Culture battle: Selective use of history should not be used to justify the status quo
Culture battle: Selective use of history should not be used to justify the status quo by COL. Henry J. Foresman JR. in Armed Forces Journal.
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Video teleconferences, meetings and PowerPoint presentations are how decisions are made in the Pentagon. No decision is made without countless hours spent making slides by "action officers" and countless revisions by those above them. No decision is made until all the general officers are on board. No decision is made without total agreement. Staffing actions are routinely sent back to the drawing board because some general has a better idea, further slowing a process that already moves at a snail's pace. The system is not designed for quick decisions, as all decisions must work their way through a vast bureaucracy before the ultimate decision can be made. Decisions are made in a system designed for an Army at peace, not an Army at war.
As I have mentioned, transformation is more than organizational change — it is a change to how we think of war. The greatest threats to transformation are those who would turn back the hands of time to an earlier day when the Army would concentrate on fighting major combat operations or grand wars and ignore the rest.
Wars of the 21st century will not be state-on-state but rather will involve states taking on organizations and groups that share a common ideology, culture and outlook and to whom the state, and state boundaries, mean nothing. They will wage their wars, holy or otherwise, wherever they must so that they can achieve their goal, whether it be greater Islam or otherwise. They do not wear the uniforms of a state, nor do they fight in the same manner as conventional armies. The wars of the 21st century will not be fought on the open plains of Europe or in vast sands of Middle East. They will be fought in the urban sprawl of our increasingly urban planet. They will be battles for the hearts and minds of a local populace where the U.S. and the Army will be seen as the invader and occupier and not as the liberator.
Cheaper, better, smarter...
Marc,
the hypothetical or real war with China you are describing is, to me, not much of a military matter. It is a matter of smart economic and social policy here that recognizes the inevitable consequences and opportunities of globalization. I don't think we should worry much about an enormous trade deficit with China or any other one country. Trade, being mutually beneficial theft, is a two-edged sword. They get a lot out of it too.
I have a huge trade deficit with the local grocery stores: They don't buy and read nearly enough of my papers. But I don't lose much sleep about that. We should worry about having a negative national savings rate across long periods of time...just as I should worry about a negative personal savings rate over long periods of time. But I do not care about running a truly massive and frightening trade deficit with Kroger, provided I am running surpluses elsewhere to cover it.
True, China could cause short-run pain here by cutting us off, but they would hurt too and there are a lot of other countries who would be only too happy to pick up the production slack. And then where would China be: "OH we promise never to do it again, please come back and buy our products...puh-leeeeeze?" Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Trade wars, as countries have discovered, are very expensive, and cause people to diversify away from the aggressor, to the ultimate long-run detriment of the aggressor.
We should worry about income distribution and inequality of opportunity, things that are worsened by the loss of the jobs of yesteryear's economy, whatever they may be. But the gains we get from trade generally are enough to compensate for those losses. We need to be more serious about that compensation, and also get on with the business of distributing education (and re-education) widely.
True riches simply cannot be piled up by producing the goods of yesteryear, which have become so commodified that almost anyone can produce them, so that they essentially trade in competitive markets: There's no interesting rent to be earned there. Let the Chinese earn those relatively uninteresting and trivial rents and sell us the goods back at bargain basement prices. Relative to their incomes, those trivial rents look big and give them these big growth rates. Yes, $10 is 100% of $10. But it is only 1% of $1000. We cannot get their growth rate from producing those goods and earning those rents.
Real rents, massive surplus value, comes from innovation and creative destruction: We want to be the masters of that economic universe, and then distribute the gains sensibly. We do that by making our people highly educated, easily re-educated, easily mobile with highly portable health insurance and retirement and hence very dynamic employment markets, and so forth. Charity really begins at home here. These things are way cheaper, better and smarter long-run solutions to a "threat" like China than anything else I can think of that we might do.