Does Todd Zywicki believe in the efficient markets hypothesis?

Thomas Ricks in today's Washington Post has a very interesting story about Rumsfeld's latest efforts to shake up the military establishment. His target: Civil Affairs.

The Army is engaged in a bureaucratic brawl with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld over how to organize troops for "nation-building," a growing problem for the military as it settles in for lengthy occupations in Iraq, Afghanistan and possibly other countries.

Rumsfeld wants to shift thousands of civil affairs troops from the Special Operations Command to the regular Army on the theory that the service needs to do better at security and stabilization. This comes as he is pushing other components of the elite Special Operations Command -- such as Navy SEALs and the Army Delta Force -- to focus on aggressive actions against terrorists and other missions.

Officers specializing in civil affairs -- which helps establish local governments in occupied areas, oversees humanitarian assistance and coordinates military activities with aid organizations -- say they oppose the move. They say many officers believe, based in part on their experience in Iraq, that regular combat commanders do not understand their work and do not know how to use them well.

I have been intending to write up a post in reaction to Dana Priest's book The Mission which I recently finished, and also tie in some of the observations made by Major Isiah Wilson in his report on civil-military planning in Iraq. That post, still only half-formed may have to wait indefinitely, with the start of classes soon (the Wilson report is about sixty pages and I don't know when I'll have a chance to sit down with it soon). Until it does materialize, this may serve in lieu of it.

Although Priest talks about the US Army's increasingly frequent service in nation-building, peacekeeping "operations other than war", she doesn't go into great detail about the structure of the military's civil affairs duties — perhaps because that role has often been assumed ad hoc by units deployed to Kosovo and elsewhere. If she mentioned that Civil Affairs was a subcommand of US Special Operations Command, I definitely missed it.

Previously I've thought that one answer to the issue of America's increasingly militarized nation-building mission — a role that, as Nadezhda (and Priest) argues, the military has traditionally been hesitant to embrace as a whole, despite admirable performances by those who serve in these missions — might be to somehow expand the concept of "joint" operations planning to include US civil institutions like State, the Justice Department (why do we train so many foreign soldiers, and so few police?), and so forth. Not having read the full Wilson report yet, I'm still not clear on just how operational war plans are made, but it's my impression that whatever influence these other non-military branches of government have on the campaign occurs more at the strategic (ie., the President and his Cabinet) level than the actual planning of the deployment and order of battle. The result is a situation where, as Wilson describes it (I have gotten this far), the armed forces defines its mission in strictly military terms and assumes that the responsibility for political, economic, and social reconstruction falls to someone else. In other words, Phase IV is somebody else's problem.

Reading this article, now I'm wondering if one good start might not be to go one better on Rumsfeld and actually make Civil Affairs Command its own independent command, with an independent institutional voice at the table alongside the regional CinC, SOCOM, and the others. As Ricks' piece notes, even though Civil Affairs is opposed to being subsumed under the regular army's command,

having civil affairs in Special Operations has never been a great fit, either. "We do not, after all, fit the mold of steely-eyed killers," [an officer] said. "We are supposed to be language and cultural experts."

No matter how much the Bush administration team may dislike it, the nation-building mission is not going away, and we will need a force structure capable of bearing that load. I think the dangers we face in Iraq today show some of the costs of going into "post-modern war" (to borrow Wilson's phrase) without adequate preparation for that Phase IV post-combat mission. Perhaps State under Condi Rice will develop into a strong voice for taking on that role, but I doubt it. Like it or not, given how much State has withered as an instrument of American policy when compared with our military forces, I think there has to be some effort to strengthen the standing of those soldiers devoted to the study of "operations other than war" within the US military if we're to see effects. In this, rather than going too far, I think Rumsfeld may not even be going far enough.

Edit - See also a parallel discussion at Tacitus, a somewhat related proposal on the subject of military reorganization at Belgravia Dispatch, and the Barnett briefing in comments.

So says Steve Pearlstein, and he assembles a pretty long list of troublesome points. I don't know about you, but between oil prices likely to remain at over $50 a barrel and a current account deficit on an upward path toward 6% of GDP , I'm starting to get a little antsy about, say, interest rates and growth rates going in the opposite (wrong) directions in the medium-term that don't have anything to do with the business cycle.

[UPDATE 10-31-04] by nadezhda
Seems I'm not the only one fretting. See below the fold.   more »

I have three term papers coming due at the end of the next month and a half or so, all theoretically running at 10-15 pages each but which, depending on my ability to focus, may well end up sprawling past that nominal limit.

For my Islam in South Asia course, I have chosen to focus on Uighur separatism in China's western Xinjiang province. Muslim minority separatist groups in places like Chechnya have in the recent past successfully exploited their identity to appeal to a broader Pan-Islamic community, drawing in material, monetary, and ideological support as well as the occassional corps of foreign volunteers like the Arab Afghans of the 1980s; given the considerable efforts by Beijing to repress Uighur nationalism and the Han colonization campaign in the west, it's important to determine whether those small handfuls of Uighurs you always hear tacked onto the end of the list of Egyptians, Jordanians, and other Middle Eastern and South Asian militants captured or killed in the news reports are signs that Xinjiang might develop into the newest front of radical Islamic revivalism sometime in the near future.

For my China course, I'm planning on writing something on the danwei work unit system, with all the incorporated housing, educational, and social controls that come with employment in a state-owned factory unit; the basic focus of that will be the penetration of the CCP party-state apparatus into Chinese society and asking whether the CCP leadership can continue to effectively rule China without the use of such interventionist state organs to prop up their rule.

And for my Japanese Foreign Policy course, I'm trying to explain why the Self Defense Forces continue to operate under a system of such binding hadome ("brakes"), because frankly it just boggles my mind the kind of restrictions they place on their military forces. Did you know they can't even take part in land mine removal missions? I don't think they have to wait for a Diet resolution to return fire any more, but some of this stuff puts even the American aversion (that keeps repeating itself every other chapter in my American Military Experience course) to funding a standing war-fighting Army during times of peace to shame.

Right now for all this I have... an introduction for one of them and an outline for the other two, so if I'm not blogging much from now till early December, I trust you'll understand why. If I get any good excerpts while writing, I'll be sure to post them here, otherwise I'll put the whole things up when I can finally get them finished.

There are several closely related themes floating around the political ether:

1. the increasingly evident disconnect between fact-based reality and the policy decision-making and execution by the Bush Administration over the past three years, especially in relation to Iraq
2. the credibility gap, which is becoming a chasm, between fact-based reality and the claims of the Bush Administration regarding its policy and the results of its policy
3. the apparent continued credulousness regarding the Bush policies within a substantial portion of the pool of potential voters in November's presidential election, and
4. the failure of the US mainstream media to identify and communicate effectively these various disconnects.

Sunday's NY Times Magazine piece by Ron Suskind is the talk of the day, and both bondra and praktike have offered their personal takes on the tale of why a president, and the apparatus structured to serve him, have become so disconnected from a world view and an intellectual process that are the sine qua non of governance for the country's professional elites. Relying on the explanation of "faith" (not necessarily religious, but at least moral certainty) for the president's attitudes and behavior, Suskind extends this explanation to the portion of the public who not only continue to support Bush's re-election, but share his assessment of both the primary foreign policy goals of the US and how the US is and should be going about achieving those goals.

I also have a personal take, which is consistent with bondra's and praktike's views but comes at the conundrum of Bush and his supporters from a bit different angle than Suskind's. I began to sketch it out in an earlier response to bondra using a Viet Nam analogy as a sort of typology of politicians and opinion groups. I'll try to get to fleshing that out a bit further in the next few days after I finish some more of Charles Kupchan's The Vulnerability of Empire, which deals explicitly with the dynamic between elite decision-making and public opinion in foreign policy. But in the meantime, I want to go back to the issue of the "credibility gap" itself.
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One of the things I find fascinating, and maybe to an extent under-appreciated, is the extent to which the implementation of American foreign policy has become militarized; that is, when it comes to administering, informing, and representing American policies overseas, the Department of Defense has found itself in a greater and greater role over the course of the past century in general, and I would say the post-Cold War era in particular. The marginalization of the State Department from the policy-making and implementation process was particularly vividly apparent in the run-up to the Iraq conflict, but it's something that's been going on for a long time now, to the extent where the best solution for American engagement in a region -- say, Africa -- requires appealing to the power of the proconsuls first.

One of the themes of my course on the American Military Experience has been the evolving role of the US military, from a small regular force primarily intended to operate at the core of a larger citizen's militia during the immediate post-Revolutionary period to the pacification and exploitation of the West to the gradual movement towards professionalization of the services and a reliance on a trained regular standing army, something anathema in the founding days of the republic, in the post-Civil War era. The Spanish-American War of 1898 marked a major turning point in resolving what purpose the Army would be used for in the future, with deployments of military governors and counterinsurgency forces to Cuba and the Phillipines and the inculcation of a set of lessons for occupation duty that I believe are still studied today -- the Marine Corps' Small Wars Manual being one example. Though civil administration followed, it was the Army that was tasked with reconstructing Cuban and Phillipine society and administering the American protectorates -- just as it had been forced to do in the occupied South in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War.

Tomorrow's lesson will be on these nation-building efforts in the Phillipines specifically, and I hope to have more specific insights to offer after the lecture. Professor Bacevich has actually written a book on one of the major figures of the Phillipine occupation, Maj Gen. Frank McCoy, and his hybrid role as a military leader and a political envoy and administrator, which I read two years ago and will have to look up again to refresh myself on, because it too covered the question of the proconsul's role in some great detail as I recall it. On the one hand, I can appreciate the unity-of-command type logic behind relying upon a central politco-military authority to implement US foreign policy in the farflung corners of the globe (after all, as Clausewitz said, they are essentially two responses on the same spectrum), but if it's truly going to be US policy to ultimately rely upon its military to run the show, it seems as though it will still require a serious shift in their defining missions, geared as they are now to war-fighting above all else.

Because that's the thing -- as much as we rely on the military to implement a whole range of foreign policy for us, they don't really seem to want to be doing it. When the entire US Marine Corps, often the first responders to a crisis overseas, maintains only two teams of civil affairs units (as I learned in reading this interesting report of one such unit's daily struggles), or when I read about Tommy Franks' and others' bizarre insistence that tactical military success against the Hussein regime somehow constitutes a "victory" totally separate from the failings of Phase IV post-combat operations (more on this in Prof. Bacevich's review of Franks' recent book here, it makes me think we have yet to seriously come to grips with the requirements of concerted nation-building, which seems to be a recurring need in the implementation of our foreign policy. If I remember correctly plans to do away with the Army's small peace-keeping school were in fact put on hold, but if the military isn't willing to whole-heartedly embrace the state-building mission (and I can see why they would be reluctant to, given their conception of their role as warriors first and foremost), maybe we need to think seriously about developing a really strong foreign civil service corps for these sorts of duties that can work directly alongside them in complement to the military mission. Out of all the categories we have here on the blog, I think the broad issues of "Nation-building" are the one topic of pre-eminent, overarching importance for the future of US foreign policy (in the sense that it seems to me to be, in whatever degree, the ultimate answer to "what is the solution" after we've finished establishing "what is the problem"), and it's something I'm not at all sure I know enough about, on either a practical or theoretical level. When you think about it, it covers such a diverse array of issues that it could really be almost a major unto itself, let alone an important subset of international relations; I don't think there are really any comprehensive courses taught here at BU in "Occuptation theory" or "Comparative State-building Missions" but if there were, I'd sure like to take one.

Initially posted on Tacitus Fri Jul 16th, 2004

This is a followup to hcaufield's Diary Entry on profiles of 9/11-type Islamist terrorists and the observation that they seem like people who live next door .

IIRC from my old poli sci courses, the profiles of Islamist terrorist leaders cited by hcaufield and praktike are pretty consistent with literature on leadership of revolutionary movements. Similarly, the observation that poverty isn't "the breeding ground for terrorism" fits with conventional wisdom on revolutions. Revolutions are more likely when things are getting better than worse -- an improvement in absolute poverty, modernization, growing literacy and education, greater exposure to outside ideas, etc. The ancien regime fails to adapt, leaving it vulnerable to the ability of disenchanted elites to mobilize attacks against it when a crisis appears (e.g. Russia in WWI).

Although poverty has been generally dismissed as a "cause" of revolution, it is certainly relevant to the conduct and consequences of revolution (and we can hypothesize terrorism as well) in three ways. CAVEAT: the following are extremely broad generalizations.   more »

Of all the classes I'm taking this year, I think my Islam in South Asia course has the potential to be the most interesting -- in part because it is all very much new frontiers for me personally in my studies, in part because of the increased profile of South and Central Asia in our post-9/11 security conceptions, and also in large part because of the professor himself. A former reporter in Afghanistan during the jihad (he briefly met bin Laden "back when he was nobody"), a former Pakistani ambassador to Sri Lanka, and an expert on political Islam in its various permutations, Professor Haqqani leavens his considerable personal experience (he's recently mentioned his friend former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto as a possible guest speaker at some point in class) by engaging readily with his students; a diplomat's skills at personability, no doubt.

In any case, my having come to the class already familiar with (and with plenty more questions about) the broad outlines of the Afghan conflict and the twin roles of Pakistan and the US in shaping the anti-Soviet jihad through having read Steve Coll's Ghost Wars has given me a bit of a rapport with him, but not so much that I wasn't rather startled when out of the blue in class last Thursday he asked me if I'd be willing to comb through the book for some quotes he would be using in a book he's working on. Well... sure, why not? I've certainly never been asked to be a research assistant before (if you could call it that) but hey, I'm not about to pass up the opportunity. So last weekend, borrowing his copy of the book (Amazon just delivered mine yesterday), I set about skimming over the pages again looking for quotes (which, having compiled and handed on to him last Monday, I've now got burning a hole in my hardrive waiting to be put to use in some blog posts; I've attached the complete list I found at the end of this post for others' use, and there are a lot of them -- the one in this post's title on page 166 definitely being my personal favorite) on the liasons between the US CIA and the Pakistani ISI and how the Americans were initially content to a great extent to sit back and allow the Pakistanis control where US money would be funnelled. This lax oversight of American money and materiel is a dominant theme in the early parts of Coll's book, -- having set the CIA to the goal of bleeding the Soviets, the Americans in Islamabad and Washington, D.C. left questions of who would be undertaking that task (and thus gaining training and support) and what kind of political future might follow to Pakistan's ISI and ruling junta under the political Islamist General Zia ul-Haq.    more »

I'm really not sure what I think yet. I'm interested
mostly in the regional governors move rather than the political party move.
The politician class has been totally unable to develop representative
parties, and I'm not sure this would hurt them -- might actually force them
to get their acts together. I'll have to look at the measures with more
care.

As for the governors, I always have a lot of sympathy for the Kremlin when
it comes to wanting to control the regional governors. It's such a big f**ng
country, and the government is so d**mnd ineffective. The governors are a
kind of blend of king of the local scene and French intendents of
departements. The Kremlin doesn't have a lot of coherent strings to pull,
carrots & sticks. The various ministries have their local branches, but
that's the government, not the Kremlin (never confuse the two). And in any
event, the Russians have similar problems as the Chinese with capture by the
locals of the regional branches of the government.With some of the regions,
it's like negotiating with a quasi-sovereign nation over whether they'll pay
taxes and how much. It's a lot more of a bother, in many ways, than the
challenge the oligarchs present. If regional elections had become a method
by which parties organized a power base and channeled policy and influence
up and down the ladder, then I'd see this as anti-democratic. I'm not all
that sure it's terribly clear cut (as one must admit is usually the case
with Russia).

As for how the populations is reacting overall, it will be a mixed bag. But
a lot of Russians would like a government that worked and wasn't so corrupt.
Putin has struck a chord there. And he basically faced up to the fact he had
personally failed on the major issue on which he had risen to power. No
bobbing and weaving on that matter unlike some other less, what's the word,
"forthright"? leaders we might mention.

Putin is sending signals he's willing to find accommodation methods with
more moderate Chechen groups. He's trying to split the rebels into those one
might do business with and outcasts. He has the broader problem of
reconciling the other fights within the Caucasus region, and the border
issues that aren't Chechen. But he's absolutely baffled by the school
massacre. That wasn't a gesture within a bargaining process that would lead
to a political resolution. Heaven knows its purpose, but it's not something
that he could respond to even if he would.

I haven't been following internal issues like the regions at all, let alone
with any care. I've been picking up some stuff on a few bits of the most
recent moves by Putin and will continue to do so, but I think I'm going to
let it ripen.

In response to your question, where do I think I'm going with all this. I'll try to give you a few more thoughts ranging from a couple of details to the wildly abstract. So it best belongs under the "musings" category.

I really like all the stuff you're posting. It's exactly the sort of experimental mix I'd hoped you'd put together. It's got lots of variety. Some headlines, when they've got serious implications, like the withdrawal of NGOs from Iraq. The quotes on democracy both make a great set of points and are useful to have stuffed away in the "filing cabinet." And the set of pieces that ask fundamental questions on Iraq are excellent and deserve some followup, as I mentioned I'd give on the Posner piece.

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