An American Engineer

Grand Strategy

John Keegan makes a brilliant argument, in his "The History of Warfare", that war is neither diplomacy by different means nor an extension of the political will of a nation, but a cultural phenomena. In a sentence, we go to war because it is part of our human culture, an expression of genetics, psychology and Jungian archetype that seems to remain a constant regardless of a civilizations level of development or attainment.

This blog is too small a venue to address his argument with any justice. It is the product of a commanding intellect and a lifetime of study and observation. I leave you, the reader to the book (www.amazon.com) and to its merits. For my purposes, I simply accept that conflict between nations and ethnic groups will remain a fixture of the human experience, just as crime and vice persevere in the face of all attempts to eradicate their influence. Keegan bolsters this view.

Following that logic, then, even the most peace loving nations and peoples must prepare for war, and be prepared to act when their citizens and national life is threatened. Some situations demand forceful response. This has been true, is true and will remain true. The action against the Taliban and the Al-Qaida in Afghanistan were the logical and necessary consequence of the raid on New York and the destruction of the Twin Towers by terrorists.

However, the necessity to act does not then excuse any action, and it does not absolve the government of the requirement to act competently. Particularly in a democratic society, we elect people and give them extraordinary power and influence with the expectation that they will use that power, the might of an entire nation, wisely, prudently and intelligently. The decision and rational to invade Iraq is a flagrant violation of that principle, I can find not one lick of wisdom in that decision. It is not so much that the war was sold to the American people on false pretenses, though I do have a problem with that. Admittedly, FDR did everything in his power to push America to enter WWII, and the Japanese mostly did him the favor he had been asking for with every action of 1939-1941.

In the case of WWII, Roosevelt had a well thought out reason for his actions based on clear intelligence and analysis. A Germany triumphant in Europe and a Japan in control of Asia would be not only a threat to democratic countries, but a direct long term threat to the United States. Fair enough, he did what had to be done.

With Iraq, it is clear that the data was crafted to fit ideological reasoning, and the reasoning was pure wishful thinking by a pack of numbskulls that had more experience gladhanding each other in conservative think tanks that actual experience on the ground. We are currently in the middle of a conflict that has been a failure on every level. Iraq is in the beginning of what will clearly be a disastrous civil war, Iran has been embolden and strengthened by the new shia powergroups arising in Iraq, and instead of a "wave of democracy" sweeping the middle east, we have created a breeding ground for radical Islamic militants that will threaten not only our security, but the security of the states in the gulf (Saudi Arabia, UAR, etc) that currently control our oil supply.

Most of all, we have been discredited. The America that was feared by all in the aftermath of the First Gulf War is now seen as both overextended and incapable of defeating a bunch of yokels and kids armed with light weapons and homemade bombs. The Iraqis do not trust us, our friends do not believe us, our enemies no longer fear us.

Lets talk about that for a minute, because it is crucial. Benjamin Franklin once pointed out that influence is a tool which diminishes with use. A good parallel to that is that people fear the unknown more than the known. The exercise of power, done properly, is and should be more threat backed up with occasional, well planed and highly successful action. The Assyrians understood this, and more cities capitulated out of fear that under the impact of the battering ram. Engage too often, and eventually your enemy learns how to counter you, he adapts. And as he learns, he learns that you are not quite the danger he had imagined.

Fear is useful, because it is cheaper to get what you want via threat than actual action. Move fast, hit hard, use overwhelming force,achieve your stated objective and get the hell out. That was the principle followed in Panama, Grenada, the Libyan raid, and the First Gulf War. It worked, and it was smart, because it preserved American lives and achieved goals. Each of those actions increased the worlds respect and fear of American might.

In the 21st century, the day of the global conventional conflict is almost over. We will see conventional ground wars, but they in all likelihood will not be the threat to America or to Europe, or to any major power. Where countries have equivalent conventional forces (Russia, EU, US, China) they also have nuclear weapons and increasingly integrated economies. Even India and Pakistan have stepped back from the brink, both understanding that the border wars of yesteryear can all too easily become nuclear exchanges.

What we will see, and what many writers before me have discussed, are asymmetric wars. We have taught the developing world that the path to resistance in the face of a First World invasion is the path of the guerilla, the way of the terrorist. In the face of that kind of conflict, air power, the basis in the end, of American power, is almost useless.

All we won in the lightening armored campaigning of Gulf War II was the arrest of a deranged old man and the right to sit in the green zone and get bombed. We overran Saddam's pathetic army and created in its wake an insurgent force that is committed, lethal and practically impossible to kill.

Well, as I have said, we are engineers here. We see a problem: American strategic thought today is in the hands of lunatics misapplying the wrong tools. The lunatics we must wait for the next election to fix. But the tools and the strategy? So, what strategy and what tools do we need?

Read the next post.

posted by Maurice_Basilius @ 11:37 AM 1 comments

Practical Solutions

Engineers get a bad name. Geek, propeller head, nerd, the popular image of us is either a middle aged, pocket protected, horn-rimmed bespeckled 1950's throwback or a google eyed, skinny assed, pastyfaced hacker kid cooped up in his mom's basement surfing porn and cracking email accounts of girls that would never give him the time of day. Management sees us as "cost", marketing sees us as "road block", and the greatest nightmare of any salesman is that we might just talk to a customer alone and unsupervised.

That, and it seems that we are completely outsourceable.

Yet, our entire technical civilization is built on engineers. We are the solution guys, the ones who have to take all these half baked theories and ideas that flow from the imaginations of artists and the dreams of scientists and craft them into cold hard reality. We are the guys tasked with making the tradeoffs that must be made when wants and desires make their inevitable head on crash in to the laws of physics and nature, and the need to do something in a time frame smaller than the age of the planet.

Engineers argue, they disagree, but in the end they understand how to make compromises, work from data and facts, and get on with the job at hand.

Data and Logic and reasoned Compromise, my DLC principle of good engineering.

It bugs me that we are under-represented in legislature and the executive branch. We have instead, it seems, lawyers, ideologes, professional agitators and "do gooders" from the left and the right. Lawyers love to argue, are by nature and training hyper-adversarial. The do-gooders (an old term, but a good one) are focused on absolutes, completely up in their heads and disconnected from reality. From where I sit, your garden variety Focus on the Family Christian Rightest is pretty much the same as your dyed in the wool far left Julia Butterfly Sierra Club Member. Both would rather see the country go up in flames in righteous revolution that even consider that the other side might have a point.

Put these two groups together and you have a lot of people that would rather posture and argue and bombast than find real solutions. Case in point.

Abortion and family planning.

On the right, you have people that truly believe that abortion is a sin, and also believe that contraception is a sin. Pretty much they think that sex is a sin, but carefully avoid saying that in public. The only answer they have is for everyone to wait until marriage and then have sex that only produces kids. Till then, teach abstinence. Well, that does not work, and any one with a lick of sense and a smidgen of history will tell you that humans as a group no more practice abstinence than Christian monks recite the Quran. What we really did before the sexual revolution of the 60's was for men to practice hypocrisy around sex and for society to practice repression and coercion on women. To think that would work today (or to think that it ever really worked) is akin to saying that the Iraqis were going to welcome us with open arms and flowers.

On the left, we have a rabid movement that:

1. Includes in the set of contraceptive choices a late term abortion procedure that requires the doctor to crush the head of a viable fetus, killing it, before removing the child from the mother's womb.

2. Seeks to legally exclude the parents of a pregnant child from any decision concerning abortion or contraception.

3. As an added bonus, pursues policies that have as their basis the concept that all men by nature are rapists, murders and abusers.

Take these two groups, add lawyers and some cynical special interest groups and a large dose of bombast and shake well. What comes out is the current abortion fiasco that has already helped to distort and inflame American politics to the point where it is practically impossible to speak to each other, much less get anything done.

So how would it be different if engineers were running the show?

First, we would get our assumptions:

1. Having kids is a big responsibility. People should be able to choose parenthood, not have it thrust upon them.

2. People have sex. Designed that way. Nothing will change that. Just ask Jim West.

3. Leave God out of this. Nobody has a direct line to the big guy/gal, anybody who tells you differently is selling something. God may protect children and fools, but we do not rely on that principle when designing child car seats.

4. We can argue all day, but it is pretty clear that a fetus that could survive out of the womb, even as a preme, is a person.

5. Parents have a right to raise their kids at least until they are 18.

So the engineering tradeoff would look like this.

Contraception remains legal and available to every one. Kids below the age of 16 need permission to purchase contraceptives.
Abortion is legal in the first trimester.
Abortion after the first trimester is restricted to saving the health or life of the mother.
Kids below 18 need to notify their parents, and below the age of 16, need consent.

Now we might extend the time to include the point where testing for birth defects can be done. Sorry, but as a society we cannot dictate to someone that they must devote their lives to a child with serious defects. As a tradeoff, if we decide require the parent to have the child, then we need to agree as a society to bear the cost of maintaining that child.

See, tradeoffs. Women get to control their bodies, but they must be responsible. Parents get to have control and influence over their kids proportionate to the age of the child. Nobody gets every thing they want, but everyone gets something.

And most of all, we as a people settle this question once and for all. We stop wasting hours of Supreme Court confirmation hearings listening to partisan grandstanding and spend more time addressing the real issues facing the republic.

posted by Maurice_Basilius @ 12:14 PM 1 comments