharsis. The process, as seen in South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, is the only escape. And while justice is not always done--in South Africa the full admission of crimes saw killers granted an amnesty--dignity, identity, and most important, memory are returned. This, for many families, is enough.

Antisemitism and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

When I got accepted into this scholarship program, I knew from the beginning that I faced a unique personal hazard. I would be studying Conflict Resolution with a special focus on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and I would be doing it in the very heart of the region. The problem is that I would be studying it from only one side. I live in Jordan, a country that has fought multiple wars with Israel and where 1.9 million of its 6 million people are registered as Palestinian refugees. I knew there would be a subtle process of adopting the views of the Jordanian people. I tried to mitigate this by deliberately seeking out Israeli viewpoints. Before I left for Jordan I bought a large stack of books by Jewish and Israeli authors and am planning to visit Israel as much as possible while in the region. I want to understand the region and its conflicts from all sides.

Looking back, I think I may have overestimated the danger. I've discovered that living in a foreign culture is like living with a family. Spend enough time in a culture, and all your illusions get stripped away; you become intimately familiar with the full humanity of the people you're living with. You get to know their strengths and their unique cultural charms, but you also get to know their weaknesses and their maddening idiosyncrasies. There is a lot I love about the Jordanian people and their culture, but there is one nasty trait in my new adopted culture that keeps rearing its ugly head: rampant antisemitism.

I came to the region as a pragmatist and realist who cares deeply about the moral dimension of peace and war. I am sympathetic to many Palestinian and Arab grievances and believe the US needs to adopt a more balanced policy in the region. I also believe the US has traditionally had a deficit of experience and wisdom in the Arab world, which is why I competed so hard to get into this scholarship program, learn Arabic, and move to the Middle East. I have dedicated my life to standing in the gap between civilizations and doing the slow, gritty, painful work of building peace. I am trying to be a true friend of the Arabs by listening to their stories, learning their culture, and bringing that knowledge back to the US government. It is in the United States' national interests to hear and understand these perspectives, and enact fair policy that addresses some of these root grievances. Many American policymakers have come to understand this, which is why the US has begun challenging the Israeli settlement enterprise.

This is why I'm so angry and disappointed by every new example of antisemitism I encounter here. I want to promote understanding between Arabs and the West, but each instance of antisemitism reinforces all the stereotypes of the Arabs' harshest critics. It's sad and pathetic. It is also self-defeating, because it undermines legitimate Palestinian pleas for sympathy and a just resolution to the conflict.

The existence of antisemitism here does not surprise me; what does surprise me is how thoroughly it permeates the culture, including among highly educated and pro-Western Arabs. Back at DLI, my wife and I became dear friends with an Arab couple who taught at the school. They have lived in the US for over twenty years teaching Arabic to US military. Their kids grew up in the US. They are American through and through. So I choked on my coffee one day when we were talking politics and my friend said, "Who knows if the holocaust even happened?" I had a similar experience here with an older, highly educated friend. A mutual friend warned me not to bring up politics and especially the Holocaust with him, because I wouldn't like what I heard. One time I had dinner with a well-educated Jordanian lawyer, who lectured me at length about the Zionist conspiracy that led the United States to secretly collaborate with Iran and support the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 2006. And let's not talk about all those Jews who knew about September 11th beforehand.

Perhaps the most disappointing of all is my best friend here, a Palestinian who studied conflict resolution and wants to work on peacebuilding in the future. He is a close friend and I love him like a brother, and he strives to be objective and moderate, but he still carries prejudice against Israelis that he is mostly blind to. He won't use toothpicks at restaurants, because someone told him Israelis with HIV cross the border and infect toothpicks. Yesterday he told me he doesn't like vacationing at the legendary Sharm El-Sheikh in Egypt because so many Jews vacation there. When my wife and I challenged him on this, he got defensive. You don't understand, he said. The Israelis are still our enemies. You don't know what it's like suffering as much as we have. Every Israeli man serves in the IDF; maybe that Israeli tourist at Sharm El-Sheikh killed one of my relatives. If you were me, you wouldn't want to spend time with Israelis either.

So what does all this mean?

If you're thinking, "I knew it; those Palestinians are all antisemites", then you're taking away the wrong lesson. I suspect this rampant antisemitism has less to do with the intrinsic character of Palestinian and Arab culture than it does with conflict dynamics. In war, both sides spin elaborate narratives that dehumanize their enemy (see my post Dehumanization and Racism in War). Today I wrote about antisemtism, but I could also write about Israelis I've met who have about as much regard for Palestinians as they do for stray dogs. When I was at the Air Force Academy I knew a couple exchange cadets from the Balkans. Their temperament completely changed if you got them talking about Serbs. Wars radicalize people; I think Arab antisemitism has to be understood in that context. Two features of antisemitism make it unique, however. First is its severity, which is unique throughout history. Nations and peoples have reserved an unparalleled level of contempt for Jews. Second, the Palestinian narrative has taken the process of dehumanization and racism to a legendary height. Antisemitism is a central feature of much anti-Israeli rhetoric. Witness the way some Arab governments distributed the racist forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and taught it in schools, or the references to this document in the Hamas charter.

What do we do about antisemitism? Or about racism and dehumanization in any conflict environment? Education is vital... both the kind you get in a classroom or from books, and the kind you get from spending time face-to-face with your enemy. The biggest tragedy with my friend isn't that he carries deep prejudice against Jews; it's that he spent two years studying Conflict Resolution at university, but his prejudice went unchallenged. He wants to help solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but he doesn't want to sit in a lawn chair next to a Jew. I have to wonder how many students in this program meet a single Israeli during their studies. How many Jewish students in Israeli universities have the same experience in reverse? If we can't even get dedicated, pro-peace students to talk to each other in the safe environment of a classroom, our rhetoric about conflict resolution is just self-deceit. We have a long, long road ahead of us.

PowerPoint, Decision-Making, and Useless Staff Work

T.X. Hammes--a retired Marine officer now studying history at Oxford--has a new article that will warm the heart of every military officer who has done staff work in the last fifteen years or so. "Dumb-dumb bullets" warns about the hazards of PowerPoint. It's not a rant; it's a very thoughtful essay with an important thesis. We invest millions teaching our leaders how to think, Hammes writes, but:

as soon as they graduate, our people return to a world driven by a tool that is the antithesis of thinking: PowerPoint. Make no mistake, PowerPoint is not a neutral tool -- it is actively hostile to thoughtful decision-making. It has fundamentally changed our culture by altering the expectations of who makes decisions, what decisions they make and how they make them.

Hammes explains why. First, staff officers focus their intellectual energy on transforming a complex topic into a series of visually appealing slides, rather than writing a cleartext summary. Precious energy is wasted on slide layout details and bullets do a poor job conveying the necessary information to decision makers. Second, PowerPoint briefs tend towards information overload and emphasize quantity over quality. Third, decision makers spend more time watching slides and less time deliberating and thinking than they did in the pre-PowerPoint era. Fourth, the efficiency of PowerPoint means decision-makers can schedule more and more briefs in a given day, which leads them to reach farther and farther down the chain in search of decisions to make.

In my opinion, the root problem isn't PowerPoint itself; the problem is a bloated bureaucracy and individual commanders who require that their personnel spend inordinate amounts of time on redundant and ultimately meaningless staff work. PowerPoint plays into that. In my experience many of the most time-consuming briefs are actually required by Air Force Instructions. Preferences of individual commanders can make these briefs better or worse. I had one commander who loved PowerPoint and constantly asked us to create new presentations of the same data. Rather than managing the squadron's training (our job), our shop spent almost the entire week preparing slides. I balked when my commander asked me to add a new slide that I estimated would take 3-4 hours a week to update. He was adamant.

This PowerPoint bloat parallels another broken staff function: writing performance reports. Officers don't write thoughtful and accurate reports on a subordinate's performance; they spend countless hours trying to fit their reports into a ridiculous, misshapen mold that has evolved over time. If they deviate, the report bounces back from Group or Wing with a long list of edits. The pilot you're rating has "hands of gold"? Sorry, the current commander has forbidden the use of precious metals in reports. Line 6 has four white spaces at the end; the limit is three. "Pilot" should be abbreviated "plt" and the extra space used to lengthen the bullet elsewhere. I wasted a year of my life as an Executive Officer, doing these kinds of edits four or five hours a day. Unfortunately, everybody has to play the game, because their subordinates' careers depend on it.

This staff environment is toxic. It burns people out for all the wrong reasons. I was deployed 200-250 days a year while flying C-17s. With that kind of ops tempo, commanders should look for ways to reduce the workload at home. Instead, we were swamped at home. Offices were always undermanned, so for my first year at McChord, our AFI-mandated post-mission crew rest (recuperation days) were waived down to a single day. I know many officers who were so busy with staff work during the week that they had to fly their training locals on weekends. The worst part? Much of this work is useless. I was constantly burned out because I had so little job satisfaction in the office. I hated being away from my wife while traveling, but after two weeks in the office writing performance reports, I couldn't wait to leave on a mission. It kept me sane. My most valuable contributions to the Air Force--like writing a program to interface Google Earth with DOD mission planning software--came on my own time. I love the direction my career has turned--learning Arabic and studying the Middle East--but I'm frankly dreading returning to the staff world, where I fear I won't have time for that.

The important question is what we do about these problems. I'm skeptical about our ability to transform the military's organizational culture, but individual commanders can make a big difference for the people in their organizations. Bureaucracies always to try to grow and multiply work; these laws work like gravity. Good commanders should constantly be looking for ways to fight back, to eliminate redundancy and useless work, and to steer their people toward productive work.

On Kindles

Since I'm citing Wings Over Iraq today, I want to echo one of Starbuck's other recent topics: the Amazon Kindle 2. If you like to read--especially if you're a military servicemember who spends the majority of the year living out of a suitcase or dufflebag--you need to buy one. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say the Kindle 2 has changed my life.

When I was flying C-17s the hardest part about packing for deployments was deciding what books to bring. I would spend hours piling up the books I wanted, sorting through them, agonizing over which to bring and which to leave behind. I would cram every pocket with books, toss more in my flight bag, even store one or two in my helmet bag. Once I was on the road, I would scour libraries and BX's at each base for good books. A couple years ago I flew an out-and-back from Kyrgyzstan to Kuwait, and made the mistake of buying Stephen King's masterful The Gunslinger at the BX there. It was the first of seven volumes. I devoured it in a day, and spent the rest of the deployment hunting down the remaining books. Every time I flew to a new base--even if it was just for a few hours--I would run to the BX while other crewmembers fueled the jet, hunting for the next volume.

As a devout reader who loves the texture and feel of a good book in his hands, I swore I would never use e-books. I was issued an old e-reader at Squadron Officer School and hated it. Then my dad bought a Kindle 1 and loved it. When I visited the Kindle website, I noticed something curious. The people raving about Kindles weren't gadget geeks. They were writers like Neil Gaiman and Toni Morrison, librarians, and literature professors. They were people who loved reading.

I preordered a Kindle 2 and received it on release day. Since then, my reading habits have changed forever. In most cases, I actually prefer reading on the Kindle over paper books. The reading experience is superb--Kindle users consistently say the device disappears in your hands. You get lost in the book and forget you're reading electronically. The screen quality is fantastic; you have to see it to believe it. I can read it for hours without eyestrain. It reads perfectly well in direct sunlight. Because there are no pages, a book always lies open--you can read with one hand or set the device on your lap. Because I have a small son I'm always playing with, this is a huge help; I can set the Kindle beside me and read while we play. You can also adjust the text size. I always wanted to read while exercising, but there was too much jostling on a treadmill or elliptical, and it was too hard to turn pages. With the Kindle, I can increase the font size and set it on the console in front of me. The device is thin and light and easy to pack around. It carries a library of around 1500 books and the battery life is excellent; I recharge my Kindle every 2 or 3 weeks.

The best feature is the availability of books, especially now that I'm living in Jordan. In the States you can order books directly from the device in a matter of minutes. Internationally you can visit Amazon.com, buy a book with one click, then download it to your computer and transfer it with a USB cable. I buy a book every few days here and it's delivered instantaneously; no waiting for boxes to ship. A huge selection is available. I'd estimate that 80% of the books I want are available for it.

It's important to know that the Kindle is designed for just one purpose: reading books. This isn't a laptop computer, a music player, or a web browser, although it does have some experimental features. If you expect an iPhone, you'll be disappointed; if you want a device for reading books, you'll love it. The Kindle is also best for books you read straight through and that don't have lots of graphs, figures, or footnotes. If you need to do a lot of underlining and notetaking or need to flip from section to section, a good old-fashioned book is probably best.

If you want more insight on how Kindles do in the deployed environment, read Starbuck's thoughts here and here.

The Army's "Intelectual" Powerhouse

When I was at the Defense Language Institute, my Army classmates told me not to be fooled by all those smart Army officers at Small Wars Journal; rest assured, they said, the Army still has plenty of cavemen and barbarians. I remembered that conversation when I saw Starbuck's most recent post at Wings Over Iraq (which also gave a shout out to my blog recently). Since I've heaped so much praise on the Army's new intellectual leadership, I couldn't miss the chance to do some needling as well.


By the way, this is what I meant the other day about how Web 2.0 technology works. Your organization has a Twitter page? Yawn. You make a critical typo that gets noticed by a random helicopter pilot, posted on his blog, and repeated on blogs all over the Internet? That is social networking technology at work.

Why Language Matters

Why should American military officers learn foreign languages? For that matter, why should Foreign Service Officers or any other representatives of the American government? The answer is more complex than I used to think.

Conventional wisdom, especially in the wake of September 11th, points to the appalling rates of foreign language acquisition among Americans and warns that we're facing a crisis. We consistently seem to be behind the power curve training up speakers for the current war (let alone the next war). Congress, the military services, the intelligence agencies, and the State Department are constantly cooking up new ideas to improve our country's foreign language capacity.

This conventional wisdom has its critics, however. Some wonder why we should bother training new foreign language speakers at all, rather than just recruiting more native speakers. Others claim that the US government should rely primarily on short-term trained interpreters, rather than trying to squeeze foreign language into the crowded careers of its employees. I've also encountered the idea of consolidating foreign language speakers in reachback cells. If you are in the middle of rural Afghanistan and need someone who speaks Pashto, you dial up the reachback cell on your satellite radio. Much more efficient than providing every unit on the ground with its own interpreter. Right? Still others question the need for foreign language acquisition at all, especially in the staff world. Senior military officers have told me that if an officer works in a US embassy abroad or on a policy desk somewhere, foreign language really isn't necessary. Translators are available when necessary, but most information that an officer needs for analysis is available in English. I was surprised to find this logic at work within the US embassy here in Jordan. While I have met some FAOs and State FSOs who are keeping up their Arabic, I've met others who have let their language atrophy because they don't need it--and don't consider it that important. Language has enough skeptics that I've had to carefully think through why I believe language is so important.

The questions surrounding foreign language are becoming even more complicated for two reasons. First, knowledge of the English language continues to grow even in unlikely developing countries. When I arrived in Jordan I was shocked how many people speak English. I do not consider myself "immersed" here and have to make a proactive, daily effort to find environments where I can practice my Arabic. Second, automatic translation technology is getting so good. Google's translating engine is remarkable for written text; on many subjects it translates far better than I can after a year of full-time Arabic study. Automatic translation of speech is progressing slower, but it is progressing. DARPA is "aiming to get an affordable iPod-size interpreter on the chest of every American warrior, foreshadowing the day such devices will be as common as music players" (full article here). With such technology in the pipeline, why does learning a foreign language matter anymore? It's a good question.

My view on all this is rather complicated. A common fallacy about foreign language is that it's one-size-fits-all; in fact, this fallacy is codified in the DLPT tests we use to assess foreign language ability, which reduce a person's skills to two numbers. Language is NOT one-size-fits-all, so I support a balanced plan to improve our country's foreign language capacity. I believe recruiting more native speakers is vital, think that reachback cells could certainly have a role when field interpreters are scarce, and welcome better automatic translation technology. It will be an exciting and revolutionary day when automatic speech translation is commonplace. With that said, I still believe learning human languages the old fashioned way is important. Why? This is the crux: foreign language ability is not just about converting information from one format to another. It's about human relationships.

If you view language skills merely as tools to convert information, I can understand why they seems redundant. The curriculum at DLI is focused almost entirely on reading and listening to the news. It's a disheartening exercise to spend an entire year learning to translate something that Google can do better. And with the abundance of English newspapers and the availability of translations, a lot of the information an analyst might want is indeed available in English (although certainly not all of it). As technology improves, the need for translation services will probably decrease.

But language is more than a mechanism for converting information; it's a means of building relationships. A few years ago, while General Abizaid was still CENTCOM commander, I flew a C-17 into Cairo to pick him up after a meeting. While I sat on the parking ramp with my engines running, knocking out checklists for the next takeoff, I looked out the window and saw General Abizaid moving among a circle of grinning Egyptian military officers. He was shaking hands, talking, doing the kinds of things a combatant commander is supposed to do: keeping our alliances strong at a time when the situation in Iraq was critical. Because he is fluent in Arabic, I presume he was doing at least some of this in Arabic. I remember thinking, Wow. This is why language matters. Last summer I met a former Olmsted scholar who lived in Germany, and ended her military career by running the White House Situation Room. After the invasion of Iraq she participated in a meeting between newly-minted US general officers and senior Germany military officers. At the time, the tension between the US and Germany ("Old Europe") was extraordinary. During the question and answer session, she astonished the audience by asking--in perfect German--what they as young general officers could do to repair the relationship between their two militaries. She said she could hear a pin drop in the room.

That is why language matters. It builds relationships and wins trust. That's also why language speakers shouldn't simply be rerouted to policy desks or in hidden cubicles watching Al Jazeera; we need commanders who can speak foreign languages as well. That is the unique vision behind the Olmsted program (of which General Abizaid is a product).

Here in Jordan, I've found that being a decent Arabic speaker has opened doors and invited trust in unlikely ways. I have to think that a US soldier who walks into an Afghan or Iraqi village speaking the language will have more trust than a soldier who calls up a translator on his satellite radio. If he slaps the DARPA voicebox on his chest and lets a synthesized voice do all his speaking, I imagine it would just scare the hell out of everybody. That's certainly a useful technology in the absence of human translators, but how much more Darth Vader can we get?

Language is extremely hard. We need as many language solutions as we can get, and technology certainly can and should help fill the gap. But no matter how good the technology gets, no matter how prevalent English becomes, old-fashioned speaking of a foreign language still matters.

Reforming Civil Military Relations

I've written before hat I believe Samuel Huntington's classic definition of a military officer as a "manager of violence" is no longer sufficient. Once upon a time that definition might have sufficed, but in today's world, officers are responsible for a much broader domain than mere violence. I have suggested that officers should be "full-spectrum conflict managers." Officers must understand and be able to differentiate between different types of conflict, and thoroughly understand why conflicts begin and escalate; they must know how to employ military, diplomatic, economic, and informational capabilities in harmony to shape a conflict and achieve their strategic objectives; and they must understand the conditions under which conflicts end, and how to restore security and stability in war-torn environments. I also recently suggested that building a smart, networked, innovative military might require changing classic definitions of "military professionalism" to encourage more vocal junior officers. I've thought about writing a paper on all this, but with all my other projects underway, I've never had a chance to do so.

So I was pleased to find Dr. Tony Corn's new article at Small Wars Journal: From War Managers to Soldier Diplomats: The Coming Revolution in Civil Military Relations. He phrases things differently than I do (and with far more sophistication), but his point is essentially the same. The stagnant academic field of "civil military" relations needs an overhaul to catch up to the modern world. Here's his thesis:

The changing nature of democracy, the changing character of warfare, and the changing conception of professionalism since 1957 make it today imperative to reassess the relations between the Soldier and the State in general and the importance of Professional Military Education in particular. In the age of Hybrid Wars, the role of the professional soldier will continue to shift from that of War Manager (Cold War) to that of Soldier Diplomat (Long War)...

A number of trends have converged to politicize the environment in which officers are asked to accomplish their mission, but our definitions of military professionalism still demand soldiers to be thoroughly apolitical. Corn writes:

Yet, in view of all the developments mentioned above, it is not too early to start thinking about a new theory of civil-military relations which would squarely confront the main challenge of the 21st century: namely, how to increase the political literacy of the officer corps while continuing to prevent political partisanship. This challenge, in turn, calls for a re-definition of military professionalism.

Corn holds up the example of diplomats, who learn political skills but are still expected to avoid political partisanship. In fact, many diplomats are tasked with implementing policy they detest. Surely military officers can strike a similar balance. The military has been adapting to the charged political and legal environment in which it operates, but there is no systematic effort to teach officers political savvy. Corn writes:

the risk is not that the military is gaining greater political literacy, but that this political literacy (be it in the form of “military governance” or “strategic lawyering”) is being acquired through a haphazard self-education, and against the backdrop of increasing frustration against the political class.

You'll find lots of other interesting ideas in this article, particularly about military education. I hope this article sparks some discussion and a serious reconsideration of how we define military professionalism.

Now That's Cool

The Army has just announced something that I consider a major breakthrough for the way the military does business: they are putting several field manuals online in wiki format and allowing anybody with an AKO account to propose changes. Manuals that have a 3-to-5 year writing and updating timeline could soon become living, organic documents that harness the brainpower of every soldier in the Army willing to contribute. The pilot program includes 7 manuals, but over 200 are scheduled to go online eventually. I've already raved more than once about Lt General Caldwell on this blog (commanding general of the Combined Arms Center), but now he's officially on my hero list. This is a big, gutsy move that I think will bring immense benefit to the Army.

General Caldwell gets it. When another government agency creates a Facebook page or starts twittering, I'm not impressed; it only shows me how far behind the times these organizations are and that they don't fully understand the technology. Facebook and Twitter aren't about delivering the same old message in a new medium; they're about community. Their power is not in the technology, but in the people who use that technology to knit themselves into purposeful communities. General Caldwell appears to understand that social dynamic. He didn't merely start a blog for the Combined Arms Center; he has tried to create an organizational culture that encourages every soldier to engage with new media. Now, with the advent of wiki field manuals, Caldwell is harnessing crowdsourcing technology to achieve something extremely valuable: giving every soldier a voice, ensuring the best ideas rise to the top, and ensuring that every soldier enters the field with the most up-to-date tactics and procedures available.

I can't have a post praising the Army without picking on my colleagues in the Air Force. Why didn't we do this first? We're supposedly on the cutting edge of technology and fly, fight and win in air, space, and cyberspace. We've been busy trying to figure out our cyber mission. We're looking for ways to make ourselves more relevant in counterinsurgency environments. So why aren't we doing stuff like this? While we're busy arguing with our Secretary of Defense about how many F-22s to build and trying to stop airmen from reading blogs, our brethren on the ground are creating one innovation after another. I'm embarrassed--but I'm also excited for the Army, and hope that the Air Force will steal the idea.