Ask a Pakistani why Afghanistan matters

If you want to know, ask somebody: (ht: smallwarsjournal)

Afghanistan: Seven Fundamental Questions by Major Mehar Omar Khan

I know we live in a world that is real and is moved by minds – thinking, manipulating, conniving, conspiring, calculating and masquerading minds. Our world therefore seldom has a place for ‘sentiments’ – pure, sincere, honest and spontaneous as sentiments are. But when it comes to war in Afghanistan, I am not deterred by the tyranny of the trend. I like, in fact I am forced, to think through my heart. What else can you do when you see images of your countrymen; innocent and unsuspecting men, women and children; ripped apart by other human beings exploding in their midst almost on a daily basis? How can I not worry about my daughter when I see a pale and empty face of a mother in Kabul or Peshawar, bent like a broken branch of an old, dried up tree; over the dead body of her child? How can I not cry when the soul of my nation is hit and hurt by violence that is so inextricably linked with bloodshed beyond the snaky Khyber Pass? For us in Pakistan, the ongoing struggle in Afghanistan and astride Durand Line is the most seminal endeavor of our history. If this war is won, the entire world stands to benefit. But if it is lost, one country that will be hurt the most is Pakistan – my daughter’s home and her future. War astride the Durand Line is therefore so personal to so many of us.

This war is also extremely personal for thousands of American mothers who await and pray for the safe return of their sons and daughters: bright young men and women who deserve to live and who must never be wasted just because someone considers it politically expedient to continue to muddle along and because setting the course right needs some statesmanship and may also involve some political cost.

Major Mehar Omar Khan, Pakistan Army, is currently a student at the US Army Command and General Staff College at Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas. He has served as a peacekeeper in Sierra Leone, a Brigade GSO-III, an instructor at the Pakistan Military Academy in Kakul, and as Chief of Staff (Brigade Major) of an infantry brigade. He has also completed the Command and Staff Course at Pakistan’s Command and Staff College in Quetta.

War is hell

From The Fourth Star: Four Generals and the Epic Struggle for the Future of the United States Army. 

The book chronicles the careers of four different generals (GEN John Abizaid, GEN George Casey Jr, GEN Peter Chiarelli, and GEN David Petraeus).:

A few weeks before he was scheduled to depart, Abizaid was walking on a craggy ridgeline with a Peshmerga commander when he noticed three Iraqi corpses, their bodies covered with burn marks and their eyes gouged out.

“Why do you torture everybody?” he asked. “Why not just kill them?”

“Nobody fears death,” replied to commander, his rifle slung over his shoulder and a scarf wrapped around his head. The survivors, he explained, need to see mutilated bodies of their fellow soldiers so that they understood what could happen to them if they fought the Kurds.

A reflection on action research “storytelling”

What follows is a 1st person, stream of consciousness  reflection written to my mentor & committee chair.  

I describe  what it was like to record a 10 min video “telling the story” of  some preliminary findings emerging from my action research cycles into curriculum and adult learning. 

The video is hosted  at YouTube.

It will be shown at an international conference in Athens, as part of the Collaborative Action Research Network (CARN) annual conference, as part of a bundle of reports from the Future(s) of Education project, an international  participatory action research network.  

Dr Alana:  

i am just glad to get it out of my head  

i had a real out of body experience recording that one;  

i  am a very effective briefer in person, because i can read the audience pretty well.  

i have recorded hundreds of mini lectures etc for my business and for use here at the college on various topics.

i have never, ever needed more than a single take to record, decent and sometimes even inspired voice-overs  until  last night and that briefing.  

I literally needed about 30 takes to get thru it; most i stopped when less than a minute into it because the tone just didn’t feel right

 i think it has to do with being a fish out of water, and the difficulty i felt in trying to tune my story for an audience i couldn’t see, but more importantly didn’t have empathy for

because the audience characteristics still feel fuzzy to me, i couldn’t call up the right tone, voice, persona to apply  

 this caused me to have almost a split personality in the moment, when i am ordinarily dialed in

 i had a “talking part” and a “look ahead part” that is concerned with shaping the transition to the next point/slide  

but now i had a disconcerting 3rd part that was trying to anticipate the possible reactions of an unfamiliar, and hard to imagine audience  

this is what made me feel so out of sorts

 until i “wore out” the last, 3d part and was able to trust in just telling the story, and accepting the vulnerability of knowing that i couldn’t know the audience, i found i just couldn’t get thru it.  

this is the same phenomenon I spoke with Prof Mike Wesch, the digital anthropologist at Kansas State University, and world thought leader on social dynamics in social media: the camera eye represents the unlimited, unfathomable infinite future of all possible audiences across time and space who can be looking in on the “telling moment”.  

in a sense, its like coming face to face with the unblinking eye of God and wondering what she is thinking  

 it is trust that lets us get thru that moment, the accepting of vulnerability, that creates the empathy that hopefully fills the story, as told, with hope.  

that’s a clumsy way of trying to express my meaning of the risk and vulnerability to “telling” and why it can be such a powerful learning moment, and why we need to model it, embrace it, encourage it, and support it. 

Your “producer’s draft” was exactly what i needed to be able to get out of my own comfortable fishbowl; 

you gave me a bridge to the audience that i could not create on my own.  

this has become an interesting reflection to me already  

please put the video on the website, and any or all of this reflection as you deem suitable  

have a great time at the conference!

Force Generation curriculum project update

In one of our top level curriculum review meetings yesterday, our Deputy Commandant mentioned in his concluding remarks that there was a real “buzz” in the Army among the senior leaders concerning “Force Generation”, and he attributed it to the initiative I have been describing here which is holding out a lot of promise for transformative change.

This is before I even briefed him on the next phase, which is a survey/questionaire that we designed this week with our Quality Assurance Office and CGSS. Through the survey instrument, we’ll invite 1500 current students and 3000 graduates of the last 2 years to solicit : (1) their most important questions, (2) what they know that other students should know, (3) the problems they are experiencing with the force generation process in the field, (4) their best advice for solving problems, and (5) their interest in being part of the design team to craft curriculum to address the questions and problems.

We’ve already made contact with the Army proponents for each of the top level processes that govern the Army Force Generation process: policy, materiel, personnel, funding, training, and synchronization, and they have committed to helping us answer the questions that the students generate, as well as maintaining an ongoing knowledge base in the form of a wiki and a student text that will be widely available to Army units to reflect the most current wisdom associated with this process.

I see the wiki, the student text and our college as being the infrastructure that connects the educational needs of our officers with process experts from the generating force as well as the practical expertise that resides in the action-oriented leaders of our units in the field. I expect we’ll continue the survey as an annual instrument designed to ensure that our ST, wiki, and curriculum remain as adaptive as ARFORGEN is dynamic.

By staying connected to our officers’ stated educational needs and incorporating the best knowledge from experts and practitioners we intend to be relevant and adaptive as a department and college. When the day comes we no longer get urgent questions or significant problems identified that surprise us, we may conclude that we have a manageable ARFORGEN process. (There are more than a few things in the Army that are manageable but still hard )

In a classroom study group next week with volunteer students we will begin the design of the ARFORGEN wiki and Student Text “knowledge artifacts” that will represent our current consensus knowledge on the many complexities of ARFORGEN.

We think we can distribute the survey by 1 April, receive the bulk of input by 15 April, forward bundles to proponents by 1 May, be ready to populate the wiki and STs with initial answers by our 12 May ARFORGEN worksop at Ft Leavenworth, have a robust ST and wiki by 1 Aug, be ready to support curriculum for the 10-01 class, and then continue to refine the process and product through staff work and attention to detail.

A Reflection on Personal Learning Environments, blogs and wikis

Dr John Persyn  from the Dean of Academic Operations  started up a study group to look at what InstructorNet could/should/might/ought be. He made the mistake of asking me to think out loud. If you don’t disagree with anything that follows, or at least wonder what I am smoking, then I have failed 

I take the InstructorNet working group inquiry questions to include: 

1. What should InstructorNet be and why should we care? 

2. How can we give Voice (and action) to instructors to better align resources with efforts 

3. How do we improve the connections among the members (nodes) of an Instructor Net (I am thinking of this as a utility function:  bringing electricity/water to rural areas) 3. What technologies will unleash classroom excellence? 

4. How do we eliminate the boundaries of walls, bricks, mortar and time to support lifelong learning across the force (for our demographic to begin with)? 

5. How do we shift from an Industrial Age frame of education to a Network-centric, connectivist frame? 

(a short oversimplification and misstatement of Connectivism: the knowledge resides dynamically in the network, its participants and their connections, and has a shelf-life; the network adapts its tacit knowledge much more quickly than its explicit knowledge in response to an increasingly dynamic environment, and so we need nodes of cognitive excellence creating knowledge artifacts rigorously, but connection modes and tools that facilitate making the tacit knowledge explicit AND the ability to sense educational needs and assemble rapid response teams of connected nodes from across the network, etc) (I’ll develop this definition better later) 

Useful metaphors:

1. An “InstructorNet Mall” of available resources in one spot for instructors to meet their needs 

2. A Google “Knowledge Map” of available content that’s searchable, zoom-able, and subscribe-able thru RSS so the network alerts you for items meeting your interests instead of waiting for you to craft a search every time you feel a conscious need. 

3. The Amazon/EBay “smart network” that automates the search and recommend function based on stated interests AND by remembering searches & paths 

4. Customer Service center for instructors seeking help 

5. Tour guides/Marketing Aide to demonstrate “How to use these resources” 

6. Magazine model of info mgt/distribution: a targeted demographic, whose readers shape the course of the magazine/tools (Dear Readers! We listened to you!)  Lean 6 Sigma techniques have a way of accomplishing this, and a partnership with an LSS project seems like a natural one 

Other work to be done:

1. Considering how we encourage/reward professional writing like lesson notes, course content, blog/wiki work that contributes to the practice of knowledge, in the same way we have tied promotion and retention to academic writing. 

2. An FDP that incorporates more ideas related to “Master Classes in graduate teaching” on a regular basis. Some ideas include:

                a. Group learning vs Team-Based learning.

                b. RSS in the classroom (and blogs and wikis and podcasts…oh my)

                c. Live dialogue mapping skills to frame group discussions better (Google “Compendium” for demonstrations)

                d. How about giving Voice to faculty to let them nominate classes they want to receive, or challenges they face, and target the top vote getters? 

3. An InstructorNet Mall should have a “store” that has searchable index of available, recorded FDPs with quick summaries of what’s available for the individual instructor looking to sharpen his practice. 

4. UCTV (University of California “TV”) is a branded channel on YouTube with thousands of hours of content of their best instructors delivering on their best topics. 

                a. Why don’t we have Geoff Babb’s China lectures recorded and available in a catalog of Quality? Or Chris Paparone giving his best pitch on technical rationality and ADCON? 

                b. Why doesn’t the college actively seek and reward these mini-centers of excellence?  The Foundation should give cash awards to the mini-lecture each month that has the most (downloads x the highest quality rating) (like Guitar Player of the Year) 

                c. MIT has put their entire curriculum online. We need to do a better job of finding the tacit expert knowledge and making it explicit. We have replaced the value of SME for an industrial Age approach to standardizing curriculum delivery around uniformity, discipline and control, at the expense of risk, artistry, and informed speculation (some evidence that is loosening up I assert, by looking at Dr Kem’s study group pilots, and Dr Paparone’s innovative use of the Blog of Log to engage student critical thinking and professional writing in the new milieu under control) 

                d. The students should be able to give cash awards to their picks for instructor of the Section. Or POGs redeemable for valuable cash prizes at the PX. Or student nominations for Excellence in Innovation, or for Trying Really Hard Even Though The Experiment Blew Up In The Lab But Didn’t Hurt Anybody (the TRHETTEBUITLBDHA award) 

                e. Students should be able to record a 20 second praise  for instructors or AAPs, filed by AAP and instructor to guide next cycles towards our real excellence, that is searchable only by students.  Need more emphasis on Rate Your Instructor mechanisms 

5. I think we need a DDE rep on the team to assist the inquiry 

6. I think the instructor needs survey is essential 

7. I’d like to see a process map of instructors of all forms for CGSS: an operational graphic, who, where, what, and their AO and AI. We write curriculum for them in a vacuum; they have little to no voice in our design decision-making 

8. The instructors need a persistent forum for nominating “the policy that most gets in the way of my effective teaching is…” with room for public, persistent dialogue, instead of periodically asking for feedback snippets that get lost in the OPTEMPO 

9. Personal Learning Environments (PLE):

                a. Officers and faculty should have a profile page in their Personal Learning Environment that identifies, in one place their research interests and their research offerings. 

                b. It should have links to their writings on blogs, papers, wiki’s available, with their ability to make their writings public or private from their personal page. 

                c. It should have an RSS aggregator/reader integrated that automates a wide daily search of the early bird, BCKS AKO, DKO, Joint knowledge online, Small Wars Journal; in fact a listing of highly recommended sources they can check off for inclusion in their search, with the list expanding as a function of the community-wide ratings hit a threshold. 

                d. It should have a world class search engine that truly gives us ask once, search many capabilities; unlike AKO. All you need to know about AKO search is that when you search for “FM 3.0 download”, the first link is NOT to where you can download the manual. (I have a current screen capture, but don’t make me use evidence, because I will if pushed to the limit) 

                e. The amount of information being added to the Web each day is so large that we cannot afford bad “Search” AND we cannot afford to wait for people TO SEARCH, especially since we can give them a Voice in creating their default, persistent, context sensitive, active search profile on a Personal Learning Environment 

As part of the InstructorNet workgroup, I am focusing my personal efforts on:

1. a short summary of various educational applications of wiki, blog, podcast, RSS with bibliography

2. If I can find some practical details PLE (personal learning environment)info, I’ll do that as well

3. Creating a departmental resource catalog to support the ideas noted above.

4. Encourage the shift from Industrial Age to Network Age education

 

 

Reflecting on education and promotions within the military

A fellow student was researching the relationship between education and promotion within the Army, so I wrote him this quick reflection:

its very true that military promotions are multi-variable; explicitly we consider the whole person concept. Education IS a factor, but only up to a point

 

Examples:

1. enlisted soldiers get promoted based on total point worksheet which includes points earned for attendance and at military schools and separate points for attendance at civilian schools;  BUT only up to a point.  when you have max’d out that category, additional schooling does not add points.

 

2. for officers, there is no formal point award for promotions: they are awarded by boards who look at all records. there is a negative discriminator for younger officers who can get commissioned without a 4yr degree, but who must complete the degree in order to make Captain.

 

3. The Masters degree is not a discriminator for promotion to any rank, but it has achieved the status of cultural icon, where it is sort of expected. Any 2d career middle mgt job though working with the Dept of Defense will require a Master’ s degree, and since we provide opportunities to get the degrees with minimum pain, generally about 90% of MAJs have a masters or more.

 

4. Specialized masters and doctorates, while not boosting promotions per se, can easily lead to specialized assignments within technical domains, where longevity is assured if not advanced promotion.  West Point professorships are a case in point. guaranteed promotion to Colonel, and a 30 yr career and favorable consideration for retention after retirement as a civilian professor emeritus.

 

5. For  long while, excessive education actually became a cultural discriminator, because guys were not following the mainstream of service in units.  Modern officers like GEN Petraeus and BG H R McMasters are bucking the system by spending considerable time away from the service to get advanced degrees in top flight academia. Their decision was risky; their battlefield success points to potential efficacy of such a path, and there is something like a reform movement afoot to encourage more folks to get out of our own echo chamber.  i am examining this in a small way in my research.

 

a second thing to look at, apart from credentialing, is the actual knowledge and skill benefits you get from the degree and education, where the education gives you an edge in performance of daily mission.  this was my experience with the Masters in Systems Mgt i earned in 1993, since it gave me insights and techniques that were directly supportive of my successes in a variety of management and leadership positions in the last 15 years. I am still getting a payoff in that sense.

 

in conclusion, i think its useful to consider which demographic, and “how much” education, and then both the formal and informal values of the organization with respect to the importance of education.

 

John has uncovered an interesting and important anomoly: where theory does not fit observation;  i recommend going back to the experts on their own perceptions: ie his surveyees, to dig deeper into the disconnect.

 

it is also absolutely true that the single most important factor in promotions is your senior rater’s estimate of your future job performance in psitions of greater responsibility based on demonstrated performanc ein field units, especially if it was under combat conditions

The face of future warfare or a phenomenon emerging from complexity without attribution?

Here is some underreported insight that supports the theme of “Money as a Weapon System” which should give you a moment of pause.

 

LiveLeak reports this interview of Rep. Paul Kanjorski. At 2 minutes and 20 seconds in the video below, Kanjorski explains how the Federal Reserve told Congress members about a “tremendous draw-down of money market accounts in the United States, to the tune of $550 billion dollars.” According to Kanjorski, this electronic transfer occurred over the period of an hour or two. And it gets worse. Kanjorski paraphrases the following disclosure by Bernanke and Paulson:  (emphasis added):

 

            On Thursday (Sept 18), [2008]at 11 in the morning the Federal Reserve noticed a tremendous draw-down of money market accounts in the U.S., to the tune of $550 billion was being drawn out in the matter of an hour or two. The Treasury opened up its window to help and pumped a $105 billion in the system and quickly realized that they could not stem the tide. We were having an electronic run on the banks. They decided to close the operation, close down the money accounts and announce a guarantee of $250,000 per account so there wouldn’t be further panic out there.

                       

            If they had not done that, their estimation was that by 2pm that afternoon, $5.5 trillion would have been drawn out of the money market system of the U.S., would have collapsed the entire economy of the U.S., and within 24 hours the world economy would have collapsed… It would have been the end of our economic system and our political system as we know it…

 

 

We are no better off today than we were 3 months ago because we have a decrease in the equity positions of banks because other assets are going sour by the moment.

 

To consider: 

1. Was this on the order of magnitude of the Bay of Pigs in terms of potential?

2. Where does this situation (connectivity and propagation characteristics of the global economic digital network) rate on the list of Top Threats in the National Security Strategy?

3. Is the Secretary of the Treasury the main effort for interagency?

4. Would you rather have a great Secretary of the Treasury or a great Secretary of Defense?

5. Could this enormous withdrawal have occurred without planning? or is it a property of densely connected networks that go beyond planning and control? ([Hint: if you answer no, you have some work to do]

 A friend replied:  

I saw this interview last week.  My father is a President of a bank, so I often turn to him for his opinion and perception on the financial markets.

I’d like to tackle your comments one at a time.

1. Was this on the order of magnitude of the Bay of Pigs in terms of potential?

I think the situation was very dangerous, but the solution that was applied was nothing more than a pressure bandage on a single wound.  Our country is over $10T in debt.  The money that was released by the Federal Reserve is money that is borrowed from other countries – mainly China and the Gulf States.  Shutting down the markets was the only thing they could do, but it did not address the core issue – we have too much debt.

Would the country have been crippled if the run on the banks continued?  Absolutely.  Again, I do not think that the measures applied since SEP 09 have done much to solve the economic problems of this country.

2. Where does this situation (connectivity and propagation characteristics of the global economic digital network) rate on the list of Top Threats in the National Security Strategy?

In my opinion, in the top three, quite possibly number one.  The US economic system is built on some very shaky ground.  For the first time in US history, there are more governmental jobs than jobs in the manufacturing sector.  We have become a service based economy.  Due to the overconsumption of our government and our people, we have a national debt of $10T and it’s growing to even larger extremes.  

The amount of foreign investment in this country is massive.  The Arabs – mainly from the Gulf States and Saudi Arabia – have quietly poured hundreds of billions if not trillions into the US economy since the 1970’s.  The Chinese own hundreds of billions if not trillions of US Treasury bonds.  One of many countries could have been behind the sudden withdrawal of funds – setting an example that the US financial system was collapsing.

The connectivity associated with the 24 hour global financial market has become too vast and too complex to manage.  Add in some horrific if not illegal financial practices – the Madoff Ponzi scheme, the use of derivitives, and credit default options – and the system cannot be sustained. If the bottom of the pyramid is built of mud, and it starts raining, what happens with the top of the pyramid.

3. Is the Secretary of the Treasury the main effort for interagency?

No.  Interagency operations should have no permanent lead.  They should task organized as appropriate.  I also am confused by the question – main effort for what?

4. Would you rather have a great Secretary of the Treasury or a great Secretary of Defense?

Since we are a capitalist country, in theory at least, a great Secretary of the Treasury is mandatory.  All other governmental functions are reliant on a stable economy at the least, and a growing economy is desired.  The Department of Defense is reliant on taxpayer funds, which are derived from the state of the American economy.  Going back to my thoughts on debt, it is possible to cut governmental functions to save money and lower taxes for the American citizen.  

Without a strong American economy, you cannot have a strong military.  Look to the Great Depression and the state of the Army from 1929-1937 for an example when our country has a weak economy…a weak military is sure to follow.

5. Could this enormous withdrawal have occurred without planning? or is it a property of densely connected networks that go beyond planning and control?

I tend to believe it’s more related to your second question than you first.  It is possible that this was a planned effort to send a message to the US.  The Chinese would probably do something like this because of the massive amount of T-bills they hold – we’ve reduced rates on them to literally zero on the short term bills.

But I think human psychology has a huge part to play in this.  If I recall correctly, this was around the time when Lehman Bros. was allowed to fail, and no one realized how interconnected they were into the mortgage markets.  When the government allowed them to fail, it sent a message to many people in the world that there was a significant problem with the US economy and the financial sector.  I think it led to some wise financial gurus saying “I have to get some of my assets out of the financial sector and banks before it is too late.”  After you reach a certain point, you then hit a level of panic.  It would be instructive to see an hour by hour breakdown of the $550B worth of withdrawals to see if the snowball was gaining momentum.  I think this would confirm my belief that people were starting to get real scared about the viability of the market.

And as we’ve all seen, the following weeks saw more giants of the American economy begin to falter.  AIG, Chrysler, Ford, and GM – not to mention other financial firms like Merrill Lynch and banks such as Bank of America and Citibank – have all had major problems with solvency.

I’d like to conclude this entry with something too many people within our military have forgotten:

Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden said he is trying to bankrupt the U.S. through its war on terror, a strategy he says felled the Soviet Union two decades ago in Afghanistan, according to a translation by al-Jazeera television of his full, videotaped statement.

““The mujahedeen recently forced Bush to resort to emergency funds to continue the fight in Afghanistan and Iraq, which is evidence of the success of the bleed-until-bankruptcy plan — with Allah’s permission,” bin Laden said in the video that aired on the Qatar-based satellite network, according to the translation, posted today to al-Jazeera’s Web site. The channel aired portions of the statement on Oct. 29.”

 

I agree with you that we have just seen the first steps of trying to stabilize the patient with respect to maintaining orderly markets. Miles to go before we get to long-term treatment considerations, and the development of healthy lifestyle issues in our financial markets. At some point we have stop the tactic of borrowing to get out of debt, and rebuild the capital base through savings and production, rather than soliciting the capital of others exclusively.

I also concur on the magnitude and potential consequences of financial meltdown. The interconnectivity and subsequent fragility of global markets seems to have caught everyone by surprise; a classic case of a complex adaptive system that cannot be understood and controlled, but perhaps managed within boundaries; what Dr Paparone (and others)  have described as “messy management”

Acknowledging I am a naïve child in this area, it seems to me that the challenge to interagency effectiveness  is our departmental  structure which can be seen as an attempt to bound all problems within formal domains, giving authority and responsibility (unity of command) to a single department for typical problem sets.  We don’t habitually try to “matrix manage” governmental problems; rather we try to stay in our lanes. When problems spill over boundaries we wander around like  “ducks that have been hit on the head”, and we have no routine “current ops” shop that is designed to coordinate and integrate. The problem seems to be that every such problem will always be a task organization challenge as some lead agency tries to pull a team together. With respect to nation building it seems like DoD, the most resourced, has been trying to take the lead to force IA. In Homeland defense areas I can see other dynamics in play.

Departmental bureaucracies, by their nature, seem ill-suited for routine IA.  Where is the government’s  “G3”? Is it the White House?  You see more “coordinators” there and staff synchronizers than you do true Opns:  I am thinking about the national Security Advisor and the War Czar particularly. A policitical consideration is that the White House gets a some plausible deniability (survival insurance) by having expendable department heads in charge of wicked problems as opposed to trying to direct traffic themselves.

I also concur with the idea of the primacy of the economic dimension in terms of importance of national power (I am doing a lot of concurring here )

I think the better explanation of sudden massive withdrawal s is power of complexity theory and the butterfly effect to magnify feedback in complex adaptive systems as opposed to deliberate planning. The financial markets are wired for the free and full expression of human psychology to be manifest . Momentum ends up having a power all of its own, like an avalanche effect.  John Maudlin, of Frontline Thoughts” has a worldwide readership of over a million, has done a good job of summarizing this vulnerability through complexity and connectivity in global markets over the last couple years. Your dad is probably familiar with him

Boomers meet Dr Strangelove: a friendly exchange of ideas

I respect Jim Quinn’s mind and writing.  Always thoughtful and provoking, often persuasive, never dull. He issues an interesting challenge to Boomers everywhere in this essay on the arrival of their defining moment. It’s a good read, as always, but I took some exception to the part where he said:

 “…The Military Industrial Complex will grow stronger. We have no intentions of leaving Iraq and we will double our presence in Afghanistan. The Defense (should be called Offense) budget will increase. We will be told that the Russian threat is growing. We will be told that China has aggressive intentions and that Iran threatens the Middle East. The public will go along because they don’t think for themselves. We will be told that the Defense industry generates American jobs. As the government identifies false threats, they will take away more rights and liberties in the name of protecting us. It will be gradual and almost unnoticeable to the Average American, but it is happening. A stronger more powerful Military will want to prove itself. They will be itching for action. When you are a hammer, everything looks like a nail…”

 I emailed him a note that said:

agree with just about everything you wrote with the exception of the paragraph on a stronger military itching to prove itself. There is absolutely no desire to look for a fight in this Army. I think that mischaracterizes the leaders i see on a daily basis in the college. it will actually take, by my estimate, 10 years to repair the damage done to the finest Army ever fielded, given the size of budget cuts (rather than budget increases) that i have seen estimates of, for planning purposes. no soldier is eager for war;  especially not these guys, who on average have served 3 of the last 5 years in a warzone away from their families.  u have correctly identified the neoconservatives as the morons who itched to send other peoples ‘children to war in their misguided faith in their ability to reengineer the world into Little America.  they honestly thought that the liberation of Baghdad 2003 was the liberation of Paris , 1944 

on the subject of the economy, the current plan, as i see it,  is nationwide program to remove all available private capital from the hands of the people who have demonstrated they know how to care for money (ie they still have it in the middle of a recession and didnt blow up) and give it to the people (govt) who have demonstrated beyond a reasonable doubt that they have no clue as to how to deploy it.  if we break even after 30 yrs it will be a miracle, not to mention the best case scenario 

keep telling the truth  

cheers,ken

 After he clarified to me that he had been describing the civilian leadership, I replied:

the scene that comes to mind is the story from the Clinton whitehouse when the SecState was itching to use military force, and Colin Powell, as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, was aghast at how easily the mil force option came to the top. He advised against it, as he had against mil force in other previous situations.

the Sec State (Albright) said to the effect, ‘well why do we have such a big professional military if we are not going to use it?’ 

Holy cow, what a mindset. That’s what passes for critical thinking and judgment in an administration overly concerned with opinion polls and expedient action in pursuit of lofty goals 

i dont deny there is an urge to use ready, available, reliable tools like the military, but it is more often coming from the civilian side lately. 

there was a time when this was not as true, such as in the 60s in the LeMay era, as parodied in Dr Strangelove, which like all great satire, is well connected to essential truths

Cultural context in qualitative research: can it even be done?

  A “critical friend” in the action research process is a trusted agent who gives deep insights from the outside into the nature, quality, and path of  your introspection. They help keep you grounded, and offer triangulation points in the sense-making process as you grapple with your own questions and insights. They act as sounding boards and mirrors, acknowledging that we can’t really ever know in the scientific sense about the truth of our propositions when dealing with complex human terrain. However we can pursue quality and appreciation instead, and that’s whata  critical friend’s role is.   

A good friend, acting as one of my  ”critical friends” in my 1st person action research process offered the following for me to consider after a journal entry concerning a confrontation I had over curriculum transformation with a peer.

Ken, this journaling effort seems to carry itself in your research.  The fact that I have a military background provided me with certain comforts in reading this, but for those without the cultural insights…they may be a little lost.  If you approach your writing with a bit more cultural sensitivity, or as a “foreigner” your words of wisdom would reach a wider audience.  Military culture is very specific in communication styles, so standing in a circle outside the backdoor ***ing about directives and expectations is very NORMAL to soldiers, of which I contribute to trust among the brotherhood, but please know that many organizational structures do not support this special sharing and feeling process among its members.  You identified what is normal for a DC, so from that baseline you should be able to point to cultural inconsistencies which are now creating ripples.

 

I really like this 1st person reflection, but I feel a sprinkle of cultural unraveling/description is necessary to fully understand the phenomena. 

I replied:

I think you are exactly right Jeff.  The deeper into a subculture we go, the more unpacking and “scaffolding” we need to provide a framework of meaning for outside readers. I was thinking of a translation of a Chinese classic novel I have started to look at. It has 45 pages of dramatis personae before the opening scene and covers many generations of the family that is the central to the plot and narrative. I am exhausted by that already   I just can’t upload that much into short term memory and hold it there to make an informed reading. So I am having to nibble on it as I go. 

I wonder how much like that the study of other cultures are for researchers? The ethnography chapter describes that dilemma: the knowability of other cultures, no matter how immersive you become. Could Jane Goodall every really be “of” the apes she studied?  The French sociologist Francois Jullien wrote with a certain despair of trying to fully grasp for himself the subtle elements of Chinese thought  in his book “In Praise Of Blandness’, despite a life of scholarship. Then he considered just how hard it is, if possible at all, to communicate the essence to another culture, which he was no longer fully a part of precisely because of his immersion in the Chinese culture. He was seeing himself in a no-man’s land of “between” 2 cultures.

In another sense that’s kind of where we all are: between our sense of self and our sense of the dominant culture and other subcultures in the soup we swim around in.

I say all that simply to say that what i am trying to do on my journaling is to capture the moment as quickly and deeply as I can, without over-thinking it and the first order immediate reflection, in order to build up some snapshots in time of my own role inside of my research. Dr Alana has recommended some qualitative analysis software called Atlas/ti that should assist me in identifying and linking narrative themes connecting the snapshots in time.  I am excited to see where it goes.

It is clear to me that I need to provide an intermediate layer of context around the raw entries in order to improve the accessibility to key points and themes as they emerge.

Jullien, F. (2004) In praise of blandness: Proceeding from Chinese thought and aesthetics. 169 pages. Zone Books, New York.

 

Blogs and democratization within hierarchical organizations

an update on “giving voice to important matters”

after we briefed him on the power of blogging, our commandant, the senior military officer in charge of the college has embraced the idea and has started asking provocative questions about the future of the college’s curriculum and modes of instruction.  Students and faculty are starting to give voice to their concerns and ideas, and it seems to me we have passed the tipping point, The culture is changing around the former centers of power and there is a new spirit of democratization in the air.

I have appended an example of one of his questions, extracted my commentary from the discussion thread, and then provided a 1st person AR reflection as part of my self examination which i share with critical others as part of my efforts at transparency. I include some comments on “playing multiple roles” as part of my reflection in the practice of dramaturgy, one of the qualitative methods we are looking at in MGM815 with Dr Wishart.  Coughlan & Brannick discuss “roles” in their excellent book “Doing Action Research Inside Your Own Organization”.

this blog thread comes from the college’s top level blog. meanwhile my departmental blog, started  last term, continues to grow in content and usefulness as documented in the chart at the end.

 

 

PAR Journal entry 2009-02-05

Subject: giving voice to the future of education.  Flexibility vs Standardization 

The thread was begun by our deputy commandant, the senior active duty military officer in charge of the college. I have extracted out my commentary from the discussion thread and provided a reflection below

=================================== 

Is it possible to address contemporary, real-world problems while still upholding our learning requirements? Is it possible to address contemporary, real-world problems while still upholding our learning requirements?  Let me give you an example. 

From November 2008 to January 2009, the Command and General Staff College conducted a pilot special research study with two staff groups in the 09-01 ILE course to analyze the impact of the “surge in Afghanistan.”  The plan was to study the time period from December 2008 to August 2010, a critical time for operations in Afghanistan, in part because of the election of a new administration and the subsequent shift in focus for the United States military from operations in Iraq to operations in Afghanistan. In this 18-20 month time frame, a critical planning factor was to show “discernible progress” in the security of Afghanistan. 

This pilot study was intended as an alternative approach to achieving the same purpose, outcomes, and learning objectives as the common curriculum AOWC 1 block.  The study focused on the intangible aspects of battle command — understanding and visualizing – using current and emerging doctrinal concepts.  Additionally, the pilot study targeted the following objectives: pilot the use of real world topics to meet learning objectives in the CGSC classrooms; provide research products to the operational force through specialized studies to enhance CAC as the “Intellectual Center of the Army;” shift focus from Iraq to Afghanistan within the leader development community; conduct parallel strategic engagement opportunities.

 Among both our faculty and students this study demonstrated the potential to break traditional educational paradigms and explore progressive methods.  This is in line with a shift in CGSC to refocus on the leader development in ways that will be vital to winning this war…and the next one. We are always looking for new and unique ways to educate our students with practical, contemporary issues.  The pilot study demonstrates what is possible – is this methodology appropriate for our Field Grade education? 

My response: 

Can “manufactured” scenarios against notional opposing forces prepare professionals for real demands? yes. 

The Great Krasnovian Wars, fought in CBS, on the plains of Kansas and Nebraska, prepared officers for challenges of planning, synchronizing and executing complex conventional operations which contributed in some fashion to victories in Desert Storms and OIFs. 

What were the equivalent real world challenges we’d have been working on instead of the Krasnovians? I suppose how to conduct small scale humanitarian aid interventions. 

Exclusive focus on the immediate problem set would have left the Army less ready to adapt to the discontinuous challenge of large formation conventional operations. I think that remains true now as it was true 10 years ago, 100 years ago. 

Because we can’t predict the future with certainty, and time is our limiting factor, we cant afford to pick a single strategy and bet the farm on it. I think our conception of Full Spectrum Ops is sufficiently complex and challenging enough that we need to be educating adaptive leaders to perform in all of the dimensions, with more focus on the leader qualities and skill sets, and less on content-centric curriculum. 

If you believe in the description of future dynamic uncertainty found in the Capstone Concept for Joint Operations, Commander’s Appreciation and Campaign Design, the TRADOC concept for the Human Dimension in 2014-2025, in FM 3-0, and in the importance placed on Commander’s judgment expressed in FM 7-0 

If there are real world problem sets available that allow us to get to the educational outcomes of producing agile, adaptive, educated leaders, then by all means we should take advantage of the situation, provided it supports our design goal of having the officers experience problem framing, problem solving, decisionmaking, leading and managing at multiple echelons, with multiple mission profiles, with sufficient complexity to challenge their belief in school solutions, and enough human terrain variables to keep culture, media and world opinion firmly in mind. 

That said, every time we incorporate real world problems in lieu of standard curriculum,, we’ll need to be able to rapidly craft a study proposal that can be compared to the design criteria of our student education outcomes, tailor an assessment and evaluation plan that meets the standards of accreditation and our Accountable Instruction System. 

 the infrequency with which we actually leverage real world scenarios suggests this will be quite a stretch for our culture and routine processes. There will be tension between the desire to incorporate the newest real world scenario, and the standardization, uniformity and stability that AIS values. 

We’ll have to let go of the comfort of a stabilized curriculum, that seeks minimal changes year to year, of year over year trend analysis. We’ll need to do it in AOWC, because that is where we do much more application of theory to practice, whereas Common Core emphasizes the basic cognitive and affective skills that are broadly needed in the force (probably our CMETL). 

We’ll have to accept variation in content and delivery across the multiple settings where our course is delivered. A shift to student-centric education outcomes, away from content based standards of performance will help, but not completely solve this problem. We’ll have to have a rapid prototyping and approval process for proposed studies that can routinely make the assessments as to the business-case merits of research proposals, so that we can maintain our commitment to evidence based educational assessments which represents our institutional committment to intellectual excellence. 

At CGSC, we are precisely at the intersection of theory and practice, with a requirement to make sure that our doctrine is communicated and exercised in the classroom, yet acknowledging the primacy of the practical and immediate lessons we are learning in the war we are fighting to win right now. i think the risk is well worth taking. 

Ask yourself when was the last time we were prepared, as a faculty, to be genuinely surprised and delighted with the results of student inquiry into a wicked problem set. When was the last time you went into the classroom excited about the uncertainty of the direction our investigation into our craft and profession might lead us? When was the last time we modeled the kind of adaptive ingenuity, innovation and measured risk taking we assert we are educating our officers for? 

At times it seems we have carefully scripted the curriculum to beat innovation into submission. When was the last time we had the time and flexibility to carefully examine the results of our first round of inquiry with our officers and collectively assess the results, and then decide where the next round of inquiry should take us? This kind of living action-research, is risky, the results aren’t preordained, but we have good processes and passionate, committed leaders and I am confident we can do a lot more in this area than we currently do. 

a follow-up example of the kind of analysis i described above.

In the W100 block the hour operational logistics lesson is designed for every officer to get to the apply level  of of the sustainment warfighting function. To assess that, we designed the lesson  so that each officer participates in log prep of the theater, does individual deep analysis on a commodity or service area, participates as a member of the staff to complete and brief a concept of support, and then write an individual logistics estimate (employing materials contributed to the group effort by others).  This lesson is designed to address a persistent educational gap in the field: that commanders have not always appreciated the effect of sustainment on their vision and plan, and that staff officers need a better personal understanding of logistics basics in order to be more effective as a member of the team in any capacity.

The analysis and decisionmaking that allocated 16 precious hours to these educational outcomes and to perform them at the apply level was non-trivial.

I believe that a study of operational problems in Afghanistan can meet every design goal of the existing curriculum. I know that we know a lot more about the theater in GAAT than we do in Afghanistan, simply from the knowledge that is created through hundreds of staff groups examining GAAT over multiple years and the deliberate analysis and research we do to improve the quality of the scenario materials every year. I also know that it is not the complexity and level of detail we get to that matters in this lesson, it is the process we follow, and the questions we ask, and the answers we tentatively form in the time available.

If we are professionally sure that we have a good set of education outcomes, then when examining a proposal to do a study into a real world problem set, the crucial question becomes: how do we ensure the outcomes are achieved in this new context, and if there is something we dont get to, what gets cut? This should be a routine professional judgment call, which gets documented and accompanied by evidence after the execution phase in order to learn and grow for the next round

My reflection on action: 

The posting above will be read by several hundred high ranking people in our college. It represents the kind of discussion which until this year and this doctoral program, I would make verbally to my peers or in meetings where there was little likelihood of bveing heard. It was a safe existence but frustrating in many ways.

I confess to feelings of apprehension mixed with excitement as I hit send, knowing that once posted, the words will stand on their own merits and my standing in the college will undergo some change, in unpredictable ways. I enjoy the risk and appreciate the new opportunity to be heard directly. 

In terms of action research and dramaturgy, this particular Q&A thread has many touch points. I am voicing a role as a professional curriculum developer for a particular department. My example of how important it is to analyze the standard curriculum for the real world study that replaced it could be seen as an indictment of the Afghanistan study as executed, because they blew off the logistics requirements that are an important part of the standard curriculum. There is no doubt their study was valuable, but logistics instruction was sacrificed without a hearing.  There was no due process. 

I am also speaking as a change agent in this thread, independent of my “hired job”.  I am on the side of those who are pushing for more change, not less, in the curriculum, and because this represents a challenge to established authority and more work for the faculty to adapt, it is not popular. There will come a decision point and I will support the decision even if I don’t like the outcome, because due process will have been followed  to my satisfaction because I am now certain that my voice has been heard by those charged with the decision, and I trust in their personal integrity and judgment. 

I will end up playing the role of advocate and supporter of the final decision when it comes to preparing the department and faculty to  implement. I will also maintain my role as change agent in the next rounds of change 

Until the advent of the blogs on our college homepage, it is also the kind of dialogue which would never have a practical chance of being heard given the real constraints on time and the formality of a command hierarchy for decision making. Only the dominant narratives survive to make it to the top level decision makers, except under exceptional leaders. 

The infrastructure of the blog, and the willingness of the current crop of leaders to engage personally and professionally in bloggery prior to decision making, is a democratization and a loosening of the formal process, one that is changing the nature of the culture in significant ways.